Stan Efferding KOMPLETTES Seminar in THOR's Powergym

first time in Iceland obviously and it was 75 degrees in sunny when I left Vegas my shorts and a t-shirt and I landed here and this is what I got my goal is not to make this some sort of complicated scientific you know pretend I'm a smart guy kind of seminar my goal is to try and get you some takeaways things you can apply immediately to your training this is a program I've kind of outlined a program that I would give to Hoff Thor the detailed all the things I wanted him to pay attention to kind of a prescription for nutrition you know training and sleep take your jacket off real quick oh you got your mic on I want to see the and then turn around and show them the back of your shirt this is the to-do list this is it this is all you need to do train eat and rest sleep and that's all I focus on I don't have anything more complicated than that I just try and get you to optimize every one of those areas and pay attention to all the details that go into making all those things better because then your training is better all you do in the gym is break down muscle tissue we don't build any muscle in here we lift weights we break it down that's the fun part that's the easy part in my mind in order to make that effective in order to make every workout great and to get stronger and bigger and faster you have to eat sleep and train and the best part about this is is that the more these little tips and tricks you apply the more discipline you are the stronger you get now everything that we talked about affects hormones ultimately and that's where a huge benefit can be had if by sleeping better you can improve hormones if by eating better you can improve hormones if by training optimally you can improve hormones then you're going to get better results and whether that's as a natural athlete or using performance-enhancing drugs it doesn't matter you still have to optimize hormones because if you're deficient in a hormone your performance is going to suffer if you're low in testosterone you're not going to gain muscle if your thyroid is slow you're not gonna burn fat and we're trying to optimize that and that was the first thing that Hawthorne and I worked on together was trying to make sure that we understood what to optimize his hormones and when you're just eating anything and everything and maybe missing some sleep or maybe overtraining then those hormones start to get negatively affected and then your performance stops and then injuries start to occur and you start putting on more fat than muscle and the whole thing just starts to Creator so I've kind of tagged my my diet information is the vertical diet and talking about how the vertical diet effects and peak performance and everybody's kind of heard about it as the meat and rice diet and I'm okay with that that's really the prime where the primary benefits come from and there the reason for that and we'll go through it today but it's it's based on a horizontal program that creates a foundation of things that are really important that you want to pay attention to when you're eating and so we'll go through a lot of that stuff today first most important thing I always talk about it first is sleep and you have to optimize sleep because it affects so many things that improve or make your training suffer there's some great research out there sleep loss limits fat loss when you lose sleep a lot of things happen hormonal II there's some great research that shows that you're gonna your insulin resistance will increase so you start losing sleep you become more likely to gain fat and less likely to put on muscle the insulin resistance is important because the food that you eat is going to be either preferentially shuttled towards building muscle or it can be shuttled towards putting on more fat and insulin resistance determines that and the more we can improve insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity then the more we can the better result we're gonna get from the foods we eat the proteins in particular but also the carbohydrates are those being used for energy and muscle glycogen or those being stored as fat because you're missing sleep and your metabolism starts to slow down so insulin is a really important part of this equation and I measure that and we'll talk about it later in blood tests we looked at HOF Doors hemoglobin a1c which is the historical measurement of your blood sugars and how well how efficiently your body is processing sugars and releasing insulin as a result and we need to optimize that for best performance when you lose sleep you increase blood pressure which is obviously a negative effect you also increase ghrelin think hunger so people who lose a lot of sleep tend to gain weight they tend to eat more and have more insulin resistance and so their body's just gaining fat primarily increases cortisol and we all know that that breaks down muscle tissue so that's a bad place to be it decreases metabolism your metabolism actually slows as a result of losing sleep it decreases testosterone another huge factor it decreases thyroid function which is directly affected you know affects your metabolism and here's this isn't me I didn't invent this stuff I didn't create it there's a great thing about this industry now is there's so many professionals that are involved in the sport that you know these Brainiac PhDs that are applying their knowledge to sports performance and this dr. Charles just Lurky he coaches athletes unsleep but he works with a lot of professional athletes from NBA NHL and FL now these these people go and consult with these doctors and every time they'll recommend a nap or a more sleep instead of practice it's particularly for people who travel athletes who travel so it's not just me saying it's important it's a huge priority so how do we improve that and that's where it comes down to proper sleep hygiene here's things you can do today to make sure that your sleep improves and a list of those things is pay attention to your circadian rhythms the body wants to sleep between say 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. or 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. that's optimal and you can't change that people who work a night shift and sleep days are always running at a deficit they'll constantly be in a sleep deficit and you can't really do anything about it now if that's what your situation is that's what it is and you'll have to do everything you can to optimize that but if the opportunity presents itself this is the best time not 1 a.m. but between 10:00 and 11:00 you're going to get more sleep better sleep and it's not just about the amount it's about the quality so 7 to 9 hours seems to be the range the more you train the harder you train more muscle mass you carry obviously you're gonna need more sleep if you're trained in two-a-days or if you're getting ready for competition you should be closer to 9 hours and sedentary people might be able to get away with 7 or somewhat before that again relative circadian rhythms every hour you get to bed before midnight is like two hours in the bank so op optimize that try and get yourself set up to you're regularly getting to sleep at 10 or 11 o'clock at the latest doctors will tell you the best way to set this program up because your circadian rhythms you can kind of establish how sleepy you are at night and what time you go to bed by what time you get up in the morning so ideally when you kick off this program to try and start to wake up at the same time every morning now if you stay up late on Friday or Saturday night and wake up late on Saturday Sunday morning it is going to have an effect on your training and so it's ideal that you do this consistently trying to recover from bad night's sleep might take you 48 hours you're losing two days of optimal recovery and that's a huge deal one of the problems that Hawthorne experienced is his travel schedule often puts him in a position to where he's got jet lag or he's getting to bed late or missing hours of sleep and so we try to optimize that part of his program I talked to his manager and I asked him hey if he has to stay an extra night get him there a day early so he can travel during the day and not have to land at midnight or one o'clock in the morning and then have to you know forage for food at 2:00 a.m. that kind of thing's not optimal so a lot of this the programming that I do is about logistics it's just about trying to optimize all these things and plan ahead with meal preparation travel time what time you wake up what time you sleep and these things will drastically improve performance these are some of the things that I paid the most attention to when I was training was things outside the gym even in college I was in bed at 10 o'clock I didn't party all my friends knew that my chariot turned into a pumpkin at 10:00 p.m. and I was getting ready for bed and that was it it was seven nights a week is boring but it was effective and that's why I did it so some of the things that go along with this and sort of optimizing your sleep is make sure you've got a pitch-black room I've got blackout blinds at home so that when I shut things down it's pitch-black I turn off all the electronics I don't have any lights my daughter likes having a nightlight in and I fight her all the time I got to take it out and so you know since she's scared it's dark so I got to work with that but a lights what they do is they prevent your melatonin from being released and so that affects optimum sleep and if even just having like the sunlight or the moonlight coming through and touching your skin even if your eyes are closed your body knows about that light and it can it can may have an effect on the quality of your sleep no electronics I think a lot of this is heard now if you're looking at your iPhone or your TV right before bed that's preventing your you're affecting your circadian rhythms in your body your melatonin isn't being released and so it's hard for your body to get set to get shut down and go to sleep on time so optimize that by trying to get away from your electronics about an hour before bed and didn't and start to get yourself set up conversely when you wake up in the morning it's optimal to have a lot of light and that might not always be possible depending on the season but optimally you would you would get the blinds open and be exposed to light I always write after breakfast I go out and do my walk in the morning and it's sunlight out that's how this whole thing starts it starts when you wake up in the morning and how much lights you get a lot of times in environments where it's dark Alaska Seattle where I lived for a long time here it's really important some folks get a lot of benefit from doing light therapy you've probably heard about about that it's probably a lot of that here and that would be good to get some sort of lighting that that possibly affects your circadian rhythms you know I don't know the specifics on that but there is a light therapy that I'll have to do some more research to get the information I've never had to use it you know because yeah and the big one vitamin d3 and everybody who's watched my stuff has heard me talk a lot about this this helps in setting circadian rhythms it's important for a lot more things including immunity insulin sensitivity it's going to be a huge part of my program is always optimizing vitamin D and that kind of brings us to this article here on the big vitamin D mistake there was a article that came out I think it was out of Sweden and they found that there was the formula for calculating how much vitamin D you made was somehow misrepresented and they didn't realize how much you actually needed the recommendation is that you get in 8,000 I use the vitamin D a day that's enough to keep about 90% of the population in a safe range 8,000 I use it sounds like a lot but it turns out that that's an effective dose and anything less than that you start potentially compromising the benefits of these circadian rhythm benefits the insulin sensitivity the immune system benefits in a climate like this it's estimated that more than 75 percent of people are probably vitamin D deficient and this is a huge thing that's one of the first things I put into a program we did blood tests with hoth or I do blood tests all the time if you have the opportunity to do that we're going to talk about a little later but I strongly recommend it vitamin D is one of the things we test on the blood test and make sure to optimize and a lot of the athletes that I've worked with dan green - Brian Shaw - Larry wheels they were all vitamin D deficient and when they started taking vitamin D their performance started to improve their sleep got better their immune system Hawthorne I talked about this last night I haven't had a cold in over two years since I've really been steady on optimizing vitamin D and increasing my sodium which we'll talk about later but even if you do get a cold it's it's shorter in duration and it's less in its severity so you don't get taken down as long I think I've missed one workout in two years from a little head cold or something and Huff were saying it's been he can t remember the last time you had a cold and when you optimize vitamin D and nutrition and sleep that's what happens your immune system becomes bulletproof one of the great benefits of that next one is sleep apnea almost everybody I come across in the powerlifting business or strong man or even bodybuilding have thicker necks and sleep apnea is relative to neck girth and that's what crowds the airway and can cause sleep apnea if you're snoring at night or you're waking up tired chances are pretty good for athletes like us who train heavy and hard and have extra weight and body mass and muscle that you're suffering from at least some degree of sleep apnea and this can drastically affect your sleep and performance and so one of the first things we we try and do is address that and another big benefit of addressing sleep apnea and sleep issues is that it's the number one thing that prevents heart attacks and it's the number one cause for people who are susceptible to heart attacks is sleep apnea holding your breath at night elevates your blood pressure and creates an environment to where heart attacks are more likely so I recommend a CPAP and I know that sometimes when I get into countries who have socialized medicine it's harder to get an appointment with a doctor to get a sleep test and to get a CPAP prescribed they're expensive in the States what I've been recommending and if you've got a friend in the States or if you need to reach out to me we just go onto Craigslist and I found SI paps for 200 bucks and just buy it and start using it right away there they're not highly scientific the cpap stood a or Otto set so they interpret your breathing and give you the air that you need it's it's not something that you need a doctor to mess with they hate when I say this but the fact of the matter is is that the medical lobbyists in in our country have made it really difficult for people to get these things without going through a doctor or a medical supply company which drastically increases the cost the CPAP that I bought for me and for my stepson was two thousand dollars a piece so with taxes and masks I was in almost 5 grand it was like buying a car I had to sign a lease for two and a half years and pay monthly on forgetting seep apps that are available on Craigslist for 200 bucks and I think it's it's just criminal that that people don't have access to these so if you think you're experiencing and I talk about I spend a lot of time talking about this because it's the most important thing you can do for performance right now is improve your sleep it's a breathing apparatus that you put if you're if you're snoring at night if your wife says or girlfriend says you're snoring if you don't know or if you wake up with a sore throat or you wake up tired you're probably experiencing sleep apnea it's a high likelihood for guys like us who train and lift so I encourage these I am adamant about it one of the things that I do as a trainer is is not to try and be a brainiac I try and be your mom and I start nagging at people and I tell them where's your CPAP where's your CPAP and if I can't get compliance then I'll ask their girlfriend hey is he wearing a CPAP and I try and find out and I pay a lot of attention to this because it's a lot more important to me than their training hugely important so I'll spend more time worrying about these things so you get a CPAP and you put it on at night and it's a 99.9 percent here for sleep apnea you wake up the next morning and your life has changed and I don't say that about very many things not a big supplement guy I don't wave my arms about creatine but when you wear a CPAP and I experienced this myself I started using one back in the mid-90s when I first got started getting really heavy to 40 to 50 to 60 that always increases apnea problems the heavier you get and I did the same thing in the mid-90s I found a used one and started using it myself before I could get a doctor to work through and get a sleep study and all that stuff I've done this for so long with so many different doctors because I experiment behind the scenes working with different that I know it's pretty simple you know you buy it you plug it in you put it on and the next morning you wake up and you want to clean your gutters and wash your car and mow your lawn you just feel like you get all this energy and it's fantastic in the absence of it you start to realize just how tired you are or were that you might not even recognize as much now so on to the next thing you hear me rave about and that's sodium and there's a great article on in the on the internet called sodium your secret weapon and it's one of my favorite articles that talks about how beneficial sodium is we calculate calories we calculate macros we religiously figure out how many scoops of a protein powder or a creatine that we're going to take but how much attention do we pay to one of the most beneficial performance-enhancing micronutrients on them available and that's sodium do you know how much you take in are you paying attention to whether or not you're getting adequate sodium in your diet what I found is is that people who try and eat clean they start cutting out pizzas and processed foods which is a good thing end up eating foods that are low in sodium chicken breast you know just eggs if it's a little bit of sodium but not enough for an athlete salt has a ton of great benefits I'll go through a few here I think what does it do for you increases performance increases stamina increases endurance when you go to the gym and you hit a wall twenty thirty minutes into a workout that's sodium depletion that's not carbs I promise you it's not carbs it's sodium depletion it's a it's a the single most important thing you can do to increase stamina endurance at the gym also when you're out of the gym that's the best thing you can do for recovery salt increases blood volume now if you're low in salt your blood volume decreases think thickens now how does that how do you get oxygen how is it filtered it's think honey through a filter you know it when your salt deficient it affects everything from how efficiently it filters through your body and gets toxins out of your system to how much oxygen it deliver to the cells that need it so it's important to keep that salt adequate that one of the biggest performance-enhancing I get more emails and comments and messages on the sodium rant I did on rhinos rants in terms of improved performance benefits people saying they got 20 kilo PRS within a week of starting to implement salt usage there is a small percentage of the population whose salt sensitive and will respond with higher blood pressure and those folks like people who have peanut allergies or lactose allergies can't eat peanuts or milk those folks have to be a little more cautious about how much sodium they use usually when you start using sodium or salting all your meals folks will gain a little bit of water weight for the first few days until your body starts recognizing hey I'm not a deficiency anymore I don't have to hold on to this and then it will start regularly processing salt and it'll normalize so within a week you're you're back to normal any blood pressure increase you may have realized initially in the first day or two will dissipate unless you have a intolerance to sodium and it'll become highly effective for you so just like you measure your macros and you get in how many grams of protein and how many grams of carbs and fats try and look to adding sodium to your diet and it can be just salting your meals throughout the day I'm not sure if I've got a slide for this I think a little later when I talk about water will cover that what kind of salt do you use people talk about you know table salt as opposed to you know mineral salts from say Himalayan or sea salts one of the things that's important when you get salt in is iodine iodine is strongly stimulative of the thyroid which directly impacts metabolism iodine also is a huge benefit for your immune system and so I recommend getting iodized salt like an iodized table salt the CDC in the states added iodized salt in the 1920s to at an iodine to table salt in 1920s and drastically impacted Gorder which is a huge problem with iodine deficiency start getting goiter which is a thyroid malfunction so iodine's and just as important is sodium and iodine can have huge benefits like I mentioned with respect to the immune system iodine a lot of people are exposed to fluoride chlorine bromide from breads those things have they'll lodge into the same receptor sites as iodine and do bad things toxins okay iodine will displace those and flush them it'll be flushed out of your system as a result because iodine alakh you PI the receptor sites that it's supposed to so iodine is a huge thing it'll be great for your metabolism great for your energy and so I recommend using an iodine salt now a lot of folks don't like getting table salt because it's been bleached and it might have caking agents in it and that's fine you can find an iodized salt that is say have a kosher variety or a himalayan salt that has iodine in it but I choose to find some food sources if possible I just mentioned it impacts thyroid function impacts metabolism as a result interesting thing about iodine and sodium is it stimulates the liver seventy percent of thyroid conversion from t4 to t3 occurs in the liver so now we're talking metabolism we're talking about a downrange effect on all of your hormones it's how important that it is that you get in iodine daily and so it acts as that the liver is kind of your detox people talk about detoxes in terms of juicing etc completely worthless the only thing you can do is optimize your own systems mechanisms for efficiently handling toxins which is your liver in your kidneys that's why I mentioned increasing blood volume benefits your kidney filtration using iodine benefits your liver which improves filtration of toxins as well and also when people take thyroid what are they taking triiodothyronine which is I misspelled but iodine that's one of the components of of t3 triiodothyronine that's why iodine is so important because it's part of your thyroid function and that takes us to water I purposely put salt first because we have this misconception as we carry around our gallon jug of water and we drink it all day long but that's of primary importance and it's not turns out that the minerals are a lot more important here's another expert who I rely on for information dr. Sandra gotek she's PhD of exercise fish directly to specializing in thermoregulation hydration and electrolyte replacement I think she knows what she's talking about okay so here's what she says this whole eight glasses a day of water it's complete myth she says drink when you're thirsty it's more important that you have the minerals and electrolytes drink when you're thirsty she says your decrease in performance happens when you're low in minerals electrolytes when you're low in sodium potassium magnesium zinc those kinds of things and so she says drink when you're thirsty most people have performance problems when they start getting low in salt because that you sweat out salt and some people sweat out more salt than others so while you're training you're losing sodium just like you're losing carbohydrates and you're losing water as well those are the things you want to replace salt drinks here's the thing to get an effective dose of sodium like with Gatorade they put salt in there it's not enough because if it were it would it wouldn't be palatable now I still put salt tablets in my water but it's not the most effective way to get what we call an effective dose you know a lot of companies will tell you supplement companies will pixie-dust their products with a little tiny bit of a supplement that's not even an effective dose to cause any benefit but say it's in there that's the way I feel about something like Gatorade which might be better than nothing or better than water but it's not optimal because you wouldn't be able to drink it if it had enough salt in it it just wouldn't be palatable and a lot of people think that that when they drink tons of water and they're peeing clear they're healthy there's a matter of fact they're not that's not a good thing you want to have minerals and electrolytes and vitamins in your system and when the water is flushing them all out now you don't have them anymore they're not there to benefit you in your performance and these things start to happen obviously we know about cramping but you can get headaches insomnia low sodium can affect sleep negatively and then brain fog when you're up during the day and you get that sensation in your head that brain fog so that moves us on to protein I should mention with respect to if you're not getting enough salt if adding salt to water doesn't provide you enough how what does adding it to food put salt on your food saltier meals throughout the day at least start to try and keep track of how much salts are taking in I'm not sure if I mention it later in the slideshow or not just threw it together this week but what's an optimal amount if you're gonna measure how much salt you get in a day the research suggests that anything between 3 grams and 6 grams is very healthy and they don't see any negative side effects from that anything over 7 grams can potentially be harmful for a sedentary person anything under 3 grams is even worse than over 7 grams sodium deficiency causes more problems than sodium excess so 3 to 6 is a sedentary individual and now you're exercising working out and burning a lot of water and in nutrients sodium then you need to replace a little more and I look at about 8 grams per gallon of water that you take in or remember it's not just about drinking water there's water associated with your food and I consume a lot of rice in a day a lot of chicken stock fruit those things give you a lot of water so I'm not saying you have to drink a gallon of water but if you're drinking a half gallon of water and eating wet foods throughout the day I think eight grams is a good number to shoot for we've seen like in the cosmonaut studies in Russia they followed I think it was 300 cosmonauts for more than a year who consumed 12 grams of sodium a day they put some of them on eight grams and some of them on four grams and here's an interesting thing to consider and I don't know the answers to all this I'm just telling you what the research is out there they had three groups one took in four grams of sodium a day one cook in 8 grams of sodium a day one took in 12 grams of sodium a day they were all given the same amount of water the higher sodium group had more urine they were measuring how much water they took in how much water they peed out the 12 gram of sodium group had more urine well how does that happen think camel fat in the hump broken down water extracted used for its necessary purposes that's what happens in humans as well and they did a rat study to follow this up and found the same thing increases your metabolism and will break down actually muscle and fat for water unless you're getting adequate protein exercising stimulating the right hormones and then you'll have less muscle tissue breakdown more fat breakdown sodium is something I incorporate pretty aggressively in people who are dieting as well because of that reason it increases your metabolism you find out that you have more energy you are hungrier but if you can manage the hunger you'll burn more calories and lose more fat and so that's just something to consider that with respect to sodium and what it does will on a protein everybody wants to know you know how much protein should I eat here's a guy who I don't know if any of you follow Greg knuckles stuff on on the internet but he recommended an article here here's a PhD candidate that is working on muscle metabolism and has some great research called perfecting protein intake in athletes and he talked about here's Greg knuckles stronger by sciences his stuff here and again it's just awesome that we've got people with that are that are so smart that are involved in this industry now giving us the science behind things that you know we've stumbled into over the years that we know works how much protein what kind when and this article got and went into the the depths of that it concluded that one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight is plenty that's 2 grams per kilo is plenty of protein and you probably don't need any more than that too you could even use less and still be adequate but what's important is is how much per meal and he talked about getting 20 grams of protein per meal gives you about 90% of the muscle protein synthesis that you can possibly stimulate so for most folks that's enough 20 grams a meal but if you jump it up to 40 grams Emil you're gonna get the other 10% and so obviously that's what I recommend 40 grams of protein a meal is optimal I don't like to eat less because I don't want to inhibit muscle tissue repair and building and I don't necessarily like to eat more because it tends to slow metabolism and it fills my body with galleries that I could probably consume elsewhere that might give me a greater benefit and we'll talk about that in a bit says that older athletes need more I still stick it 40 grams a day I seem to do fine on that but as you age you you don't absorb protein as efficiently and so you may need to take a little more yeah absolutely all this is relative to how many calories you burn and whether or not sure you're working out and breaking down muscle tissue but it's not that different to be honest yeah possibly I I think some of the research that says the older people need it need more of it is because they're not steamed they don't have as much muscle tissue not stimulating muscle protein synthesis as much so that's another thing is it doesn't really matter what you it's not as important what you eat it's more important what your body can utilize and assimilate and that's affected by the stimulus that you apply meaning training in particular when you work out a muscle protein synthesis is elevated same things true when I talk about these 10-minute walks it increases your insulin sensitivity and so now you can utilize those calories better so what your actions are dictate what kind of how many calories you need and what kind and how they're utilized he focuses on this pre-sleep protein says this is pretty important to try and get that 40 grams right before bed and that can help keep protein metabolism elevated throughout the night while you're sleeping and it's a recommendation particularly for athletes who might otherwise be deficient at night and I know there's a lot of talk about now about the the fasted the intermittent fasting and that and I that's fine for some conditions as is Kido for some conditions there's cases in which I recommend those diets but for an athlete who's training hard and long and getting ready to compete I don't want to have long windows of fasting as I'm concerned that they're not going to get all the nutrients that they need particularly for someone you know that's in the heavy weight class trying to you know lift and gain a lot of muscle size and then meal frequency and then he recommends that four plus meals a day get protein about every few hours four hours five hours at the worst the important thing there is is there's no mechanism within the body to store protein you could only utilize what you've eaten what is readily available in the bloodstream and so you do want to get protein in at frequent intervals throughout the day I to try and get in five meals when I was training I was getting in for bodybuilding I was getting in as many as eight meals a day I'd start eating at five in the morning and finish at eleven o'clock at night he mentioned another thing that I haven't tried yet but it seemed pretty compelling when you read the research because he talks about amino acids a lot and he found a significant spike at muscle protein synthesis from using leucine not branched chains not leucine isoleucine valine but just leucine by itself about fifteen thirty minutes before a meal then when you ate the meal the muscle protein synthesis drastically increased so I've just tossing it out there is something that might be worth trying they asked for BCAAs he said they're relatively ineffective particularly for people who are getting adequate protein we found the same thing in terms of glutamine it's the most abundant protein in the body so if you're getting adequate protein these things are pretty ineffective somebody who is on a significantly restricted caloric diet and low protein may see some benefit from supplementing these so in terms of saving your money and directing it towards something that might be more effective this is one of those areas where having said that folks that don't like just drinking regular water and might want to flavor it they tend to put in BCAAs or a mineral electrolyte tablet because it tastes better and it'll help them drink a little more water during the day it moves us on to fats fats are hugely important all of the vitamins A D and K your fat soluble vitamins of course are in there and those are hugely important those micronutrients for performance and recovery and so I don't restrict fats I don't believe in the low-fat program they've actually shown that the higher the fats the lower the body fat the little more fat that you lose in many many studies so I try and focus on getting a decent amount of fats in and I use cholesterol based animal proteins I think that the American dietary Association just came out in 2015 and said that there's no upper limit to the amount of cholesterol that you can consume it doesn't it doesn't have any effect your your liver determines how much you need and can convert it again like sodium sensitive people cholesterol is more genetic whether or not you have an elevated cholesterol problem seems to be more genetic and for the vast majority of people who don't have that issue eating cholesterol does not increase cholesterol in the bloodstream and cholesterol has a lot of benefits and it's it's what's used to manufacture hormones in the body so it's hugely effective to use those kinds of proteins just a little note that I put in here because some people like to eat egg whites always throw a yolk in with those the problem with even with vegetables is is that when you start to get those vitamins in your system if you don't have a fatty courier if you don't have some sort of fat to take them to the cells every cell in the body is surrounded by a fatty membrane and you need fats to penetrate that and to take those vitamins and minerals into the cell so I don't believe in separating and I'm always confused how people take God's foods split them up and recombine and add them and think they're improving things it never happens that way eating whole foods and in their most original form is always better primarily because a lot of these foods come with cofactors that help you digest these foods better and utilize the nutrients and prevent excesses when you take a multivitamin it's very easy to build up in excess and a lot of times those multivitamins aren't of the form that your body can utilize and when you eat the quality foods they're in the four highly what we call a highly biological available form and you use more of those nutrients brings us to red meat which everybody knows my steak and rice diet you know I'm big on eating red meat and lots of red meat red meat is probably you know everybody talks about these all these wonderfu or red meats probably the only food that is a wonderfu it has everything in it you can live on it exclusively you don't need anything else everything is in there and not just survive but thrive on just red meat so if there's one thing that you should have as the core of your nutrition program not just for macros not just for protein but for micros it's the most micronutrient dense food that you can possibly eat and it has the most variety heme iron is a highly biological vailable source of iron it's hugely important is in red meat B vitamins is a monster B vitamins are what helps you metabolize food into energy and red meat is high in B vitamins and it's one of the things that that that a lot of people will supplement but it's not in the right form and it's got a wide variety of the vitamins obviously zinc magnesium creatine is in red meat I've found that athletes who don't eat any red meat tend to get some benefit from taking creatine and athletes who eat enough red meat and enough salt tend not to get very much benefit from creating I never got much benefit because a plenty of salt mate plenty of red meat so create never did anything for me maybe cause some cramping it was just my experience but people who had who just ate egg whites and chicken breast and some veggies and we're low in sodium creatin causes some water attention some cellular retention which most folks tend to believe that that's really why you get strength result from creatine is just because of the intracellular water retention which you could get from sodium intracellularly this brings us to process vegetable oils which I misspelled don't spell it that way these are poison this is your can't even read that but it's your canola oil your corn oil these processed vegetable oils loaded with omega-6 fatty acids these things are oxidized very easily which creates toxins in the system you know free radicals that all happens from these vegetable oils they're unstable and they're a horrible source of food and even their structure they're high in omega-6 fatty acid and instead what I use is animal proteins and vegetables and I prefer to use omega eggs or line-caught fish or you know obviously red meat the reason being is is that when you eat eggs and chicken or farmed fish it's higher in polyunsaturated fatty acids then fresh and polyunsaturated fatty acids are not as efficient for your body to utilize as energy again because of the oxidation and now you've got free radicals and inflammation and again butter people always ask me and how do i grease my pan or kind of oil do I use particularly if you're eating a lot of vegetables you're going to want a fatty source with those vegetables because there's no way to get those vitamins into the system without some sort of fatty source so now more recently people are saying I'll throw butter or oil olive oil on your vegetables because the cold-pressed oils are okay extra virgin olive oil avocado oil coconut oil those things aren't chemically processed with hexane which is a gas really and then I try and get my fats out of my whole food sources I don't need to add a whole bunch of fats in because they're in there and I use things like steaks and eggs and I should mention with respect to red meat lamb is red meat high in myoglobin so that's a source that might be more affordable here I would highly recommend that you use that one of the things we did with hop stores diet there's go on to say here that all these vegetable oils there and everything I can't go to restaurants because I tend I have an allergy to vegetable oils it just causes major digestion problems wreaks havoc on my stomach and I end up racing to the bathroom I know when I've got vegetable oil in my food because within 30 minutes I'm just full speed and headed to the bathroom but they use it in everything you'll see this stuff everywhere I was surprised to see when I went to Whole Foods Market and looked at all of their hot prepared foods almost everything as canola oil in it they put it in bread it's used to cook your eggs and restaurants it's used to cook your all of your food your Flatiron steaks are soaked in canola oil it's in everything it's hard to avoid that's why I don't eat it restaurants very often and if I do it's got to be flame grilled food and I specifically tell them I'm allergic to those oils here's a great reference on the internet there's ray peat and I always will put in ray peat clips and it is all of these one two three four minute little clips of him talking about many of these things such as polyunsaturated fats and how horrible they are for your body and for the system and how consuming them increases all cause mortality the oil industry will try and tell you that they decrease cholesterol and therefore have a positive effect on heart disease but what they don't tell you is that they cause that you haven't a higher all-cause mortality when you eat these things and you're fatter as a result but repeat stuff is excellent and he talks about the vegetable oil effects on the body eventually I'll throw in a video or two to share with this Mary Enoch PhD in nutritional science published an article on fats and oils she's got a great piece called the oiling of America which goes back and talks about how we ended up with trans fats margarine but that everybody's so eagerly accepted and tried to promote as a result to try and reduce using saturated fats but it was all tied into the oil industry the canola oil industry out of Canada Canadian oil it's not even a food canola Canadian but this article here goes into the money that's behind that and the reason why we've been pushed all of these polyunsaturated fats and told that they're healthy and they're not I would never the first thing I do is go into Diane athlete's diet and pull all of these out and tell them not to eat foods that are high in these polyunsaturated fats and oils brings us to carbs now when I train an athlete I adjust carbs based on their needs and I use them to fuel workouts and to protect muscle tissue from being used as energy carbs are highly protective of muscle tissue so I'll use those for people who have a high workload now if somebody's experiencing say pre-diabetic situation where their hemoglobin a1c is elevated and their blood tests show that they're having a hard time with insulin sensitivity I'll reduce carbs for a period of time incorporate exercise to try and you know fix that problem first and a lot of the problem with some of these carbohydrates that people eat is they bring a lot of baggage with them we'll talk more about that as we go through this this slide some carbs that you utilize in your diet are easier to digest and utilize than other carbohydrates and so we'll want to pick the right ones when I'm doing weight loss programs I tend to lower carbohydrates when I'm doing weight gain programs I tend to raise them and when I say weight gain I mean muscle performance I'm never try and encourage gaining fat limit carbs for weight loss I increased carbs for weight gain it's a huge component of my vertical axis for people to grow on but I use a particular type of carbohydrate so what I do when I do a low carb diet I still include fruit a small amount of fructose in the diet and people hear fructose they start to freak out and I go fructose you know soda pop high fructose corn syrup you know obesity and insulin resistance all the you know metabolic issues that come with that the problem is is that fructose powerfully stimulates the liver that's where it's digested that's where it's it's pulled into very quickly and utilized and the liver loves it and when the liver is happy it's the chemist of the body it becomes better at processing toxin it becomes better at like I mentioned earlier in terms of thyroid conversion from t4 to t3 keeping a liver happy is important and I've been getting blood tests every month for over 12 years I probably spent 50 grand on blood tests in the last 12 years and I monitor these things I monitor my liver enzymes my ast alt and that tells you whether or not your liver is healthy and I know from having competed in the past when you're using an oral performance-enhancing drug that drastically affects your liver your liver enzymes start to elevate and you lose your appetite as a result because your liver says stop feeding me there's too many toxins in here so if people are having trouble with with with their appetite I try and and help their liver stay healthy now the downside of that is too much fructose like you for drinking a six-pack of soda every day with high fructose corn syrup your liver loves it so much it'll take it all in converted to fat and hold it it can only hold 75 200 grams of fructose a day as glycogen it converts it to glycogen and stores it there and so I never recommend more than say 50 grams a day but I put it into these small 10 or 12 gram doses about three times a day and my favorite way to get in is just orange juice I'll drink 3 ounces just a tiny little bit orange juice 3 or 4 times a day and I've noticed on my blood tests that when I do that my liver enzymes come down and I notice that my appetite improves as a result but I'm not taking in so much that I'm creating any of the fatty liver problems so it stimulates liver you can use it pre or post-workout when on low carb intake I try and time my carbs for pre and post-workout no no how huge deal that is but it tends to give you a little more energy for your training so you don't have to use stimulants when I'm doing high carb intake I use easy to digest carbs such as white rice and again some fruits to stimulate the liver it's also been shown that when you take in two types of carbohydrate sources one from fructose and ones from say dextrose or another carbohydrate source that your body will absorb more of it faster and so that's why people will put in these cyclic dextrose products where they put in multiple carb sources in their post workout shakes and this is one of the ways that that I help please eat enough calories to fuel their workload in their muscle mass and grow is to use the extra carbohydrates and here's some of the carbs that I use to build a foundation what I call the horizontal platform of my diet because I want to get in all the micronutrients that's really important I talk to you about measuring or at least paying attention to sodium measuring or at least paying attention to iodine to make sure you get it in every day so now here's some of the foods that can contribute to that an HA thor's diet I make sure that he got in carrots every day gets in some sort of vegetable I like to throw in sweet potatoes because it's a root tuber as his carrots now this whole prebiotic probiotic science that's going on right now is extremely complex nobody really knows what they're talking about everything is really kind of a guest it'll be 10 years of probably before we have enough information if ever to make any real significant and I think suggestions or recommendations about prebiotics probiotics and your gut biome that's a name that's been thrown around now that everybody's focused on is gut biome there's a hundred trillion bacteria in your gut biome your the likelihood that you can affect that it people used to think that it could change weekly or daily but now we're seeing that it can change by the minute your gut biome so I well I say that I'll eat certain foods to try and improve my gut biome really what I'm talking about is trying to make sure that my digestion feels good that when I'm eating the foods don't aggravate my stomach that don't cause gas and bloating so that I can digest my food quicker more efficiently I'm not on the toilet all the time and then I can eat more of the kinds of foods that I think I grow from so this is the micronutrient profile that I like to see I bring in a potato sweet potato again a prebiotic it's supposed to stimulate the bacteria and the digestive enzymes in the body so we eat a daily care to eat a small sweet potato the problem with a lot of the foods that I put in my horizontal diet is that they have some benefit up to a point and then trying to eat too much of them can bring detrimental effects they there might be resistant starches in by eating a lot of potatoes in which case you start getting gas and bloating and and the like so I use just enough to try and get my not micronutrient profile complete but I don't build the the bulk of my calories on these items I wouldn't eat 10 potatoes a day or 10 carrots a day I just have one care today I have one sweet potato a day I'll throw in some maybe some peppers or spinach because they tend to be low gas you don't get a lot of methane build-up from eating those I use the fodmap and we'll talk about it here in a minute it's it's a list of foods that are that are more likely and less likely to cause gas and bloating in IBS and indigestion problems I focus a lot on my diet on that most of the athletes I talked to that's one of the first things I do is ask them how's your digestion you know like Marc Bell says in his in his podcast sometimes he says may your shits always be tapered and there's some science to that and you want to pay attention to those kinds of things because your regularity and the quality of of your shits is important and I know this I got a five year old a three year old and I know what from what I feed them I know what's gonna happen and I got to clean that up and so I'm really careful about what I feed them or have fed them in the past and feed them now and I try and you know monitor that with myself and my athletes too I ask them those questions so it can be kind of personal if you're working with me so now we get to some of the differences here why I use you know a steak and rice you always see me using white rice and that's because it's very easy to digest and it I can eat it in large quantities other foods like wheat oats potatoes like I mentioned they bring baggage with them they have a lot of anti nutrients phytic acid lectins things that cause a lot of gas and bloating things that your body doesn't digest things that are in digestibility intestines and then the bacteria that breaks them down doesn't really break them down it converts them into methane and that makes you uncomfortable and it it starts to affect your diet so I use a lot of white rice and that's white rice isn't terribly nutrient-dense but that's not what I'm using it for I'm using it for the macros I'm not using it for the micros and I want to be able to take a lot of it into fuel a big appetite if I've got to take in 5,000 calories a day and I try and take in a whole ton of brown rice then my guts just going to be exploded it's going to be terrible same thing happens with oats oats tend not to be able to do in its dose-dependent you could have a cup but if you try and get the bulk of your carbohydrates for your day out of oats then you're gonna start to get massive problems with gas one way you can remedy some of these problems like when people eat legumes which are loaded with lectins is they soak them overnight and that's beans by the way and I don't recommend burritos to my athletes because the beans are hard to digest and my athletes who need a lot of calories aren't gonna be able to eat six burritos and so I try and keep their stomachs happy and healthy and so but if open meal is something that you enjoy or have a lot of access to one of the ways to remedy that is you soak your oatmeal overnight put it out on the table put some warm water in it and put a couple tablespoons of yogurt in it and that will help ferment it that'll help pre digest it so when you wake up in the morning and you cook that oatmeal and eat it you probably won't get bloated having said that I still prefer white rice for the majority of the calories that I pack into a vertical axis of this diet because I don't have to worry about somebody's reaction to lots of oats I talked about the fodmap one word FODMAP and you can google that and on the internet you have a question shoot same problem when you eat a lot of it you start to notice that it's hard on the stomach and so quinoa is great it's loaded it's got a good protein source it's got good vitamins and minerals it's great but it's it's not magic there is baggage that comes with it in quantity so it's dose dependent yeah and that's the thing the reason that I have the carrots in there and the the spinach which is low gas but still has fiber carrots tends to be well tolerated by the gut but still has fiber fiber is not always a good thing too much fiber can start to wreak havoc it impedes protein absorption it binds to valuable minerals and electrolytes think sodium potassium zinc magnesium too many too much fiber can shuttle those all those things out of the system it grabs ahold of them and takes them out but there's some benefit to those fibers because they also take toxins out of the system when your kidney and liver the process those toxins and there they need something to attach them to to get them out of the system so they're not reabsorbed and then just keep circulating through your bloodstream so I do include some fiber there's a lot more foods in my steak and rice diet that that you you're starting to discover and there's reasons for them in terms of the macronutrient foundation and these are some of the reasons the fiber for toxins to help with digestion I find that a lot of historically a lot of people would take in too just a ton of like egg whites and broccoli and broccoli is really hard to digest it comes with if you are cooking that really really really well so it's soft with a fork to push through it to break down some of those anti nutrients so that your your stomach can digest it without creating all that methane so I'm cautious about which food I eat and that brings me to the fodmap the fodmap kind of defines foods by hard to digest and easy to digest and I use that as a reference it's not magic but it starts you thinking about how does a food feel on me I told huff tour last night we're talking he's like don't you eat this don't you eat that and like look I don't choose foods based on how much I like them I choose them based on how much they like me and I make that decision about an after hour after I eat I decide whether or not the food I ate was a good choice and that's kind of how I've come to this these food items that I've selected and they tend to be consistent with this fodmap which shows a lot of alternatives so it doesn't have to be specifically what I eat sometimes people can't eat those things we mentioned earlier with respect to cholesterol it's it's not defined like it used to be when our Herman came out with trans-fats to try and avoid cholesterol there's really no indication that unless you're sensitive to cholesterol that you're eating cholesterol is going to cause heart disease and it's important for hormones in the body moves us on to caffeine and the caffeine is a good performance enhancer I utilize it post workout with my carbohydrates and my sodium and my water to help intake those nutrients faster that's a one of the bigger benefits that I've realized from it problem with caffeine is you attenuate to it and which means that the more you use it the less results you get and another problem is is that in an effective dose for performance it's like 600 milligrams is really where they found to be an effective dose to actually show a performance improvement that's a lot of caffeine and that much caffeine say in a powerlifting competition can cause the kidneys to release water you get some you start to pee more and now people might get dehydrated if they start pissing a lot at competitions I don't know what this is but it looked good the time I suppose caffeine yeah it doesn't have any extra calories you want to don't want to take it too late at night so it doesn't interrupt sleep and I prefer like people asking about do you use a pre-workout and I don't and there's a few reasons for that is because I get adequate food throughout the day carbohydrate sources I a meal two hours before I train and I get plenty of sodium and sodium provides me all the energy the stamina and endurance people who hit a wall are sodium deficient and they'll take caffeine to try and compensate for that and just end up digging a deeper and deeper hole and so I don't want to use pre workouts another thing about pre workouts is what me cayó Cokely have told me one time is that when you get to the platform you want to be able to have the ability have trained yourself to capture to draw in and get your adrenaline and get psyched for your lifts if you do it artificially with some sort of pre-workout or caffeine or something that stimulates you then you lose the ability from not having trained your self to grab that that adrenaline you lose the ability to do that and you can't time it very well you're just kind of jittery though through the whole workout which isn't good you want to be able to amp yourself up and then relax and then for your next event amp yourself up and then relax on caffeine you can't do that you stay where you stay amped up the whole time and that cortisol is releasing because every action has an equal and opposite reaction and when you start pumping your body full of caffeine and your body starts putting a lot of cortisol out there to try and slow down that that adrenaline that's created I just take like a hundred milligrams post-workout some folks will take a little bit before but I'd prefer to do it with food and again the caffeine can wreak havoc on your adrenals and cause chronically elevated cortisol levels and just recommend it to use it sparingly meaning you might use it just on squat day if that's what you wanted to do but if you use it everyday it's not gonna have any effect on on a particular day we'll talk about cardio the body responds to the stimulate stimulation that the stimulus that you provided and that means if you're trying to be bigger stronger faster and you go in the gym and do a whole bunch of steady-state cardio you're sending the wrong message and your body doesn't respond accordingly the only time I recommend steady-state cardio is people who distance run and that steady state means you're getting on a treadmill and walking for 40 minutes or jogging for an extended period of time sends the wrong message to the body when trying to maintain lean body mass and here's why because your muscle has a high nutrient demand it's heavy it has a high oxygen demand and it has a high water demand and if you're on a treadmill walking for 40 minutes your body says Tim this muscle is heavy it has a high oxygen demand it has a high nutrient a man needs a lot of water I got to get rid of this muscle and that's how your body responds and I learned this the first year I competed back in 1986 the people who were jogging a lot attended not to be very conditioned they didn't have a 6-pack of ABS they tend to carry fat on their obliques even the women who were jogging 5 miles a day at the gym I was training at all tended to be fatty they weren't lean and hard there was a great article that that I send people that of a triathlete a female triathlete and there's somebody who swims two miles jogs 26 miles bikes 100 miles was not lean wasn't defined the body holds on to that fat for fuel and it gets rid of the muscle but when she switched to high intensity training say CrossFit her body started to change lost the fat increased the muscle so your body responds to the stimulus that you provide and I use that theory when I specialize with an athlete I use that theory as we get ready for say a strength competition as opposed to hypertrophy training and I try and focus get everything focused towards that direction yeah they need that that fat for the endurance activity that's absolutely right then it's completely different thing and if that's your sport that's great you know your body will respond to the stimulus you provide that's great you look at the Kenyans that are doing the marathons their body's perfect for that you know but the sprinters you know Usain Bolt is just going to be rocked out so there's a and you as an athlete want to recognize that whatever stimulus you're providing yourself is how your body's going to respond and if you're sending it to messages then it can't ever get great at one thing and you talk about CrossFit there they're good at everything but they're not great at any one thing and that's not to knock CrossFit that's what their job is to be good at everything like a decathlete the decathlete never wins the hundred meter dash you know the decathlete never wins the shotput but there can do everything better than anybody else can do you know everything so that takes me to hit under load so how do you work your cardiovascular system because you do want to keep your body fit and make sure that your oxygen that your body utilizes oxygen well because it helps with muscle repair and so many other things so I use hid under load and that might be I think I've got a couple examples here whether you're high-intensity interval training so it improves cardiovascular benefits while stimulating muscles I talked when we started off about how everything you do stimulates hormones when you do hit training when you do explosive training and weight lifting you're stimulating all the hormones that result in gaining muscle and those those are the hormones that we want to stimulate and that's what we do these works and so I use weighted exercises with higher reps brief rest periods and supersets and that's weight it carries it's why strongman such a great you know training protocol for being both healthy and strong because they use weighted loaded exercises through distance time under tension and all use same bodybuilders will use higher rep stuff will do 20 reps sets of squats or if we do weighted carries we'll take maybe a 30 second rest and do another one take a 30 second rest do another one that's going to drastically elevate your heart rate without breaking down muscle tissue so I use these strategically running stairs pushing prowlers weighted carries those are all the thing I like about stairs as opposed to sprinting is that it's all concentric loading every time you push on a step its concentric most of the muscle tissue as you know gets broken down on the eccentric load like on when you're when you're going down in the squat or coming down and a bench that's your eccentric load and that's where most of the damage occurs so when you're doing when you're not actually weight training but you're doing a supporting exercise you don't want to break down a ton of muscle tissue you want to still be able to recover quickly so I use stairs or a recumbent bike under a little bit of tension and I do a 30 second sprint with a 30 second rest 30 second sprint with a 30 second rest now I'm stimulating muscle without breaking it down I'm getting lots of blood in the area which heals my body and I'm getting the cardiovascular benefit from that and it's very brief it's less than 10 minutes I might do 10 30-second Sprint's with 10 30-second rests that's 10 minutes and I'm done when I was training for competitions I would put a recumbent bike in my house or in my hotel room depending on where I was training I did this with mark Bell for two months I'd put a recumbent bike in my extended stay and I would have a big squat day say on Sunday on Monday at least three times throughout that day I would ride that bike wouldn't break down any muscle tissue and stimulate a ton of blood flow I'd get a good cardiovascular benefit that you don't get from doing two reps on the squat so I was able to stay healthy but still be focused on the event that I was you know on strength as my primary goal and that takes me to the 10-minute walk after you eat a meal I've been pushing these 10-minute walks and there's the because it improves digestion I think I got a whole list of things here these 10-minute walks increases insulin sensitivity decreases gas and bloating so as soon as you get done eating you go take a 10-minute walk and it actually helps decrease gas and bloating improves digestion decreases delayed onset muscle soreness because you're walking and moving the body and now the blood is flowing and that's how it's healing if you just lay down all the time it's every time you get up you're sore you're like oh like that but if you move the body and lots of blood gets through there blood is the life force that repairs and fixes everything it brings all the nutrients in but you have to move your heart has a pump your heart is a pump that pumps the blood into everywhere in the body but to get the toxins out you know the blood will go in and repair things but there's there's toxins as a result right to get those out of the system you need the lymphatic system the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump it moves with movement and so you have to move frequently throughout the day we see this in people who work in office buildings and stuff instead of desks all day if I can get them to stand up for 10 minutes out of every hour it's the equivalent of jogging 12 marathons a year just by implementing that one change also in these studies I don't know if I put one up here or not three 10-minute walks which is 30 minutes a day is far better than one 30-minute walk Japanese ran a huge study where they put the pedometers on a group of people and asked them to walk 10,000 steps a day you see the guys have seen those they have fitbit's is that what they are and people put those on or the pedometers and it measures how many steps a day they take then they took another group of people and they asked them to take three 15-minute walks they walked maybe four thousand steps but the 15-minute walks were brisk you actually got your heart rate elevated you you know it wasn't a full-on workout but you a good arm swing and they did three 15-minute walks walked maybe four thousand steps they outperformed the 10,000 step group to fold on every measurement decrease in blood sugar increase in or decrease in body fat and body composition cardiovascular benefit all of it was improved and they walked they did half as much movement but they did it more deliberately with more intensity so the three ten-minute walks are huge I would replace for any athlete I would immediately replace all of your or any of your steady-state stuff with these three I use these for people who are dieting for shows like women for bikini and I use them for athletes who are trying to gain as much weight as possible because they are equally as effective for both based on your calorie intake so very effective again I talked about standing at least 10 minutes every hour sitting is the disease think about that when I fly and I talk to Hoffler about this or just if I'm working throughout the day I usually set my phone for one hour timer goes off every hour on the hour and that reminds me to either get up and move around and I'm on an airplane I do take advantage of that I'll go back and walk to the back to the bathroom and I'll stand back there and do this for as long as until the the flight attendants kicked me out and tell me to go back to my seat and I do that every hour that's why I always sit on the aisle so I can get up and move around on the plane because if you sit there my flight over here was seven hours you imagine just sitting there for seven hours straight I think it digs a hole it puts you at a deficit sitting as a disease it causes all kinds of problems people always ask me how many calories to eat and usually I designed the program first for you know micros and macros and then how much of those you eat really depends on what your goal is I ask folks to tell me what they've currently been eating and trying to estimate about how many calories there are eating you can't fine-tune a number everybody's different they burn a different amount of calories their workload is largely impacts that so I just estimate and you can do the same thing you just kind of got to take an estimation and then one of the reasons that all my programs involve because I want to be able to check their weight every week or even every few days to see are you gaining or losing and then we start throwing more calories into the equation here's an interesting thing about how does your body burn calories because people tend to focus on the wrong thing seventy percent of your calories are burned at rest from your basal metabolic rate that's why it's optimal to increase muscle tissue because you're burning more calories at rest just while you sit there 15 percent are burned from daily activities you call the non-exercise activity thermogenesis and that's just walking around you know vacuuming cooking your food going to the grocery store 10 percent are burned from eating that's your thermic effect of food and protein has a higher thermic effect than say carbs or fat and then here's the important one 5% are burned from exercise exercise activity thermogenesis so tells you how little importance walking on the treadmill is in terms of your total calorie consumption for the day and how much important it is to burn those calories at rest by increasing your metabolism this is why everything you do how it affects your hormones affects your rate of calorie consumption we know if your thyroids optimal you're going to burn a lot more calories and your body temperatures are going to stay elevated more and that's the most important thing you can do so if I had to choose between stimulating the thyroid and doing a whole bunch of cardio it's an easy choice for me because 70% of your body's calories that you burn is directly relative to the health of your liver and your thyroid function so that's why I do blood tests and find out where your thyroid function is because it dramatically affects in the greatest way you can do all the treadmill you want twice a day hour each time and have very little benefit as compared to just optimizing one of your hormones more exercise does not equal more fat loss solution to that we increase our basal metabolic rate by lifting weights so when I implement a weight lifting program I oftentimes do two a days just like the three ten-minute walks some people go into the gym and they'll train for an hour and a half or two hours straight I'd rather have them train for 40 minutes in the morning in 20 or 30 minutes at night they're actually working out fewer minutes but I find that their intensity increases as a result and when you match for volume you'll get a better result from the shorter amount of time so I do love to add eight ratings particularly for hypertrophy training when it comes to strength training you may have two to kind of ramp that back a little bit because recovery becomes important but what I'll do is is I'll use a hypertrophy training program to develop an elevated level of fitness your cardiovascular fitness from having you know done more super sets and you know short rest period stuff so that when you start decreasing volume and frequency but increasing weight as you get closer and closer to your competition there is a carryover effect so you can recover faster as you go through that process staying active throughout the day just hang on your feet you're gonna burn a ton more calories than if you just sit down and then the high-protein diet again helps and the exercise that's more for people are just focused on losing body fat really calculating calories how many we just talked about that everyone's different start somewhere near your current calorie intake clean up your diet did you gain or lose weight and did your performance and body composition improve and those are the things that I asked people along the way to make sure that that they're eating and training according to their goals we talked about hormones we talked about how salt impacts thyroid and about how too much cardio impacts your metabolism and about how lack of sleep impacts your hormones increasing car cortisol and decreasing testosterone so we've covered that information blood tests are biggie for me and I don't know how hard it is to get a blood test here and how expensive it is and how time consuming is pretty easy on my site I have a link Stan efforting comm called blood test and if you click on it it takes you to private MD labs which in the states we use to get the forms we need to go down to a lab and get a blood test without ever having to go to a doctor and they send you two results directly to your email on there I recommend a particular test and if you go to that test and click the information link it will list all of the blood tests that they run at private MD labs your whole profile all the things that I like to see print that out take it to your doctor and see if he'll run all of those labs and then you have access to all that information and then when I have an athlete do that then they send me that information I take a look at it and we decide together how we're going to improve you know where their things deficiencies are at talked a little bit about supplements big thing for me is the supplements can help they may help but they should never replace food lots of times for convenience people who replace a meal with a protein drink and I would never do that I'm talking about a good better best scenario and the stuff I put out for me is always opt what's best and if you have to make an adjustment make an adjustment but if we I'm trying to do I'm trying to pull out all the stops and do everything as efficiently as I can what I mean by that is is that a supplement is never better than food and sometimes people think that protein shakes have been advertised so aggressively and they talk about muscle protein synthesis and they talk about you know hydrolyzed whey isolates and stuff like that and give you the impression that that's better than steak and it's not it's nowhere close so particularly because of what I mentioned in terms of those those cofactors when the nutrients all come together those those protein powders they're a processed food and so all of your micronutrients are gone they've completely been processed out sometimes they'll throw in and fortify them with certain things fortification never works as good as a natural food because it's often not in the right source that your body utilizes and it's often not with the right cofactors fats in particular that help you use those nutrients so you know sometimes as a matter of convenience we use a post-workout shake other than that I tend to try and eat all my meals I always try and prioritize real food over shakes and this is this has something to do with my horizontal foundation too little of into any nutrient can slow progress so that's why we do the blood test to find out if you're deficient in anything we try and get all the micronutrients in the highe dine magnesium zinc you'd be amazed how a deficiency in one of these vitamins can just stop perform and drastically impact your negatively impact your strength and recovery too much can be bad as well that's the problem with supplements when you take supplements sometimes they can spike certain nutrients we found this out and the line is falling era where we were mega dosing vitamin E and other antioxidants and come later to find out they're they actually increased all cause mortality to have super physiological doses of vitamin E or vitamin A so supplements can lead to excesses much quicker than regular food I talked about the cofactors in food tend to meter how much your body absorbs and utilizes and again use the blood test to address those concerns so commonly my programs I'm not a huge fan of multivitamins I'll be honest with you the research doesn't suggest that they do much of anything Harvard studies that have come out say that they don't decrease all cause mortality but then the same researchers will say but I take one anyhow and so I'm kind of there with that in terms of multivitamin I try and get my micronutrients from my food I pay attention where am I getting my vitamin A from that's why I try and throw in some fatty fish where am I getting my iodine from and I try and find a source of that where I getting my vitamin D from that are usually supplement cuz it's hard to get but that's why you saw me throw in a daily carrot a daily orange a daily spinach a daily sweet potato those those things make sure that I've got all my micronutrients in and I don't have to supplement because supplementing is never as effective as food an interesting thing and if you guys follow Lane Norton he talked about recently when people clean eat and Lane Norton's a big fan of if it fits your macros when people clean eat they tend to over restrict and then they end up with deficiencies and the problem with just eating anything everything is that yeah you get everything but you also get a lot of the baggage that comes with it you might increase fat and decrease insulin sensitivity and get all the what I said the the anti nutrients so you have to try and find when you're cleaning up your diet I don't I'm not talking about eating clean I'm not talking about restricting your diet to three or four food items I'm trying to be cautious to get everything that you need because too much restriction can but you in a deficiency state so eating fewer things doesn't always solve the problem B complex vitamins sometimes we'll throw in people who sweat a lot but I can get most of that a lot of that from the red meat red meats and loaded with B vitamins and it's hugely effective for performance d3 I tend to have to supplement it's hard to get d3 in the quantities if you can't get enough Sun then you're into the supplementation and again 8,000 I use a day is pretty typical get a blood test and look because too much is not good either and there should it should be in an optimal range and then the calcium magnesium zinc sometimes that can really help the zma people talk about taking before bed can help with your sleep and relax you some people may experience some general benefits from these other three items protein powders I don't prescribe them but it as a matter of convenience you can use one post-workout creatine may work for some people again I found that when you're taking in red meats and you're taking in enough sodium probably not going to get much benefit from it and then Omega threes I try and get my Omega threes from a fatty fish a line-caught fish a salmon or a cod or a cod liver oil supplement be a better place in my mind to use than Omega threes because omegas are there E they oxidize very easily they turn rancid and become toxic and causes a lot of problems with free radicals so I'm cautious about supplementing Omega 3s and thinking I'd rather get it from my food so my diets usually throw in salmon twice a week just a serving a salmon twice a week is adequate and if you are taking a Megas you don't wanna take too much it's another one of those things that more isn't better and you can create some problems by going over say 2 grams a day of just 2,000 milligrams a day of omega-3s I personally don't take them I try and get my omegas I get my omegas from a cod liver oil supplement and I use the capsules because cod liver oil tastes like so on and that we talked earlier about detox the idea that people have that you can drink something a juice diet or something that's gonna detox your system is complete so work from the other direction stimulate the body so that its own organs it's kidney and its liver can do the job it's supposed to do and then stop putting all the trash garbage in so provide the nutrients that are necessary for the body to do its job these lemon juices and all this other stuff is really just hogwash the best detox is to stop putting the garbage in your mouth to stop eating all the crap food and that's really the only benefit for a juice diet or a juice fast or whatever is that you stop eating the fast food and the you know the deep fried fries that are cooked in canola oil and all the other processed foods that give you all the toxins that's the only benefit you realize that and diarrhea here's your post-workout drink I've talked a lot about this and people seem to really I don't want to over emphasize any supplement or claim that there's any special quick fix what I've learned from all of my years of travel and I've purposely sought out the best people I could in the industry I moved to San Jose to train with flex wheeler for two months and I still train with him to date almost ten years later I moved to Sacramento and stayed in a extended stay for two months to train with mark Bell when I wanted to work with Eddy Cohen I flew out to Chicago and I stayed there with him for a few weeks and trained with him I've used every guru in the business and I don't claim to be a guru I'm a blue-collar guy that just tries to present some fundamentals I don't have any tips or tricks there's no magic out there I've hired Dave Palumbo work directly or indirectly with Chris Osito Hannie Oscar the guys who train hi Green and Phil Heath I've worked with all these people I've sought out their information trained with Charles glass paid them for their services and got the best of what I thought I could get from them and so I've turned over every Rock and spent untold amounts of money searching all over the world to try and find some secret and if I had one I'd tell you what it was but what I discovered is there wasn't and that's why he's talk so much and so aggressively about sleep eat and train because these this is the secrets this is the Holy Grail the sleeping the eating in the training so having said that I worked closely with George Lockhart who put here he's worked with Conor McGregor John Jones and Cyborg and he's probably one of the best water cut and nutrition guys in the UFC along with Mike Dolce and I've worked closely with Mike Dolce and know him well I had George I flew him out to my place and had him work with me on a professional MMA fighter I've done water cuts for some of the best world record holders in almost every weight class in powerlifting dangreen larry wheels eric Lillibridge I've worked with the omits appear just about everybody who's had to cut weight to get on the platform but when it came to MMA fight or professional MMA fighter I was working with a couple years ago I'm not an expert on on how to refeed them I can get them down to wait but refeeding and MMA fighters different than refeeding a a a bodybuilder powerlifter so I worked with with Conor I worked with George Lockhart and here's one of the things that he suggested particularly for athletes were training twice a day if you're putting in an intense workload what are the three things that you're burning water sodium and glycogen those are the three things that you should replace immediately when you deplete something and then feed it to the body it super compensates it'll take up more of it faster and like I mentioned earlier when you use carbohydrate sources such in pairs such as different carbohydrate sources such as fructose and dextrose you absorb even more it and it absorbs faster so I quickly replace what the body used during hard training so if I've got somebody going in there just doing a monster workout here's what I give them post-workout particularly if they're training twice a day that the research is conclusive that the second workout becomes much much easier you recover faster you get your glycogen restored your your sodium restored your water restored then you go into your second workout and all of a sudden you're not hitting a wall and most of the MMA fighters train twice a day all the body builders that I train train twice a day I don't recommend such for say a strongman in season because it's just too much work load to do twice a day but post-workout if you have a huge workout that'd be an excellent drink to take in it's kind of confusing here but the post-workout drink is fructose and dextrose and sodium and I throw a hundred milligrams Fein in there and I don't put any proteins or fats in the post-workout shake you can get them 30 minutes or an hour later it doesn't matter because it's slow absorption the American Diabetes Association doesn't even endorse the glycemic index because when eaten with proteins and fats the whole glycemic index thing it becomes it doesn't measure that way right your your carbohydrates are slowed down in their absorption by proteins and fats so I use that to my advantage and I don't put them into my post-workout drink the fructose could just be orange juice dextrose is something I just buy online and scoop and put it in there it's identical to glycogen and there in this is a glucose in the system so it's absorbed really quickly without having to digest it I've taken at least 600 milligrams of sodium and some of the bigger athletes will take in 900 milligrams because you'll burn anywhere from 1 to 5 grams of sodium during a workout depending on how salty of a sweater you are how hot it is how hard you train and so I want to replace that right away and the caffeine just helps accelerate all of that so this straight for some reason since George brought it up on mark Bell's podcast and since I've talked about it that's I get asked about that more than anything you know and I'm interested in the CPAP and I'm interested in your micronutrients tonight but this is what people ask about Stan what's that drink and so I'll share it with you and it's really effective it's almost euphoric when you get done with a massive squat session I'm doing 20s or something and I go sit down and I sip this drink I just down for 10 minutes and I take this in it's almost euphoric the way you feel your body just sucking all these nutrients in it feels good and you tend to recover faster and have less delayed onset muscle soreness as a result of all those things Diet calorie balance not sure what I was talking about there calories in versus calories out this this is really the primary focus in terms of gaining or losing weight it's a it's a it's economics it's a calorie equation we got to create a surplus or deficit if you're going to gain or lose weight if you're trying to lose weight I've got a wrist like not to restrict calories I like to increase workload it has the same result but it doesn't starve the body so I'm not losing muscle tissue I saw this in bodybuilding for the last 25 years every show that I would get ready for where I cut calories and increased cardio I get smaller bodies shrinking not bodybuilding every show that I got ready for that I increased galleries and increased workload to create a calorie deficit hence training twice a day I found that I would stay bigger and fuller and harder and perform much better yeah absolutely but you could buy training twice a day and doing exercises by weight training exercises that changes the equation it's the cardio that has very little effect on on that and it sends the wrong message so I adjust calories downwards to lose weight adjust them upward to gain weight and the hardest part about it is is compliance most people just don't stay on the program all diets work when they're strictly adhered to and what I found in the industry is is that most people just stop doing the diet they fall off start eating a ton of food start exercising less that's generally that what happens is discipline and again I mentioned earlier it's not just about what you eat it's about how that goes how much you burn through workload and metabolism and how those calories are utilized mm-hmm proteins the key nutrient we all know that we talked about that earlier and I use animal-based proteins interesting thing about my vertical access on my diet I put eggs in my horizontal axis I put them in there as a micronutrient mostly because of the choline and all the nutrients that are in eggs because eggs tend to be a high allergy food and the more of those you eat the more susceptible you are dairy is the same way I try and put dairy in the horizontal access my micronutrient profile in smaller amounts and that's to get calcium of course from Dairy but some people are lactose intolerant and that can be dose dependent and we be able to handle four ounces or so or maybe they have to eat a cheese because it's lower in lactose or a yogurt because it has probiotics and so it's more easy to digest so I try and get all these things in there people eat chicken for in my mind for one reason and that's well there's two reasons one because they think it's lower in fat but lean cuts of steak such as a top sirloin are pretty close to the same amount of fat but it's usually a financial issue because chickens cheap and there's a reason for that because from birth to plate is like three months and they're usually eating corn or soy or something crappy like that and so the nutrient density of a chicken is a lot less than that of red meat of especially if it's a grazing animal such as a cow or in here as a sheep so they're not as nutrient dense and so it you you couldn't I said you could survive on just red meat you can't do so on chicken they're deficient in B vitamins and and some other nutrients that you just couldn't survive on in terms of nutrient timing I don't think carbs are the enemy and a lot of people hate their demonizing sugar now but and I'm not a big fan of sugar except that post-workout shake but carbs are really important for especially for strength athletes for performance if it's a health issue it's very different I might pull carbs way down to people are obese or suffering from type 2 diabetes or something but I would still keep the fructose in even as type 2 diabetes fructose does not elevate blood sugars it's very low on the glycemic index but it does stimulate the liver and the thyroid so that would be beneficial to someone who's trying to lose weight if they're diabetic variety is good don't feel restricted by a diet and we talked about that earlier in terms like I want to get good variety and I don't want to take out my my horizontal micronutrient profile is pretty diverse and we can always make adjustments and that's the horizontal and vertical dieting that I talked about we built our horizontal platform with mostly micronutrients and then vertically is our steak and rice as we have to increase calories to support the Hoff doors of the world who have to take in you know thousands and thousands of more calories in the average person I do that on the vertical access with with food items that provide the most benefit with the least baggage which is my white rice and steak easy to observe to utilize very little waste on a lot of these diets that that I get power lifters that are on they come to me they're on the toilet all the time because they're eating a ton of things like pizza and pancakes and Subway sandwiches and burritos and that stuff just wreaks havoc on the digestive system so we clean that up and give them the vertical foods and their digestion improves so the horizontal foundation includes foods that supply the bulk of your micronutrients they aid in detoxifying the body such as the the carrot and the iodine that I mentioned about they improve digestion stimulate hormones they don't cause gas or bloating that's a huge thing that I pay attention to is questions that I ask every single week with my clients you know how do you feel how just how's your stomach how's your digestion and they shouldn't contribute to digestive disorders red meat I mentioned high quality protein loaded in B vitamins heme iron zinc magnesium cholesterol and vitamins A D and K people always ask me about grass-fed versus commercial grown beef oddly enough there's not a huge difference and I hate to say that because I'm on proponent of grass-fed foods particularly foul you know chickens and like I mentioned earlier whose whose fatty profile changes drastically when they start eating commercial grown chicks they're much higher in polyunsaturated fats as are their eggs but the fat content with grain-fed is higher because of course they fatten those cows up cows are weaned on milk and so they gain a significant amount of weight from that from their mother and get a lot of nutrients from that and even if they're commercially grown they're gonna get some grains and then usually it are fattened on corn or something like that so you get a little fattier but the fats not a bad thing that's where all the nutrients are it's there it can be higher in a de and K from hat that's where the nutrients are is in the fat those vitamins saturated fats about the same monounsaturated fats are a little higher in grain fed here's the thing people always ask you about what about the Omega profile of beef grass-fed is supposed to grain-fed the problem is and I should have mentioned this when I talked about the difference between white rice and brown rice people say that brown rice has more nutrients and people say that grass-fed beef has more omega-3s than gray well they're of such a small amount that's not where you should be looking for them anyhow if I want a lot of nutrients I'm not gonna go to brown rice for it I'm gonna go to something that has a lot more of those vitamins and minerals in it same thing with omegas you shouldn't be looking to beef for omegas that's why I throw the salmon in twice a week that's why I take cod liver oil because there's there are such small amounts insignificant uneffective amounts and the ratios aren't really that terrible anyhow one two three as opposed to one to six so that's really my answer on grass food versus grain fed and when it comes to a cost issue I'd prefer that you still got your red meat in if those people who can afford grass-fed great but I can find these things somewhere else for less money and I put them in my horizontal access steak vs. chicken not a big fan of chicken anybody ever seen a big chicken we should be able to stop right there but but I got to keep going steak vs. chicken steak higher in vitamin D and in B vitamins which B vitamins are enormous source is huge it's one of the reasons why there's so many problems with the vegan diet is because the lack of B vitamins and supplementing them doesn't doesn't fix that problem higher in minerals iron potassium copper zinc higher in saturated fats higher in monounsaturated fats and then the chickens have the higher polyunsaturated fats and believe it or not they're actually higher in cholesterol the the bulk of your nutrients are in the steak and so I'm not only do I use that on my vertical axis but I use steak for my horizontal access to get a significant amount of micronutrients it's much more micronutrients in steak than a lot of other food items big fan of ground bison I know it's not up here but you can get we talked a little earlier I mentioned the lamb and it's grass-fed and what I like to do and what I recommend for folks who have to get a lot of food in is that and it's hard to eat steak he's chewing on it I was eating steak when I was training with Flex I was eating four pounds of top sirloin a day and I was cooking it in a Foreman grill in in a hotel room in a Foreman grill imagine how tough that was my teeth actually started getting loose and I've told this story and so I stopped eating steak for two days and I started eating whitefish and check and flex would weigh me everyday and we would pose after every workout for a brief bit and he would so he could observe and see how I was transitioning he would train me twice a day for two months we did this and so I went into the gym in two days later after substituting the steak with chicken and white fish I had lost three pounds just like that and looked flat or not as full not as as vascular and flex was asking me is like what's going on he lost three pounds in two days he thought I wasn't eating I was training my training partner time Keith who was staying with me we were both training flex is looking at us and keeps doing one of these numbers because he knew I wasn't eating my steak you know but we can't lie to flex and so you know he called me out on it and I told him that I couldn't you know the steak was my teeth were hurting my jaws were hurting my teeth were hurting from chewing on so much steak and that's when he told me to grind it and I'm like you know dummy so we started grinding the steak and eating and cooking it and eating it ground beef so it increases the surface area so it's digested quicker you can eat more of it more often so it's a great way on the vertical axis if you can't get enough meat in from eating steaks just have it ground either your butcher can do it or it's of such benefit to get one of those they're on Amazon for like a hundred fifty bucks you put a meat grinder in your kitchen you bring home your steak and run it through and then put that on the grill and you've got it I I cooked these up you've heard about my I'm gonna go through the the items now I talked about the daily carrot and that has a little bit of fructose in it and vitamin C vitamin A is also in there unfortunately it's in the carotene form it's it's not in the retinol form so vitamin A is actually better to get from your fish cod liver oil is where I get that from and I get the capsules again I haven't tried it I think that would be I think everybody should take that because here's the thing when you look at at native cultures they ate the whole animal they ate the eyes they ate the livers they ate the hearts they ate all of that that's where most of the nutrients are they're not in the muscle meat actually they used to take the muscle meat and feed it to the dogs and they would eat the fattier stuff and the organs because that's where most of the nutrition is so when I'm trying to get vitamin A and recommend people eating liver but it tastes so horrendous that you just supplement and cod liver oil if it's if it's line-caught cod has all of those benefits in it so vitamin A is in there potassium carrots are also an errand gen and they're an anti estrogen and so that can be of importance particularly for people who are using performance-enhancing drugs and might have problems with estrogen and even for women estrogen out of control estrogen is going to cause body composition problems you increase your your fat and decrease your lean body mass here's my daily orange for women who I have diet they might eat three orange three little orange slivers with each of three meals so it's like one worn today but I break it up in two doses so I'm stimulating that liver all day and their metabolism increases their energy levels increase and they start having a body composition change as a result of all these things the sodium the iodine the little pulses of fructose for men who want to gain weight I generally drink three ounces of orange juice with every meal drastically increases your appetite you just go crazy and you just your body temperature increases and I'm all about eating more food when I'm working on athletes who are trying to get bigger stronger vitamin C potassium and again anti orange isn't in their engine and it's a critical part of your horizontal micronutrient profile this is it doesn't really know and vitamin C increases iron absorption so it can have another benefit or a detriment if you get a blood test in your high iron you got to be cautious about that this is I think one of the magic secrets and not because I think the chicken stock is a cure-all for everything but because it really helps digestion and I don't know what the reason is some people say it's the collagen protein and the the gelatin as a result I just know that when I eat this with my food daily a few times a day just a chicken broth or chicken stock that my Jessen is incredible and I'm regular and it's tapered so i really suggest that you incorporate that and it's got a great micronutrient profile in it because they grind up what celery and care it's and a whole bunch of other things in there Costco I think hopefully you guys have that here and have that Kirkland brand go complain to the management low gas vegetables and again on your fodmap I list these as being my preferable vegetables because they don't cause distension and they don't cause gut problems carrots cooked spinach again cooked spinach preferable that you not eat salads that are uncooked again they can bring anti-nutrients with them that in quantity its dose-dependent cucumbers squash zucchini these are all great and you get in any one or more throughout the day and these are just small servings to be honest with you that I use for my micronutrient profile for my horizontal platform because I want to save room for the rice and steak for my vertical platform we talked a little bit about the fiber Menace there's a book out called the fiber Menace and it's it's not a lot of these books I referenced it doesn't mean I agree with everything that they write in them I don't think it's that fibers the Antichrist and I don't want to demonize entire food groups but you should be careful about how they affect your body in what quantity and from what food choices but a lot of fiber can stretch the intestinal tract and destroy good bacteria I mentioned the anti-nutrients the phytic acid and the lectins the polyunsaturated fats that comes with grains and legumes you know beans and wheat and the indigestible fibers increase the methane gas and bloating let the Sheep have that problem what the cows have that problem cow has five stomachs and let them do the methane thing so you can eat the nutrients in a form that you can absorb without all those problems they prepare it all for you fatty fish twice a week try and get in fatty fish vitamin A iodine omega-3s or the the Icelandic cod liver oil here's one of my more recent favorites this is something that can drastically improve your energy levels it's a high iodine fresh pressed cranberry juice not from concentrates high in iodine has vitamin K as well which when you're supplementing vitamin D it's a good idea to get vitamin Keun as well because it helps with coagulation so that you don't get thinning of the blood and I'm not sure if I have a slide on it but I should talk about it briefly with respect to blood thinning anytime you ever go in for a surgery they ask you if are you taking by omega threes don't take those because they cause blood thinning are you taking aspirin don't take those they cause blood thinning tumeric causes blood thinning a lot of these products that people take yohimbe is an anticoagulant so I'm really cautious how many of those you combined and in what dose because there can all be blood thinners I'm not a big fan of that this is an antioxidant the tannins in cranberry you know people hear cranberry juice you think of women and UTI problems you know urinary tract infections and the problem is is if you drink the cranberry juice after you've already got a UTI I won't do anything for you the e-coli is already established into the gut wall it may minimize the severity and duration possibly for for spreading but if you drink it before as a regular part of your diet the it will line your bladder and urinary tract and prevent those bacteria from attaching it's kind of like the the methods behind zinc has a similar effect so it's huge for that there's fiber in it and phytochemicals and it's great for the immune system and here's why iodine Amanda mentioned it earlier that because of the chlorine and the fluoride and the bromide all those toxins the iodine occupies the space that those toxins would otherwise get in and start wreaking havoc on the system I read a great book by dr. Bredesen called the the end of Alzheimer's my dad's 87 years old his dad died of Alzheimer's or the complications of Alzheimer's he was in his 90s and mice and my pops worries about this all the time but he's got a really healthy diet we feed him iodine iodine salt and foods he's kind of on a similar program fatty yogurts and berries for the fructose it cetera but one of the things that that this book mentioned it's a book all about how the many factors that contribute to Alzheimer's and how to affect those and one of the biggest ones was sleep that was the number one thing he said if you can sleeeeep and the way to do that he said was with vitamin D primarily and B vitamins because it both helps your gut bacteria and then avoiding toxins and he points to iodine is a way to prevent the toxins because those toxins after your liver your brain is your next organ that detoxifies so you know you got to be careful about how many toxins you put in and whether or not you've got the right nutrients to help detoxify the system and the amyloid plaques if you've heard that name that tend to clog up the brain are there as a defense mechanism much the same way cholesterol is actually in your arteries as a defense mechanism it's what your body uses to fix the problem but with too much toxins then the amyloid plaques can clog up the brain and cause the Alzheimer's so just a side note about why I think this is another great benefit to get the cranberry juice in there and this is not from concentrate and no added sugar it would be important it wouldn't have the iodine in it in particular but it would have the phytonutrients that's why they like iodine or a red wine it's because of the antioxidants that are in those those berries I talked about the sweet potato almost a perfect food it's deficient in b12 but other than that you know people have gone on a potato only diet don't know if you're aware but they eat just potatoes you can survive on that you can't thrive on that which is why I'd make that distinction because on red meat you can actually thrive on that and get healthier full of vitamins the prebiotic and I'm careful about the resistant starches so I don't eat too much of them as dose-dependent allergy intolerance - I think we already talked about this that some people are allergic to to milk some people urge it to eggs these are the most these foods here tend to be the highest allergens most people are affected the higher percentage of people are affected by these milk and it could be either way or lactose or casein I know if you've taken whey proteins or casein proteins and had problems with digestion some people are allergic to casing or have an intolerance to lactose and that can be dose dependent the lactose issue also if you have stopped drinking milk for a long period of time your lactase enzyme will decrease and then if you jump back in try and drink a ton of milk you won't have the enzyme necessary to digest it and or enough of that enzyme and you'll start to experience problems I can introduce milk sometimes to people who historically haven't had a real huge problem and I'll put it in four ounce doses and then increase it to six and increases to eight hawthorn I talked about this yesterday with respect to the amount of calories that I eat I mentioned I ate four pounds of steak a day when I was training with Flex well that diet started six months before I went down to train with him and I could only eat two pounds of steak and after about a week or ten days I got hungry again he added me asked me to add two ounces of steak to each meal or add a meal and so this is in Iran I talked about training your metabolism if you start to gradually just like when you're working up on a bench you know progressive resistance and you add five pounds or Rep every week and overtime your bench increases the same thing happens with your your your body's ability to to utilize and process certain types of foods and then amounts of those foods you have to gradually go into this and anybody who tries to jump on a ten thousand calorie diet tomorrow thinking that they're gonna you're just going to bog down your system and you'll quit within a week so these are the allergens that I look out for soy in particular so horrendous food I don't even like eating animals that eat soy because it increases the polyunsaturated fats these are the ones that can cause allergies and so I try and keep those to a minimum why right rice easy to digest there's no phytic acid because that's in the bran and there's no polyunsaturated syn the germ and that leaves you with the endosperm or the the white rice dairies high in calcium vitamin D and probiotics I'll use a grass-fed butter or use a hard cheese it gets good probiotics and nutrients and a Greek yogurt and milk I eat I drink raw milk back home I get it from a farm in Utah because our nanny state of Nevada doesn't allow raw milk it has to be pasteurized but I prefer that because I think it has the additional enzymes in it to minimize any digestive issues I love to throw eggs into the micronutrient profile I can't eat a ton of them because I find that if I try and build my vertical access on eggs that I just can't tolerate that many I never have that problem with red meat I can eat this as much of that as I want as I'm able to over time and I don't get any of the problems loaded with protein Omega 3s choline sulfur vitamin D sulfur is good for hair nails eggs are always good and I keep the egg yolk in that's where a lot of the micronutrients are here I mentioned about the omega-6 vs. omega-3 profile of grass-fed vs. confinement and you could see in the blue is the omega-6 the quantity of omega-6 in an egg that's been free-range and the quantity of omega-6 is compared to Omega 3 the omega-6 is in blue as compared to an egg that's of a confined chicken huge difference and you know I'm not a fan of polyunsaturated fat to do everything I can to minimize those and increase the omega-3 ratios and that might just be about it for the vertical and end of slide show lucky you that's that's kind of the vertical horizontal program I hope you guys got something out of that and I think that off the word I said we just open up for questions to see if there wasn't anything more specific I could help you in you know we had a lot of hope high hopes for DNA sequencing when it first came out and invested billions of dollars into it it hasn't returned to us anything significant there's some small things here and there in terms of likelihood percentages of susceptibility to particular diseases etc cancers but there's there's nothing there might be some small obscure benefits to certain populations that are subject to you know certain diseases but I haven't seen anything that can benefit our community from that or by having that done you can change anything I know a lot of folks like to charge you for that and then talk about a what are some of the things that people talk about a blood type diet etc etc I just don't see the sensibility behind it I don't see the science you do a show finals and depends what you look like it really you know if ya if you think you're dry or that's different for everybody that's why guys like Hani get paid money to go in and and look at Phil every hour on the hour or whatever for between morning and night show or between you know day one and day two is because it's a it's a crapshoot and can you hold that conditioning and you see even pros I've been doing this for many many years miss one day or the other in terms of optimizing I can't say anything with a broad brush that can help that and they're using oftentimes many different drugs to manipulate that whether it be insulin or diuretics I mean they're real they're doing everything they can't it's a hard thing to manage it really is yeah absolutely absolutely no the only time you manipulate sodium is the last 24 hours before the show your body will respond very quickly when you pull sodium and in particularly if your effect carbs and water becomes part of that same equation beyond that salt can help you with your metabolism your endurance your stamina your recovery so now your workouts are better your sleeps better your your thyroids elevated so sodium is king I was training a mr. Olympia competitor and I had him supposedly on 10 grams of salt today and his wife had pulled all the salt out of his diet unbeknownst to me and he was exhausted he would come into the gym just drained and tired and every time we posed he just looked flattered and his skin separated from the muscle you know how the muscles will shrink and pull away from the skin they're not full there was no vascularity and I was just perplexed I couldn't figure it out and there was a language barrier because he was from Iraq and or Saudi Arabia and so finally we sat down with him and his wife and flex wheeler who was there and we just carved drilling and with question after question had a question and finally she acknowledged that she had pulled his thought that because you trained him for many shows or been with him cooking all his food and we put the salt back in at 12 grams a day for two days and by the end of the second day he just changed his energy levels changed his ability to Train his recovery he and just at the mirror transformed his muscles popped out its veins definition so I don't don't want to overemphasize it but it's pretty dramatic and I know how women work much harder than men preparing for shows I found that they'll wake up at 4 a.m. and just do just crazy to get ready for shows and starve themselves to death so sodium is a huge thing in terms of just sense of well-being you know energy all that stuff so when I throw that in people just think I'm you know fantastic because they feel better you know their sleeps better and everything and your body temperature will increase particularly with the iodine in the iodized salt you can you can measure this you know I'm not just blurting it out you can put a thermometer under your arm when you wake up first thing in the morning and lay there for five minutes or ten minutes and start tracking your body temperature and it fits below I know people think 98.6 but it's really somewhere between ninety seven point eight ninety eight point two you guys will have to convert that to this itself but in in the Fahrenheit scale it's somewhere in there ninety seven point eight to ninety eight point two if you get down ninety seven point six ninety seven point two if you start getting down below that range then you know there's a problem with your thyroid and iodine and and the the fructose are two really effective aids with that and that's why most women who compete take thyroid because they're suppressing it with with the calorie restriction the sodium restriction and the sleep restriction the over cardio all that suppresses thyroid is here fighting that battle so I like to let the body do it for me by giving it the tools that needs yeah it's it's on the blood test iodine's in there yeah cuz again too much it can be a problem as well but when you get it from foods it's a lot less likely to create an excess as opposed to supplements if you take an iodine drops you pretty quickly get your iodine pretty high but the RDAs remember the the optimal ranges are for sedentary people and generally it's some 60 year old sedentary hundred and forty pound women it's not for you know an athlete and so you got to be so I play with those i watch the first thing I do is I just put it in and I measure what I'm using whether it be five grams of creatine the day or whether it be 20 grams of protein powder a day or whether it be my post-workout shake at least I'm measuring it and so I'm asking you to pay attention to all these things and look and see where am I getting my vitamin D from where am I getting my vitamin A from what's the optimal protein source does it have all of the nutrients that I need in particular the B vitamins the zinc the iron magnesium which for me is is red-meat anybody else got a question that must have been the best presentation ever nobody has the question I covered it all I knew the overhead would help oh well vegetarian if it's vegetarian you know then it might lock to a bow vegetarian maybe egg or milk that that's great fish that's great yeah no those are all excellent sources I choose the meats generally I'm working with athletes who want to gain a ton of size and strength and that seems to be the best avenue to do it yeah it's pretty light and you know I do it with with women who are getting ready for bikini shows too I'll just pull out the egg whites and the tilapia and I'll put in three ounces of top sirloin steak and their body changes the performance improves because it's it's too restrictive and so I you know I'm a big believer and I've just seen it so many times I've experienced it and I've used it for decades now and it just its effect is pretty dramatic particularly we throw all the things together no I all my food outside on a barbecue grill at at the Arnold last year I got a hotel that had a barbecue grill and it was outside and I was cooking hot doors food it was 20 degrees in snowing 20 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing was at zero Celsius centigrade and so I'm out there in the snow you know cooking the flap steak for HUF doors food well mine too but I'll do the same this year because if you can get the food it's really important that because we're gonna eat a lot of food it's really important that it tastes good and it has the the right consistency and so I like I mentioned with the meat grinder that's one of the things that comes up when I'm working with athletes are you able to eat the food and why not and when they're trying to take in like spaghetti or too much oatmeal or brown rice I find very quickly that they're not able to eat the volume of food that they need to eat the total calories because of the the anti nutrients all the baggage that those foods bring with them the gas and the bloating and the digestion problems so it's really important to me that you know what what meat you're getting what cut you get whether or not you can grind it and how it tastes the way you cook it and so I find out the barbecue girl is the easiest way for me and that's why I throw in the white rice and the chicken stock and I mash it all up into a mash because it's easy to eat it tastes good it's got the salty flavor I made like a dozen of those before I left off there laughed at me I showed up I had a I had a separate carry-on bag that I opened up and I'm putting all these Tupperware's in his refrigerator in his house yeah I just got all these and I had heated up three of them before I left the house and that's what I ate on the plane on the way over here so I had all my own meals and that's I do that every day you know I don't even compete anymore but it feels so good and I feel so good if I prepare my own meals as opposed to trying to eat the airport and if you have to eat a lot of food you want to make sure it's the foods taste good and that they're a low impact on the body on the digestion no I grind the meat first and I make patties out of it make a hamburger patty I put that on the grill a little bit of salt on it and then when I take that off the grill I put like ten of those in a ziploc bag and put them in the fridge and then I have a rice cooker going all the time it has a timer on it so it's actually fresh when I wake up in the morning there's already rice there you know I don't eat rice for breakfast though I usually just meats and nuts but at least my second meal I've got fresh rice but there's always fresh rice and then I could pull that bison patty out of the fridge put it the microwave for two minutes add some fresh hot rice to it and heat up for one minute some chicken stock and now I've got a meal and if I've if I've cooked up some spinach or some peppers I can heat those as well and and I can eat those you know for two days I can do all my meal prep for two days and in one hour and have all those meals ready for me I like to do I I don't eat carbs for breakfast very often because it tends to make me tired a couple hours later for some reason you know and so I'll eat I like steak and nuts and with Charles Bullock one's a big fan of that and so I'll put together or I'll just eat my monster mash for breakfast you know but I do like or eggs and if I eat eggs that I'm eating a few carrots and maybe ten almonds if you have a problem with the phytic acid from almonds and you can use a macadamia nut doesn't have the acid in it and it has full of monounsaturated fats so I just choose a little a little mix of something that's fatty and protein and skip my carbs for breakfast at night no no yeah it'll affect your sleep not immediately following a meal because I think there's plenty in my bloodstream from the meal I ate two hours prior which had 40 grams of protein in it that formula yeah yeah I haven't had I haven't drinkin a protein shake in years I just I didn't drink one single one when I got my pro card when I was the best I ever was competing in bodybuilding and I didn't drink a single shake when I set my world record in powerlifting not either time I just not a supplement guide it wasn't taking any creatin I mean people squawk well you were on performance-enhancing drugs well the nutrition is what makes those things work not protein powders so becomes even more important and you in here everybody you know you watch Kai green has a voracious appetite Ronnie Coleman voracious appetite the reason those guys are as good as they are is because they could eat a ton of food you see Phil Heath every time you go up to video of him you sitting there eating food and talking while he's eating what's his name Jay Cutler said the very same thing he says he's never been able to gain or maintain a significant amount of muscle on protein shakes and he eats his food seems like all the videos that are out on bodybuilders is I'm just doing this and they all had that look on their face what I've tried to do is design a program I'm carefully picked through all of these things to find something that that I enjoyed so it was wasn't as hard to eat that many calories and that's why I presented this today was to try and give you some ideas that could make this easier on you because I've suffered through the same experience and I've tried the gallon of milk a day thing back in the 90s I was drinking a gallon a whole milk a day but that wreaks havoc on your stomach and so I've tried to pick foods that that can optimize performance with a minimal baggage you know I mentioned earlier that that I think it's fine for some people in some circumstances for you know health considerations you know some folks they they want to be they want to live to 100 and I've said in in a rant that that health and fitness are two different things and they kind of they they battle with each other and I just think that that an athlete that's training as hard as someone like half-doors training and as much nutrition as they need that I don't like to see those long windows without nutrition I just in terms of good better best I prefer to have the frequent feedings and that's just my preference for weight loss I think is fantastic and for addressing high blood Sugar's it's fantastic the intermittent fasting and the keto not necessarily 100% keto because you know how I feel about getting a little fructose in there and keeping the liver happy and the thyroid and all that keto tends to slow metabolism and I like to I could cheat a little bit and I don't necessarily think ketones is the be-all end-all I think that the carb restriction is what mostly helps with blood sugar issues and as does intermittent fasting so I use it as a health for some people whose health is a primary goal I use it same day way in or 24-hour way in yeah 24-hour way and here's the thing about weight cuts and I've done a ton of them let's just throw a number out there let's say you're gonna compete it to what what key door you're gonna compete at 82.5 and how much do you weigh okay so that's three kilos maybe six pounds you don't want to be dieting into a meat what I try and do is is if I'm gonna use pounds just goes easier for me so if someone needs to compete at 200 pounds and they can cut say 10 pounds of water easily then I only need them at 210 I want them at 210 a month out so they can train it that weight if they're losing weight all the way into the show they're losing all the way into the show and that happens across the board almost so if I can get him at 210 a month out and then just keep them there then 48 hours before they weigh in I start dropping 10 pounds of just water because I don't want to lose any muscle okay and I just dropped water I do that by loading them about a week out I load them full of salt and water have them drink as much water as they can take in as much sodium as they can then their body starts getting into this system where it can process a ton of it well then all of a sudden I I stop I pull I pull the sodium I don't feed them any more salt but I keep giving them water and now the water flushes all the sodium out and then I pull the water and the body just lets it all go and overnight within 24 hours you can lose 10 12 pounds of 5 kilos no problem and you haven't lost any muscle you weigh in you step off the scale you start refeeding and you put it all back on within 24 hours usually by that night you've added not just your your few kilos back but probably another kilo because your body super compensates right from being depleted it absorbs more I took Dan Green from 248 pounds down to 220 that's a 28 pound weight loss in 48 hours and within 14 hours some time you weighed in until that night he was 252 so when he said his world record in the 220 class he was 252 on stage yeah that's drastic Dan grind Dan everything Dan does is extreme yeah you watched and do a rep and you think it's a max and he'll do four more just like it you know he's just intense as can be most people though if you're carrying a decent amount of muscle mass muscle 70% water if you're carrying a decent amount of muscle mass you can easily cut that water and put it all back on and not affect a performance 48 hours out yeah I'm gonna have you email me Stan efforting at yahoo.com and you just tell me what you're trying to do and when the competition is and I'll send you the protocol and so you can just follow it step by step yeah yeah also everything that I did on the the projector today along with all of the articles in the supporting science that I referenced and more the program that I did for HOF for if you guys email me I do this for people who come to my seminars just send me an email Stan efforting at yahoo.com say hey I saw you at the seminar can you send me that program I will send you this entire program which is even three or four times more than we talked about today with all of these videos and articles linked to them so you can see the science behind what I talked about you have to revert to the science so people don't you know in this to today's era tell you you're all bro science but that having been said from experience I've learned that sometimes certain thing things some things just work and you can't always explain it I've tried to do the best I can but these are the things that I think I've benefited from the most they eat sleep and train things that I presented today no that's the way yep salting your food and that article that dr. Sandra gotek she too says using carbohydrates as a courier if you put it if you take in a ton of salt you're gonna piss it out your ass because your body is going to pull water into your stomach and get rid of it right away so you have to I try and take in the bulk of my soul salt with a with a carbohydrate meal it uses it as a shuttle and then that can go to the muscles with the glycogen storage and it just helps prevent your body from overreacting now this isn't a more is better deal you know I gave you a pretty specific range I asked you to kind of pay attention to it to start adding it to each meal and then see how you respond I somehow I mentioned it to my training partner a year ago and he he went home and took a whole bunch of sodium and had that experience out his ass and he's like yeah I tried to assault thing he's all mad at me cuz you know everybody is if one is good ten is better you know and it's not a more is better scenario it's just it's a matter of using it consistently and the benefits are extraordinary and the iodine I can't say enough about how important it is whether you use iodized salt or whether you use you know some sort of iodine food the cranberry juice I think is great hugely beneficial for the thyroid for your energy levels for your immune system and so they go together in my mind salts measured in milligrams iodine and micrograms so you got to kind of be careful about how much you're taken in oh yeah there's a little bit there's a little bit not enough usually it's iodized table salt it's it's it's been fortified it usually it'll say it on the label if it'll say iodized right on it kosher what's that because there was such a huge problem this is worldwide with goiter with thyroid deficiency it's a reaction it's a it's a iodine deficiency that causes the thyroid to well and they end up with these big orders on the neck and that's because a lot of soils are iodine deficient it used to be you'd get a lot of that from the foods that were grown in soils that were iodine rich and but iodine you can also find in some fatty fish I like the cranberry juice I think it has so many other benefits and I used the cranberry juice like medicine I take four ounces twice a day a lot the same way I use orange juice like medicine I take three ounces four times a day so I you know I and it's it's different but it's similar the orange juice stimulates the liver the iodine specifically stimulates the thyroid gland so but they have a similar effect on the metabolism and the IC all works together the the thyroid is converted from t4 the inactive form into t3 the active form in the liver in a healthy liver and so that's why that's so important and I run across you know I I fall across these things because I've put myself in a position to where I've been unhealthy many times and have recognized from my blood tests and then have implemented a plan to fix that problem and then when I come across athletes who are experiencing the same problem I ask them to do the same thing and they have the same good result and their blood tests show that they go from a high ast alt down to a high liver enzymes down to low in liver enzymes and they go from having no appetite to having a good appetite again because they've used some of these methods they're pretty effective what you smiling about over there huh you gonna go home and eat some steak and rice some orange juice good for you when we shut down say goodbye to our our audience on the camera there we'll go we'll go black we'll go black

Channel: Dennis Kohlruss

Views: 6,698,362

Rating: 4.5060239 out of 5

Keywords: Strongman, Powerlifter, Powerlifting, Strength, Power, RAW, Brutal, Viking, Loglift, Atlasstone, Benchpress, Bizeps, Squats, Deadlift, Kreuzheben, Squat, WSM, Rastatt, ATX, Barbell, Dumbbell, Monster, Training, Ernährung, Nutrition, GodsRage, Seminar, Stan Efferding, TheRhino

Id: BeOc7TRo9Os

Length: 135min 10sec (8110 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Anthedon]

This video is mostly about his dietary/sleep recommendations. His rants usually cover the same topics but this video is over two hours long. So there might be some information in there people haven't heard about yet.

[u/BlenderTheBottle]

Efferding really seems to be pumping out the content lately and I think it's awesome. You can tell he is really influencing a lot of people. Watched the recent Brian Shaw day of eating video and in it he ate a lot of rice, steak, and bison along with lugging around some orange juice and some salt after his workout. Large change from his previous day of eating video where he ate a ton of noodles and other such carbs. Pretty cool, hope it works out for him!

[u/BlkWhiteSupremecist]

TL;DW part 2

So, I got around to watching the rest of the video (about 45 minute mark and onward) and it's 90% nutrition. Mostly just emphasis on getting your micros, eating stuff that's easily digestible and easy to get down, and trying to get your micros (and protein) from meals rather than supplements. For the most part, solid advice but nothing the majority of us haven't heard before. A lot of fundamentals, I think it's mostly stuff the majority of us have seen before. If you're totally new to the world of nutrition, this isn't a bad ~90 minute functional nutrition lesson.

There were a couple of topics he covered that stood out a little more as either not nutrition-related, or more his personal opinion rather than concurring opinion with established nutrition guidelines.

HIIT

https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=3762

His post-workout shake

https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=5087

Why steak over chicken?

https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=5683

Daily carrots, orange, and chicken stock

https://youtu.be/BeOc7TRo9Os?t=5862

Q&A session at the end is interesting, covers some more topics and he details making weight

[u/BlkWhiteSupremecist]

His whole salt rant is a gimmick and is absolutely nothing new or groundbreaking the way he paints it. "Salt" instead of "sodium" is just his own marketing technique. He says the research says that 6g of salt per day is the upper limit for healthy adults, which equates to almost exactly the 2,300 mg of sodium UL for healthy adults published by the FDA. The 8g of salt gives you about 3,000 mg of sodium, which is still under the average consumption in the US of 3,400 sodium. Basically re-stating the FDA guidelines in terms of salt rather than just sodium.

With that in mind, I watched most of the first 45 minutes or so and almost everything he said is basic stuff you can find on the FDA's site. There's one huge difference though, and that's how he seemingly advocates eating lots of saturated fats, or at least doesn't differentiate much between unsaturated and saturated fats.

Red meat, coconut oil, and butter are all loaded with saturated fat. The other fats he mentioned that should be eaten are salmon, avocado oil, and olive oil, all of which are mostly unsaturated fats (good fats). Red meat, butter, etc are fine in moderation, but before you start eating red meat several times a day along with buttered veggies and eggs cooked in a butter-greased pan, make sure you know the risks of over consuming saturated fats.

https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/resources/2015-2020_Dietary_Guidelines.pdf

Pages 97-98 for a table of micronutrient RDIs.

TL;DR (for the first 45 minutes)

Do the things you know you should be doing to maximize your sleep quality, and take a look at the FDA's published recommendations for nutrient intake (if you do decide to watch the full video, just take into account the dangers of over-consuming saturated fats the way Stan advocates).