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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
I got a few questions to start with on on keto carbs and stuff like that because Okay. Yeah. It's it's it's it's still not a 100% clear to people at the bank. Okay. But just laying out.
Speaker 1:But you know your book on the keto diet. Yes. Before we get into questions, would change Would there be any changes you do to that book if you had to rewrite it today?
Speaker 2:Honestly, no. I mean there's certainly been a lot more research looking as far as you know, the weight loss and the fat loss a lot of which wasn't really available then. But as far as you know, what I talk about in terms of you know pros, cons, how to set it up, not really. One thing I think people assume about that book usually because they haven't read it is that because I wrote it, I must be like Mr. Keto, Pro Keto like that's all I believe in and if you actually like look for years I was just the keto guy and his name I've been tried to get away from for years because you actually read the book, nowhere in it in all 300 some odd pages do I say here is why you should do this diet.
Speaker 2:I went from the assumption of okay, so you've decided to do a keto diet, here's what you need to know, here's the physiology, here are the considerations, here is the research, here's the positives, here's the benefits like nowhere and I still people have people accuse me of that. Oh you promote, no I don't read my book. Nowhere in there where you find me say that I'm recommending it anywhere. It's like anything else. There are places where it is completely appropriate.
Speaker 2:I think one we talked about previously that maybe I'll touch on, you know, in polycystic ovary syndrome, very low carbohydrate diets can have extreme benefits for certain situations, absolute adherence, etc. Absolutely and in others it is completely the wrong choice. If you're a high level athlete, is absolutely the wrong choice. So it's really just a matter of, but in terms of the actual setup and those types of things, I'd very much update the training stuff because a lot's changed since then. But at a fundamental level, no, not really.
Speaker 1:What do you say to people that say, well, there's the paleo argument where they think humans were only fat and protein, no carbs, and they say the body doesn't need carbs, like, because it can get, you know, the ketogenic states through the ketones. So what's the answer to that side? Because people will see I've seen a few people post a study that says, you know, you don't need carbs. Know, going to ketosis is absolutely fine, there's loads of these benefits. Actually, we are meant to eat this way because we did years and years and years ago, they claimed that.
Speaker 1:So what's the For the average person, what's the
Speaker 2:first let me touch on the paleo diet thing. So we're watching that develop in, it was probably the early 90s when a lot of that was coming out and I used to watch the, it was funny watching the different paleo groups start to schism and get it like they would fight with each other more than and I just sat back arguing about our potatoes good or bad and all I guess hilarious to watch as every little group split off. And all of this data from you know, the the supposed evolutionary diet or paleolithic diet came from a couple of very early books, the ethnographic Atlas that basically they asked a bunch of extent really like what do you eat? And then what was interesting to me is that different researchers would look at the same day and come to completely different conclusions, right? So on the one hand, they're like, oh, yeah, they ate 65% meat and 35 whatever another was like, no, no, no, they only ate 20% and the problem with this entire argument.
Speaker 2:Well, there's two of them. The big one is there was no singular Paleolithic diet, right? Anyway, if you look at the Alaskan Inuits who probably did I mean what they had whale blubber and whale meat. I knew someone from Alaska years ago and apparently the two weeks a year that they have fruit, they mix fruit and whale blubber and that's how they make ice cream which sounds both delicious and disgusting at the same time and then you've got say you know the Maasai or some of these South African tribes which basically that's not so to think there was any singular Paleolithic diet is nonsensical to begin with. All we can say is that there weren't there wasn't junk food.
Speaker 2:We didn't have highly processed food. We didn't have cookies. Didn't have cake like that. That's the only thing I think we can really say about. And yes, I would absolutely agree that most people could probably be better off eating less of that, right?
Speaker 2:I'm not going to argue that point. However, I guarantee you if Paleo man lived now, he'd be eating the hell out of that because it was a lifetime struggle for paleo man to survive because of it was because food and sort of an interesting follow-up to that part of the paleo idea is, oh, we are we still have the same biology. We stopped evolving after agriculture and if anything the exact opposite is true. It's a really great book if anybody wants to look it up. It's called The Ten Thousand Year Explosion and it makes an extremely cogent argument that if anything evolution accelerated agriculture became a thing, once grains became a thing for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:One of them is that we went from having to hunt and gather and basically struggle to get food every day. Once agriculture was developed, that's when society started, right? And I wrote a long article I wrote a bunch of years ago in article series and I kind of jokingly said like look without agriculture there would be no internet. There would be no modern society because you look at the extant hunter gatherer societies they spend their entire day trying to survive. Once we had agriculture, we could make more food more easily, more cheaply for more people.
Speaker 2:Once that happened, for good or for bad, we then got the development of a hierarchy, a caste system. Some people had more, they became the rich, they became landlords, Lords of the land. Those people were poor peasants. They got to like good and bad came out of it, right? Obviously and we still now are living in that kind of situation.
Speaker 2:We have the elite and the folks that have been rich for generations and then you know the poor still gets screwed and always will. Now I think we'll go oh but but in the early days of agriculture everybody was shorter less healthy because of grains. It wasn't because of the grains, is the absence of protein. Because for a little while there, we went too heavy on the grains didn't have enough, but then we domesticated animals, then we had plenty of meat and all that went away. That also spurred and here's a really easy example.
Speaker 2:All right, lactose intolerance, some people I'm one of them don't digest milk well, right? And the argument was always well in evolutionary times, nobody really drank milk after you weaned, you know, as a two year old or whatever that happens, whenever you stop drinking mother's milk. So there was no reason for the body to maintain this enzyme. Well, and if you actually look data, I think I was in my protein book. Could be very careful in how I phrase this.
Speaker 2:Basically the darker your skin the more likely you are to be lactose intolerant and this is just a function of it was mainly Western European Caucasian that had more agricultural developments Middle Easterners which is what I am. We're living in there wasn't a lot of milk being drank. So Middle Easterners far more likely to be lactose intolerant individuals of black descent more likely still, but people re evolve the ability to consume milk because once it became available because we domesticated cows and goats and sheep, whatever else someone decided to milk, right? We continued to evolve and we have and there were lots of other differences and there's one that is in the book that I don't really gets into IQ issues and I don't want to touch that topic because it can be very inflammatory. Yeah, basically once you developed certain niches for certain ethnic groups, right?
Speaker 2:And a lot of that again still lives with us today and again, I'm trying to be really careful in my language because it's taken so out of context, but at the time people of Jewish ethnicity the niche they sort of fell into at the time was financial management for the rich. Yeah. And a lot of that tradition maintains today. Of course, lot of that has been co opted by a lot of evil and I don't even want to touch on that topic. But there was some evidence presented in this book and it's hard to say but there were changes in average IQ level.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that's intelligence but there were just different evolutions. So this idea that we are still the exact same biology as paleo man is asinine. There's also the fact that on average like paleo man, yeah, they died 35, 40, whatever the average lifespan was which given how much I dislike paleo cultists, if they want to adopt an aspect of the paleo diet, I want it to be that one just so they'll hush. The only thing I really dislike about the paleo thing, again, don't mishear me. Did most people do better eating less processed junk food?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's that zealot cult mentality. They're like, oh, well, I follow the paleo diet. All right. Well, number one, it wasn't just the diet that was part of the health.
Speaker 2:It's part of the culture extremely active every day. No stressful society. They weren't smoking. They weren't like what paleo people have by and large done is taken the easy bit, which is the food intake and I guarantee you over here are super expensive healthy food Whole Foods. I'm sure you've heard jokes about it in other countries where you'll pay three times as much for healthier food.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, got news for you. Paleo man was not going to a store like that to get grass fed high omega-three beef, right? So don't tell me as you drive in your car with air conditioning wearing your glasses with a caffeine pill you took the antibiotics you took to go to your living paleo so that you can go blog off your iPad onto the internet and your paleo, right? And when I brought that up they go, oh no, no, no, no. I live a paleo life, right?
Speaker 2:You pick and choose which bits of it you want to follow. Paleo man doesn't have glasses, take them off, take off your contacts, get off the internet, right? And there are every once in a while I hear about some real paleo guy. He'll go out into the woods, hunt his food, skin it, wear the clothes, I can respect that. All these other people on the internet they're like I'm paleo because I go get the paleo protein.
Speaker 2:Oh, so you're telling me that paleo didn't have processed foods but paleo brownies, paleo protein powder, tell me that's not a little bit processed? It's just a newer version of clean eating. Yeah. Where clean means whatever I want it to mean. Probably one of the funniest things I ever read about, there's a book, it's terrible.
Speaker 2:It's called The Paleo Diet for Athletes. It's a terrible book. It's hilarious and his arguments which is not wrong. He was writing to endurance athletes and said endurance athletes tend to over consume carbohydrates with insufficient protein and dietary fat. Now I don't disagree with that.
Speaker 2:I don't disagree with that at all because I've seen it. Although the Kenyan endurance runners eat about 80% grains and they seem to be doing alright, just throwing that out there, but I don't disagree with them fundamentally. So his logic was therefore we should go full paleo. Eat nothing but protein, fat and vegetables. I'm just curious, but we've got one extreme and is there nothing in the middle?
Speaker 2:Is there not a happy middle? Is it not possible? Just maybe just possible to get enough protein and fat while still eating grains? Is this an option that I'm only aware because people make that argument. Well, since this is bad, since people eat 80% pasta or whatever, let's eat zero.
Speaker 2:You can I've gotten into arguments like that with people. They'll be like, oh, you know, I eat clean. I go well, you know, you can have a piece of whatever a couple times a week. Oh, well, if you want to eat pizza all day, that's fine. You know, I don't think that's what I just said.
Speaker 2:Or one of the paleo cults ago, you know, you can eat carbohydrates and well, I mean, if you want to eat an 80% grain diet, I don't think that's what I just said, right? If you look at what athletes do, lots of lean protein, veggies, fruits, healthy fats, moderate carbohydrates, starchy. Anyway, so he wrote this book saying that's how endurance athletes. Then he managed to justify using carbo gels, those little things of processed goo around training and here was the argument because that would represent when paleo man found a honeycomb and It was able to was just like the mental gymnastics he was going through. Now what's funny is if he'd said I want to recommend this to strength athletes, I wouldn't have had a problem with it because a power lifter who's doing triples and Olympic lifter, they don't need a lot of carbs, But he was addressing only endurance athletes and that's the kind of so you get paleo, paleo with milk, paleo but I'm gonna eat dextrose around my workouts and it's like just stop, just stop, right?
Speaker 2:Because this has gotten so far away from paleo, you're just picking and choosing and the line you're drawing in the sand is well, this is paleo but this I and I and then the moral superiority kicks in and that's when I because whatever it is, this is what you want eat, that's fine. A lot of people, yes adopting, like I said eating less junk food. I'm not gonna argue with that. If going to that extreme makes them stick with it, cool. At the stores now we have paleo bars and they're like fruit, nuts, whatever they put in there and objectively the nutrient profile of these things is worse than the processed protein bar they're selling right next to it.
Speaker 2:So I get the Kirkland protein bars that has 20 grams of protein, 30 grams of fat, carbs, seven grams of fat. This little paleo nut bar is like three grams of protein, 17 grams of fat and And I'm like, I got news for you. This is not healthier than what I'm eating. So yes, are there elements that absolutely make sense? Sure.
Speaker 2:Do we need to be more active as paleo man absolutely was? Sure. Does that mean this particular zealot cult is the way to go? No, we can find a happy medium. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of my rant on I was gonna do an article a bunch of years ago, but I know about a little bit and I was going to title it F Paleo Man because like I said, until these people ditch their glasses, their antibiotics, their iPads, their central heat in their houses, all that stuff and are Amazon Prime, they're not Paleo. So they can spare me.
Speaker 1:And it's like the people who are really religious who hate science and it's like you're tweeting off a phone.
Speaker 2:I think you're using science right now to tweet me. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's there's endless examples of that. Mean, I've known over here, know, you get the woke social justice warrior people that will have their $1,200 iPhone tweeting how capitalism is evil. Just spare me, right? I had a buddy, a roommate in college and he was one of those he wanted to be a revolutionary to him that meant signing petitions but not actually doing anything. He watched more TV than anyone I've ever known.
Speaker 2:But he had to kill your television bumper sticker on the car that his mommy and daddy bought him after he went to Japan for a year abroad on their dime, spent all his money on import CDs, so that he can go back and tell me that, you know, capitalism was bad and I should, you know, I skated to class every day. He would drive his car using a carpool sticker that he lied to get and would tell me about the environment. And I had no time for that. So yeah, you see that type of thing where and I get it, we all wanna be morally self righteous and all that kind of stuff. But if you're gonna be self righteous, you need to be right.
Speaker 2:And when you see that ahead.
Speaker 1:How would you saw like for the people watching now as well, like how would you not get pulled into these tweets that people say or post articles by sometimes people with a doctorate or they are doctors or people who automatically think they know what they're on about. And they claim stuff like, let me just find one now, where it's you know, it's kind like of like they scare people, you know, the brain doesn't use carbs, glucose, but it doesn't need it. It works fine on ketones. Don't need it. Oh, yes.
Speaker 1:Sugar is the devil. So like for the person that's not really aware of anything, they're gonna go, oh shit. Yeah. Well, I don't need carbs. Why don't you need carbs?
Speaker 2:Well, and actually let me address that before I come back to your question. So the statement that the body does not need carbohydrates is actually true. Yeah. In a literal physiological sense in that. So when we talk about nutrition, we'll talk about nutrients that are nutritionally essential, which means that sort of has a couple parts to that definition is that one, it is required for life or health.
Speaker 2:Two, it must be obtained from the diet and there's a couple others but those are really the key ones, right? So vitamin C is an easy example. We need, with insufficient vitamin C we get sick. The human body cannot make vitamin C. Now some animal species can because they don't eat and again, this is evolutionary aspect.
Speaker 2:Once humans at whatever level started eating high vitamin C fruits, the body was like, well, we don't need to make it anymore. This is energetically costly, so we'll stop making so much of it. Cooking food was also a big part of that. If you look at animals that eat uncooked food, they have these extremely long digestive tracts because they need them because it takes that long to extract all the nutrients. Once we started cooking food it allowed our gut or intestinal size to shrink it's thought that allowed more energies for us to get big brains so that we could then go argue on the internet because that seems to be the pinnacle of human evolution.
Speaker 2:But anyway, so it has to be required by the body for health, but the body can't either doesn't make it or can't make enough of it. So vitamin C is an example, right? Our body can make about eight of the 16 amino acids. So eight of those are considered essential. They're required for health.
Speaker 2:Our body can't make them, we must get them from the diet. So protein is required. Technically only this but proteins have both so we don't really make that distinction, right? There are two essential fatty acids, the omega-3s and omega-6s. Body can't make them.
Speaker 2:We have to get them from, so those are essential. Then we get to carbohydrates. Strictly speaking the body does not need carbohydrates because most tissues in our body muscle, heart, most things can run on glucose or fatty acids based on what if carbs are available it burns carbs if they're not they can switch to fatty acids. Ketones are kind of a separate thing and I'll come to that. There's a couple weird exceptions.
Speaker 2:Want to say the eyeball basically your pupil, some part of your eye requires a little glucose, the kidneys require a little bit of glucose, but the body can make some glucose. It can make a lot, right as part of fat metabolism, a little bit of glucose is made the body can break down amino acids to make glucose a couple other places so the body can make a small amount of glucose every day and it can make enough to fuel those tissues. So when you already eat zero carbs, you see is that most of body switches to fat, fatty acids. The body can make enough carbs to fuel those couple that require it, but then we get to the brain because this is where it gets so you'll frequently see people say the brain cannot use fat for fuel, which is true. Ergo requires glucose, but that's where ketones come in.
Speaker 2:So ketones are just they're made in the liver from fatty acid metabolism. The specifics aren't aren't really that important and they exist to provide a fuel for the brain during starvation which was was part of our evolutionary past. So when you say you stop eating carbs, the first couple weeks you tend to get that keto flu that keto fog and a lot of it is your brain kind of wants to use glucose and the ketones it takes about three weeks minimum for the brain to kind of to shift over and after about three weeks the brain will be using about 75 ketones about 25% glucose. Again, the body can make that. So yeah, in the strictest sense, if you never ate another carbohydrate again, you would not die, you would not get sick, you might get bored because carbs taste good, but that's a whole that's a separate that gets into a whole different issue.
Speaker 2:But no, they're not physiologically required. So that claim is true. Yeah. However, one we have to eat something, right? That's just a function of we have to get enough calories every day.
Speaker 2:There's a limit to how much protein any human being can eat. There just isn't it's eventually you can only eat so much fat can certainly be used, right? And it is possible to fill your calorie requirements protein and fat. Carbs cheap, tastes good, readily available. I said that's where the agriculture came in.
Speaker 2:All these grains were just cheap and easy and I mean their entire cultures that basically, you know, rice is their primary staple. That is their primary food because you can make a ton of it in a small space relatively cheaply and feed lots and lots and lots and lots of people. You can't do that with, know, when you had a small hunter gatherer tribe, couldn't really it was tough. It was tough to get enough food for everybody. So yeah, but then we enter, then we get into the exercise thing and the training issue because there's another option.
Speaker 2:So there's nutritionally inessential nutrients, the body needs them but we can make enough. There's nutritionally essential, which means we need them, the body can't make enough or can't make it at all. There's a third category that's called conditionally essential, which means that the body can make it but may not be able to make enough as we need. And there's a couple of examples of amino acids that nobody cares about and I don't remember. It's like if you have way too little of one, the body can't make enough of the other and it doesn't come up in the real world other than the weirdest diets you've ever seen.
Speaker 2:But if someone is involved in high intensity exercise, whether that's weight training, higher intensity aerobic activity interval training, those activities can only use carbohydrates for fuel. Despite what the keto people claim, no amount of fat adaptation can make you lose fat, can make you use fat during weight training. It's a physiological impossibility. You can use it during low intensity activity. So if you're involved in lots of high intensity activity, carbohydrates may become conditionally essential that the amount that you need to support your training cannot be provided by the body and that's where keto diets tend to basically lose the plot is they become now if all you're doing is low intensity activity, you don't have to ever eat another keto can be perfectly fine And there's other What if you're in between ketosis and you slip up every few days, you're going in and out of ketosis, what happens to the body then?
Speaker 2:It's a good question and I don't The adaptation isn't immediate and actually I'll mention I can actually I can speak to that. So sports scientists have tried for years to get fat adaptation to work and this is for endurance athletes, right? So imagine you're riding the Tour de France, you've got to spend six hours on a bike, right? Which is you can run out of muscle glycogen, can run out of carbohydrates stored in the muscle. So in premise, you get the body to use more fat for fuel most of the time, that would spare muscle carbohydrate for the other time, right?
Speaker 2:So a complete low carb diet can't do that. So what they've tried to do in different forms, they're like, okay, we're gonna do five days of low carbs like near zero that causes some degree of fat adaptation. Now we're gonna refeed them carbs for a day. What happens? What fuel does the body switch to?
Speaker 2:And it can switch back a little bit, but low carb diet and again, we're talking this is high intensity performance. This isn't sort of general day to day stuff where I have less of an answer. What actually ends up happening is the body sort of loses the ability to use carbohydrates during high intensity activity. One of the enzymes gets down regulated which I'm not gonna get into because I think that's what they found with this. They're like, all right, great.
Speaker 2:So we've got these cyclists and their low intensity performance goes up but then they can't sprint worth damn and for high intensity athlete, that's no good, right? If you're unable to use carbs for fuel when you need them, which is what happens and they've pretty much given up on at this point. May have tried and tried and tried to make it work and at best it has no impact at worst it tends to hurt things. There's a couple early studies where they showed some huge benefits, but it was only in low intense activity and again, if you're just a general person, that's great. If you're a high intensity for a high performance athlete keto diets just they cannot, you know, then they're like, okay, maybe you do that in the off season when all you're doing is lots of low intensity work and then we switch it.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah, but by the time you switch back to carbs for a few weeks you've lost all the adaptation. So as far as on a day to day basis for the average person, I don't know, there's probably a little bit of switching back and forth like I can only sort of you know, this is purely anecdotal because scientists just don't really look at this type of thing. Like when I used to play around with keto and I did for years in my 20s and even in my early 30s like that whatever I'd lose it have bunch cereal usually not even probably go out of ketosis or wake up back in ketosis in the morning and I mean one thing we did try and this is in my first book, right, as we had people that wanted to be keto for some reason, usually pre diabetes, insulin resistance, adherence, whatever. They wanted to perform high intensity activity. Well, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 2:And what we came up with was a couple of different options. One of them was the early the cyclical ketogenic diet, right? Was athletes five days of low carbs, one to two days of very high carbs rinse and repeat. That didn't really work for those folks. So what they would do so we call the targeted ketogenic diet and they would have you know 25 grams of carbs before a hard workout, 25 grams after sort of support that training and it would that seem to be sufficient like the body could apparently switch back it for that short term, but then they'd stay in ketosis the rest of the time for whatever benefit that had for them.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of hard to tell but you know, people whatever they have that short term high carb meal and they might not even get kicked out of ketosis which is I don't want to get too deeply into all the metabolism which is more liver function and you know when your muscles are really depleted of glycogen you eat a bunch of carbs those carbs tend to go into the muscle first they kind of get sucked up in there. The liver is not really going to change producing ketones. I don't think. Probably another question that if it wasn't asked, I think somebody might ask her as a follow-up. A question that comes up, right, so it takes about three weeks minimum to really start adapting to ketones for the brain especially.
Speaker 2:You kind of feel like you've gotten hit by a truck the first few weeks. A question that becomes well, what happens if do come out of ketosis for whatever reason, get sick of the diet, go on. Some people, well, then what happens if you try to go back, right? And then again, this is purely anecdotal. It seems like once you've done that first block of ketogenic dieting where you kind of adapt to it, you can kind of bop in and out and not feel it.
Speaker 2:It's I used to like I used to for whatever reason I wouldn't eat or I'd go low carb for a couple of days and I'd fall right back into ketosis and I speculate there's some kind of permanent adaptation in the brain. I've never seen it studied purely anecdotal. A lot of people have reported it. So yeah, it's there's something might be going on well, I don't really know but the body can certainly switch back and forth to some degree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And when it comes to keto or low carb diets, when we talk about fiber, is is back in the day, obviously, you know, grains have got fiber. What happens to the body just for people to know if they're not getting enough fiber? I know, obviously, you get constipation, but what actually is there anything else that happens or a negative side effect to not having enough fiber?
Speaker 2:So there was a couple of studies a few years ago. Well, first let me back up is one of the interesting things, of the big arguments I saw you know, against keto was oh, you can't eat vegetables so it's unhealthy. I'm like, I have news for you. People I know on ketogenic diets eat more vegetables than they did they did it because that's all you can eat. I'm like this if I have, if I can eat grains and carbs and breads, I'll eat those.
Speaker 2:When you can eat those, eat whatever vegetables you can. So a people do in my experience, I mean it's not everybody but when that's all the carbs you get to eat is vegetables people actually. But there was a little bit of research that it might negatively impact you know, excuse me gut health or the microbiome which is all you hear about all the time. But like I said, most people eat you know because one thing people do report on keto is oh, I don't poop as much. Well, that's because there's not as much to poop.
Speaker 2:Most of the residue that we make from the diet comes from carbohydrates. Carbs are only most most carbohydrates only digestible to about eighty eighty five. Percent. So most of what comes out the other end is carbohydrates, protein, especially animal protein digested 90 to 95% efficiency. So not a lot comes out the other end.
Speaker 2:Dietary fats about 97%. So part of the reason you poop less is that there is less moving through you. There's less residue. But yeah, I mean, again, is fiber essential? Probably not, like you wouldn't die if you never had a vegetable again, but it's generally healthy.
Speaker 2:Know, fiber metabolism can generate short chain fatty acids and have certain benefits. Like I said, my experience has been that most people eat probably more vegetables on keto than they did before.
Speaker 1:I agree. I I think it's it's good to cover because like obviously, people prefer the keto way of living and wanna Sure. Straighten out. But let's talk Just quickly,
Speaker 2:I just wanna say just like and don't mishear me. Not anti keto any more than I am pro keto.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I am pro context, right? There are a number of situations where keto may be very beneficial. And it is interesting. I was researching the women's book. You would find women on it switch from like the traditional, a very traditional excessive carb diet.
Speaker 2:They would switch to keto and they'd be like, oh my god, everything is keto is magic. No, keto kind of tricked you into getting sufficient protein, sufficient dietary fat, sufficient sodium, which a lot of people cut out. Like you went from basically something that was bad to something and paleo does the same thing frequently, it tricks people. So of course they think it's magic, but it's only better by comparison to you see the same thing in training, right? The high intensity training zealots.
Speaker 2:They're like, oh, I did Arnold's volume training for years and got nowhere but oh my God, I switched to one set, HIT is magic. No, what you were doing before was terrible. It's only better by comparison. And again, I'm not saying keto is bad. Get enough protein, get enough fat, get enough nutrients.
Speaker 2:It can be very nutritionally sufficient for many people. For many people eating some carbs makes them want to eat all the carbs. I'm like that. Are you I was like that much more when was younger and less so now. If carbs are a problem food for you, I'm not I'll use the term trigger food as in sort of a general where eating some makes you overeat them.
Speaker 2:If going keto helps you adhere to your diet long term, fantastic. Now if you're doing high intensity training and finding your performance is suffering, maybe you have find a modification. Maybe you have some carbs during training. There's actually some really weird research where swishing a carbohydrate drink and spitting it out that actually improves performance like if you're that anti carbohydrate that that can actually tricks the brain to think you eat carbohydrates. It's a little gross in the gym, but hey, whatever, you know, so we're just kind of looking at context for people with severe insulin resistance who may be carrying excess body fat, may be very inactive, mentioned polycystic ovary syndrome, very common.
Speaker 2:In that case going very low carb may be very beneficial and very important from a health standpoint. Yeah. At least initially tends to trick people into eating less because let's face it most of what we eat are tasty carbs because they're tasty. Yeah. If you take out if someone's eating 60% carbohydrates and you tell them to eat zero, they will eat less without thinking about it.
Speaker 2:And I'm all for the problem is that when people hear oh calories don't count on keto, then they start eating the fat bombs and keto brownies and keto cookies that have just as many calories of what they weren't eating before and they stop losing, you go you're gonna have to track your calories and they go oh calories don't count. That's where it but that has to do with how it's presented. So yeah, if a keto diet meets your needs, fantastic. Something else I would add, one thing we tend to forget is that the diet that you lose fat or weight on is not the diet you have to maintain it on. It's another trap we a lot of people fall into.
Speaker 2:Oh, well keto is not sustainable for fat loss. Who said you had to do it forever? Right? That's I see that argument made all the time online. Anybody that says you should cut carbs to lose weight is already like why?
Speaker 2:Just give me an objective reason why? Because you got to cut something. You can't cut protein, might cut fat, you got to cut something. And if keto helps you adhere to your diet and get taste buds take time to adjust, instant sensitivity improves, who's to say that you can't bring carbohydrates back in later? There was actually a study a year or two ago, Zach, because that's what for a lot of people, let's face it, we crave carbs.
Speaker 2:What it did is they took two groups and have them go full blown keto so less than 50 grams of carbohydrates a day for whatever time period. Then they told one group, alright, you can bring carbohydrates back in to whatever you feel is your personal level. And they did that and they ended up at about 150 per day, which for most people not doing a tremendous amount of activity is plenty. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:But the key so again, but the key was they did this to kind of again, I dislike reboot the system, whatever help you get to your goal while you're increasing your activity, losing fat improves insulin, yada yada yada. You can bring those back in once your taste buds have adjusted. The key being that you're still maintaining sufficient protein, moderate dietary fat, plenty of vegetables. It's just it's kind of resetting the system, but there's nothing that says you have to be on that forever, which is something that apparently people in my industry can't wrap their heads around. So yeah, if it's appropriate for you, it meets your needs, I'm not against it.
Speaker 2:But if it's not, don't get sucked into the cultists of keto who are like, this is the magic best thing forever for everybody under all context. Because what that means is it happened to be the right diet for them, which is fine. Love it. If you find the right diet for you, no arguments for me. Then they project that well, this worked great for me ergo it is, I mean that was Atkins, Doctor.
Speaker 2:Atkins died back in the 70s. Yeah. It was his personal, it helped him ergo, he described it as better than sex and sunshine. No joke, look it up, it's in the book. The ketosis was better than sex and sunshine.
Speaker 1:Fuck it out.
Speaker 2:Because it was his own per and that's what happens. The people then start to project and by the same token, I still see mainstream dietitians going well, everyone should eat 70% carbs, which is just as shortsighted. And of course, they're they're like well as long as you're eating high fiber unrefined carbohydrates and lots of vegetables. Okay, I don't disagree. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2:People don't eat like that. That's just the reality. Most people don't, right? So your assumption about how people are eating in the real world is mistaken. Maybe you eat like that or I've seen sports dietitians do it too.
Speaker 2:Since runners and cyclists need 70% carbohydrates who are doing twenty to forty hours a week of training. Therefore, all athletes, therefore an Olympic weightlifter doing three reps per set. A sprinter who's never running more than eight seconds at a time. Why do they need as many carbs? But people just can't see beyond their own little anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good, it's good. It's a good overview of the keto diet and all that stuff, which is great for people. I want to go back to what actually happens when fat loss happens. So I know you mentioned is it Ultimate Diet two point zero, I can't remember which one about the brown fat cells and doing high intensity interval training followed by lower intensity and stubborn fat areas? So I wanna start off with the basics.
Speaker 1:What happens when we lose fat? What the fuck is going on, basically? And then, okay, so why does fat not go in certain areas and then why is brown fat and then what is the Yes. So let's walk them through that.
Speaker 2:Okay. So just for background, there's technically three different well, right now I'll just say two different types of body fat or different areas, right? Here I'm talking about what's called well, there's white fat and there's brown fat. Let's start there. And that has to do with their color.
Speaker 2:It's more like beige, it's more like kind of a milky chalky color and more of a beige brownish. White fat is what we tend to think of as body fat. It is the majority of our body fat. It is if you look down if you're a man you've got fat around your midsection, hips and thighs for women or wherever that's white fat. That is your basic body fat primarily storage of energy to be used for whenever it's needed.
Speaker 2:It has a bunch of other, does a bunch of other things in the body, they're finding out that fat cells not release all kind of hormones and all this other stuff but predominantly energy storage. Then there's brown fat and we'll come back to this. Brown fat is a special type of fat that burns white fat for energy. Basically generates heat, it's thermogenic. I'll come back to that.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna sort of push that to the side for the time being. So we're mainly focused on white fat. This is the stuff that we want to lose and sort of subdivide that white fat. The first is visceral fat. This is the fat that's found around the internal organs, very deep fats, typically found more in males, right?
Speaker 2:So you've probably seen pictures of those guys that had somebody I talked to recently that looked like they swallowed like a beach ball or like a soccer ball, European football, right? They just have this, you know what I'm talking about, And they may not even look very fat visually, but they just look like they've swallowed, you know, a giant beach ball. That's an accumulation of visceral fat around the midsection around the internal organs. More common in men due to testosterone, women with polycystic ovary syndrome who have typically elevated testosterone levels frequently develop that. Postmenopausal women who don't go on hormone replacement tend to see a shift towards more visceral fat.
Speaker 2:If men or women gain an excessive amount of body fat, they tend to develop visceral fat. Now visceral fat is very metabolically active. It tends to dump a lot of fatty acids in the bloodstream, which is good because that makes it easy to lose, but bad because that cause a lot of health negatives. And that's why there's you will see all you know all those articles and they're just like walking burns off visceral fat whatever it is gut fat, deep gut fat. So when you lose visceral fat, you don't see a big visual change.
Speaker 2:You feel leaner. If you have an experience that it's hard to describe.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:like again, this is typically more men and they start to lose this start a diet lose visceral fat. So it's like suck your tummy and you just feel leaner inside but without big visual change. All right, so the other one is subcutaneous fat. Sub means under, cutaneous means skin. So this stuff we can see.
Speaker 2:Is generally we're talking about dieting. This is what we want to lose to improve appearance. All right. Subcutaneous fat cells are about 85 to 90% stored triglyceride. Triglyceride is just say it's called a glycerol molecule down to three fatty acids, right?
Speaker 2:Triglyceride, that's stored fat, right? If you look at a piece of steak, it's got gristle or fatty whatever same thing that's on our bodies stored triglyceride. That's what we eat. The rest of it a little bit of water, some cellular machinery, but predominantly that's stored triglyceride.
Speaker 1:All
Speaker 2:right, so mobilization. Mobilization is hormonal. The two big hormones that we focus on are insulin, right? Insulin is released pretty much when we eat protein releases insulin and carbohydrates release insulin. I'm sure everyone listening to this has heard about, you know, the insulin hypothesis and dairy, TOBS and all that other thing.
Speaker 2:Insulin is certainly involved in fat storage. When insulin levels are up, it tends to promote nutrient storage and this is in all tissues liver muscle, but also fat cells. So it tends to push calories into fat cells. However, it also inhibits fat mobilization. So insulin is kind of a double whammy because when you're fed, you've just eaten a meal, the body has calories to use for energy.
Speaker 2:So it doesn't need to release fat. It doesn't really need to release fat, right? There's certain logic to it. So when insulin goes down, you haven't eaten, you exercise, exercise lowers insulin, fat storage gets decreased, fatty acid mobilization goes up, right? Insulin, it's kind of like taking a break off of fat mobilization.
Speaker 2:But the other hormones of importance are what are called the catecholamines. In The US we call them adrenaline and noradrenaline and everywhere else in the world they call them epinephrine and norepinephrine. Yeah. Because America. Adrenaline is released from the adrenal gland, epinephrine is released from the adrenal gland.
Speaker 2:So when you exercise, get stressed, scared, adrenal gland dumps adrenaline into the bloodstream and it has effects all over the body, right? So watching a scary movie, heart rate goes up, blood pressure gets up, get anxious, jittery, that's adrenaline or epinephrine. Norepinephrine or noradrenaline is released from the nerve terminals, right? So fat cell, you've got a little nerve right here. Noradrenaline was just released very locally.
Speaker 2:Those turn on fat mobilization and I'm going to ignore there's a whole bunch of complicated steps how to do things called hormone sensitive lipase and there's a bunch of new lipases I've even bothered to keep up with doesn't matter in the big picture. When this happens, when insulin is lowered, the catecholamine levels go up during exercise, during stress, during starvation, fat cells will break these triglyceride molecules that'll break the individual fatty acids off those go into the bloodstream, right? So that's step one. Without that you cannot lose fat short of surgery, right? If you can't get the fatty acid out of the fat cell, you cannot lose fat.
Speaker 2:So that is in many ways the most important step, or it is the most important step because without that nothing else can possibly happen. Now blood flow through fat cells is not very good, but it depends. It varies and we'll talk about this. Visceral fat, a lot of blood flow. Upper body, subcutaneous fat, pretty good blood flow.
Speaker 2:Women's hip and thigh fat, terrible blood flow. If you feel those fats up put your hands on that area, it's cold to the touch, very, very poor blood flow. And that's really the next step because now that the fatty acids in the bloodstream, it has to get moved away from the fat cell because if it isn't, it can get stored right back in.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So if you're in a deficit, right, and your body needs the energy, it's like fuck, I need the energy, But you can't get the blood flow to where that fatty acid is stored. You can't get that fatty acid into the bloodstream to use.
Speaker 2:Well, it'll be in the bloodstream, but it can't go anywhere. And if it just sits there, eventually it'll just get stored back in the fat cell.
Speaker 1:And how much of a degree do reckon this happens in people who are like, I can't lose fat in certain areas when they're still in debt? So like, if you're in the deficit, what's the chances are that regardless of the deficit, you're still gonna lose that fat or actually you do really, really need to make sure whether you get the blood flow and you need to get, you know, activate this kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Me come back to that. Let me finish the process of fat loss then we'll talk about because different areas of the body do differ in terms of all of this. Yeah, how easily they mobilize fatty acids or store them the amount of blood flow the way hormones work They do vary from and this explains why we lose fat at different parts of the body. So let me come back to that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right. So the fatty acids in the bloodstream hopefully and it binds to albumin or something another protein. Hopefully it gets carried out. Now what happens? Well, ideally it runs into something in the body like the heart, an organ, skeletal muscle that can burn fatty acids for fuel.
Speaker 2:If so, it will move into that cell. There's a transport protein and get burned for fuel in the mitochondria producing energy and it produces you probably some listeners may have there's an article a year or two ago and it was like what really happens when fat is burned and what happens is when you burn fat which means you're just mitochondria is oxidizing it, you produce energy, you produce CO2, you produce a little bit of water. So if you want to get really really semantic about it, when you lose fat, you exhale and pee it out but nobody really thinks of it in those terms. So like the three big steps and there are minor ones throughout this. First you know blood, you have to get the fatty acid in the bloodstream.
Speaker 2:That's hormonal. Blood flow has to carry that fatty acid away where it hopefully gets a tissue like the heart skeletal muscle liver where it's burned for energy. I want to mention something that women's bodies hate them and I'm not, again, I sound facetious in saying that but women's bodies make all this harder because one of the fascinating things women's bodies can do is mobilize fat from the upper body which is easier, we'll come back to that and if it's not burned for energy, it gets stored in the lower body because in the same way that a fatty acid can be released from a fat cell and get put back in women's bodies can release a fatty acid from like the abdomen and it come down through the bloodstream get to the hips and thighs and get stored there Because there was years ago, Women, female dieters would report this or like I'm leaning out up top, but I swear to God I'm getting fatter in my lower body and we're all like, yeah, whatever. It's all in your head because that's what idiots do. We dismiss everything women ever say, but it's absolutely it turns out to be absolutely true.
Speaker 2:Sarah Walker to everyone why I know why it's just so that's that but so those are the three important steps mobilization, transport, oxidation, burning for energy. When that happens, you have burned fat for now, you have to be in the deficit, right? Because if you're just storing the fat back in from another meal, you're not losing fat. There's no net effect. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, you still have and this gets into a whole separate thing. Fat balance has to be like we talk about calorie balance, calories in versus calories out, that has to be a negative. It's about fat balance, fat burning has to be greater than fat storage and that difference that will be the loss of fat from fat cells. So that is the general process. So the next question becomes why do we gain and lose fat in different areas?
Speaker 2:And there's a bunch of reasons many of which are hormonal, many of which are biological and it sort of comes down to differences in how all these processes work. So without getting too deep into the weeds, right? I mentioned the catecholamines. They have, well, all hormones have receptors, receptors, right? So insulin binds the insulin receptor, estrogen binds the intrusion receptor.
Speaker 2:The way hormones work, we like to describe it is a hormone is a key, the receptor is the lock, when the key goes into the lock stuff happens. That's my super technical explanation of how hormones work. The stuff happens, you don't where there's a bunch of stuff happens and then the important thing happens. So insulin binds, stuff happens, store carbs, fats, whatever. Some hormones have multiple receptors.
Speaker 2:Estrogen has an estrogen receptor alpha and estrogen receptor beta. What this allows the body to do is have one hormone work differently in different parts of the body, right? If one tissue has a lot of estrogen receptor alpha that'll do one thing another has the beta. So now I need to talk about something they're called adreno receptors or just adrenoceptors. These are the receptor for adrenaline, for epinephrine and they are all over the body and there's two different types beta receptors and alpha receptors Each one of those has multiple subtypes, I'm not getting into that because it's not that important.
Speaker 2:All right, so beta receptors, think of those as accelerator, right? So, when adrenaline, when epinephrine and norepinephrine binds to a beta receptor, it cranks things up, right? So, you get stressed, get scared, adrenaline binds to the beta receptor in the heart, heart rate goes up. Same thing in fat cells, when the catecholamines bind to the beta receptor, fat is mobilized. There's also an alpha receptor.
Speaker 2:An alpha receptor is like a break. So when one of these hormones binds the alpha receptor slows things down. So if adrenaline binds to the alpha receptor in the heart, it slows heart rate down, brings blood pressure down. In the fat cell alpha receptors when it binds inhibits fat mobilization and the consequence of this is that the ratio of the alpha and beta receptors is very important in terms of how easily or how difficult it is mobilize fatty acids, right? You've got a lot of beta receptors and not a lot of alpha receptors, you got a lot of the accelerator, not a lot of the break.
Speaker 2:It's very easy to get fat out of those fat cells and if it's the opposite, you've a lot of the break, lot of the alpha receptors, not as many beta receptors, it's much much harder. Well, these different fatty these different areas, right? Visceral fat is the easiest to mobilize. Insulin doesn't have a big effect on it. So insulin can't block the release of fat.
Speaker 2:A lot of beta receptors, great blood flow because it's right there near the internal organs, very easy to mobilize fat from. So if you're a male, woman carrying visceral fat and you start to diet, that stuff that comes off the easiest. Then we tend to sort of lose fats. We lose fat from inside out visceral fats first then subcutaneous fat. Generally is that from the top down, right?
Speaker 2:What happens when we die? Face starts to lean out often getting extremely unhealthily lean depending on what you look like beforehand. Upper body comes in next, right? You'll have leaner women who are just have you know, crazy upper bodies, veins, striations, cuts. The abdominals are next and the abdominals there's actually three different areas.
Speaker 2:There's a deep abdominal wall close to the visceral fat, there's an upper outer abdominal wall and there's a lower outer abdominal wall and they lose in that order, right? So for men, they lose visceral fat first, upper body, upper abs always come in and lower abs are the last because of these differences and listeners, the women will not be surprised to find that and there's and all these things are kind of gradually changing, right? The deep abdominal fat a little more sensitive to insulin visceral fat, but not by much still nice and sensitive to the epinephrine and norepinephrine, good blood flow, upper fat, upper body fat's a little bit harder, lower abdominal fat, women's hip and thigh fat tends to store fat very easily. It has some research has found a nine to one ratio of the alpha to the beta receptors. So they're nine times as many of the receptors that inhibit fat mobilization as stimulator and terrible blood flow.
Speaker 2:So it's easier to it's harder to mobilize fat out of there. The fat that's mobilized, it's harder to get through there because of low blood flow. If you can do that, it can be burned off for fuel, But if you can't get it out away from the area, none of it doesn't matter. So that's sort of it and again, testosterone is involved, estrogen is involved, progesterone is involved, other hormones play secondary roles. There's biology involved here in terms of the fat cells developing, you know, chromosomally, hormonally, but that's sort of from a biological standpoint that why we tend to sort of lose fat in a very predictable pattern.
Speaker 2:So inside out top down hips and even men that carry more hip and thigh fat and they do exist. There are some men that have a more female fat pattern, a lower body fat pattern. They have the exact same issues because basically their fat cells, their lower body fat cells are pretty much the same as well as their body fat cells.
Speaker 1:Is there any cases where someone has got such density of alpha receptors, terrible, terrible blood flow, and they're in deficits and they don't lose the fat there? Like, does it get will it eventually come off or not?
Speaker 2:I think eventually is the key because a lot of this stuff can change with fat loss and the problem is you know, that research on this tends to look at people carrying a very large excess of body fat, right? Not so much moderately lean and especially not leaner individuals. I mean, it's probably conceivable that someone like I don't know if it would ever be truly impossible. It will simply be difficult. Now there's also the issue, right?
Speaker 2:Like when we diet some people lose more muscle than others and in a conceptual sense, if your body can't mobilize fat for energy to cover the deficit, it has to come from somewhere. You can't get fat out for energy, it may break down more muscle. So that might be part of what explains it. I think what you tend to see more and obviously this is all irrelevant without practical advice and I will discuss that. But yeah, you'll see people that like women, I mean especially right, they get this ripped upper body and as one as an old mentor of mine used to put it looks like you've stapled two bodies together, right?
Speaker 2:You've got this super lean upper body and I think as he described, you know, basically like you're carrying life support for your butt because you're still carrying lots of hip and thigh fat. What's always sort of what I find, I guess ironic is the right word, right? Men usually have very lean legs, like no matter how much fat I've ever carried. I've always had cut legs, my thigh skinfold has never been above three, even when I was carrying a lot of body fat. Will get a six pack and still carry fat on their legs.
Speaker 2:Men will have ripped legs and still carry fat around their midsection and both wishes they had with the other half. And thus is the balance of the universe maintained. Cause it's yeah, because yeah, I said women you'll see they'll get the full six pack and there are there are also people I should mention that carry fat very evenly. Like they don't have any real trouble spots. I don't know why that's the case but you do see it and this has both pros and cons.
Speaker 2:The pros are they never look like they're carrying a lot of body fat even when they are because it's so evenly distributed. Yeah. The con is that when they lose fat it doesn't look like anything is happening because it's coming off so evenly that like again, look at the typical diet, right? Face starts to get lean and Kimberly said that's me. Upper body, again, at women when they hit even you know, the high teens low 20s they'll just have you know, ridiculously cut upper packs.
Speaker 2:But these people with the even fat distribution will lose and lose and lose and they're five kilos of fat down and ten they're like, I look the same. However, maybe Kimberly can mention something in chatter whenever we eat. But when they lean out, it's like overnight, right? It's just like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh my God, suddenly they hit that point and everything comes in at once but it can be really, really, really frustrating because everything has changed.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so this is all sort of that physiology of it In terms of you know, where the one random thing this was actually a surprise to both myself and I guess the researchers. It's always kind of assumed that when women eat, the fat goes preferentially to their lower body. That's actually not true most of the time. Both men and women store fats initially in the upper body because it's easier, I guess, it's closer, more blood flow, I don't remember exactly why. Over time, women do that fat redistribution thing.
Speaker 2:So they stored in the so which means that if they whatever they're eating and if that gets stored, if it gets burned off quickly enough, it never has a chance to sort of migrate to the lower body. But over time and this I think is months, fat that stored in the upper body for both women and men in women will get released into the bloodstream not burned and they'll just eventually it'll get to the hips and fat and once it's there, it's much much harder to get off. The only thing I will add to that, there was one study that looked gave women a tremendous number of calories and something like 100 grams of dietary fat, just enormous. Under those conditions, fat was stored preferentially in the lower body. So in women eat like and there's no saying here at least that I'm sure non US has to some effect, which is a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is true like and there's, you know, there's much truth to what your grandma said, like a lot of that folk was and it's true because once it gets stored in the lower body, can it be mobilized? Yes. Is it easy to mobilize? Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:And what is the best way or the most effective way to mobilize fat in those areas?
Speaker 2:Okay, yes. This is the practical bit. So we go back to, you know, the 80s and the 90s, even in physique competitions. The way you dieted was basically a high carb low fat diet. I'm just looking at what you
Speaker 1:can read out this down maybe.
Speaker 2:Oh, there we go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just nothing visual happens until you get to a very much lower level. Right. And everybody did, you know, low intensity cardio, lots of carbs, lifted weights and that's when you really tended to see a lot of those problems with women just wouldn't lose hip and thigh fat, right?
Speaker 2:I wrote my book The Stubborn Fat Solution whenever 2008 and I talked about some of the ways around this. Going back to keto, for whatever reason low carb diets do tends to help mobilize the stubborn fat that hip and thigh fat. Something about having lots, chronically lots of fatty acid in the bloodstream seems to inhibit those alpha receptors and this gets a little bit confusing. So the alpha receptor is the break, right? When it's activated, it inhibits fat loss.
Speaker 2:If you inhibit an inhibitor, the effect is a positive. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a double negative basically. So if you inhibit the inhibitor, low carb diets seem to benefit.
Speaker 2:I've written about it, there's a dietary supplement called Yohinbine that naturally impacts that has its own set of issues. We can talk about that or not. I'll come back to that. But one thing is I wrote about again, we talked about this hormonal thing. Talked about epinephrine released from the adrenal gland, norepinephrine released from the nerve terminal.
Speaker 2:During exercise, these hormones get released at different intensities. So at lower intensities, your body pretty much only releases epinephrine from the adrenal gland, has an effect full body, but I already mentioned terrible blood flow to the lower body. When you get above a certain intensity and that intensity variably variously called the lactate threshold, the anaerobic threshold, think of it as the highest intensity you can maintain for like an all out hour, right? But you would be suffering the entire time, right?
Speaker 1:What's that? How long do you say? Well,
Speaker 2:no, I'm just defining it. It is the highest intensity that you can maintain for like a maximum of an hour and it will be hard the whole time. Right? Once you go above that, right? We get into high intensity interval training.
Speaker 2:At that point, you're gonna fatigue very quickly. Now if you're just above it, it might take you ninety seconds. You're very you know going all out, it might be ten or fifteen, thirty. Now when you go above that threshold, as it turns out, that causes norepinephrine to be released. That causes the body to release that hormone from the nerve terminal.
Speaker 2:Oh, I should also mention blood vessels have alpha and beta receptors just like the fat cells, exact same thing. The beta receptors are activated, the blood vessel gets bigger when alpha receptors are activated, blood vessel gets smaller. So there's another effect of that in women's lower body fat, but when you go above this high intensity threshold and generate this hormonal response, it is able to overcome some of that difficulty in mobilizing the fatty acids, right? So you look back at the 80s and the 90s, all everybody did all and look at how women have traditionally dieted. High carbs, lots of low intensity, go to the cardio deck for your two hour grind or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:I found a few studies, I think they're in the women's book and if not I found them more recently that looked at this and kind of accidentally found that when women performed more high intensity activities, whether it's high intensity weight training or high intensity aerobic activity rather than losing almost exclusively upper body fat, they lost the fat more evenly. Now someone, a podcast I did, I won't say last year, you know, someone asked me, you know, where are those stubborn fat protocols in 2020, right? Because what the two of the protocols I described in my book were to start with a very high intensity short interval workout, like ten minutes. The idea being to mobilize those fatty acids. Like I said, if you mobilize them and don't burn them, they go right back in.
Speaker 2:You follow that up with your low intensity activity to burn them off. Boom. So he asked me, you know, where do those protocols stand in 2020? And I said, well, it's interesting because you will find a lot of coaches that go, oh, stubborn fat is not a thing. I've never seen it.
Speaker 2:But the way people diet now and train now is very, very different. If you look at when one of them who I will not name, he is a keto zealot and he tried to engage me and I said, it's real simple. You don't see stubborn fat because you're already using one of my protocols. I win. You're all your people on a keto diet.
Speaker 2:It's one of my recommendations. You don't think it exists because you're already doing something that I, right? So, but most diets now as women have become more attuned to the benefits of higher protein, the benefits of moderate fat, that only leaves so much room for carbs. Yeah. Right in the modern world of dieting if you're getting whatever 1.8 to two grams per kilo of protein, half a gram per kilo of dietary fat, how much room do have for carbs especially smaller women that don't have a lot of calories to work with.
Speaker 2:They're ending up at you know, 2530% carbs maybe two grams per kilo lower in that range. In addition, women have adopted much more high intensity weight training. Now that's become more normalized and high intensity interval training has become such a thing. Well, basically moderate what I wrote about in 2008 that was at the time very different from how people approach dieting and sort of it's kind of the norm now in in the aggregate. So these physique coaches are like, yeah, my women don't have problem.
Speaker 2:Right, they're doing intervals twice a week. They're doing high intensity weight training four times a week and they're on no more than two grams per kilo of carbs. So kind of it's just reached the point that it is essentially doing everything I was trying to accomplish in 2008.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And when you just like be clear when you say high intensity weight training, a lot of people have a question like about how out of breath or sweaty they should be like when it comes to weights, when you said sixty minutes, should be, you're gassed. But does that mean that in that sixty they have to really be like, so you know.
Speaker 2:That's okay. So that was really for aerobic training, that sixty minute number. Weight training lives in its own little world first in so many ways because by definition, weight training is above this threshold where the hormonal response is because it all even you know, lower intensity weight training. If it's gonna cause you know you to fatigue in 35 reps that's still what's that three or four minutes? That's still if you can do a set of weight training for twenty straight minutes, you're not doing it right.
Speaker 2:Although there were there are these old studies in the 70s that sound horrific. They're out of Scandinavia, there's one university that does like top tier science and they would do what they described as one legged kicking for like 60, basically they were doing leg extensions for sixty minutes. I can't think of anything worse. I mean, know, basically they made it aerobic, but oh my god. Anyway, so weight training by definition is going to be above that intensity and in the sense of a fat loss standpoint, no, you're not having you don't have to rush through it.
Speaker 2:I guess when I say high intensity is traditionally, you know, when women have entered the weight room, it has been sort of you know faffing about with three with you know, kilo and a half dumbbells or doing fifth doing and not really challenging themselves. Yeah. There has been, when I say high intensity, it's more that's being done at a challenging enough level where a set of 15 is not impossible, but you know, the last two or three repetitions are pretty hard. Women in general recover more quickly between sets than men, right? If I give a man a set of 15 lunges or squats or leg presses, he will have to lay down for about five minutes if it's hard.
Speaker 2:A woman sixty seconds later will be like, I'm ready to go now. Women do so women I think probably instinctively keep a little bit faster pace in the weight room just because they don't need it, they don't need those long rests by and large. Maybe at the you know, the extreme levels of power lifting and stuff like that. Stephie Cohen is doing, you know, two eighty kilos in the deadlift. She probably rests a couple of minutes in between that but we're talking about, you know, us mere humans don't need.
Speaker 2:So I think women maintain a little bit of a pace. I do like to keep the weight training quality, right? You shouldn't be moving through so quickly that being out of breath is impairing your ability to do quality work. Although and this is on my website, there's an article I call it, it's called weight training for fat loss. I kind of distinguish what I call tension weight training.
Speaker 2:This is heavier weights challenging the muscles, the goal is to build and maintain muscle, right? So might be sets six to eight sets 10 to 12 pretty heavyweight, maybe rest two minutes between sets. There's also metabolic weight training where you do 15 to 20 repetitions in about sixty seconds. That's an interval workout, right? Sixty seconds of pretty high intensity work, rest forty five to sixty seconds, do multiple sets, multiple exercises, that'll have a very interval like effect.
Speaker 2:If you do that, do it with safe movements, do it on machines, do it with kettlebells, do it with battle ropes, like don't do power cleans like this. Women can, you know, squats can become very, very, can get very, very rough very, very quickly. Do it with same but that is a way to sort of generate that same hormonal response and what you could very easily do is thirty minutes of metabolic weight training, catch your breath for a few minutes, go walk in the treadmill for thirty minutes, boom, the weight training will mobilize the harder to mobilize fatty acids. Now realize you're never women are never going to be able to get only lower body fat mobilized, right? The body is still always going to pull up from easier spots.
Speaker 2:It's more a matter of proportions and what these papers found was rather than it being like a 100% upper body fat loss, which is pretty common. It was some mixture where and they were measuring skin folds or Dexter whatever it was, excuse me. And just that in contrast to most other studies doing the high intensity work, the hips and thighs actually did reduce, which they had not when only low intensity aerobic work was done. So it's just a matter of getting it to move proportionally more quickly and what you will women do fine, right? When everything else gets lean and you kind of ask this question, it kind of has to come from somewhere in women as they get very lean and you're talking 15 to 16% body fat, which is not realistic for everyone.
Speaker 2:The lower body moves more quickly, right? It's the same in men. Everything in a man will be absolutely ripped. I get questions in my forum all the time or my Facebook group. Get all this fat around my midsection.
Speaker 2:What's my problem like? You're male. That's it. That's your problem. You know, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 2:Go, well, you're a dude. That's what's wrong with you. And it's just but when men get there, if they keep dieting long enough, it means that very, very quickly women tend to be the same. So I prepped a physique competitor years and years and years ago, mean, sure, upper body was just shredded, and her thighs hadn't moved that much. And right then all of a sudden, it was like every day, like once it started to move it moved fast.
Speaker 1:And did you put him on the like the protocol, you know of like the I
Speaker 2:think I had her doing Yo him being at that point. I had this was before I'd really formally developed a lot of those protocols. I had an early one that I used and it's a very fine balance with her because she decided she wanted to do a bodybuilding contest and then do a powerlifting contest two weeks later which is one of the most challenging experiences I've ever had as a coach because I had to figure out how to diet her down, make her weight class, make her body fat goal and keep her performance up. And she actually somehow I did it. I don't know I could do it again.
Speaker 2:She actually made it to stage two weeks later, we kept her in the lighter weight class. She hit at least a bench to deadlift PR I think but I was very limited in how much interval work I could have her do or any of that because she was squatting and deadlifting heavily twice a week. So it's a little bit, so she's in a lot of low intensity fasted cardio after Yo Him Be and that was kind of and she liked lower carb diets, but the higher intensity protocols were out of the question for her.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To this, let's start with the protocols just as a overview. So if someone here is like they've been losing weight for a lot a lot of members have actually said this, they've lost a lot of weight this year, you know, being in the community. Now it's slowing down, and it's not and it's, you know, obviously, like, maybe them the maintenance has dropped and stuff like that. They need to lower their calories.
Speaker 1:But Right. I think a lot of them are finding the, like, stubborn areas are, like, open up. So what would be the first kind of step? What would be like a really basic version? Would you say weights and then just cardio as a basic one, two
Speaker 2:or That would be one is you could depending on how often your weight training because during a diet, always like to maintain some amount of that tension, that heavyweight training. You don't ever want to lose muscle on a diet, women have an advantage, they lose less muscle than men. So that is one of the places women do get a little bit luckier, but you want to maintain some that both from a metabolic reason and just a shape reason. But if you want to replace one of your weight workouts with more of that metabolic weight training, so you might be looking at 15 to 20 repetitions, you know, you want the sets to last about forty five to sixty seconds somewhere in that range. So you're looking at what is that, you know, one or two seconds up, or two seconds down, sixty second rest, do three sets for one exercise, move to another exercise, do three sets of 15 to 20, you know, just kind of work in a circuit, do that for thirty minutes, rest about five and I want to get into details of why just trust me on this and go walk on the treadmill for thirty minutes at a brisk intensity, right?
Speaker 2:Now, what you will find, right? Let's say normally you walk on the treadmill at whatever pace, I cannot do kilometers an hour, I can do kilograms but that's a At a normally pace that give you a heart rate of like 120 whatever it is. It doesn't have to be walking, go get on the elliptical like whatever you want to do. What you will find is that doing it after that type of high intensity work, your heart rate will probably be about 10 beats higher than it would otherwise be and that's just because you've got all these epinephrine, norepinephrine hormones are still it's still cranky basically just everything's cranked up. So don't worry so much about heart rate.
Speaker 2:Don't be like I got to maintain a 120 heart rate. Go with a you know, a four or five rating of perceived exertion challenging, you're not dying, you want to burn off, you know, burn enough calories per minute, burn off those fatty acids, boom. So that would be one basic way to incorporate it. The other one and this is more sort of the formal protocols. Like I said, going on lower carbs can do it.
Speaker 2:Not everyone likes low carb diets. Don't respond to them, don't feel good on them, don't have to do it. That's why with this book, The Stubborn Fat Solution, I made sure I wanted to offer multiple protocols. Be like, all right, can't do this, here's another option. Yoimbine, that oral supplement can be beneficial.
Speaker 2:A lot of people hate it. Actually use it to stimulate anxiety attacks and research. Can't get it everywhere. Most of herbal forms are terrible. Not everyone likes it because they don't like the way it feels.
Speaker 2:If women go this route, I'm happy to sort of provide what I would recommend. A couple
Speaker 1:of things.
Speaker 2:You will see listed on the bottle that women shouldn't take this and here's why. Back in the day, well, let me mention they use Yohimbine for another purpose, erectile dysfunction. This is a blood flow thing. Same thing, alpha receptors in a man's penis decreases blood flow. Yohimbine inhibits the alpha receptor, right?
Speaker 2:So again, we're inhibiting the inhibitor, so we're taking the break off. Now, fifty years ago, nobody knew anything about anything and the assumption was that anything that helps men function sexually must work through testosterone. So you will see him being listed as a testosterone doesn't affect testosterone at all. It's a blood flow thing completely. I would mention this and I'll try to make this as uncrude as possible, I know it's probably not a word.
Speaker 2:Women who use it may find that they get some tingles and I'll just kind of leave it at that. When men use it, one of the like it's bad, right? Like if you're doing your cardio as a guy and there's someone very attractive to you on the treadmill in front of you, it can be awkward. That can happen to women as well. So just be forward if you decide to go down that route.
Speaker 2:If that's not an option and I don't even know like you can't even get it in Australia. I know that for a fact. I don't know if you can get the good stuff in The UK. In America for good or for bad, we can get everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can get everything. I think there's a few places I know it's like I think that on the label it says HCL, I'm not sure I think that's the version you're Yes.
Speaker 2:So there's you'll see two different kinds. One is an herbal form. It's usually something like Yoheendi Bark. Don't use that. It's awful because you'll be like hot and cold, stimulated and clammy.
Speaker 2:It's just it's got all these other herbal stuff always has all this other stuff in it that you're never quite sure. Do not, I used it when I was younger, it's awful. If you can get it and decide to go this route and I'm gonna like I said make a number of very strong statements. You want to get what's called Yohimbine Hydrochloride. This is the pharmaceutical version that they use.
Speaker 2:Like I said, they prescribe it for erectile dysfunction. They use in high doses to trigger anxiety attacks. So if you're prone to anxiety don't even consider this because what it's doing and also it's increasing noradrenaline levels in the brain which is what makes a lot of people anxious.
Speaker 1:It be like a really really I've tried it before I'm like yeah, it's been decent, but is it like a really strong or is it like a high dose caffeine type of feeling for people who
Speaker 2:have got It's different, it's hard to explain, it's a different, it's not an active stimulant like caffeine is gonna kind of activate the beta receptors. It's kind of an indirect stimulant but you will, some people get jitters and anxiety, you know, I said a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of weirdness, but it's not quite the same. It's really hard to describe. Yeah. A couple things.
Speaker 2:The dose of Yoheem Dine if you decide to use it is zero point two milligrams per kg. So a woman who's sixty kilos twelve milligrams. Now the pills come in a maximum of two point five milligrams per pill that is the highest you can dose it. So sixty kilo won't be looking at roughly five pills somewhere between five and six if they wanted to use it.
Speaker 1:All in one go or split?
Speaker 2:Yes, you take it all at once with some caffeine. The key thing, it has to be complete even small amounts of insulin will completely block you him being effects. So this has to be done before morning fasted cardio. Right you get up in the morning take caffeine take your him being an hour later. Go do your cardio of whatever kind.
Speaker 1:How much coffee?
Speaker 2:One hundred and two hundred milligrams is usually plenty.
Speaker 1:A cup of coffee will do? Yeah, strong cup of
Speaker 2:coffee is like sixty milligrams, so maybe a cup and a half. Tea is actually, I should mention tea just because it's kind of interesting. Tea, know, is a stimulant but you don't get the same jitters as with coffee. So I'm told I don't drink either. There's a compound in tea called T and E that often is recommended for anxiety for sleep because what it does is it prevents that big increase in hormone levels in the brain.
Speaker 2:This is why tea has a stimulant effect but you don't get as wired. It's kind of a calmer cooler stimulant effect for a while here in The US we've called smart caffeine. It was two hundred milligrams of caffeine. I want to say two hundred milligrams of tanine. So it kind of woke you up and got you moving, but you didn't feel like you wanted to murder somebody.
Speaker 1:That's quite good. Why is it that that's not a bigger thing?
Speaker 2:I don't know quite honestly because the stuff's great. Like it's such a it's just a mellower buzz to do, you know. I mean, US is not a big tea drinking country by and large, but not sure why tannin hasn't caught on more as an add on to stimulants because it definitely evens stuff out and makes you get a lot less wired and aggressive. So anyway, would take so the protocol would be, you know, totally empty stomach. And when I say totally empty stomach, I mean that I mean, if you want to have coffee, you got to take it black, no milk, no cream, no sugar.
Speaker 2:Like I mean, fasted as fasted as fasted. So totally empty stomach one hundred and two milligrams of caffeine zero point two zero point two milligrams per kg of Eohimbine sixty minutes an hour before you know forty five to sixty minutes of low to moderate intensity aerobic exercise. You do not want to take this. You're going to do intervals don't take this. You will feel like you're having a heart attack.
Speaker 2:Like you're not but you will feel because what you've done, right? The interval training is already jacking things up but now you've taken away the normal block and everything just goes to the ceiling. Don't do it before weight training, You'll hate it. You'll like the only way to use it for weight training and this is so let's say you're gonna do an hour weight workout. You could conceivably take this stack right at the beginning of your weight workout.
Speaker 2:One hour of weights and it'll be hitting your system right when you start your low intensity cardio. You do not want him being in your system when you're doing any, like I said, you will feel like you're having a heart attack. It's really really really awful. If you're going to try this, start with a half dose, right? So if six pills is your dose, start with three, assess your tolerance.
Speaker 2:It's not for everybody. A lot of people just hate it. Yeah. If you're prone to anxiety, don't even consider it. That's why I did other protocols.
Speaker 2:This stuff's not for everybody. It's also not going to help a lot till you're relatively leaner. I think the other protocols probably have more use in the earlier stages. Save this for towards the end when you really need it, use the other ones first. Alright, so the two sort of formal stubborn fat protocols that I wrote up.
Speaker 2:The first one and I came up with this like, well with a friend, God, probably in 2,000 and I think I only saw it plagiarized a half dozen times without credit, maybe more than that. The basic idea you do like, so stubborn fat protocol one, five minute warm up, low intensity aerobic activity, ten minutes of high intensity interval training. You're looking at something like 10 by thirty seconds hard, thirty seconds easy, five by one minute hard, one minute easy, somewhere in that range. Then rest five minutes. Go get a drink of water, catch your breath, do nothing.
Speaker 2:Actually, I'll go ahead and explain why but just so this makes a little bit of sense. Oh, man. All right, so like I said, high intensity activity stimulates fat cells to mobilize fatty acids. However, acidosis is produced during you know that burn you get during high intensity activity that inhibits fatty acid release into the bloodstream. Okay, however, if you what you see in the or one of the early studies that found this they're like, we jacked it to high intensity and fatty acid bloodstream levels bloodstream didn't go up because the lactate the acidosis was inhibiting it.
Speaker 2:When they measured them five minutes later, there's this huge rebound effect. So it's kind of like the fat in the fat cell has been broken down, but it's being kind of blocked and then when you rest five minutes, the door gets open, I guess for better and you get this huge release of fatty acid in the bloodstream. So that's the five minute rest.
Speaker 1:I mean, in the five minute rest, are you just sitting down? Are you literally just like on a walk?
Speaker 2:Yeah, can complete rest if you want to do, you know, five minutes of really easy activity to cool down, whatever and then follow that up with thirty to forty minutes of, know, moderate aerobic activity. Like I said, don't you can't really use heart rate. So shoot for, know, waiting for perceived exertion four to five. So, you know, challenging, but not impossible, know, the talk test you might be you know, where you could keep sort of a broken conversation, you know, that will sort of maximize the calorie burn without you know, so you burn off those fatty acids. Boom, done.
Speaker 2:Do that I'd say twice a week maximum. If you're doing heavy leg weight, lower body weight training, like you have to factor this all in in a diet, right? This happened, let's say late 2000s I was like, oh my god, low carb, weight training, intervals and everybody got burnt out, right? You can't weight train, you can't do heavy leg training three days a week, throw on three more days of intervals on low calories. It's all a stress.
Speaker 2:So the stubborn fat protocols like say you're lifting weights for your lower body twice a week. You might be able to do the stubborn fat protocol a maximum of twice because if you do that right now you're training your legs hard three to four times a week and that's a lot. They add up. So I would do that no more than twice a week. Finally, you can't, you know, and again, you can use kind of that metabolic weight training as to replace, I said it ends up being an interval type training.
Speaker 2:So you want to go do battle ropes, sixty seconds on sixty second rest, do that five times then you go do some, you know, go get on the elliptical, cool that works too. The key thing is not the activity so much as that the intensity is high enough to get that hormonal response. Yeah. You use to get that is much less relevant than that you get it. So that was the first protocol and that was So then the second one I came up with, some refer that protocol two, everything is the same.
Speaker 2:Five minute warm up, ten minute of eight of the eight. With this one, I suggested keeping it to a to keeping it shorter and higher intensity. So here I would do like 10 by fifteen seconds almost all out like sprinting not on a treadmill like all out on a bike or on an elliptical forty five seconds and the reasoning for this was to try to get that same catecholamine that same adrenaline noradrenaline response without generating that acidosis that kind of locks the fatty acids of the fat cell. That makes sense? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then you do you know your thirty to forty minute less miss and then the difference is that immediately after you finish your cardio you go do a very short longer very short interval session with longer intervals. So go finish, go do an additional like five by forty five seconds. Well, like, you know, forty five seconds to a minute with minute fifteen to one minute off. The reasoning for that is try to get a little bit out of that afterburn effect like it's not big, know, the whole thing where after high intensity activity, you burn more calories afterwards. The idea here was to do just a little bit more of a high intensity metabolic work so that for the next couple hours you'll burn more calories and they'll burn off more of those fatty acids.
Speaker 2:This is a very intense protocol like this probably no more than once a week if you do it at all. Honestly, Stemmer Fat Protocol one whether it's formal interval training or with weight training usually sufficient every once in a while somebody but the Stemmer Fat Protocol two can be really, really rough. It can really beat people up. So if you do it, I'd keep it to
Speaker 1:a maximum of once a week and you would so you
Speaker 2:might do the Stubborn Fat Protocol one once a week, Stubborn Fat Protocol two once a week, that's enough. Trust me, that's enough.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to put this into the document and see what people do it because it's something we recommended before but good to go through it step by step so people understand why each element is there. So, you you mentioned beta and alpha, is that genetic or is it, do like people who get obese end up with more alpha than beta?
Speaker 2:There's, God, there's all these changes that occur with weight gain and weight loss and I'll be honest that I haven't kept up with it enough to really, really remember like what's going on in terms of those changes like, yeah, probably is, there probably is some genetic component which would explain some of why let's face it, some people objectively find it more difficult to lose fat in certain areas than others like that's incontrovertible. Probably, I don't know if it's been measured, you know, that much of a, A lot of this research with it, the French are fascinated with body fat. I don't know why, like a lot, I mean like I'm not trying to be obnoxious, it's just the truth. All this stuff, research named Lafontan did all this stuff in like the 80s and the 90s because the time I think they were like trying to really figure out why? Why do men store fat one way?
Speaker 2:Why do women store? What are the physiological differences between these different areas of body fat? So did a ton of that work and I think they kind of just moved on like fat cell research just kind of went to a different place with leptin and all these other everything else going on, but I haven't really seen much about it recently. But yeah, there are probably changes that are occurring in one direction or the other and probably genetics and beyond that, I just honestly haven't looked into it recently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And when people gain fat, know, fat cell goes bigger or smaller in size and then there's some people or some studies maybe have read that shows that people get more fat cells.
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. So the answer to that is yes ish. So fat cells can grow in one of two ways. One of them is hypertrophy meaning the fat cell itself gets bigger.
Speaker 2:The other one is called hyperplasia which means that more fat cells are made. For decades it was thought that pretty much the number of fat cells that you were born with that that's what you had for your entire life. In either direction, couldn't lose them couldn't gain. Turns out that's not entirely true. It is possible fat cells can die off, you can lose fat cells, it's a very slow process.
Speaker 2:For over a decade, I tried to figure out a way to do it without killing people but I couldn't, everything I came up with was like gonna cause autoimmune disease or lupus or like no joke. Kind of gave up on the project because nothing like there are ways they can do it surgically like cryolipolysis, I don't know if that's a big thing overseas, laser lipolysis, they come up with ways to basically cause fat cells to die, They dump into the bloodstream and eventually they get dumped out of the body. I gave up on any trying to do it chemically, but under certain conditions, can make more fat cells. Well, number one, some people are born with more fat cells than others and they call it hypertrophic obesity, bigger fat cells, hyperplastic obesity. Going back to our previous conversation, different areas of body fat vary in whether they have bigger and fewer fat cells or more and smaller fat cells.
Speaker 2:Memory, no big shocker women's lower body more fat cells that are smaller and this is relevant because oddly, the bigger a fat cell is the easier it is to mobilize fat out of it. As it gets smaller, it becomes much more difficult. So people that have more but smaller fat cells have a much more difficult time losing fat and keeping it off because they have more fat cells to store incoming calories. There are certain critical times when we can really easily make new fat cells. Puberty is one of them and that's concerning, right?
Speaker 2:We know that there is a drastic increase in teenage obesity, childhood obesity and these children are probably gaining a lot of fat cells during a time that this is going to make it really difficult for them down the road because the more fat cells you have the harder this is. Pregnancy can be another one. I think if weight gain is excessive and make no mistake pregnancy not my area of expertise. So that's pretty much where I'm gonna start and stop with that, but it can occur. However, what has been found is that fat cells can only get so big and once they get to a certain size, they release various chemicals whose names I have since forgotten.
Speaker 2:They cause what are called pre adipocytes, little baby fat cells to mature into full blown fat cells. Boom, now you have more fat cells. Now, in a way this is beneficial in the sense of as people gain excess body fat, they become insulin resistant, diabetic, metabolic syndrome, right? If the body makes more fat cells, there's more place for incoming calories to go. So actually as people reach that point, the ones who make more fat cells stay healthier than the ones that don't.
Speaker 2:And some of the drugs they use for diabetes, I'm going to call them the TZDs because I can't pronounce it. They actually cause the body to make more fat cells and doctors use this because in the short term it lowers blood sugar and in the long term that person now has more fat cells. This is not helping in the long term. So there is that situation where when fat cells get big beyond a certain point, they tend to get bigger or sorry, once they make more, they make new fat cells which are then very difficult to get rid of. And then of course, there's women who no surprise have it worse and study I cited in the women's book took men and women that were of a moderate body fat percentage.
Speaker 2:We'll say the men were low 20s, women were low 30% somewhere there and then they deliberately had him gain weight. What it found was that at that point the men basically the men did tend to gain more upper body fat and the fat cells got bigger and the women gained lower body fat and they made more fat cells. So when the reality is that once you get to a certain body fat percentage, if you continue gaining body fat, yeah, the body can make new fat cells and they're damn near impossible to get rid of short of like surgery or cryopolysis and stuff like that. Yes, that tends to be I hate to say at the extremes because that sounds just dismissive or critical or whatever. But yeah, it's when happens in men too.
Speaker 2:When you get to a point that your fat cells just can't store anymore, body has to do something and one of those one of those some things that can make new fat cells and that's No,
Speaker 1:this is all interesting stuff. So switching gears. So we'll do another we'll we'll go to the hour. Lars, I'm gonna keep you to your own and then Yeah. See if there's any questions.
Speaker 1:But can we talk a bit about the study by Branch Schornfeld on the resistance training volume. Yeah. What I can get from it is if you're looking to gain muscle, then it seems more volume is preferable. But if you're looking for strength gains, you're okay with less volume, but still the intensity is that kind of the gist or my role?
Speaker 2:To a degree, I've been very openly critical of that particular study because it tends to go against pretty much the entire body of literature that's ever been done in the history of ever. Like and I'm not really exaggerating with that and there you know, the gist of his study was he had groups do what was it nine twenty seven or 45 sets per muscle group per week supposedly found that the highest volume group gained more muscle but statistics didn't support that at all. Whereas the strength gains were no really no difference. So that kind of where where things stand right now as a generality is that gaining muscle has there's more of a volume component and it's not that more is better. There's sort of an optimal like a U shaped range and we can talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Strength is more related to intensity and one of the explanations given for why Brad study didn't find that more training gave greater strength gains is what a lot of these studies do, right, is they'll train people in like the eight to 12 repetition range, but then they'll test them on a maximum signal. Any power lifter, any strength trainer will tell you if you don't practice low repetitions, you don't get better at low repetitions. So it's hard, think a better test would be to test, you know, a 10 rep, the maximum they can do for 10 reps because that would be specific to the training. So that is like, yeah, the lowest volume got same strength gains as the highest volume. Yeah, but none of the workouts were geared towards strength gains.
Speaker 2:So I'm not too impressed by that. Even the statistics actually only supported that the moderate group was better than the lowest volume group, but no better than the highest volume group. This is just and really the entire fitness industry has walked back from this entire eighteen months later after arguing with me about it. They've all walked it back to basically written long articles that amount to Lyle was right all along, but none of them will say it. Because what basically we've concluded after all the data looked at all the studies is a weekly volume somewhere between ten and twenty sets per muscle group seems to be about optimal for 10 to 20 like and I mean challenging sets, right?
Speaker 2:I don't again I mean just like go fast about like sets that are within you know, one or two repetitions from the most the limits you could do, you know, you're doing 15 you would only get 17 if you went all out, 10 you would only get 12. Like they have to be challenging. Some of that range it seems to be about optimal. I will say women for a number of boring reasons probably can handle a little bit more volume than men. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm not talking a ton, I'm talking like maybe, you know, a handful more sets. They do recover a little bit faster, it doesn't seem to generate as much fatigue as a set of men's does to me. They made a little bit, you know, others have made the opposite argument since women have less testosterone, they should do less volume, but I think most in the field have kind of empirically anecdotal like women can handle a little more volume. They just don't get the same stress per set as a man does. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So 10 to 20 sets, know, if you're doing two workouts a week, you're looking at, you know, eight to 10 sets, even five to 10 sets, heavy sets per muscle group. And that should be pretty Just
Speaker 1:to clear because I know people ask like what you mean by body parts? Well, mean the biceps and the biceps, then when it comes to the shoulders, are we saying front side rear or are we saying just shoulders?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's where it gets into so much, there's so much overlap. This is even an issue with a lot of the studies, right? So Brad's study, here's what it did. They did nothing but bench press. No direct tricep work, no direct arm work.
Speaker 2:Then they measured the triceps. Okay, can we say that 45 sets of benching is equivalent to 45 sets for triceps? I don't think so. No. I think if you talk to most coaches when they math it out if they pay it like yeah, maybe about half someone does 10 heavy sets of bench I would probably count it as five for triceps and when you you know, again, I'm not saying that is or is not the right number, but it does indirect work, right?
Speaker 2:Does a pull down train the biceps as hard as the biceps curl and one study has actually said absolutely no, it doesn't. Takes the biceps longer to recover from bicep curls or from under grip pull downs. We get into a lot of issues with muscular overlap and counting sets and all this other stuff, right? So let's say you've done eight sets for chest and let's say you did all pressing, compound pressing, maybe you did four sets of machine chest press or dumbbell bench press or barbell bench press, you did four sets of an incline chest press, right? That's eight sets for chest.
Speaker 2:Do that twice a week, that's 16 sets, boom, sort of. But then what do we do for triceps? Well, I would personally count that as four sets for triceps already. I would do maybe four direct sets of direct tricep work, push downs, close grip, whatever you want to do. Then you've gotten the equivalent of eight sets for triceps, four of them came from the benching, four of them come through and then if you want to get super complicated, let's say you did four sets of barbell bench, four sets of cable crossover, That's still eight sets for chest, but now you've only done four sets that hit the triceps.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:I count that as two and then I would add maybe four to six more of direct tricep work to get to that A. So you start and then delts get super complicated, right? So we do have front side, rear delt. Now I tend to count front delt, most people don't need a lot of work there. They're doing any sort of chest or Medial delt, hard to say where how much I don't think it gets hit much by a lot of like chest pressing back movements.
Speaker 2:I tend to kind of count it by itself. So I would rear delts, okay, rear delts kind of goes with back. You're doing a lot of rowing. Are your rear delts getting some work? Yeah, probably You sort of get to the point with a lot of this that I would love to tell you I'm being scientific but as much as anything I'm just flat out guessing And so like, yeah, with weird and most people just get bored, weird L work is boring as all hell.
Speaker 2:So like, if you're doing some heavy cable rowing of some sort, it's working weird Ls, don't you do that for four to six sets back is also complicated because back there's the mid back, there's the lats, there's the low back, there's the traps, do we count them all separately? Mid back and lats kind of work together.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:depending on the movements you're doing. Low back I do sound separately for most back movements. If you're dead lifting rack pull, like maybe you're just cable rolling and pulling down. I wouldn't count that towards low back I train with core with people. Traps, honestly do many women want big traps?
Speaker 2:Daresay not. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had anybody do direct upper trap work. Genuinely need mid back work, you need lat work, train low back with your abs and you're pretty much sorted. And then you get into lower body, right? And there you wanna talk about guessing.
Speaker 2:So let's say you back squat. What muscles are getting worse depend on where you carry the bar, what stance you use, how deep you go, right? If you are using a very high bar narrow stance, squatting very deep, it'll be a lot of quads and glutes. If you're using a very lower bar, you're bent over a lot, you have bad mechanics for squatting, it'll be a lot of glutes and low back and maybe not a lot of quad, hamstrings don't get a ton of work from squatting. This it does really get hard like I tend to guess in my own training or with people like I would say, I kind of count squats as a quad exercise in the same way like I don't think it's a 100% like I wouldn't count it one to one.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say that four sets of back squats is necessarily four sets for quads. God, it just depends on the person and their biomechanics at which point you might as well just do like I mean like an RDL is easy, remaining deadlift, that's hamstrings, some glutes, you know, leg press, you can do quad dominant or hamstring dominant, it just gets it turns into a lot of like I said, I want to pretend like I always know what I'm talking about but a lot of it is kind of like how does a person squat? Where are they feeling it? Are they going full squat which most women can do easier than men? Then you kind of just like fake your way through the rest of it.
Speaker 2:You know, I typically might do something like you know for general leg workout maybe four sets of eight in the back squat if you can do it well, four sets of eight in the RDL. I tend to keep those kind of even. Want to do four sets of leg press? Sure. That's probably gonna be mostly quad dominant.
Speaker 2:Do four sets of a leg curl, a couple heavy sets of leg extension, a couple more heavy sets of leg curl, different leg curl. That to me is usually enough. Of course, then we get what about glute bridges? Yeah, glutes. If you're full squatting your glutes probably get hit pretty well.
Speaker 2:If you're deep leg pressing might need to go ahead and tack on, know, four or five higher reps sets of glute bridges a couple times a week. Lower body gets super complicated. I'd love to hear how you approach it. Well, we I make it up as I go along and pretend like I know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, like I mean, I don't know, with squats, we tend to find that works well with women in squats is to go and do a lot of band work to get the glutes fired. They actually feel there's some blood flow in that glutes because it's basically really cold otherwise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Things like X walks and I know people tend to kind of crap on, you know, activation type drills, but for women especially wider hips, their glutes off, you know, that's why you get the knees breaking in, getting the glutes activated certainly. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Talk about your, I wouldn't say, was it beef with back in Triass or whatever, him saying hip thrusters was better than I believe you've seen the squats for the glutes. Is that what he was saying?
Speaker 2:Yes, did based on his thesis where he took two twins and had one half squat and one glute, one do hip thrusts. He has said that full squats are not a good way to build the glutes. And I say look at every Olympic lifter that's ever existed and you will see a butt like you would not believe. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying hip thrusts are bad movement, right?
Speaker 2:I like to be real careful. I don't like zealotry, I don't like absolutes, but it's I don't, I try not to confuse the messenger with the message. I think glute bridges for women can often be a better exercise than squats for the glutes. Not for any necessarily biomechanical reason although that's part of it. Women's muscular development tends to be biased towards the lower body, right?
Speaker 2:Men are fairly even, women if you look at relative strength levels, women are like 75 to 80% as strong in the lower body but only about 50 to 60 in the upper body compared to men. Yeah. What a lot of women run into the problem is that their lower bodies can move so much more weight than their upper bodies can hold, right? They don't have well, we're just talking about the traps. They don't have the muscular size in their upper back.
Speaker 2:They don't have the shoulder girdle to comfortably handle the heavy bar that they need to challenge their glutes and that can be a very big limiter for them. The hip thrust in that sense takes all of that out of the equation, right? You eliminate the entire upper body limiter in the back squat. Now am I saying this is true of all women? Absolutely not.
Speaker 2:As a random example, female Chinese Olympic lifters, right? If you watch female Olympic lifters, what they can pull off the floor and what they can hold overhead are often very different because of that different. Female Chinese Olympic lifters do a ton of upper body line to try to balance that out. So not saying this is true of all women, but for many women what they can hold on their back will not challenge their legs significantly. Leg press takes that out and a deep one legged leg press can be a great glute movement because you've eliminated the upper body issue.
Speaker 2:If women have very long upper thighs, they may end up squatting so bent over that it's a terrible exercise, squats are just a losing prop. Hip thrusts take all of that out. It isolates the glutes. If you use a band around the knees so you can push out, you can get glute max, glute medius, glute minimus all at once. Allows you to use a lot of weight which is good and bad.
Speaker 2:A) If your ego is wrapped into how much weight is on the bar, you can move a ton of weight because of where the bar is positioned. So it's the lever arm is so short like there are guys out there they were doing like 700, 800 pounds and then stopped because they were getting hurt. Not to mention it will feel like it's crushing your pelvis. I mean, there's an entire industry of nothing but hip thrust pads solely to keep people from crushing their pelvis underweight. But it allows women to train their glutes safely, intensely and effectively while eliminating a lot of the issues that make other movements that might be very good for some completely ineffective for them.
Speaker 2:So it's not my issue, like I said, if you can do good heavy full squats, I guarantee you you're gonna get a bump. Yeah. However, not all women can do that. Hell, most men can't do that well. The hip thrust can and there's other movements certainly that can be done again, one legged deep like press will work the hell out of the glutes.
Speaker 2:You know, RDL to some degree will get the glutes but the hip thrust is a good isolation, but exercise make absolutely no mistake. I just disagree with the, but my problem is the Xelatreme. Yeah. But my problem is always with the Xelatreme.
Speaker 1:And what is your opinion on the squat versus the leg press in terms of say, someone could do a 150 kilo squat, but then they can put on Yeah. 600 kilos in a Right. A lot more. What actually what is actually happening there quad wise if they're doing the same stance, same depth? Are they gonna see more activation in the quads with the leg press because of more weight or not because of like
Speaker 2:It's probably not in the sense that even though the weight is higher, it's just because the biomechanics of the movement, right? On a 45 degree leg sled, you're if you remember back to high school or college physics and you're only really dealing with you know that's why I mean guys love the leg press. Put all the plates on there and get two of your buddies to stand up on top and strain a lot, guys love leg press. Awesome. Takes you longer to load it than it does to actually do your set
Speaker 1:and
Speaker 2:so yeah, in that sense, probably not assuming that she can do a good back squat, right? And I've written this also an article on my website because there is a lot of this that you must squat and if you don't, you're this and that and the other. Not everyone is built well to squat. I am, I'm short and I've got short femurs. I can squat very upright, very high bar, narrow stance, when to squat, I have great quads.
Speaker 2:If a woman is taller, if she has very long upper legs, female power lifter I trained named Sumi Singh, her femur, her upper leg is just ridiculous. Her legs are so long, right? I'm five'seven and she's five'five. If I'm standing behind her spotting, her pelvis is at my belly button. So even though I'm two inches taller, her legs are that much longer
Speaker 1:than me.
Speaker 2:She is not built to squat. I have taken me three years to get her squat to a point where I'm a she's very bent over, it's not a good quad movement for her. She squats single, she's terrible for reps because after one rep technique just falls completely apart. So for many women, the squat is not a good choice if they're not built for it. If they are, it can be a great exercise and if not, the leg press maybe, you you also what if your low back gives out because if you're very tilted over, you have long legs, the low back tends to get the most stress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's great if you're using the squat to train your low back, fantastic. Most of us don't do that. That case, taking the low back out of the movements with a leg press a one legged leg press which tends to be fantastic. The one legged leg press solves a lot of problems the two legged leg press has don't have to load as many weights, activates more glutes, much harder to round the lower back, you can go deeper which gets more glutes too, maybe a better choice for individual women.
Speaker 2:Thing is for me and this is one of the funny things when a now discredited paper came out about this, there was like, well, let's do both. Well, that was never the point. The point was never whether you're not you should do both. The point was this claim being made and why I, you know, why there may be a problem with that. So yeah, like there's and that may, sometimes it's the best of both worlds.
Speaker 2:I think in most workouts I've ever drawn up for hypertrophy, especially for muscle growth or anything, you can always do both, right? Like and so like I'll use myself as an example and my trainee. So for me, I was built for squats and deadweights. That's all I had. I could get great legs, would squat but I mean I still did leg presses and leg extensions but for my upper body for example, I've got very long arms, my triceps have always been weak relative to my chest.
Speaker 2:For me to try to just do all bench pressing or all it is a losing proposition because my triceps give out. How am I training my chest? So I'd use a mixture. I would do a few sets of some heavy bench pressing exercise and I do a couple sets of flies, a couple heavy sets of incline bench. There's nothing that's ever said.
Speaker 2:I think for most people probably doing a combination will be better anyway, right? Compounds frequently they let you hit more muscles at once, but in that they're hitting more muscles at once, they're not hitting any one muscle necessarily well, I guess that's the best way to put it.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Whereas an isolation exercise, yeah, it's a lot less time efficient to do one exercise per muscle group with an isolation movement, but if you're doing a leg extension, all you can use is your quads. Well, that's not true. You'll see guys literally slam their I've seen you probably seen this in the weight room though. Let's throw the weight up and it'll slam and pick their butt up out of the seat and they'll and they'll seesaw. However, if you're doing it properly, you know, if you're like doing a leg extension or a leg curl it can only be the target muscle because if you're doing the compound exercise, it'll be the target muscle plus a bunch of other things and if the other things fatigue first, you may not be getting the best training effect for the goal muscle.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, jeez, my last question to you and then we ask what was left you to to ask questions. But with with sports and, like, lower back pain and, like, everything that comes with the potential like, I know a lot of people who can't sport. A lot of people say I can't sport. It hurts. What's The worry is basically, am I missing out because I can't squat?
Speaker 1:How much am I missing out that I can't squat? Is it that I'm 80% of my potential because I can't squat or can I get everything in my leg development without the squat?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I don't, the only people who need to squat in my opinion are power lifters, Olympic lifters and probably strong person, strong man, strong woman competitors, even a lot of them don't because power lifter is part of your competition, limbic lifter is essentially part of the competition. There's no exercise that is mandatory for anything beyond those two things. So in the big picture, your muscles don't know what exercise you're doing. Now your nervous system does, right?
Speaker 2:Like if you want to get better at squatting, have to squat. All the light presses in the world will not make you better at squatting if you don't squat. That's your nervous system. But all your muscles know is tension. How much tension am I having to generate and fatigue which has to do with stuff that gets produced during exercise.
Speaker 2:That's really it. So any exercise is only as good or as bad as it allows an individual trainee to generate sufficient amounts of tension and fatigue. So again, go back to the squat. Let's say you're squatting, try and train your quads or your glutes, but your low back gives out or your upper back gives out. Well, you may have gotten a great training stimulus for your upper back, but you've done nothing for your quads or your glutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? They have not sensed enough tension and enough fatigue to turn on muscle growth. Whereas now we move you to the leg press, good solid one legged leg press, nice and deep, good knee bend for quads, nice and deep for glutes. Now your low back, the muscles that you're targeting are getting sufficient tension and fatigue over time as you progress in that way.
Speaker 2:Not to mention, I've known a lot of people that were not built for squatting that just toiled at it for years and women in my group, men in my group and they're like, man, I squatted for years and I'm still only lifting 50 kilos. And don't mishear me, I'm not saying, oh, you suck, that's all you're lifting. My point is that they've worked for years and never been able to go heavier than that and it's like and you see them biomechanically they're not built to squat. It's not if they're not working hard, it's not if they're not putting in the time, they're not built for this movement. I go, not only this is like, A, this might be, you might be harming but this is never gonna help you progress towards your goals because in addition to that tension and fatigue, the key to all this is progression.
Speaker 2:To get a bigger muscle, you have to stress it harder over time. That means being able to over time add weight, lift a little bit heavier, work a little bit harder. If you give an exercise you can never add weight to because it hurts your low back, it's unsafe for you, you keep getting hurt. That's never going to get you. I got years ago, this must have been twenty years ago, I got this argument.
Speaker 2:I'm like, look, someone who squats who can never add weight for whatever reason or doesn't ever add weight will have smaller legs than the guy who leg presses and adds 50 kilos to the machine over six months because the muscles don't care the exercise, they care about progressive tension overload. So exercise selection at the big picture, I mean there are other concerns for women in terms of bone mineral density having to load, you know, the long bones of the body and you know to load the spine You may need a weight kind of on your shoulders to load the lower body leg press does just fine for body bench for like there are other issues that but in terms of we're talking about just muscle growth and physique and appearance and things of that nature. All it comes down with exercise selection is must work the target muscle for you, right? People differ, right? If someone goes man, the bench press is great for chest and you look at them you go, yeah, you're built to bench.
Speaker 2:It's a great exercise for chest for
Speaker 1:you, which
Speaker 2:is fine, but they don't realize that not everybody is built like them. You see somebody goes, squats are the best for legs. They will be short, they will have short femurs, They will squat bolt upright for but I'm like, okay, fine. Tell me that an American basketball player who's seven foot four whose legs are as tall as I am totally. You can tell me this is a good exercise for him, please.
Speaker 2:People project. I'd say in Tokyo, people go on exercise sucks for this because they're bad at it. They're not built for me and I learned how to do it. So the exercise must hit the target muscle for you. It must be safe, right?
Speaker 2:If you're getting hurt, you always make less gains when you're injured. You need to be able to see, you need to all do it safely, do it progressively over time means you can work hard, add weight, sets, whatever without getting hurt. That's all that matters and for any given individual that may vary. So there really is, at least that's sort of a couple specifics, there is no exercise anybody has to do despite the internet's slavish. Because a lot of this, let's face it, the weight room has traditionally come out of a) men and b) macho nonsense, which is synonymous with men.
Speaker 2:The only reason people are still married to this stuff is because that's what they always did.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Back in the 1930s when all this really started, they didn't even have squat racks. How you squatted you tip the bar up on its end. You rolled it onto your back or you got two idiots to put it there for you. Squatty, squatty, squatty and then you had to tip over and set it down. It's called the Heinborn squat, something like that.
Speaker 2:There are still guys today that are like this is a great move, dude, forgotten movements were forgotten for a reason. They only did this because that's all they had and as soon as they could, they started trying to build machines because the only reason it's all oriented around barbell work and again, I'm not saying barbell work is bad, saying that this slavish macho adherence to it without the realization that not everybody can do this safely or effectively is the problem, right? It would be no different than going well, you know, horse drawn carriage has always got us where we needed to be. These damn cars, you don't ride a horse, not a man. Like that's kind of, to me that's where this mentality comes from.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh, you have to squat. No, you don't. For many people not squatting will probably be superior in the long run because beating your head against an exercise you're not built to do. You have to be a little bit crazy. Mean, that's my female power lifter.
Speaker 2:The first thing I told her, like, I got bad news for you. You will be a good squatter. You will never be a great squatter because she's just not built for it. She's a great bencher and she can pull the world and deadlift the absolute world. Her deadlift is 50 kilos above her best squat.
Speaker 2:So she's a she's a media. I mean she's a good squatter. She's not a great squatter and but her deadlift she can because she doesn't have to work because her femur is just too long. If she had any sense, picked another she'd be a great runner, a great cyclist. She wanted to power lift and like okay, you wanna beat your head, bang your head against the wall.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to get her to like you're trying get her to push pull where you bench and deadlift but she's not having that. Yeah, like beating your head against the wall for an exercise that you're just not built to do and never gonna be any good at.
Speaker 1:Was Is it worth I'm thinking now, like, because, you know, we do give, like, strength training plans and kind of basic ones to follow. Is it worth giving people, like, like, maybe a quiz or a questionnaire to start and being like, what's your body type? And then give them, like, listen. Is it worth doing that or is it worth letting people just, like, get on with it and maybe find out they're bad or something or actually I don't even think they would even know and they might demoralize So are there actual 100% specifics? Like if you've got a fever of a certain length or a certain height, you're not gonna be the best for Scotland.
Speaker 2:Probably yes. One thing you will see and you'll see this in powerlifting is like if you have very long upper leg, you'll see people they will sumo squat, they will widen their stance extremely because that sort of offsets, it's very hard to describe. So imagine that like this is your femur from the side, right? And so if your stance is narrow like this is the entire length. If you take your stance out very, very, very wide, right?
Speaker 2:Now I'm looking from the top. If you take it out very, very, very wide, the distance kind of effectively shortens. Women can get so yeah, you will see power lifters do that be like, okay, I'm not built a high bar squat, but widen my stance because I've got the flexibility to do it and that's all good and well, but at this point you're also working, you're not stressing out the quads probably as much but again that's for performance. This is what they're having to do to try to move, you know, work around their individual biomechanics. Like I'm sure those numbers exist.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's people out there that have specific ratios. I'm sure it's the Germans. If anybody has done it, it's them. I don't, you know, for me it's more of an eyeball thing. I do think and we're looking in the beginner stage, this is probably less relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sort of generally of the opinion like, yeah, do I think everyone should probably learn a basic squat pattern, right? A lot of people get a squat pattern and what's a hinge pattern and a push pattern and a pull pattern and carry pattern and all whatever the terminology is and it's like, yeah, if I was gonna take a beginner regardless, I would have to do a goblet squat or body weight squat, which is not as big of a deal. In the initial stages, that's fine. And with me when I trained beginners, I never started with squats anyway.
Speaker 2:I wanted to give them something they could do effectively, feel good about. Learning how to do a squat as a beginner is just sucks because you just feel awkward and uncoordinated and again, not everybody and I'm not saying that I'm not like trying to be mean to beginners. Anytime you do something new that's difficult, you're going to be bad at it. When I started relearning to speed skate at 35, I was terrible at it because I was having to relearn a very complicated movement pattern. I always wanted to give people things they could do right off the bat and accomplish right off the bat.
Speaker 2:And the barbell back squat did not fit that criteria for most people. Now, had trainee once, she had done dance her whole life. Dancers, gymnasts who've done that kind of stuff, I could go shift your weight back half an inch or to one centimeter. She knew what that meant. She had done fifteen years of movement work.
Speaker 2:By the beginner coming in at 28, 30, 35 years old who's never done this, I'm gonna put them on a leg press. I don't care. I don't care what movie you think they should do. I want them to come out of this exercise going, hey, I can do this. Now we are also in COVID land, Corona Villas, they're calling it over in my hometown, right?
Speaker 2:Now, you don't have many options. You got body weight squats, whether you're both former like now we have to kind of make do with home workouts, just always a little bit more difficult. Most people I think doing a goblet squat and that's where you're holding, you know, some type of weight up or doing a body weight squat where you put your arms out for balance, very different than holding a weight on your back. The balance is much, much, much different. I think even people that are not built for back squatting but with a barbell seem to be able to goblet squat.
Speaker 2:Again, if you've got very long legs, you might find that you do their wider stance a little more comfortable because a narrow stance just puts you like you're bent over so much whereas if you widen it so you can kind of sit in between your knees. Yeah, so yeah, I think in general like yeah, would I at some point think most people should learn them? Probably like I don't train a lot of beginner but my goal with beginners was always give them something that they could do just because when you're starting, none of this matters. Literally none of this matters. All you just doing anything works as a beginner, which is both the good and the bad about training.
Speaker 2:Like anything you do will be an improvement and you can worry about all of this, number of sets, number of days per week, all this stuff comes way later in the game.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's a good way to finish my questions, Yuval. You've covered like a lot of good stuff that we've got. Kim, have you got any questions? I can see your face how you've been here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for showing her. Natalie, Emma, Sophie, Jade, get on here.
Speaker 3:I haven't actually got any questions, but I just wanna say I think he's an amazing man. He's got so much knowledge. I could just sit there and listen to him for hours and say Oh,
Speaker 1:thank you. Yeah. So That's a common compliment for you, Kyle.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Kyle. Think mile. It's okay. I get out of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Natalie, are you got any questions after all of that? I know you're there. Yep.
Speaker 3:No. I'm all good. I've been listening along to it the whole time. Great. But, yeah, that's been really, really good.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Natalie. Who else? Yes. Sophie and Jade and Emma. Emma, by the way, if you are listening, I will get back to the the woman who gave me details for.
Speaker 1:Okay. Seems that it's no questions. This has been awesome. Thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lyle, again, amazing time. Thank you for coming on. The next time, so we're doing something called maybe you can bring some of the office, but we're doing the Christmas challenge. Okay. And we're gonna bring in different experts for different things.
Speaker 1:But is it comes to Christmas time, I want you to come on and maybe like menstrual cycle, Christmas time, eating patterns, behaviors, whatever it is. Yes. It'd be awesome if we could do a topic next on that and specifically over Christmas because I think when it gets to Christmas time, I think behaviors obviously change. I'm not sure if it's behind menstrual cycle changes as well, but COVID as well thrown in the mix. I don't know what's gonna happen this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Holidays are always in America, we've got it. We've got three big ones in a row. Three big food on.
Speaker 2:We got Thanksgiving in Halloween in October, Thanksgiving in November, Christmas like it's basically just three months of gluttony in a way that only America can do it and it's rough like it really is hard. We are in a culture and a society that revolves around food. It's all around us. You don't want to go to a party and you know be be that person is just like oh no. I think what America needs to do which they need to spread them out.
Speaker 2:We need one big holiday every quarter. We need Easter and then like Thanksgiving and then Halloween like we need them about three months apart so we can do damage control. But yeah, holidays are always rough. Who knows? I mean, with COVID going on it might be easier.
Speaker 2:Nobody's gonna have parties, right? Nobody's gonna have group gatherings so it might actually be a little bit easier to stay away from that stuff but yeah, no absolutely.
Speaker 1:That'd be awesome. Lyle, thank you so much and thanks everyone for joining in.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. Alright.
Speaker 1:Bye. Thank you. Bye.