Natural vs Enhanced: Becoming the Best Bodybuilder You Can Be ft. John Meadows (MountainDog)

okay what's going on everyone so what follows is a conversation that I had a couple days ago with John Meadows and for those of you guys who don't know John is in my opinion one of the most highly sought after bodybuilding coaches that are out there and he has been for a long time he himself has competed over 60 times in bodybuilding and he's actually done 11 shows as a pro and he has his certified strength and conditioning specialist degree or certification and he's coached hundreds if not thousands of bodybuilders from all around the world on the Pro and the amateur level and I really like his approach because he's just so open and honest really about everything and he also keeps a very open mind in terms of new science that's coming out and I really respect the fact that I think he's one of those rare and refreshing examples of a coach and a bodybuilder in the mainstream who really does keep themselves open to scientific evidence just a few quick things to note this was basically a raw unscripted conversation that I had with John so this should probably be seen more so as just us kind of having a chat rather than a scripted Q&A interview per se and we do talk quite openly about anabolic steroids in this interview or in this conversation and I've voiced my personal opinion on the channel a few times about steroids and I'll just basically link a couple of videos in the cards up here if you'd like to check those out after this but I basically wanted John to more or less have the floor in this one someone who has a ton of experience on this front and I really appreciated and respect and respected his basically just no [ __ ] very upfront approach to communication on this topic so I really hope that you guys do as well and just as a note the recording does like glitch out I think about partway through the interview for some reason my recording software decided to freeze on my face so I have the exact same facial expression for about 10 or 15 minutes about partway through other and that there is a little bit of static in the background noise throughout the the interview so just be aware of that still basically trying to figure out how it is I can record these over Skype in a way that that sounds as crisp as possible or maybe I may have to start doing more in person interviews but anyway my goal is to improve the audio for these in the future and I'd appreciate if you guys just basically bear with me in the meantime there will be timestamps in the description box if you'd like to to jump around a little bit and I'm gonna be releasing this on my podcast as soon as I get the design work back from my my graphic designer basically rebranding my podcast as the Jeff Nippert podcast so once I have that all ready to go I'll release that over there and you can check that out in the description box once that once that goes up and yeah please leave us a like on this video we'd really appreciate that John was very generous with his time on a Friday night actually to record this with me so show your appreciation for his time as well and yeah just hit the thumbs up button it'd be very much appreciated and without further ado here is my interview with the mountain dog John Meadows alright everyone so I'm here with John Meadows and John I just want to say thanks for coming on the channel and coming on the podcast it's really nice to have you here man well you bet you you're done some awesome work man so the pleasure is all mine sweet yeah and I think some of our listeners might be a little maybe surprised by this this collaboration but I think that it's something that a lot of people will benefit from with with your very extensive experience as both a body builder and a coach and so I have a ton of respect for your work for anyone out there who maybe isn't familiar maybe you could just give a give us a quick primer on your background as a coach and as a body builder yeah well man I got started real early when I was 12 years old actually competed the first time when I was 13 years old so I've been pretty obsessed with hypertrophy my whole life I mean I always wanted to be a body builder right I did some stints in piloting a Westside barbell which I thoroughly enjoyed but you know I started competing very I to this point my career I've done over 60 contests I did I've done 11 shows as a pro I placed in five of them but I've always been interested in how do you make things better you know just because something's working doesn't mean it can be better so you know I got my back in the day I got my CSCS and I got my certification from Jose Antonio's group and and I've always I've always just felt like no matter how much I know there's just so much more out there to learn so I feel like I've been a coach forever and I don't feel like I know everything I feel like there's still a lot to be learned and I'm just as excited about bodybuilding now I think as I've ever been from purely from the perspective of just muscle building you know mm-hmm that's awesome I yeah I didn't realize that you did your first show it's 13 years old that's that's crazy yeah I was a little insane and I remember I was in track at the same time and I remember I would train my legs and I was a sprinter I had to run 100 and 200 and it didn't mix very well there's no safe workouts in the same days so so if you were onstage at 13 you must have started weightlifting when you were what 12 or did you just hop right on stage right away oh when I was 12 I started training I've actually got some pictures of when I was 13 and I competed I was 119 pounds but in 1985 I watched see that mr. Olympia used to be on ESPN and the 1985 I watched mr. Olympia and course Lee Haney to me I'll always be this just fantastic guy and a fantastic champion so I always loved Lee Haney and always appreciated tom platt seat he had an intensity to this day that's probably not been replicated and he was also very scientific in his approach you know he did some collaborations with Fred Hatfield just as an example but he was I went to his seminars when I was a teenager I went to several of them and he was incredibly articulate he understood training at a very deep level and I was just obsessed with it by that point I you know I I knew all the hamstring and for our muscles when I was probably 16 17 years old so those were the two that I really liked they really got me into it just right out of the gate gotcha and you've obviously developed this into like a career in a business for yourself have you found that in doing that has it taken away any of your passion or has it tainted it in any way you said you're just as gung-ho as you always were that's something that I get asked a lot is someone who's now like turning this into basically a profession it's like sometimes people will say once you start doing it professionally it takes take some of the joy out of it have you found that at all well okay so sometimes it gets sometimes I just want to train and I don't want to film I don't want a video but I but I do video I'm very active on Instagram and in YouTube so at this point in my career that's a marketing department for me and it's a tool to educate people and just to share just there sometimes and I just want to just get away from social media and just train but not because I dislike social media I just I don't like any distractions but in terms of actually training I still love it man I mean I still I still never miss a workout I couldn't tell you the last time I missed a workout and I don't anticipate on that change in anytime soon I mean it's been 130 some years now so that's awesome man yeah yeah I'm sure a lot of people are really gonna gonna look up to that I find it really inspiring myself so I guess the first thing we can start out with here I wanted I think most of our conversation to be focused around around training I've had a few a few friends who've ran through some of your programs or tried to anyway and they sound pretty intense pretty in group pretty grueling to me how how would you describe your general training philosophy the mountain dog training philosophy well it's it's very methodical for one it it may seem like everything is a little crazy but there's a reasoning behind everything I do I have what I call base workouts and I have pump workouts and the strategy itself that I use has just evolved over a long period of time I didn't just wake up one day and go huh I'm just gonna throw a training program together and think of a name and sell it some of the routes you know I a lot of it it's rooted in longevity too when I was in my twenties it seemed like I was constantly getting injured almost I almost tore my pecs I'm gonna say probably 40 50 times constant strains and I was always doing compound movements first so eventually after many many years I realized you know what that might not be the best thing for me so I moved the compound movement into a different part of the workout either the second or third exercise and you know as you get older you start to realize how important activation is and I thought you know when I go to those compound movements you know for me as a bodybuilder not a power lifter I'm trying to use them for hypertrophy so the better I can get it activating the muscle before I even get to it the better off I'll be so you know I have a phase where I'd really worked for activation at the beginning and then we plow the compound movements and we work hard I try to train compound movements with a fair amount of speed I'm a big believer that you should apply as much force to the bar as you can and you know for you know for to hit the maximum muscle fibers and then you know you kind of got this old-school thing to with the pump and I've always felt like the the really exhausting and this is probably the stuff but your friends were talking about their drop sets the ISO holds all that I feel like that has a place in your workouts now I only do that for one set and some people see a video me doing it and they're like oh my god you're going over train they think I'm like it's my whole workout but the reality is it's one set of the third exercise and of course now Brad Schoenfeld and all these folks are talking about cellular swelling all this stuff and that's essentially what I'm trying to accomplish and then one of the things I've always felt that was really great was once you pump a muscle up to stretch it really hard use a movement that really elongate the muscle belly put a hard stretch on it and I never really knew why when I was younger doing that I just it just something felt right about it you know you I guess you could talk about igf-1 and I guess you could talk about for range of motion all those things but to me it just felt it worked so I structure those base workouts in phases and I feel like I'm getting the best of both worlds I feel like I'm getting you know the stuff the the tension the mechanical tension the drys muscle growth I feel like I'm getting the metabolic stress that drives muscle growth and you know that is like the meat those are the base workouts and then the second workout I come back again later in the week and I just drop out that face to the compound stuff so like if you were training chest for example I wouldn't let you do the barbell movements second I feel like that's a recipe for disaster over the long term when your joints are connective tissue your ligaments and stuff and when I really started figuring that part out is what that's one of the major things I can say to help my longevity I you know I don't think that training a muscle group once a week I mean it it weren't initially but man it quit working and I can take you through kind of why my frequencies changing all that but I feel like that's a way that's a way for me to increase or anybody to increase their frequency without tearing herself up in the process so I guess my point is is there's there's a lot that goes into it I don't think many people have really looked at exercise sequencing and that's one of the biggest things that I've done and for about seven years now I've ever had a real study plan with sequencing and just how some things flow better and to the other gotcha yeah that's interesting it's kind of its kind of a loaded question it's like if someone asked me to describe my general training philosophy I really where do I begin there's just so much so much to get into right but that gives us I think a pretty good picture of of what it is you're talking about so when you talk about exercise sequencing could you go into a little bit more detail about that so like you mentioned doing some kind of like activation exercise first so I guess that would be like you know if we just take like the back for an example would that be like some kind of isolation movement like a pullover or something like that and then you'd get into like heavy rowing next or what would that look like I'm see okay man I love talking about this stuff so the pole over to me is more of a stress exercise okay so it would be any kind of a pulldown or a road to me probably more of a rope you know where you're using very strict form you're keeping your elbow at your side if you can I guess if you're targeting your lats but you know for a chest that might be a dumbbell press it's not an isolation movement okay it's it's just a movement to get I want to get blood moving in the muscle I want to get the you know the right muscle activated and I want to start delivering nutrients to the muscle so it's not necessarily isolation but in a lot of those isolation movements like for chests to fly for example I consider that a stretch exercise that would go on the bottom into my workout okay another example would be like a stiff legged deadlift your hamstrings that's going to go on the bottom of my workout I'll pull over for your back is a really good exercise stretch your lats that would be another one that we go to a part of the workout where I'm really stretching it so it's not necessary in isolation movement it's just a movement where you can control the way like a dumbbell or a machine machine presses for chess we can really squeeze or a dumbbell we can really squeeze that's that's what that's my thought process gotcha and you found that getting I guess like the blood flowing and kind of like targeting those muscles then allows you to sort of feel those muscles better and activate them better in the later exercises is that the the basic theory behind it or is it more of an injury prevention thing it's both it's 50/50 it's 50/50 yeah since I started using that philosophy many many years ago I never had another PEC injury and what happens is people get a little bit if they're not used to it at first so they get a little fatigue and they think I'm weaker yeah it's not weakness it's just fatigue it's just because you've done something else but if you stick with it your strength comes back and then it gets even better you know I've I what I would say 90% of people find unless they go absolutely nuts on the first exercise is that the doesn't really I'm sorry I thought no I don't know I thought that's right um well what people find is that if they just stick with it their strength comes back and it's even better mm-hmm no but that is a common thing that people say well why isn't it gonna affect the strength on my compound exercise I'm like well yeah it might increase your strength initially but it's also just fatigue it doesn't mean that muscles aren't working hard yeah and if you're going cyber trophy which mine is then it's going to help you achieve your goal and it's not that I don't want you to use heavy weight either don't get me wrong if I say a set of six I want you using as much weight as you possibly can with perfect form for your six the other thing I would say over the years tip that I've been pretty adamant about is using perfect form on compound movements and just being a part of the powerlifting world and things like that those things have a potential to really tear you tear you up so when I'm using you know incline bench press or a squad or something I want to see perfect execution and it's not that I advocate doing the light training I just want to use good form so if I had to say to a set of eight we're gonna work up until you can just barely get any with perfect form mm-hmm I got it yeah no I like it I think how I would think of it in terms of like the fatigue that you see initially is almost like taking one step backwards you can take two forward sort of thing because initially yeah you're if you're adding another exercise in before what you're used to doing first you'll be a little bit weaker on that initially but it's basically just creating a new starting point for you and now you already build your way back up right right yeah yeah and I'd also really like the the big picture long-term approach in terms of longevity because powerlifting obviously like you said you know as has gotten a lot of popularity recently especially in the natural bodybuilding community and you do see a lot of people come in and they just go boom right to their deadlift right to their squat or what have you I don't know if this correlates well with any kind of increase in injury or anything like that but from my own experience I feel like something like what you're talking about makes makes a lot of sense and if you've been able to train as long as you have doing that approach I think if my hats off to you you know because a lot of people in the sport do you get really banged up yeah you know I've worked a lot of banged up people I think it was about four years ago I started working with Marc Dugdale and he was on the verge of retiring because he was so beat up from hit training yeah he had torn hamstring torn pectoral odd and mark two years ago won three Pro shows he won one he went on a winning streak and you know he's one of many guys that I'm trained that they thought their careers where their bodies were just to beat up but the system allowed them to you know I started working with quad and he had some some injuries and Vlad was able to win a couple shows and he's had some injury sense but I think it's always smart to think long term you know I know it's why I've been there you know I was the guy Jeff that I remember when I was when I was 20 I was 21 at the time won a world gym and I was actually squatting probably around 550 or 600 back then and I remember the squats the there were five squat racks in the back and I remember the old power lifters world on those Saturday mornings and I was on Saturday mornings every Saturday morning night you'd start getting excited you start getting pumped up you just couldn't wait to get in there on Saturday and I remember going to narrow Saturdays and these guys are putting all their old man cream on their wraps and their knee wraps and I remember kind of like laughing those guys and like the only reason you guys are all hurt is because you don't train right yeah awful form and I got a little older and I realize holy crap you just get beat up it's just the fact of training hard if you train with intensity it's just it you're going to get aches and paint and pain and strains all those things so you're probably better you're probably wise to be really careful and you know to try to stay in one piece yeah yeah for sure I'm gonna get a little bit of a clearer picture about how your exercise sequencing goes so you'd start off with your your activator is this like lightweight higher rep stuff like a really like kind of constant tension type movements so like say a machine press for the chest what kind of like reps on are you working in there and are you going anything like a medium yet wait okay like eight eight to ten okay and then how close to eight how close what I typically do is I'll work my way up and the last set will be the one that's to failure okay so let's say like for a machine press for example like let's say I do you know say for warm-ups or me I do like ten warm-ups what let's say the machine has like 250 pounds let's say that I can do the machine for a maximum of eight times I might do 200 for 8 to 10 parade to 25 for eight and then 250 for eight now obviously the to hunt does those preceding sets obviously weren't the failure but I consider those working sets it's not like you didn't do anything it's not like you didn't challenge the muscle at all but then the last set I prefer to really be to true failure with good form so I'm not gonna get up to that weight and stay there set up for set on per set one of the interesting concepts now and you did a video on it is you know how often should you come how often should you train to failure hmm and so I'm not big on taking every set to failure and I've just always felt like that's probably doing a little bit more than you need you probably did a little bit more damage and you need to so to answer your question I want to work up and I'm gonna count a few of those sets as volume that aren't the failure and then the last one should be the failure gotcha gotcha and then after that do you get into like I'm ain't some kind of main movement or what comes after the activator compound movement gotcha gotcha go for chest like my favorite exercise is a slight incline barbell bench presses on Sam gotcha and depending on what the exercise is the rep range is now they're gonna drop a little bit so now you're looking at maybe a five or six or seven reps generally probably around six reps what I'm trying to do there Java's I'm trying to get people up to somewhere around 85 percent of their max for as many reps as they can get some people can get six with that some people can get five with that just in that ballpark I feel like if you get to that level of intensity as relates as it relates to a one-round maximum you can feel pretty good about hitting those threshold motor units you know with the weight being that heavy and as I mentioned earlier I like to really apply a lot of force to the bar so if it's a squat I'm purposely trying to drive up as fast as I can if it's a bench press I'm trying to push as hard as I can I kind of like have a sprinter mentality like force you know just explode so that's kind of how that one looks Josh yeah I think that also that whole speed component really ties in nicely with the safety and longevity idea because I'm aware of some research showing that if you move away that's it like say it's a lesser the weight is actually lower but if you move that at a really fast velocity you can stimulate a very similar number of motor units as you would with a much heavier weight or something that it basically makes up for lighter loads so if you can handle lighter loads it's less stress on your joints and your soft tissues just move it a lot faster and you look similar hypertrophic effect right right right well then you know when you get into rate coding all that stuff but um yeah hundred percent man plus fun she's fun yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah so after this is that when you'd hop into like some kind of stretch or movement or is there a little more fluff in there like I call this sort of the the third phase is what I call the Supermax pump phase and all that means is just I'm gonna pump the muscle as much as I can I literally want to get as I want as much cell swelling as I can possibly get so that's going to be an exercise that allows me to do that and then the fourth set is always gonna be the one where I apply the high intensity technique so it might be the drop set or it might be it might be a bunch of accentuated negatives like I might say you know have an exercise where you can just apply the lecture manual resistance on the eccentric part it might be an ISO hold at you know it might be partials all those different things that you can extend the set create lactate and all that fun stuff but that's the third phase gotcha gotcha and then after that you'll do your your stretcher to finish something that just stretches the hell out of the muscle you feel so good at that point in the workout too and yeah you know I've never seen anybody get injured down at that point I feel like I feel like it's very beneficial definitely gotcha I really I really like that that's and then you would run that through a couple times a week for each each body part or does that depend time for each body part and then the second time I take out that phase - gotcha so you don't beat yourself up with the heavy compound stuff gotcha I gotcha yeah that that's it that's a really that's a really solid setup to me and I think you're right what a lot of people tend to really gravitate to is like the hardcore bloody stuff which is like those drop sets and everything but that's just a small portion yeah that's why you're actually doing yeah so thanks for sharing that with us John one thing I wanted to talk to you about is genetic limitation so as someone who's been doing this for a really really long time I would imagine you'd have some pretty good insight into this so do you have any strategies for helping people break back or break pass what might be a perceived genetic limitation well okay so if they didn't pick the right parents you know why I tell you what though Geoff one of the things that I'm a firm believer in is people don't know what they're capable of man until someone pushes under that level and I've had so many people you know I have pros come here all the time and they'll do it they'll do a workout and they'll say I didn't even know I was capable of that mm-hmm you know and these are people that have trained hard their whole life and I think people just aren't aware number one of what they're even capable of so I think the majority of people who think they're their genetic limit I don't think they've really pushed herself to even be able to say they're at their genetic limit but let's say they're close or something like that so you know then you've got a whole lot of things you got to look at you got a look at their nutrition I personally am a big believer and what you put in your body around training around the training window I know that's very controversial but and then you get people that you don't look at their training programs so what all have they really tried like if somebody comes to me what I've always found crazy was you know you'll get people to come to you and they'll say like well my legs won't grow and you'll give them you know you'll prescribe some workouts for them they'll say well I don't I don't that'll do that I like to do this wait a min you just told me your legs don't grow from that so you know so people they getting they get like ingrained these ideas in her head and they won't change anything and I'm not married to any idea if I learned that my system was horrible there was a better way to do it tomorrow I would abandon ship and I would adopt the new philosophy but um I think one of the hard things with people was there just so first of all you got to get them to try something new then you got to look at you got to do a history with them okay what have you done because all those things that you've done that didn't work we have to do something totally different and him it might be the intensity of the workout it might be the volume with her workout it could be me and there's a number of things that could be the training frequency but there are a lot of variables that you can manipulate over time and for someone to tell me they're at their genetic limit they better I've tried all that stuff for many many years you know there's a lot of rocks that unturned before you can truly say I was stuck at 210 pounds competing for ten years and I was convinced I was at my genetic limit but I was wrong so there's a lot of rocks you got up you got a turnover there so you mentioned you know people would come in and say there they didn't even know they were capable of doing that so basically like you just have to push yourself harder how do you how do you do that without you know compromising what we've talked about about training to failure and so on like if you're only taking one set to failure and it's your last one how do you how do you kind of do that how do you how do you push yourself harder in that in those confines well the best thing that has is to have an awesome training partner yeah I've been fortunate - some really good training partners I don't know if you've seen all the videos what they've taped I have a man but we used to just kill each other but to do it intelligently you know you've got to look at a few things you know one of the biggest misnomers that I grew up with was thinking you had to be really really sore in order to have a productive workout in order to grow you had to be super sore and the more sore you were the better I was completely wrong about that and I feel like there is a point of no return where you beat your body up so bad you know when you people tell you like they can't walk for five days they can't sit down their legs are so bad that's overboard to me so if you're going if you're working that failure set really hard and you're that sore you probably went a little too far so you probably got skaila back and then in terms of just in general not a cute but chronically if you're doing these sets over and over you just got to look for the classic symptoms with people you know people tend to their performance decreases you know maybe their peak power goes down maybe their endurance goes down you know maybe they are more moody you know I see people like all of a sudden they get moody when they're a little over trained or so you got to kind of be wary of all the traditional overtraining symptoms I look at a lot of I look at the performance part probably more than most people I look at the speed in which they're training like those compound movements if all of a sudden that 315 used to fly up if all of a sudden it's going really slow that's a like a bell goes off I'm like okay we got to look at this so speed you know people don't get pumps anymore maybe their insulin sensitivity is kind of all out of whack but those are the same things you look for overtraining or kind of the same things you look for here and when you find those things sometimes you just have to pull back you know how do you pull back that's a whole nother story you know is it something where you need a D load or if you just need to maybe just maybe not a DLO but maybe you just need to adjust the intensity that once set it might just be as simple as that you know does that make sense you know that makes perfect sense um I think that's something that I kind of advise people if they're like I'm stuck at a plateau what do I do and I'm like well how beat up do you feel and if they're like really really beat up I'm like well you probably need to do a little less and if they're like now I'm not beat up at all it's like okay you need to you need to push yourself a little more I need to do a little right so so that's kind of the way I think to solve that and I totally agree how about we we bring the the steroids card into play here what do you think about people who are natural and feel like they haven't really made a whole lot of progress is that is it a different story for someone who who has anabolics on their side hundred percent yeah hundred percent I mean you're Jack and protein sent us this up so much you're reducing muscle protein breakdown so much it's a different ballgame and if anybody tells you differently then they must have had fake fake gear so it is a different ballgame you're capable your recovery is much different the interesting thing jump though is I tell you what I've always kept about you know if I look back at the number of people I have the probably half were natural half weren't so I've always had a good population it was natural and one of the things I found was that there were natural athletes that were very gifted that recovered really fast and there were also people who were not natural taking you know a fair amount of stuff that still couldn't recover so I think there's a genetic card in here for recovery and I don't really understand it I don't really understand the science of how somebody can recover genetically really well and somebody has all these extra advantages can't but those aren't the exception to the rule you know there's there's there are people like that but they're they're the exception the majority of people you know if they're using insulin and growth hormone and steroids they're going to recover ten times faster and this is what has ruined methodology and bodybuilding Jeff because people will have awful programs but they take so many drugs they just assume their programs are awesome and then they tell everybody else so you need to do these programs you know that's happens there's nobody that really in bodybuilding I will say nobody there's not too many people that have been able to think outside of drugs and this is one of the reasons why I've always liked having natural people because you can't it's not one for one you have to think a little differently I personally think natural people need a little less volume I think people who are enhanced can handle more volume and more volume as you know can create more muscle yeah but you I'd be a little bit smarter about when your natural and then also obviously the drugs push people that are natural passed our natural plateau I don't think I ever could have reached a pro status natural just no way there's just no way so you can get I think you can develop an awesome physique naturally but um just for someone is they all you can be a pro you'd be a pro bodybuilder or you can be too hard deepal and that's hard to believe but that the guys with the help are definitely recovering faster like in that book came out with let's definitely to live in her favor oh yeah yeah it's a different ballgame for sure in the context of breaking through weak points do you think it would be fair to say that like someone who is enhanced or at least open to being enhanced you could just always say just up the dose is that something that you you recommend or do you think it's more still smart to just focus more on your training just like you know a natural guy would yeah man I when I have somebody with a weak part the first thing that comes into my mind is how is their exercising most people just say more frequency just train it more often but if what they're doing if they're not executing the exercises properly just doing it wrong more often is it gonna help the first thing I like to do if someone says well my chest won't grow I'm gonna watch them train their chest is their start I'm caving in or there's all the stress transferring to their doubts and their triceps or are there some mechanical are there some things they're doing wrong with their form that you can fix that's the number one thing that comes into my head if all those things if your form is great everything looks great the tensions right and then in the recovery is right then maybe you can look at adding frequency but usually upping the dose isn't necessarily a way to fix a weak body part you know it might make your whole body grow but it's not gonna selectively like if you have poor legs it's not gonna all of a sudden make your legs grow and you're not in your upper body not grow I'm not a big fan of the up the dose just to be honest with you I mean I've been a low to moderate guy my whole life I would I constantly post posted blood work I post blood pressure all the time I posted it yesterday maybe him today and I'm gonna turn 46 in April and I'm still doing really good so I think that kind of backs up I've been saying for many many years so yeah on that note I guess now if you got time to talk about some of the the health effects especially in light of recent events in the bodybuilding community there's been a huge backlash against steroids and you know the bodies are turning up rich Piana passed away Dallas McCarver passed away really young age how much of this do you think is attributable to to steroid use and has the public caught the the wrong idea here well man the thing is the body isn't meant to have 300 pounds of muscle I mean I hear a lot of people say well I'm healthy you know it's muscle but if you think about the stress when you're hard I would almost rather someone be have more fat you know it doesn't require the blood supply that muscle does so when when your body weight gets really high for your height then you're asking a lot of your heart and if you have some genetic issues in your family like Dallas did it's really rolling a dice I've got genetic issues in my family and I'm actually getting a calcium score test done next Thursday just to see if I have plaque buildup and things like that there is a backlash and there should be a backlash it's just amazing what I hear first even first-timers doing I mean you've got these drug gurus out there that put people on right out of the gate 750,000 milligrams of tests you know all this other stuff on top of it and look I'm of the opinion people can do whatever they want you know but I'm also the opinion people should be educated to know what they're getting themselves into and you know you can take most people you know my offseasons for the last price six years have been straight HRT and I've had many many people do the same and they did really well if you if you really focus on diet and nutrition and training you can get by on such a smaller amount it's unbelievable people never believe it until they try and then it actually works for them then they're like wow you were right I can just take 500 Meg's of tests about 1,500 you know so again I don't you know people can do what they want I'm not the kind of guy says you know shame on you you can do what you want you're but I think people should understand that a lot of the coaching and information out there is just way way overboard on that part mm interesting so just for sort of curiosity when you say you bring the dose way down then in the offseason does that result in muscle loss or do you just compensate that for that by eating more calories so that you can continue to make progress or do you actually shrink up and then grow in to the show well there's a couple different approaches one of the approaches is is you got the old Kevin the brownie approach where you just shrink up and if you can respond to D ball like he can then you can blow right back up I know when I used to teach my guys in the offseason after they would do their PCT or HRT yeah if I felt like they could bring their PC their hormones back I'd put them on PC T you know some clomid hcg things like that but if you don't feel like they can get their natural hormones back then you go down to an HRT legit HRT dose you got to do that for a long time but then when I used to tell my guys was let's find the absolute lowest amount we can take and still make progress in the offseason and for many guys it was four hundred Meg's a test maybe two hundred Meg's of something else that car EQ certainly much lower than what they call blasting these days everybody likes you use the term blasting now but I used to like have my guys use the lowest amount that they could use and still do well in cycles and then you know maybe 12 weeks of that and then maybe come back and do another PCT or you drop down a true HRT dose and the nice thing there is when it comes pre-contest time that's when you do have to ramp it up to look like a pro bodybuilder you have to take more and it's not so much high doses of one compound it's now you got to work some other compounds and they give your muscles a cosmetic look and the nice thing is Nelson your body will react really well to that stuff because you weren't pounding it though all year round you know when you pound stuff year round I've been around a long time Jeff I've seen a lot of people come and go Superstars and then me and weirdest guy come from two years later poof they're going yeah you know these guys they jam it in the offseason their grams and grams grams and their body finally just says all right man that's that's the best I got you know and I think the approach that I have is also certainly much less risky I'm never gonna say with no risk it's always risky but it's nice to be able to respond to things when you're dieting dieting itself is it's hard enough to maintain your muscle right when you're dieting I mean that's hard so you know now you can actually ramp some of the stuff up close to a contest and main protect your muscle a little better right just because this is something that I I very infrequently will talk about on a channel or the podcast just keep everyone up to speed when you say HRT that's hormone replacement therapy so that's sort of like low-dose testosterone right yeah and then when you say PCT post psychotherapy so maybe you just briefly go into what that means in case anyone is is unfamiliar with that term and why that may be important and then we can move on to some new stuff yeah absolutely well you know when you when you take a lot of gear when you're taking a lot of steroids your own body you know will stop producing testosterone and that's a problem if you want to have kids or things of that nature and the more cycles you do the more years you do the higher the likelihood of you shutting it out permanently it gets shut down permanently when that happens you have to take testosterone you have to take HRT which would be a low dose of testosterone maybe 150 200 Meg's a testosterone tweak now if you're fortunate enough that you haven't set your own body down there are compounds that can get your own natural testosterone testosterone production LH FSH all that stuff back to normal you know things like HCG clomid and OVA tax and so you know if somebody is kind of beyond that point they're gonna have to do HRT arrest they're like I have to do HRT personally I tried to bring my eye I tried the last time I tried to see if I could bring everything back naturally it was 2002 and it didn't work so I've had to take HRT ever since but eventually the longer you do this stuff it'll shut you down so if someone's considering doing this stuff you really gotta think about it you know can impact your ability to have kids you can put y'all on medication the rest of your life you know there's definitely some implications with doing that right yeah I mean as a professional natural bodybuilder myself I guess I've always preached sort of that mentality on the channel I think for one thing like you sort of said earlier it almost simplifies things in a way it's like you have these two variables training nutrition and you've just got to optimize those and that's the best you can do with the genetics you have I feel like steroids involves this huge third variable that just opens up a whole nother can of worms and almost it almost turns it into something different you know in a way for me it becomes more about the chemistry it is anything 100 percent man it's a hundred percent man I love talking about training nutrition but man it drives me nuts talking about the chemicals because then all of a sudden the training and nutrition just aren't quite as important to people and it should be that should be one yeah yeah that's what I was curious about because for say just take me for example as someone who's been training I've been training now for about 11 years and it can be discouraging sometimes you know like for the last I'd say four or five years I've basically been between this like same range of body weight really right and I will improve I will see improvements in my physique like I might bring up my traps a little bit bring up my biceps a little bit but when it comes time to shred down for the stage I'm looking at you know roughly the same stage weight I find at this point you can look a little bit harder maybe the skins a little bit tighter but you're kind of looking at a very similar massive muscle so when I asked you about you know that that weak point thing it was kind of like would your advice be be different for someone who's a natural than someone who who has all the extra stuff at their at their disposal yeah and I guess the answer is is yes in a way but ultimately for you it seems to come back to the to the fundamentals of training and nutrition really yeah other person yeah so on that note I mean for say any of our younger viewers or listeners out there who've got a strong fire and a passion for bodybuilding and what kind of advice would you have for them in terms of like do you think that they should try to max out their natural potential first and then consider turning to anabolics after or you know if the genetics are there and the fire is there maybe you should get started earlier and sort of see how your body responds to it what's your thought on that well I would never in good conscience tell somebody to do antibiotics yeah you know I am I train for eight years natural I had a 500-pound squat I was benching about 365 I had a really good foundation ashore I won a contest I worked really really hard to build a really good foundation and now that I take next to nothing I still have a lot of muscle and I but I believe it's because I build it the right way I would always encourage people to Train natural as long as they possibly can you know try different training approaches try different nutritional approaches make sure you won't return every single rock that you can before you cross that line and if you do that I think I mean if you did do that and you did cross on line I think your results at the and in the long term would be even better so the closer you can get your genetic potential naturally I think the better you would be if you did the other stuff right you know but I think people meeting these guys now they just want to jump right into it it's like holy cow you know yeah yeah yeah I noticed that a lot especially like in just recreational users like say people who aren't wanting to to be on the IFBB stage they I find that if you I'm not sure about this but if you almost don't have the genetic predisposition to be a good bodybuilder it almost just makes your physique it can make it look worse in a way I find I feel like it could be unrelated but I feel like your proportions can get way out of whack in a hurry get all these bad side effects and it's just like man you you should just wait a couple years first but that's the other my opinion you know I agree you know what's interesting is people think that the biggest abusers are the pro bodybuilders and that's probably true now but back in the 90s and the 2000s it was actually the guys at the national level was actually the amateurs because they gave out so few Pro cards that these guys were doing everything they could to get their pro card I mean just roast in their bodies and many of them turned pro and then disappeared I can think of several guys I compete against that look phenomenal turn pro you know I run into them they're just like man I just couldn't handle the drugs anymore you know you talk to him about what they took and you're like whoa but um it's a little easier to get a pro card now so it's not quite as bad but but back in the 90s and mm at to me is when the people were hitting the drugs the hardest because they were right on that cusp of being a pro but there were so few Pro cards you just these guys were just going nuts you know ever I remember the first time I took growth hormone I took two I use after I trained five days a week and I went to the USA and the guy sitting next to me he's like man I'm not sure if I can afford his growth around any longer and I was like really why is that he's like well taking 18 IU's a day which was a bottle of sarah stem I was like you mean a week and he's like no a day it's like man you know I get to see a hundreds of stories like that so yeah I mean it must be an expensive hobby I mean it's got a rack of the bills I don't know how these people pay for it yeah pharmaceutical growth all around is super expensive yeah and so yeah I don't you know a lot of these guys they get involved with shady stuff and you know I don't know if you know much about my background Jeff but I worked as a VP at Chase Bank for 12 years and so I had a I had an income outside of bodybuilding and I treated bodybuilding purely as a hobby obviously I'm very passionate about it but I didn't rely on income you know I had a I guess what you would call corporate job right so but a lot of guys won't do that I mean all the guys you hear them well I can't work a real job and train to like why not I don't get it yeah I don't understand why you can't work a job and train you know even if you train two hours a day which is a lot you know you can still find time for that I know get it or just lazy yeah yeah yeah so I mean obviously there's a way to do it in a very unhealthy way and so that you can abuse it and the steroids that is and I think that this is where what a lot of the the medical literature has focused on is steroid abuse do you think that there's a way to use it that's if not healthy at least significantly less unhealthy or maybe you do think there is a healthy way to use steroids well if you have like if you have if you're at the point like you know we know that certain hormones decline as a male gets older you know growth hormone testosterone if you're in a position where those things are low they're not at an optimal level then it's unhealthy so to add the steroid in to bring you to a natural look to where it should be is actually healthy really low testosterone levels is linked to a lot of different issues including heart disease depression all kinds of things like that but you know as far as being there are ways to do it and I would say lessen the risk is what I would say I would say less than the risk because you know there's things that there's things that I really like to track I'll tell you some of the things I like to track insulin levels I don't mean fasting blood glucose I mean true insulin levels growth hormone can create a lot of glucose resistance I mean I know several guys who are diabetics from using growth hormone too much if you keep an eye on your insulin levels that's one thing and also high insulin levels are linked to heart disease and just about every Alzheimer's I mean just about everything you can think of is linked to high insulin levels I like to look at c-reactive protein just to see if your body's full of inflammation one of the things I've seen over the years is people using all these underground drugs that aren't pharmaceutical grade you know they're buys you if the their CRP levels are sky-high you know we should be 1 or below and it's actually like eight or something insane like that so I really like to watch that I mentioned blood pressure earlier really like to watch people's blood pressure it's one of those things Annalee it's a big deal but kidney damage or things are accumulating over time building for building up and when you get kidney scarring and things like that you know you can't you can't you know there's nothing that it'll just remove it the other ones I like to look for I mean on a lipid panel all the cholesterol stuff is really debatable but I still think it's a good idea to keep your triglycerides in your HDL and range the other stuffs kind of debatable total cholesterol seems to be pretty meaningless but LDL you know there's the argument is it large you know as a fluffy or molecules or small and dense or is it oxidized but I still think at the end of the days it's good to have high HDL and it's good to have low triglycerides those are kind of the markers that I look at I don't think too many people look at fasting insulin but that would put down at the top of the list interesting and how often are you recommending guys get this stuff stuff measured oh like twice a year yeah the other thing you know the other thing you got to watch if you're the gear geared up is hemoglobin hematocrit red blood cell count those things are traditionally always higher in your tank and stuff I mean that's what a lot of that stuff was used to treat you know different versions of anemia aplastic anemia and different thing different things like that so that's another one you can fix that by donating blood donate blood twice a year and that stuff will stay in range for the most part and never have an issue hmm what do you what do you think of the argument that you know if you start out saying on this like lower dose scheduling or what have you you're always gonna be tempted to want to do a little bit more because like people are kind of inherently lazy right so like there they may not have to embrace her mentality quite so much they may say well if this much is getting me this much results then this little bit more is gonna get me those a little bit more results have you noticed that a lot in your experience or is that just something that drug anti drug people say well no man it's um hey you know I felt like that too you know I used to love winstrol you know I'm like well shoot if 50 milligrams a day works let me try a hundred you know I'm not I'm not a mean to it but um you know usually there is a law of diminishing returns hey and I think that I think that people don't aren't willing to accept it they're just like well and what happens is what you mentioned earlier they go to a certain dose and then beyond that it just becomes side-effects mmm and like the sweet spot would be as much as you can with the least amount of side effects would kind of be in the sweet spot and you know and and you know not an impact to your blood work you know that would be the ideal place to be but you know it takes experimenting you know there were certain things like I can't handle tremble on there's guys out there that smashing you know and I couldn't handle it like I just one of the things I couldn't handle so everybody's a little bit different I could never handle some of the stuff that other people can handle but we're all a little different in that regard right yeah I think that's that's true I mean you you always hear about certain body builders like I know Lee Priest was notorious for at least saying this how he would take ridiculously I don't know the numbers but it's it was supposed to be a really really low much complicated stuff it was just very very simple basic stuff and he got really huge and then he might have even come off everything in his off season I'm not sure but he would still maintain like 270 or something at like five foot five in his offseason which is kind of crazy do you think that that's just a genetic thing and and you know just like anything else some people will respond like crazy to the stuff and then others seems like they can take it and not get too much out of it well look at Lee Priest muscle bellies and right there you'll see some incredible genetics yeah look at his pictures when he was 16 years old you'll see a kid that had phenomenal genetics so there's a lot genetically going on there with him yeah you know so you know you look at Sean ray when he was 16 17 18 years old he looked incredible I mean these jacks have cream of the crop genetics yeah so it's not I believe I believe that they don't need a whole lot to look great because I can see their genetics right you know now there's other guys like if you told me they took a little mound I'd say no way he's I just can't see the neck genetics you know right I got you and I think it's an important point that it's not always the case that's like the biggest guy or the most impressive looking guy is the guy using the most but you would you agree with that oftentimes sighs yeah yeah sometimes you'd be surprised sometimes a little guys the one that's usually the most because he doesn't a little guy yeah yeah all right he started then the little guy so he's cranking you know I I had a two 12 competitors send me a note about a month ago and he's like you know I feel like I'm gonna kill myself the current round I'm on and he showed me what his coach had him on this guy was about 195 pounds and he probably tripled what I've the maximum I taking it was quite cheerful what I've taken and I'm just like man I just can't believe it I get these notes all the time for people and um you know that's the problems coaching our industry is these guys they don't know how to solve problems with diet with training and nutrition and you can solve a lot of problems with training nutrition but they just you know they just they're issued their way to solve a problem is what we need more t3 or well we need more clenbuterol or we need more growth hormone there's no you know let's take a look at the diet maybe you want to do this maybe one do that so and drugs are powerful things so it works and then people like oh wow what a great coach yeah I'm curious like has any of this stuff left any bit of a sour taste in your mouth for bodybuilding or do you just realize that like in anything in any endeavor there's gonna be idiots and this bodybuilding is no different or does it seem to really attract a certain type of person how do you think you know why man I don't I'm one of those guys that people can do what they want yeah I've never been like if you told me you take five grams of testosterone I would say okay I wouldn't think any different of you whatever for me man I didn't do it I did bodybuilding I didn't do it because people picked on me or because I was trying to pick up girls I truly loved it and even though I might not agree with what other people are doing it doesn't take away my love for bodybuilding are there knuckleheads out there 100% but they're in every like you said man they're at everything yeah you know when I worked in the corporate world there were jackasses that were in the corporate world you know I worked in hard manual labor jobs when I was in school I ran a Jack I've worked in a wooden mill I worked in a car factory you know there's there was you know people who weren't so nice there in all walks of life I go to church every Sunday and there's always someone that flies out of the parking lot you got to be careful they don't hit you doesn't matter I had good teachers bad teachers so I don't get too hung up on you know sport being terrible it's just changing it's just turning into something a little different it's not like it wasn't a 90s but it's afforded me a really good life and I can never be mad at the sport because it's provided me the opportunity to do really well for my family yeah you know I never would have been in Forbes magazine if it wasn't for bodybuilding so there are no hard feelings in me man I love bodybuilding I'll always love it and you know like you said there's always gonna be knuckleheads out there yeah yeah that's that's that's well said I'm just like kind of curious now so I'm gonna have like three imaginary scenarios so you have one person who's who's relatively new to bodybuilding and they don't have the best genetics they want to put on a lot of muscle and of considering turning to steroids you have someone who has been bodybuilding for quite a while naturally and it's suspicious that they're approaching their genetic limitation they're kind of discouraged with their training not making a ton of progress probably close to where they'd be maxed out naturally then you have someone who say I don't know in there maybe 50s or what-have-you and they feel like maybe you know their strengths and their their shape is starting to like decline they're considering TRT what would you say to those those three different people and in terms of just giving them advice of someone who has a lot of experience the TRT guy okay the first thing I would say is what's your total testosterone what's your free testosterone I would want to see blood work yeah if his total testosterone was 150 I'd say we got a problem you need to get some medication in you I don't look at someone to make a guess I don't go by how how they're feeling although those things can give you vital information you still want to see some lab work yeah you know you can't ignore that and I personally would like to see lab work in all three of those scenarios I got to see what someone's at I mean knowledge is power the more you know about I have a really high free test level which is a great genetic gift that means that I can use stuff better than most people and that's probably one of the reasons why I can get away with less but I would never know that if I didn't get blood work done so frequently say the second guy was approaching his genetic potential you said yeah I mean you got oh so I start with I start with all the life stuff first yeah it's like okay do you have a are you married you have a spouse what would she think I'm not gonna tell you to do something if your wife disagrees with me do you have kids what would your kids think you know are you I like people like they get into this thing where it's just their own life and they can't see out and this is bodybuilding man this is how bodybuilding is people are very selfish it's a very selfish sport and you can get lost in it in you for you can forget about the people around you I mean I've seen so many broken relationships and body bullying more than I can count and it comes down to the selfishness it's a selfish sport but doesn't have to be so I'm always talking to people like tell me okay if you want to make this step how's this going to impact your family what's your wife won't think about it you got it you got to ask those kinds of things right because maybe this guy's all gung-ho and he doesn't and maybe his wife is like I want to have kids you know how's this going to impact us having kids so if I told that guy to go for it and his wife want to have kids and I just told him to do something it might reduce his taint so having kids I'm a pretty shitty person I think so you know I try to understand people's lives what's going on in their lives I don't coach a ton of people anymore you know but the ones I do it's like a family and that's kind of the relationships I like to have with the people I work with and these are the kinds of conversations I have with them like you and I are have yeah someone says Neil what do you think man I'm not even etic potential should I take gear I will even get into that until I understand the dynamic of their life a little better you know if it's a dude apartment just him and he doesn't care and it's the only thing he has in his life and hey man don't four dude if that's what you want to do go for it but so I guess my answer Jeff is you know you it's always good to have data it's always good to know someone's blood work is but you also got to know what's going on the person's life personally what if it's a person who has an addictive personality and you're telling to do that is that a good move probably not you know what if it's someone where they tell you they're close to their genetic potential but but you know they don't train are they don't eat right is that the kind of person would tell them take drugs probably not there's probably things they should fix first so you gotta really do some inspection when you answer questions like that you know so that you're given well informed answer I guess I'm saying yeah of course of course and then I guess for the less said of this the young guy he's 19 years old and he's kind of just frustrated wants to make some some quick gains what what would you advise him probably eat more no would you when you're younger man you burn stuff up my grandmother raised me and she worked in a restaurant she was a cook in a restaurant and she brought me home a cherry pie every night yeah when I was trying to gain weight before I went to bed I eat a whole cherry pie every night for a long time and I mean that's the goal nice sometimes it's hard as hell to gain weight you know I remember when I wrestled I would get home and my mom would make a tray of cornbread and I would have a giant bowl of whole milk and I would throw the cornbread and like mush now it eats a whole tray cornbread you know but I was trying really hard to gain weight and it didn't really work until I hit about 20 years old and then all of a sudden like you know 15 20 pounds you know from eating but most of those young guys mayonnaise gotta eat more yeah you know it's John I've got two more questions for you and then we'll call it a wrap this was a really interesting conversation for me so we talked a lot about genetics I'm curious what do you think about this do you think that genetics tend to trump hard work or can you really out work or yeah out work bad genetics and be successful as a bodybuilder well ultimately the guys who do the best they have both right they have granted that exam they work hard but I've seen a lot of genetic freaks in my day they could never get in shape they can never fulfill their potential and then you have guys like me if you look on my structure I have narrow clavicles I have a wide pelvic girdle I have a high pelvic crest I have I have hi Lance you know those are traits that you would say there's no way this guy can be a pro at let alone play some pro shows but I've overcome that and I'd like to think I did that with smart smart training so I think I think there has to be a certain level of genetics though to hit that you can't just take anybody make my pro I think that's given people false hope there's a lot of people I worked with there were great people but no matter what they did no matter what drug they took they're just not gonna be a pro it just genetically is not in the cards for him so there's like a minimum level of genetics I think you have to have and there's so much it goes into that but I have like I said me and I have seen a lot of guys with absolutely sick genetics man just never take advantage of it just lazy and a lot of them and I beat a lot of those guys yeah you know you know but then the guys come along to do both and they crush me so yeah yeah it's similar to any sport I suppose you know there's always gonna be that interplay between discipline and genetics exactly you know I'm a huge football fan I mean you know you look at the Jerry Rice the guy was gifted he was fast he ran in perfect routes and he worked hard he was one of the hardest workers in the NFL history and then you get guys like Dez Bryant supreme I think yep my dad found oh doesn't really work real hard and he you know you see your right you see that in Osborne yeah yeah so something I think that can apply to to really anyone who has an interest in bodybuilding or even just building a more impressive physique is the idea of weak points it's like some muscles and it's different for everyone just really seemed to be really stubborn and not grow no matter what a lot of guys come to me calf issues in this regard but you know I think for me is probably my biceps and my traps more than anything what would you say just general advice for for weak point prioritization or improving those well I mean again I think you gotta look at exercise execution and I'm gonna give you an example you mentioned calves I've built up 20 inch calves they're not like that now but at one but two or three years ago there are 20 inches and ever behind all your calves or genetics are off the chain like actually my genetics are pretty weak with calves but I figured out how to train them you know and it's really logical that you think about it I've been telling people for years you have to work out of the stretch everybody gets on these cow machines they just work the top half yeah you know we'll just get up and flex and do sets of 25 all it's fast twitch its slow twitch muscle fiber and maybe your soleus but but they don't really emphasize the stretch and that's what your calves aren't used to they're not used to coming out of a stretch position with heavy weight so the first thing I tell people is okay I want you to stretch I want you to pause in the stretch and I want you to use progressive overload and try to build it up until you're using a whole stack there's things like that so that's an example of people give up on their calves when the reality is how many think they've trained incorrectly so I'm gonna try to get them to train them correctly first of all biceps the biggest thing with biceps is people just train them too heavy a lot of times you know maybe there's too much lower back or shoulders when they curl no maybe there's maybe there's not enough full range of motion you know maybe they're just you're joining was so narrow they're not really long getting a muscle so I guess I'm really big Jeff and I got to see how exercise execution is and that's step one for me you know that you know if that's good if all that stuff proves right then I look at how can we increase frequency so how can we increase because maybe they're not trainable maybe they're training they're getting a nice little good effect and then they're waiting too long and it's about bottoming out they're kind of starting over so maybe you can instead of waiting five days now maybe you can wait two or three days give yourself the 48 hours it's customary and increased frequency that's of an approach I like to use here's the thing with frequency though when I have someone let's say they have bad legs and I increase their leg frequency you you don't have an unlimited amount of recovery so you've got it you got to give up something somewhere so I'll take someone strong body parts let's say it's their back and I'll bring their works that's way down hmm and I'll I'll make up with the stats on their weak body part so you can't just mindlessly add volume to people's routines and I see people do that a lot they'll take their straight routine that they're doing and then notice keep adding volume but then you can't recover if you could then we could just train our whole body every single day yeah you know it just doesn't work that way so but if we can give your body a little bit more recovery capacity and then maybe we can hit it more frequently so if you're getting 10 workouts in 30 days as opposed to for now you've got it now maybe chronically maybe you can get more muscle tissue over the year right yeah I think I think that's that's great advice right there I need to I need to apply that for my biceps Yeah right on I'm so done that's all I had for you were going on a just over an hour here now but it was it was an awesome conversation man I think I think the people are really gonna gonna enjoy it it's something different something that I've never really talked about on a channel especially the stuff to do with with steroids some of the differences there some of your training techniques I think are really really novel even for me to hear so I think it's it's really interesting I appreciate it man you're doing awesome work and I appreciate you having me on I know I'm not the typical PhD so no it's awesome I love I love talking to people who just have tons of experience in bodybuilding because like you're here like you know you can tell you like you're your own scientist and you're not dogmatic you're not stuck in your ways like you said and this is the way I see it myself it's like people will often say oh you're just like picking studies to support your point of view and I'm just like why would I do that like I'm trying to figure out what is gonna work the best all right I don't care about defending my own view if it turns out that I'm wrong tomorrow I'll be the first to admit it I'm just trying to figure out what works best so anyway I respect that he seemed to have the same basic idea there yep but yeah so to everybody listening make sure you go and check out John's YouTube channel he's putting out a ton of a really cool content there I'll have a linked in the description down below I think you guys find it helpful a lot of different tweaks and cues on certain exercises you probably won't see anywhere else and we're here recording this late on a Friday night so make sure you give us some lovin hit the hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed it make sure you you say thanks to John I like I said I'll have everything linked down there in the description thank you guys for watching if you are new by any chance you can hit the subscribe button I'm going to be doing interviews like this at least once once a month moving forward in 2018 that's something that I've wanted to sort of introduce to the channel again so yeah thanks for watching guys thanks again John and we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 839,168

Rating: 4.906343 out of 5

Keywords: vlog, vlogger, iifym, science, bodybuilding, legs, arms, chest, back, fit couple, build muscle, jeff nippard, christian guzman, summer shredding, lean, ripped, abs, diet, lose weight, fat, fitness, flex, biceps, shredded, gymshark, alphalete, physique, motivation, natural bodybuilding, canadian, john meadows, natural, enhanced, steroids, anabolic steroids, mountain dog

Id: -TGJqJZ3EaA

Length: 72min 1sec (4321 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Meadows is awesome. He's really good at responding to legit questions posted on his YT videos - don't see other people do this anywhere near as often as he does.

[u/johnlifts]

It felt like Jeff was trying to get John to convince him to get on gear.

[u/i34773]

I've seen a lot of genetic freaks in my day that could never get in shape, that could never fulfill their potential.

I too have seen Jason Genova.

[u/Zero-Power]

What would we have to do to get an AMA from either of these 2, I definitely think it would be an incredibly informative post

[u/5everSmol]

Definitely going to try Meadows exercise sequence. Never heard or read anything similar before.

[u/[deleted]]

I fucking love Jeff. He conversed first with AlphaDestiny and now with John. My 3 favorite youtubers right there.

[u/loisgzs]

I was waiting for this for so long as a natty...

[u/BigHairyWaffle]

Honestly Jeff is a great interviewer, so many of these guys in the industry talk way too much. Jeff let him talk and john wasnt being cut off.

[u/jbrogden]

Anyone got a Tl;DW?