Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
And now for my discussion with Jeff Cavaliere.
Jeff, such a pleasure for me to have you here.
I'm glad to be here.
It's amazing.
I'm a longtime consumer of your content.
I've learned a tremendous amount about fitness, both in the weight room, cardio nutrition things that I've applied for over a decade.
One of your mantras is if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete, and I think that's something really special that sets aside what you do from what a lot of other um, very well qualified people do.
What's the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place?
I think it's like a 60 40 split, which would be leaning towards uh, weight training, you know strength and and uh, and then you know the conditioning aspect be about 40.
So if you look at it over the course of a training week, I mean, five days in a gym would be a great task, and obviously not in the gym.
It could be done at home.
But three days strength training Monday Wednesday Friday, conditioning Tuesday, Thursday.
You know, two days.
It's a pretty easy roundabout way to split that up, of course, depending upon training goals.
And as you said, the aesthetic goals like that will shift dramatically.
But if you want to see the benefits of both, that's probably the effective dose for strength training and the effective dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level.
If we try to keep our workouts to an hour or less if possible.
Now, depending upon split that you're following.
If you're on a total body split, there's just gonna be more that has to be done in a given amount of time.
But in general, when you're not focused on that one aspect but the overall health picture, then you can get the job done in in under an under an hour.
And again, i always say, on top of if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete is.
You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both.
As you start to get older, is the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing.
Particularly if you're warmed up properly, like you said.
I've found personally that my warmup has had to become more of an integral part of my workout than it ever has before.
In terms of splits, you mentioned splits.
And so, for those who aren't familiar with this term splits, it's really Which body parts are you training, on which days?
I've seen you discuss, you know, three days a week, whole body workouts.
I've heard of splits like a pushing one day, pulling another day, legs another day, a day off, repeat.
I mean, there's so many variations on this.
What's governing the split?
For me, the first rule is, will you stick to it?
I don't particularly like full body splits.
I don't necessarily like to have to train everything.
Now, of course, the volumes will come down per muscle group.
But if you don't like to do that and you actually don't look forward to your workout because you're dreading having to do everything and feeling maybe too fatigued by the time your workout's over or the fact that those generally do take a little bit longer and don't fit into your schedule,
I don't care how effective the split is.
A split not done is not effective.
So you need to find one that fits.
So maybe you go into an alternative option like a push-pull legs like you mentioned.
That could be done either one cycle through the week on a Monday Wednesday, Friday split, or it could be twice in a week.
So you're actually training six times where you repeat it.
Pull-push legs, pull-push legs or however you want to do it, with either a day off in between the three days or at the end of the six days, And again that actually impacts your schedule.
I've broken that down before where it's.
If you put it in between the three days, it's good because you're giving yourself an extra rest day in between, but it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around.
So for those guys that were choosing that seven day schedule out of convenience, in our heads it starts to mess with that off day.
So others like to just keep it predictably, let's say on a Sunday and train six days in a row.
But that's a better way to maybe group similar muscle actions together, which i think i i definitely prefer that because if i'm going to be training, you know pulling movements at least there's a synergy between them and i feel like i'm looking to achieve one goal that day.
Um, and then i mean quite honestly, you can go back to the bro split days and those.
Those still work effectively.
There's a reason why they worked in the past, like I think that science shows that there's smarter ways to do them these days.
You can come back and hit a related muscle.
So you could do, let's say, biceps on one day and then come back two days later and do back, realizing again synergy between the exercises there.
Your biceps are going to get re-stimulated again.
So you could figure out ways to make that work.
But the thing that I think is effective there is that tends to be one of the ones that people like the most.
Because they can go in, they get their pump, they feel good.
It's pretty solely focused on one muscle group.
Is that the definition of a bro split?
One muscle group a day.
I see.
So it's very much geared towards strength and aesthetics, really maximizing chest one day.
Probably more aesthetics than strength.
Yeah.
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In terms of the mixing up of cardiovascular training and resistance training.
Same day, different day.
Which one should come first?
Which one should come second?
So again, I think that the bare minimum is probably twice a week in terms of cardiovascular, if you want to have some semblance of cardiovascular conditioning.
But I think most people who actually need it more or want to pursue it more than that are going to need more time to do that.
So at some point it can't just be relegated to a day off or a day off from the weight training workouts.
So at some point it has to occur on the same day.
And in that case I just like to put it at the end of the workout because you don't want to in any way compromise the weight training workout.
The intensity of those workouts is important.
I just like to put that at the end, realizing that even if my effort level is lower, my output is lower.
If it's still placing a demand on my cardiac output to get that conditioning effect because I'm fatigued, it still has a demand on my cardiac output.
So it's still achieving its goal, but it didn't interfere with my main goal of being able to increase my performance in the gym.
And in terms of the form of cardiovascular training, I've seen you do a number of, I have to say, very impressive high-intensity interval type work, rather than on the treadmill or out jogging for 30, 45 minutes.
Is that because you prefer higher intensity, higher heart rate type training?
If we could blend function across these realms and not have such a delineation between this is my weight training and this is my conditioning, but figure out a way to to blend them together.
I always think that you've got.
You've got a better opportunity to get that more well-rounded result and i like to kind of mix up that straight conditioning work and also some of the footwork you know drills like we have we.
We have some high expectations for guys that come into our programs like to just do some footwork drills like ladders, like ladders or line drills or something.
And you know what happens?
People become intrigued and interested.
Like I never I haven't tried this since high school, you know and they become interested in just the challenge of it.
And as we become almost distracted by the challenge, we're now like finding ourselves conditioning.
You know and I always think that's an important part that sometimes you got to draw people in to show them what they might be interested in.
And from the output or the effect of it.
I just think that when you're able to blend some still maintain some of that strength training into the exercise,
So as you mentioned, let's say I'm doing some kind of a pushup or a burpee.
I mean, there is an anaerobic component to that that is going to be helpful rather than just walking or just jogging.
Not to say that that isn't an effective means for strict cardiac conditioning.
It's one of the ways that we've had for centuries to do it.
But I just think that if we can blend it, then it becomes maybe a little bit more interesting and you get some of those crossover benefits and it doesn't become so segmented in terms of what we're trying to do.
One of the most important things I learned from you so over the years was that if you can flex your bicep to the point where it hurts a little bit, like it almost feels like a cramp or a cramp, or you can flex your calf to the point where it really cramps up a little bit, almost feels like it's nodding up, that's a pretty good indication that you're going to be able to stimulate that muscle well under load if you're doing the movement properly.
How did you arrive at this kind of cramp test, the cavalier test, as I'll call it?
During my workouts.
Even as a young kid just starting out, I wanted to know what was supposed to be doing the work.
Once you do that and you start to seek that out and say okay well, if the bicep is what's supposed to be doing the work, then I want to make sure the bicep's doing the work right.
So I would seek out ways to make that Happen better, and when I was able to do that, I could feel the stronger contraction.
I was no visionary.
I just felt like I knew that that was gonna be better for me if the muscle I was trying to grow was being stressed more.
When I was attempting to do this across different exercises, I would notice that what I could do, potentially on a curl where my arm is up, you know where you asked me to flex my bicep that position and I couldn't do if I was, you know, doing a concentration curl or I couldn't carry over to a cable curl.
And that shouldn't really change.
Right.
Because the function is still largely the same.
There's still elbow flexion.
There's still supination.
Like, why am I not able to do it there?
And that's where it sort of clued into me that, like you're, my muscle connection on not just your mind with one muscle, but on every exercise matters, and it varies from exercise to exercise.
There's a term I like to call muscularity, you know, which is a difference, right?
It's the level of sort of resting tone in the muscle that improves dramatically.
You know, if you can learn how to just start to engage that muscle, better the muscularity, the resting tone of that muscle is harder, it's more alive.
It's all driven from being able to connect better neurologically with the muscle that you're trying to train.
When you're trying to go and create muscle hypertrophy or even this muscularity that I talk about, you need to seek ways to make it feel more uncomfortable, right?
If you don't feel the discomfort, then you're doing something wrong.
And I struggle to this day on certain muscle groups to still do that, even knowing what I'm trying to work.
It's very difficult for some muscles and for certain people to do this on certain muscles.
But as you mentioned, practice does help.
And the more you become, you know, consistent and deliberate with what you're trying to do, the more of a result you actually get.
How do you assess recovery at the local level, meaning at the level of the muscles?
So we'll talk about soreness and getting better, stronger, more repetitions, et cetera.
And then the systemic level, the level of the nervous system.
Different muscles recover at different rates.
You might have a bicep that's able to be trained that can be trained again the next day.
And then the next day, and then maybe you need a day off after that.
That can vary from person to person, for sure.
And it can vary from muscle to muscle in that person over the course of time, as you mentioned, because the systemic recovery is going to impact all those muscles anyway.
But let's say you're systemically recovering, every muscle itself is going to have a recovery rate.
And I think that using muscle soreness as a guideline for that is one of the only tools we have in terms of the local level.
Well, that's the one that most people can relate to and easily identify and then use that as a guideline.
And if you're training when you're really sore, it's probably not a great idea.
But as far as the systemic recovery grip, strength is very, very much tied to performance and recovery.
And when I was at the Mets, we used to actually take grip strength measurements as a baseline in spring training all the time now obviously as a baseball player you're gripping a bat your pitcher you're gripping a ball like you know having good grip strength is important so if we've noticed somebody had a very weak grip it's just a good focal point of a specialized training component for this every day with those guys no we would do in spring training we do sort of a baseline entry level measurement and then we would we would measure it throughout the season maybe once every two weeks or three weeks and and and The idea there was to measure the recovery.
We have found that with one of those scales those old-fashioned bathroom scales it's a great tool for just squeezing the scale with your hands and seeing what type of output you could get.
Imagine the last time you were sick or that were you, or just try this.
You know, next time you wake up in the morning when you first wake up in the morning, you're still groggy.
Try to squeeze your hand, try to make a fist as hard as you can.
You're gonna sit there angry at your fist because it won't contract as hard as you know it can.
You don't have the ability to just create the output, And that is because in that state you're still sleepy, you're still fatigued.
You're not even awake at the whole level at this point.
So when you start to measure that on a daily basis, you can get a pretty good sense of where you're at.
And I think when people start to see a drop off of 10 or so, or even greater, of their grip output, you really should skip the gym that day, because I don't think there's much you're gonna do there that's going to be that beneficial, even if it is the day to train legs or whatever day it is.
I mean, there certainly are more sophisticated tools, too, as a PT.
We have hand grip dynamometers, and we can measure one side at a time, but that comes at a cost.
Those are pretty expensive devices.
But if it's listen, if you're an athlete, the 200, 300 bucks it costs to have one of those would be well worth the added investment.
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When's the best time to stretch for particular types of results?
And maybe you could define some of the different types of stretching.
In general, the two basic forms of stretching are active stretching and passive stretching.
And your passive stretching is done with the goal of trying to create an increase in the flexibility of the muscle.
So whether you're actually increasing the length of that muscle more, so what you're doing is decreasing the resistance of that muscle to want to stay at a certain level of flexibility.
When we can sort of take the brakes off and allow that muscle to allow us more range of motion, we're inherently increasing flexibility without necessarily having to increase the length of that muscle.
That is usually done at a time far away from your workout, because there is a period of recalibration that is needed after doing this, because you're disrupting the length-tension relationship of the muscle that causes you to not necessarily be able to rely on these I've talked about before, stored motor engrams in your mind in terms of this is the pattern for how I swing a golf club, say you know, and now introducing a little bit of flexibility or added flexibility or range, because of the stretching I did before, it takes maybe a whole or two or three to match up again.
Oh, this is the.
This is what he's trying to do.
That golf swing thing that I remembered again, like it's not remembering that every component like I have to bend my right wrist back 10 degrees and then I have to bend my elbow and I have to break like your body stores these patterns for motor efficiency.
So and when I have to start matching up that stored pattern with what's feeling new because of the increased range, I can impair performance.
And again, it could happen even in a gym workout where you're talking about your first, second set, third set, where maybe the repercussions aren't as big because I'll just do a few extra sets.
But in performance, if you screw up your first three rounds, you plan on a PGA tour and you shoot your six over.
After three you're done.
So we relegate that, as I mentioned, sort of towards the end of the day, when it's not going to impact performance but even maybe have the additional benefit of creating a, the feeling of length, or the increase or decrease in resistance to this length, at a time when I know my body is going to try to tend to heal and heal shorter.
Never longer, but heal shorter.
So if I can introduce a little bit of that extra length or decrease resistance to that length, it's a better time to do it.
So I think it promotes a a better recovery.
I'm intrigued by this concept of heal shorter.
So part of the healing and recovery process means a shortening of the muscles.
This is the tensing up in sleep.
Could you elaborate just a bit on that?
Basically, what's been shown is that when the repair process muscular repair from, let's say, strength training during the day, the repair process usually results in a muscle that is slightly shorter rather than increased in length.
Muscles prefer to sort of ratchet their way down into that contraction.
So when you're sleeping it tends to err on the side of shorter rather than longer, when ideally we don't really want that.
We want to maintain as much of that length because with more length, we actually have more leverage.
So again, it's just making a conscious choice to do it at a time of the day that makes a little bit more sense.
Dynamic stretching is really not done for that purpose of trying to create any type of increasing the potential length, as you said, of the muscle, but more so the readiness of the muscle to perform.
And increasing, you know, exploring the ends of that range of motion in a more dynamic way.
So you're not hanging out there and disrupting that length tension relationship, but just sort of touching the ends of those barriers so that when you feel movement again, it feels looser, it feels more ready.
And obviously at the same time warming up blood flow, all the benefits we get from just warming up in general.
So, like you know, that's the series you've probably seen a bunch of times.
But, like you know leg swings and butt kicks and you know walking lunges.
And those are the drills that people will do prior to training that are both excitatory in terms of just the nervous system but also helpful for just the general warm up the body because the blood flow.
But from a muscle readiness standpoint, not impairing the performance while at the same time exploring the increased ranges.
When I was working with Antonio Brown, I remember like he would spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes on all dynamic work.
And I've never seen anybody spend that long on their dynamic work.
But he said he just didn't feel right and ready to go unless he did a lot of that.
And I mean, his dynamic stretching routine would be a workout for most everybody.
There's one exercise and one particular motion that I'd like to discuss for a moment, because I believe that learning about this cautionary note from you is one of the reasons that I've maintained steady training for 30 years with no major injury.
Knock on wood.
And that's the upright row.
I learned from you that the upright row compromises some important aspects of our shoulder mechanics and can be actually sort of a dangerous movement in some ways.
But so I've always made it a point now, on the basis of this advice, to really strive for external rotation.
Please tell us about internal external rotation.
Why this is so important, not just for weight training, but as in terms of posture and mechanics and not looking like a melted candle or partially melted candle.
The shoulder has the most mobility in the body of any joint, but it's also got the least stability right.
There's always that trade-off of mobility and stability.
So your stability comes from, you know, certain muscle groups.
And one of the ones that the only muscle group that actually externally rotates the shoulder is gonna be the rotator cuff.
Okay,
And unless you are devoted to training through external rotation and exercises that are going to externally rotate the shoulder, you're not training that function.
And it's so easy for us in everyday life, especially those that aren't training, to not ever really undergo any of those stresses that could be beneficial to counteracting what happens freely and naturally, which is internal rotation.
So, when you think about the imbalance created just by nature and how we live our lives, internal rotation far far, far outweighs external rotation.
So you need to address it.
And the reason why you need to address it is because you need to normalize those biomechanics of the shoulder if you want their long-term health, and one of the functions of the shoulder is to raise our arm up over our head, and if we do that from an internally rotated position, we're going to have a higher likelihood of creating stress inside that joint.
In order to get normal mechanics and free up the joint maximally inside, you need to externally rotate as you raise the arm up.
So if your muscles aren't firing and they're not necessarily as strong as the internal rotation bias that pulls them in, you're asking for trouble every time you do that.
This exercise is literally putting you in elevation and internal rotation.
And if you were to walk into a PT office and someone said I think he's got impingement, will you diagnose him?
There's a test called the Hawkins-Kennedy test.
And I would put you in the position.
I know we're not visible at this point through the podcast, but I'll put you in this position here where I have your arm elevated and your hand pretty much under your chin, pushing downward on that to create that internal shoulder rotation.
Pretty much the exact position that we're in when we're holding a bar in an upright row.
Some will say, well, just don't go so high.
Go only up to the level of the chest.
But you're still in this internally rotated position.
The thing that I think frustrates me the most about the exercise is that I have an alternative.
And the alternative does the same thing in terms of helping the muscles grow by simply fixing the biomechanics of the exercise, but just allowing the hands to go higher than the elbows.
So, instead of the elbows being higher than the hand, which drives you into internal rotation, If the elbow is lower than the hand, the hand being higher, here I'm in external rotation.
And I could do something called a high pull and still get the same abduction of the arm and still get the same benefits of the shoulders, the delts and the traps, without having to undergo any of the stresses that would come from the somewhat awkward movement of an upright row.
And people will argue this is the way they argue that I've done this for 30 years and I've never hurt myself.
And I always say, yet, yet.
Like, listen, the goal is to not hurt yourself ever.
So even if you it's sort of like you know the championship game, you know you might play the game of your life, but if you lose, you lost.
And when you get into the end of the, you know, the record books, you're still lost.
So even if you had the game of your life, you lost.
I don't care if you do it for 30 years, no pain, you're still doing it and there's no pain.
I'm giving you an option that's going to give you the same results in the exercise that you're seeking.
That's why you're doing the exercise without the possibility of having the bad outcome come from it.
The body is like a mirror image.
The hip is like the shoulder, right?
The ankle is the wrist.
The foot is the hand.
The knee is the elbow.
They're two hinge joints.
They function that way.
Well, with the shoulder you've got that mobility that comes from having all that freedom of motion, but the stability is lacking.
Well, the same thing with the hip, like you've got mobility, but if you don't fully stabilize it by training all of the muscles of the hip, and if you don't strengthen the external rotation of the hip, then you're gonna have issues.
Like is that biomechanically gonna work the same way?
If you think of the body as a series of you know bands, you know pulling in different directions at different levels of tension.
You know you're being pulled into one direction or the other just by the balance of tension, from one weak area to one dominantly tight area.
And you need to make sure that you can sort of balance this out in order to eliminate some of the adaptations and compensations that happen.
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Again, this is a limited time offer, so make sure to go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get started today. one of the great uh tools that i i picked up from your content which is benefit uh i know a huge number of people is i think i used to hold uh weights sometimes in the in the tips of my fingers as opposed to in the meat of the palm of my hands and i had elbow pain turns out toward the end of my pull-ups or my bicep work i was letting the weight or the bar drift into my fingertips and the mere um shift to making sure that my knuckles were well over the bar or that the weight was really in the meat of my palms has completely ameliorated that for reasons that you point out and maybe you could just share with us why that is when you grip a bar whether it be through a curl or whether it be and this is mostly pulling exercises because the tendency for the bar is going to be to fall out of your hand not like with a pushing exercise where it's kind of you're pushing your hand into the bar so on a bench press say um that bar can drift just by gravity doing its thing or fatigue of the the hand grip strength can start to drift further away towards the distal digits, right?
Through those last couple knuckles that we have on our hands.
Though our hand can still hold it there, the muscles are not equipped to handle those types of loads.
And it could start at dumbbell weight.
You know 40 pounds, 30 pounds, you know even 25 pounds for some, depending upon their overall strength levels.
But then when you start to apply it to something like your body weight with a chin up, right?
Because that's natural for the bar to somewhat kind of float down towards your fingertips.
And it actually is a little bit easier to perform the exercise with that sort of like false grip, little hook grip at the end, because you're not going to engage the forearms into the exercise.
You're not going to start pulling down.
But at the same time, while it could help you to perform them better by getting the back more activated, if you have weakness in these muscles, because it's not a thing that happens to everybody.
It's not one of those upright row type things where I think this is happening to everybody.
This is happening to people that have these inherent weaknesses in these muscles.
You or haven't done enough of the gripping in the fore, in the meat of the hand, you know for long enough, but it starts to put that stress on these muscles that are ill-equipped to do this and to handle this.
And it starts to, particularly on that fourth finger.
You know, which is part of the muscle we call the FDS, the flexor digitorum.
That is just too much for it to handle.
And that comes all the way down and meets right at the medial elbow, right on that spot that you can say feels like someone's knifing you right in the middle in that medial elbow.
And medial epicondylitis, or they call it golfer's elbow, is something that a lot of us deal with in the gym.
It's one of the most common inflammatory conditions people get from the gym and it all comes from this positioning of the dumbbell or barbell or hand on a pull-up bar over time.
So the easiest thing to do is just grip deeper so that what you're doing is you're using, you know, more leverage from the palm to encapsulate the bar or the dumbbell or whatever, and you're not putting that pressure really distally right on that last digit, because that's where that FDS muscle is most strained.
So you're just almost eliminating that from the equation.
And it's one of those exercises that the load can exceed its capacity pretty quickly.
So that, like you know, maybe it's only capable of handling 30 pounds.
And then when you're doing a chin-up and it goes and it drifts so far that it's now, let's say you're a 200-pound guy, you've got, let's say, 100 pounds through one arm and 100 pounds.
This is simplified math that obviously is offset by other muscles.
But 100 pounds through one arm, 100 pounds through the other arm, 100 pounds off of a muscle that can handle 30, it's not gonna take many repetitions to strain it And you're going to feel that maybe by the time that sets over, or certainly by the time that workouts over the next day, you wake up you've got that notable stabbing pain.
Whenever someone feels that the best thing would be to determine OK, what exercises was I doing that were pulling where the bar could have drifted deeper, further from the meat of my palm into my fingers, and figure out a way to deepen that grip.
When that happens though, the best thing to do with most of these inflammatory conditions is not do any of that stuff for a little while.
There's so many other options that you can do that will train similar muscles or even the same motion and not cause that stress.
So I mean a cable curl would be much easier to do that on than, let's say, a chin-up, where you don't have the control over the weight like you do by moving a pin on a stack.
I do have a question about precision of record keys.
Do you keep a training journal?
Do you recommend people keep training journals?
I think that anything you can do to increase your awareness of your performance and also give yourself some objective goal.
Whenever we have an objective goal, it's a lot easier to actually obtain it.
When you're just there to get a pump and you're just there to lift, how you feel that day.
You have to be incredibly disciplined in all other aspects of your workout in order to make that effective.
Anything you can do to increase your awareness of it and keep you on track with that is like I'm endorsing fully.
We could talk about principles around nutrition.
What tends to work?
What tends not to work?
And how should we think about nutrition?
My approach is like I've always been sort of a low sugar. lower fat guy.
That is the best approach for I believe again in my opinion personally for the overall big picture.
Because, though the people can take exclusionary approaches to nutrition and taking carbs out or, you know, eating only fats and proteins or Again, I'm not saying it doesn't work for you, and if it's the first thing that actually allowed you to gain control of your nutrition to the point where you actually saw results and got to a healthier weight, then I always say then do it.
Then do it, but just make sure it's something you can do forever and doesn't bring upon other repercussions.
I think that non-exclusionary approaches to diets are the most sustainable.
The rest of your life and when i and all i'm interested in from a nutrition standpoint is something that's sustainable in terms of what you do eat.
How do you structure that?
Um, in terms of when you look down at a plate.
You've done these describe this before, but i think it's just a beautifully simple description, because i think a lot of people don't want to do calorie counting and all this, and i have like what i call plate method and it's just.
It's just simple because it works for me.
When you have your plate, you just simply look at it as like a, like a clock, right and um, if you just make a 9, 20 on the clock, so one arm goes over to the nine and one of the arms goes over to 20, because you're gonna make a line towards 12 o'clock too, and the largest portion is going to be your fibrous carbohydrates.
So that's the the.
You know the green vegetables, right?
So, whether it be broccoli or brussels sprouts or asparagus, those are the ones that give us a lot of the micronutrients we need.
They're the ones that are generally accepted as more healthy.
And they're also going to provide the fiber that's going to be both beneficial in terms of its impact on insulin, and also just through filling you up.
And then I take the next largest portion of that and I devote that towards protein.
And I think it's really important, especially for anybody active.
The more active you are, the more you embark on trying to build muscle.
You're going to need to have protein in every meal.
So I have that.
And again, know we're talking cleaner sources of protein but like i i am you'll never find like boiled chicken on my plate i'll have some sort of fish or chicken but they'll it will be it will be cooked in a way that's that's like you know it's got maybe some sauce on it or it's got some maybe it's tomato sauce anything to just make it a little bit more palatable and interesting without blowing the value of the meal and then that last portion is where i put my starchy carbohydrates And again, that's the part that some people will say exclude them entirely because they're not healthy or they don't work for you or they're not beneficial long-term.
For me, like most people, my body craves those carbohydrates.
I choose things like sweet potatoes, which is my favorite, or I'll have rice, or I'll have pasta.
I will have those things.
I'm not excluding them, but I don't put them in the portions that you would generally find.
No plan is gonna work if you're eating stuff you don't like.
It's not gonna work forever.
Nothing will.
You have to really enjoy what you're eating.
As long as these variations of this meal are something that you really enjoy and there are limited versions of them, their reproducibility of that is simple.
If everyone listening to this podcast can figure out their nutrition issues, this whole world will be different.
That is like one of the largest sources of disease and pain and discomfort, because people really struggle with nutrition.
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What are your thoughts in terms of the, the nutrition science, the train, the training related effects of um, the post-training meal is it something you think people should pay attention to?
I'm not very dogmatic about what specifically to eat pre or post you know workout but i do think you should have protein um surrounding your, your training, whether that be ahead of time or after, protein could be a little bit hard to digest for some people.
So if you do that pre-workout and then you're finding your workouts slogging because you don't feel good, then suddenly you put that after your meal.
But this whole concept of the urgency of time has thankfully been removed and we can just learn to eat a little bit more.
Even as far as pre-workout supplements, a lot of people don't take them.
A lot of people don't like them.
They don't take them.
They're not necessarily even being used as the nutritive side of the pre-workout.
They're just more used to fuel the workout.
For me, it's water and some form of caffeine.
Yeah.
Again, I think it's important.
I do think it's important to maintain a high level of output.
If your pre-workout nutrition requires a stimulant in order to help you do that, or if your pre-workout nutrition is causing you to have a harder time to train because you're feeling full or stomachache or something else, then that's not achieving what you're trying to do.
The ultimate goal is to still be able to perform at the highest level.
So, whatever your nutrition is required to allow you to still do that, that is probably the most important factor of all of it.
I hate to say it, but it's a lot less scientific than we want to make it and, as it seems to be coming back oftentimes, like the thing that works for you is really the most important thing because ultimately, getting your ass in there and doing what you do is is really the thing that provides the best benefit.
I think when you hear things like this, that like hey, that will work, and that will work too, and that this will work too, you know, rather than the dogmatic one-way only approach um, which could become discouraging for people um, then i think it becomes a little bit uplifting, like well, i've never tried that, i've actually never tried a total body split, or i've never tried, you know, that style of eating.
Like it becomes encouraging you might want to explore, and then you might finally get locked in and say i really like this, and then you're off and running.
On behalf of myself and all the listeners, I really want to thank you.
And what I love about all of this now that you've given us, is that there's a there's a backbone of logic, you know, and some consistent themes indeed, about consistency.
And but the the.
The logical backbone, I think, is what um will enable people to really show up to the table and stay there uh, for training consistently over time.
I'm happy I was able to make it work, cause I really I've been watching your stuff for a while and I really I love the science of it.
I like the way you think.
I'm just really fortunate that I was able to do it.
Well, I feel very gratified in hearing that and honored to have you here.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
