The Muscle Building Expert: They’re Lying To You About Workout Hours! Dr Michael Israetel

Doing this at home will give you phenomenal overall results with not so much time investment, and it's not so difficult. We're talking about a total of really, yeah, yeah. Doing that per week will radically transform your body.

Dr. Michael Israel is a leading sports scientist who provides science-based strategies on muscle building, fat loss, and helping people maximize their fitness potential. My mission is to get everyone in as good of shape as possible with minimum time investment. So, where do we start? So, it's the consistency that matters. Doesn't matter if it's 2 hours a week or if it's 18 hours a week. If you're consistent, you can get amazing benefits. And then there's specificity, which is the most important principle in all of exercise science. That's telling yourself, "Okay, I want bigger biceps," and then focus on that. And also, every real working set should be challenging.

Is there a perfect amount of repetitions to do? There is. It's a trade secret. But it's how long will it take me to lose the muscles that I've gained if I don't go back to the gym? After about 2 weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle. But most people think, "Oh my God, another 8 months just to get back to where I started." But when you gain an initial amount of muscle, it never goes back to the same size as when you started. It's just always going to be bigger.

And then, "Got a couple of hours a week. I just want to get a bit leaner and I want to gain some muscle." Okay, the first thing we do is... Dr. Michael, are there any supplements you suggest I take? Whey protein? Casein protein? What about steroids? Jesus Christ! I'm really going to say this. He's recently on like a boatload of steroids. There are a few downsides. What are the downsides that no one's talking about? They're unspeakable. You really want to know?

This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube, and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet. There's almost 50 people now behind the DI CE that work to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers, and you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and $1,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the DI CE. There's now more than 7 million of you. So if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the [Music] conversation.

Dr. Michael, what is the mission that you find yourself on in this phase of your life? For those who would like to get everyone who would like in as good of shape as possible with as minimum of a time investment, injury probability, and inconvenience in general as possible, and the highest likelihood of best results, while trying to completely excise doing anything that is pointless. And also, I say this politely, telling people things that aren't true. We're trying to get as many people fit, leaner, more muscular, more flexible, healthier, etc., as humanly possible to the extent that they are interested in that sort of thing. Because not everyone's into fitness, and I understand that. I mean, I think I look kind of, you know, freaky, and it scares certain people, so I have a lot of time for that. But if you want to get fit, uh, we're trying our best.

What are the the big myths that end up standing in the way of most people when they when they hear this conversation now? What are the most frequent rebuttals that you'll get when you say that someone can get in shape and be be lean with limited time? Two super common ones are: "I don't have the time to work out." And into that, "Time to work out" is included: "I don't have regular gym access," or "I technically do, but I'd have to drive to the gym. I just don't have the time or the bandwidth, or I don't have the scheduling positioning in my life to do this sort of thing." And baked into that is the assumption that getting much healthier and much leaner and much more muscular takes like an inordinate amount of time.

One of the most common questions I get out in the real world when people happen to look in my general direction, because usually people just kind of go like, "What the hell is wrong with that guy's head?" But, uh, one of the most common questions I get is, "How many, uh, hours a day do you work out? Or how many days a week do you work out?" And every single person is expecting an answer that's kind of like asking the tallest basketball player you've ever met how tall they are. You want an answer that's like, "2 and a half meters." You want something meaty. And if they tell you like, "Well, I'm a meter 90," you're kind of like, "Is that that cool?" And every time I tell them how much I work out, which is really like, at my real, like trying to be as good as bodybuilding as possible, is really eight hours a week. And this is to do this insane thing for people just trying to be fit and healthy, etc., where talking about a sum total of 1 hour per week, split into two or three 20-ish minute sessions, something we'll be trying later on, is such a huge stimulus and can radically transform your body, especially if you have attention to nutrition. And that's the second thing that's a big dogma, big myth, is people have ideas about what comes into nutrition. And nutrition for being more lean, more muscular, and healthier, they have all these kind of a constellation of ideas. Um, uh, economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell calls them "notions." So if you have a hierarchy of understanding, you have theory at the top, which is like gravitation, evolution, things super, super confirmed. Just beneath that, you have model, like the standard model in physics is not quite good enough, quite good enough support to be a theory, but it's a very well-understood space with a few mysteries. Under that, you have a hypothesis, which is, you know, you have a real good idea formally phrased. And underneath that, you have a notion. And a notion's just things people say, and people are like, "Uh-huh," and no one even asks or answers about, "Is this really true?"

And so when you talk to people about nutrition, or they talk to you about why they're not in such great shape, another thing I get is when you're pretty jacked and lean and you sit next to someone on a plane, they treat you almost like a religious figure, like a priest or an imam. And they're like, "Apologize. They're like, "Coach, you look like you're in good shape. I just haven't been to the gym." And I'm like, "I love you as a human being, no matter all the time, really, all the time." They apologize for the state they're in, more or less. Yeah. Or they see me eat a protein bar, and they're getting like the food on the plane, and they're like, "This is bad for me, huh?" And I'm like, "No, it's actually quite fine." And I'm always a little bit confused. So all these ideas people have about nutrition: organic, artificial sweeteners are bad, gluten-free, GMOs, you have to have very meticulously well-prepared meals. There is a ton of food that's huge, laundry list of food that's unhealthy and bad for you, makes you fat. There are other foods that are a little bit more nuanced and difficult to find that are super health foods and will radically transform you. I can go on for hours about these myths, but people come in with these myths as notions, as things they believe that they're like, "This is how it is." Right? And when you tell them, like, "Actually, that's not true," a lot of them are like, "No way," because maybe that's the first time they've heard about it. So you tell people working out doesn't have to last forever if you do it intelligently, which is what we specialize at RP about teaching people how to do and demonstrating digital products. You can get into really, really good shape with not so much time investment, and it's not so difficult. It's difficult in the moment, as far as you got to try hard, but, you know, an hour of trying hard a week is not the end of the world. And then on a nutritional front, they come in and they think it takes all these crazy special things. Like people will watch me eat regular food and they'll be like, "You eat that?" I'm like, "Yes." "Like, but I thought that you know, but you need the super special food." I like, "That's never been true." But, um, people come in with their stack of ideas, and these, there's just dozens and dozens and myths on both ends. We'll go through all of those myths. But, but my last question before we get into it is, why does it matter to be in good shape? And this is, I, I'm asking you here to really draw on some of the case studies that you've probably been exposed to where people have turned their lives around. What is the net benefit of someone who's listening right now who's maybe heard about fitness stuff before and has heard from personal trainers and bodybuilders and whoever else, but for whatever reason, they just haven't been able to get up off the sofa and get into action? It's difficult, you know? What is, why should they, why should they care?

I love that question. The first thing I'll say is, um, is maybe not a surprise to many of the people that know me politically. I'm like, super pro-freedom, freedom of all kinds, inclusion. And that means to me also that if someone doesn't want to pursue fitness as a human being, you have the same love and respect, at least for me, that anyone who's fit would have. And so as far as like, "It'll just make you a better person," and "You, you got to get fit." People will see, people that are obese and they're like, "Lazy," and, "How do they live with themselves?" I don't ever think things like that, not because I'm a good person. I'm not a good person at all. But what fitness won't give you is it won't elevate your status as a better person in some way. However, the other benefits of fitness, we could have a 10-hour podcast where I just go through them one by one, and we would never get through all of them. I'll give you a couple of samplings of kind of the big hitters. One is health, straight up. So if you reduce your body fat substantially, and you increase your muscularity substantially, and you adopt a lifestyle of moderate to moderately high physical activity quite regularly, this is about as close in real life as we have so far to a panacea, a cure-all. It isn't a cure-all, but the degree of preventative, you won't get really sick very soon effect that has is just radical. I, uh, just coming off of them, but if it's okay to say, I was recently on like a boatload of steroids, like the worst ones. Got blood work right in the middle of that because I was very lean and very physically active and muscular. My blood work's stellar. Just being leaner and more muscular and more active just cleans your blood work up like crazy and makes your long-term, it increases your longevity considerably. But it does something I think is pretty close to equally important. It increases the kind of time you're having in your life while you're alive. Uh, it makes it way better. It reduces the morbidity. And so because you can be around a long time living in an assisted care facility and like on machines to keep you, that's you're alive, sure, but there's something missing there. But if you have more muscle, less fat, and more physical activity, you ever see like an 80-year-old that's like cardio walking down the street and you're like, "My man!" It'll give you that. So that's a big deal. So health, it'll give you, usually people experience a perception of wellness that's psychological. They just feel better, they feel cleaner, they feel more energy. The cognitive benefits of health and fitness are now being addressed seriously in the literature, and they have been for a little while, but it's kind of swelling. Uh, is unequivocally true now to say that regularly engaging in fitness makes you literally smarter, just straight up. And it conserves your brain's cognitive health for decades into the future as you do it consistently. It's just win-win all the way across.

What is your background in terms of your academic qualifications and experiences that you've had that feed into everything that you know? This is, sounds so pretentious, I can't believe I'm using this nomenclature, but I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, where I met, uh, my fellow co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw. And, um, that was in kinesiology, uh, specifically a subset of something called movement science. I then went on to do a master's in technically strength and conditioning, but exercise science at Appalachian State University. Then I went for one year to go work in New York City with Nick as a personal trainer. At the end of that process, I realized that for my own personal, like vibe, I just didn't know enough and I wanted to know more. And so I got accepted to a PhD program at East Tennessee State University under the great Mike Stone, who is probably one of the most well-published sports scientists of all time, maybe definitely the conversation for the greatest American sports scientist of all time. And I went to that PhD program, and that was in sport physiology. And the best way we had of summarizing what it is we were learning is the thing we're learning best here is how to take good athletes and make them better. And so I did three years of that. It sounds like a, it's like a prison time. I did three years in ETSU, and that was the conclusion. I was a terminal degree. I got a PhD in sport physiology. And then I spent, oh, geez, 10 years in various, uh, professorships, uh, teaching and doing some research and all this other stuff. I'm no longer a college professor, mostly because, like, there's only so many things you can do at the same time well, and it was kind of like, this is, this YouTube thing is getting kind of insane, so time to pivot to that. But, uh, I'm still actively involved in research. Our company funds research. I still look at manuscripts. I still co-author. So I'm still involved in that capacity as well.

So I want to start with a start. If someone's listening to this right now and they have walked into your, this is your, this is your hypertrophy practice, let's say, this table, and they sit there and they say, "I would like to gain more lean muscle mass and I'd like to lose some weight. Um, I live a busy life. Where do we start? What step one?" And you know, like, I'm actually going to hazard a guess at step one to see if I'm correct. But for me, step one is quite psychological because it's all well and good me having the tactics and strategies and the information, but if I don't have the motivation, none of it's going to matter anyway. So is step one psychological in some way? Absolutely. My God, you should just be taking my job at this point. No, but okay, I thought so. I thought that was it. So what, what would you do for me to get me in the right psychological mindset?

I would even take a step back before that. Okay, the first thing we do is called the needs analysis. In formal sports science, a needs analysis is, what do you want specifically? Do you want bigger arms? How much muscle are you trying to gain? It's a very different conversation if someone weighs 150 pounds and they're like, "I want to be 155 but leaner," versus, "I weigh 150 pounds and I want to be 200 ripped." Different timelines, different approaches, different trade-offs. Okay, give me the typical answer to that question. Most people just open-ended, to be completely honest, honest. You're like, "I just want to get much leaner." And some of them will say, "I also want to put on a lot of muscle." The muscle thing is a lot of times with females, they just want the leaner part, but they understand in many cases that if they just jettison their muscle entirely, they end up looking more sick than healthy. Uh, but a lot of the males, leaner is important, but also getting super jacked is important. But how jacked and how lean? That's the conversation. Is it if they come in with totally open-ended concerns? It's kind of like walking into a car dealership and being like, "I want a car." Like, you're going to have to be a little... We'll sell you whatever. You're going to have to tell me a little bit more about what your use cases are, about what your budget is. So that's another big thing in a needs analysis is how much time can you give to this? Because if someone says, "I want to eventually be a professional bodybuilder and I've got nothing but time in my week to do the thing," that's getting a very different plan than someone that's like, "I just want to be able to see my man down there again and like, just not die soon, and I have two hours a week to give you." Very different plan. So I've got, let's say I've got a couple of hours a week, so you know, two, three hours a week that I could probably spare, maybe four. And I just want to get a bit leaner and I want to gain some muscle. Yeah. I also ask, "What have you been doing so far? Tell me about your approach to fitness." And the answer could be, "I don't have one. I've never tried to do anything." Once we get a lot of that information, I don't want to say the plan writes itself, but sort of almost. Now we really, really, really have all the details to fill in the blanks. And then from there, once you've done that sort of needs analysis, and you've understood the investment that they're willing to make, you understand what their goals are, you understand their current approach to fitness, what becomes step two? So if again, I'm trying to embody the viewer here who's trying to change their life. Yeah, yeah. Get going. For step two, often times, uh, just to keep it short, we can, I, we definitely do nutrition, uh, if you'd like, so please call me in for that. But I'll just use, um, training as a quick example here. Uh, a big one is, do you go to a gym? Can you make it to a gym? Or are you going to be training at home? Because training at home is a bit of a different world. You can get amazing results at home, but we need to make sure you have the right equipment. And it's super minimal. Two 20 lb dumbbells. I like that. You're looking over at the dumbbells. Like, are those 20 kg dumbbells? They're 20 pound dumbbells. Is that what I need at home? For many people, 20, like adult males, white, spry, like yourself, 20 pound dumbbells at home will give you phenomenal overall results. Yeah. What is that, nine kgs or something? Oh, here we go. Your assistance are quite strong, by the way. Do you fight crime in your spare time? Okay, so these are 20 pound dumbbells. You're just showing off now. But, but these are what I need at home to to do a workout? Uh, yeah, somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds. 10 for smaller, lighter females, 20 for larger, more strong males. Somewhere between that. Two of those dumbbells at home and a little bit of floor space can be the beginning of an absolutely revolutionary workout program. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. How so? Give me the starting position and the end position that I could get to just with these dumbbells at home. If you properly control your diet, and you haven't really lifted weights before, and you're let's say 30, 40, 50 years old, in a six-month time span, we can reliably get you to gain 5 to 10 pounds of muscle. Which if you go to the store, what is that like, five? Let's say two to five kilos of muscle. You ever buy two to five kilos of meat at the store? That's a lot of meat. That's going on your body. And we can reliably get you to lose, oh, geez, five to 7 and a half kilos of fat in a six-month time frame, just by being intelligent about your diet and doing two workouts per week at home with your dumbbells. And the workouts each take roughly 20 minutes. So that's 40 minutes a week. Oh, yeah. Now, that's if you're unaccustomed and unadjusted. And that's why those intake questions are important. Because if you're like, "Look, I go to the gym six times a week. I spend two hours at the gym." Like, them dumbbells can keep you in pretty good shape, but they're not going to elevate your shape very likely. At very least, it'll be highly inefficient and incredibly discomforting for what you'd have to do with such dumbbells. So what is step three then? So if we've got the equipment part figured out, and I guess the complicated element of that is some people have anxiety as it relates to going to the gym. I've got a lot of friends that because they're so inexperienced with weightlifting or the machines, they feel embarrassed to go to the gym. So that, well, at least that's what they tell me. Now, I don't know whether they're bearing themselves, but they tell me that they have gym anxiety. You know, you walk, and I, no, actually, I can relate. You walk into a gym, especially if I go to like a, uh, like a bodybuilding gym, and I do look around, I go, "Okay, everyone here knows what they're doing more than I do." Oh, that's already wrong. But we'll get to that a bit. And are they looking at me? Are they, do they know that I don't know how this machine works? And if I don't know how a machine works, and there's nothing, you know, no label to tell me, sometimes I just avoid the machine if I'm in, in like a bodybuilding gym because, I, [__] hell, I don't know how to do my wrist muscles. Yeah, I just look like a doofus and everyone's making fun of me in their head. What I think sometimes if I go to like a really elite gym. So yeah, so first of all, I think people's gym anxiety is an absolutely real thing. I can speak to that at at length. The next step would be to say, "Hey, listen, based on all the information we've collected on your limitations, desires, abilities, we've cultivated a plan for you. Be it diet plan, and just, just stick into the muscle growth stuff. Here's your plan for your training." And we actually have an app for this sort of thing where we would say, "Okay, here's how you, you type in all your stuff in the app. The app will create a plan for you and it'll tell you, here's what to do for warming up. Here's, you know, you pick a weight. It tells you how to pick your weights, and then it programs the rest of your two months of training for you. You fill in the, 'How do I feel? How am I recovering?' It'll take care of everything else. And if you ever get confused, you click on the exercise and it opens up a video with an audio demonstration of how to do it, and of someone, a professional bodybuilder doing the thing. You go, 'Oh, that's, that's what bicep curls was. Okay, got it.' So now you have all the answers, and you don't have to have our app. We think it's nice. You don't have to have it. Just whatever kind of plan you have, that's your little map of the Caribbean Sea with the X's and the pirate ships, and you know exactly where to go. And it's you, your app, or your map of how to train your program. And everyone else, like in The Avengers movie, it's just, just floats away. There's no one else. There's not even any other machines. It's you and the bicep curl machine. And the hypertrophy app says, 'First set is 12 reps at 50 pounds.' I take the select Dr stack, go to 50, and I'm nice and warmed up, and I do 12 reps. And that's as far as you have to think about it. Comparisons, whatever everyone else thinks without a plan, oh boy, are you second-guessing yourself. With a plan, you don't have to second-guess anything. Most of those people don't have a plan. They're just in there on vibes. "I feel like my delts are going to grow today if I do this." Like, "Thanks, thanks for that intellectual opinion."

You said there's two types of effective training. One of them's H... can't say this. But one of them is hypertrophy. Very good. And the other one is periodization. Uh, so periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want. Okay, hypertrophy training is a type of training. It's just muscle growth training. It's like a fancy [__] science word for just getting more jacked, putting on muscle. That's the technical definition of hypertrophy. And when you train for hypertrophy, you can do it kind of like by feel and more or less at random, and you'll get pretty good results in most cases. But to get your best results, you want that training to be periodized. Periodization is the scientific approach to how to organize your training to get sort of roughly three things. Some of these are a bit more for athletes and not regular people: get the best results that you can, peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer, and minimize injury risk. And taking all the science that we know, that plan that you've made, because you did it in an evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan. So that's how those two concepts relate to each other.

What do I need to know about hypertrophy in order to be able to achieve it? Is there anything really foundational? Because I think everyone wants a bit of muscle growth, and I spend, I think I spend too long in the gym. I think I could be much more efficient. Um, when I'm training, what would you recommend that I start thinking about as foundational principles when it comes to hypertrophy, muscle growth? One is specificity. It's the most important principle in all of sport training and exercise science. Is, uh, what am I here for? What do I want? Because you can do a bunch of exercises in the gym and you're like, "That was great." And someone's like, "Are you getting the results you like?" You're like, "Well, I, what I want is a bigger bicep." Like, "How many bicep exercises do you do?" Like, "I think upright rows maybe." So I want a bigger bicep. Bicep. If we just focus on me getting Steven B a bigger left bicep. So specificity is telling yourself, "Okay, I want bigger biceps," and whatever XYZ other muscles. Then we move into the principle of overload, which means you have to challenge yourself. If most of your sets, someone else watching them can't tell if you're warming up or doing what's called a working set, like a real set, you have a problem. So towards the end of all of your sets, either the weights are slowing down, or even if it's the same speed, to you, they feel perceptibly harder. You know, you do this, this, this, and in a couple reps, you're like, "That's what you want." Every real working set should be challenging. You should be work approaching every real set with just a teeny, teeny dose of trepidation, like, "Oh boy, here we go. I'm gonna have to try." Once you have that, and a set is a a group of repetitions, correct? So if I do 10 repetitions, that's one set. One set, yeah. And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy, uh, anything between between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set, where the last few reps are getting close to you not being able to use good technique and lift the weights. Check plus. So there's not a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do? There is. It's a trade secret. And I'd have to say it off camera to you. Like, ND assign. Okay, we're off camera. All right, great. So it's 17. Um, there is. So there's just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff. Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better to sets of five to 10. Other folks, even the same person, could have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30, and everything in between. But generally, you get in, in the exercise science data, you'll have a group of people training for sets of roughly five reps, and another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps, and their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 weeks is statistically undifferenced. That's so crazy. Using the same weight, I'm guessing? Different weight. A weight that is challenging for five reps is much heavier than a weight that is challenging for 30. Okay. So I do wonder this all the time. When I go to the gym, I wonder if I should be doing, I don't know, 30 reps of 10 kg on my bicep, or I should be doing 10 reps of 20 kg. They're both right answers. No wrong answers there. And they both have the same chance of growing my muscles, as long as the strain that I experience subjectively is difficult at the end of those sets, correct? Okay. Interesting. Which is really good news, because that's like another thing you don't have to worry about. Which means at home, I can get any range of weights versus having to get really, really big ones to grow? As long as they're not so tiny that you're on rep number 45 and you're like, "I could just do this for forever," or they're not so enormous that you're like, "I can't really even do two reps of this." Anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps, challenging, is really, really good. How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym to get this bicep to grow? That answer depends on how much you've been doing before, okay? But if you're new to the gym, two sessions a week with two to three sets per session for your biceps is something that's going to cause months and months and months of consistent progress. Can you do more? Yes. Do you have to do as a beginner? No. Eventually, as a more advanced person, do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions to get consistently better results? Yes. But for beginners who haven't been in the gym very much or at all, the minimal effective dose is profoundly small. Which is why I can say things like, "If you work out for 20 minutes twice a week, you're going to get great gains."

What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps and I just go to the gym once a week? Does the distance between the workouts in a muscle group have an impact? Yes. Once a week training gives you good results, but twice a week training for the same muscle gives you notably better results. Training three times a week versus twice, twice training four times a week versus three, training five times a week versus four is, uh, an an exponentially de-escalating amount of impressive differences. So one time a week works, it'll get you results. Two times a week gets you like one and a half times the results, like way better, better. Three times a week is like another little bit more results, still notable. Four times a week is like, you got to be training for a while to notice the difference between three and four. Four and five is contextual and nuanced, and I can't actually tell you that categorically five days a week is better than four. There are some things I would have to know about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion. So really, I want to be aiming at twice a week per muscle group? Twice is our minimum. Two to four times a week is what I say is kind of the best overall recommendation per muscle group. And if you train all of your muscles together at the same time, a whole body workout, which most people in the realm of just, "I'm busy and I can't train a lot," it would be all of the major muscles of your body in the same session, twice or three times or four times a week. And that is an awesome beginner fitness plan.

What's going on in my muscles that's encouraging them and making them grow? And when are they growing? Is it when I go to bed at night? Is it when I do? Do they grow the minute that I curl the the dumbbell? What's actually going on? Because sometimes understanding what's actually going on inside helps me to think through and change my behavior. Yeah, so, uh, the primary stimulus for muscle growth is, there are molecular machines in your muscles, in your muscle cells, and they are designed to detect the presence of tension. And when your muscles generate tension, the molecular detector machines go, "Oh, we got tension here," and they start, uh, saying to other parts of the cells like, "Hey, uh, let's get this muscle growth thing started." Started, not happening, started. It's a stimulus of muscle growth. There are a couple of other mechanisms which might, uh, probably have an effect, and that a couple of them are metabolite sequestration, which is a very fancy way of saying the burn. You know, at the end of a set, you're like, "Ah," the metabolites, the, um, byproducts of training. If they accumulate to high levels, it's been shown in tons of animal studies and a few human studies that like mechanistically, they might also tell the molecular machinery that grows muscle for you again later to, "Hey, get the muscle growth process." Another one is the pump. So, you know, you do a couple sets of biceps, you're, "Oh my God, what's going on here, baby?" Flash it at some girl, she runs away as usual. And the actual cell swelling itself might play a causal mechanistic role in generating more muscle growth. But, but we know it's probably at least at least 80% of the muscle growth anyone will see is because of those receptors for tension. Muscle growth, as soon as you leave the gym, is a negative because the gym is catabolic. It's a breaks down your muscle. Actually, training breaks down more muscle than it builds. However, as you go home, and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day, and you're resting, when the food's coming in, several hours after training begins, if you measure muscle growth consistently, which is really difficult to do, they don't do it super often. You have to keep people in a laboratory. You have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff. Every couple of hours, they measure the amount of muscle growth that's going on in the biceps. Goes up and up and up and up. And it usually peaks about half a day to a day and a half after you lift, depending on how hard you went. If it's a pretty easy workout, it peaks a little sooner and dives and drops off about a day or two later. If you train really crazy hard, it'll peak like a day, day and a half later, and then half a week later, it'll drop off back to baseline levels. But it's this really smooth curve, and you're growing muscle at every single point under that curve. So when you say, "Is it while I'm sleeping? Is it while I'm eating? Is it while I'm resting?" The answer is all of those, except it's not at the gym. You don't grow muscle at the gym. You give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym. And then what you do outside of the gym matters. So some people train really hard, they don't eat right, they don't eat enough protein, their sleep is total, insert bad word here, and their stress levels are just totally psychotic. They train hard, and then week after week after week, they're like, "Not seeing any results." Well, the results are actually created when you're resting, when you're sleeping, when you're eating nutritious food. They're stimulated in the workout, but that's just phase one. Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside the gym. And it occurs not in any any specific time point, like a magic window of two hours after the gym, like that's when all the growth occurs. That's actually when it just starts to go up. It's four days afterwards. So if you train twice a week, you train on Monday, you're going to grow a lot of muscle on Monday night, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Back, uh, towards the end of Wednesday, you're just not really growing much more muscle. You go back to the gym Thursday, hit it hard again, hit that curve up. By Sunday, you're totally relaxed. During Sunday, you're not growing any muscle. Your body's really recovering, a lot of that fatigue. And then by Monday, you're fresh as a pickle and you're ready to go at it again.

How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I've gained if I don't go back to the gym? So again, focusing on this bicep, I train it, I do two times a week, I get it nice and big. How long before it vanishes? Great question. Two-part answer. Part one is, within about two weeks of not training it, the first reduction in muscle that is detected by modern machinery occurs. So if you don't lift for two weeks, and we put you in an MRI scanner or a DEXA scanner, let's say a week and a half, you don't lift, I can't tell you're not really losing any muscle yet. You're just going insane. And so me personally, I'm like addicted to lifting. So if I don't lift for a week, I'm like, "Oh my God, oh my God, all my muscle's gone." There is some kind of intuitive truth to that because when you don't stress your muscles, they, when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little bit. So when you're not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller, like they've lost weight, but it's really just all water that they lost. You do one gym session thinking like, "Oh my God, my biceps are gone." A week and a half later, you do one session, at the end of that, you flex and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm the biggest I've ever been." I was just delusional that whole time. Because that stuff comes back super quick. After about two weeks of not lifting, you start to lose muscle, but it happens really, really slowly and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. After for several months of not lifting, you're going to look considerably smaller in your biceps, but probably not as small as when you started lifting, because your muscles have a certain memory, if we can call it that. Is that true? Oh, yeah. And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle, especially if you've been at it for years, it just never goes back to the same size as when you started. It's just always going to be bigger until you reach your 80s or something like that. That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size. So two weeks is the direct answer there, and it's going to take weeks and weeks and months and months to recede. However, here's part two, and this is awesome news. Because of that muscle memory situation, however long it took you to gain the muscles initially, it's going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of 10-ish or so, less time to get it back. If you've been more jacked before, if you've had bigger muscles, they come back to their old size. If it took, if you, you lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep, and you stopped lifting for three months, and it looks about the same as when you started. If you're really careful, like, "Okay, it's a little bit bigger, but really, it's just back to square one." Most people think, "Oh my God, another eight months just to get back to where I started." Like, "Forget the gym." The truth is, after roughly about a month, maybe as little as three weeks, you're going to have the same size biceps that you did in your peak. Because the degree to which your tissue grows, if it's been a certain size before, especially if it was notably bigger than normal, and you held that around for a few months and a few years, it comes back in a way that is so fast. If you experience, if you experience it yourself, it's, it's like you don't believe that it's happening to you. They've been able to like scientifically test this? Oh, yeah, all the time. Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining. Oh, yeah. They've, they've done studies where they purposefully like lift for a while, and they stop lifting for a long time, and they see how long it takes to get back. And, uh, there's one study I'm familiar with offhand that there's a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks, and there's another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks, and then took two weeks completely off in the middle, and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later. Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study. And so we were like, "Okay, so, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off, could we say that they purposefully like dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing?" Uh-huh. Yeah. Your body goes right back into regaining old lost muscle so rapidly that this is such great news. Because look, let's say you lifted consistently most of the year. Holiday season comes up, winter holidays. You're not going to the gym as much, maybe not at all. Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself, you look a little small or kind of deflated, and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm going to have to restart all this from scratch." Nope. Two weeks later, you're in the best shape of your life again. If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you're in the best shape of your life again. That's how rapidly it comes back. So it's really good news for anyone who hasn't been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it. Go back, get consistent again. You're just going to skyrocket. That is very exciting because, yeah, we always have, sometimes it's the trough, the the couple of weeks off that makes us demotivated, because that's crossed my mind before. "Oh my God, that took me three months to get there, and it's going to take me another three months to get back."

But what about, so if I'm training that bicep, how have I got to think about stretching and warming up before I start? Before I get going with my training? There are many ways to do it, but, uh, there's some research on this recently, actually. You don't need much. One of the simplest ways to warm up that we recommend at RP, and our app has it in the in the instructions. You want, let's say you have your final weight already picked out. Like last week did 20 lb dumbbells for sets of 15. This week, it's sets of 16 with the 20 lb dumbbells. What you want to do is you want to do very lightweight, maybe the 5 lb dumbbells for a set of 12, just to get everything moving and grooving, good technique, same technique you're going to use. 30 seconds of rest, a minute of rest. You pick up the 10 or 15 lb dumbbells, you do a set of eight reps there, a little bit more challenging. You feel your groove a little bit, but your body is already more warm, your nervous system is more active, your muscles are more pliable. You rest a minute after that, and then you'll pick up the weight you're actually using, the 20 pounders, and you'll do a set of two to four reps with them, just to get the feel of that heavy weight that you're going to be doing, to acclimatize not just your muscles and your nervous system, but your psychology to like, "Okay, this is, this is the business weight that I'm going to be using." So 12, 8, 4, rest another 30 seconds, first working set of whatever, six reps, you're up. When you have multiple exercises for the same muscle group, you just need to do one set of like four to eight reps in that middle weight range between zero and whatever you're going to do, just to get the feel of the exercise because you're already generally warm in that area. One little warm-up set, rest, uh, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, and then hit your first set. If you're switching which muscles.

You're using like you were training chest, but then in the same session, you started training back. That first back exercise, 1284, the weight goes up, up, up. The reps go down, down, down. Just a little bit of time between, and then you hit your first work set. You're good to go. You don't have to do cardio before. You don't have to get on the treadmill. You can if you like it. You don't have to do some kind of cardio warm-up. You don't have to do any kind of stretching or anything like that. You don't have to do any kind of weird Bosu ball, band around your neck, crazy potentiation exercises. Just that little ramp-up is basically 98% of all cases exactly and only what you need to do.

What is a warm-up? What is going on physiologically inside my muscle? Cuz we, we all just warm up, and I don't think anybody actually knows what what's going on. Yeah, so your muscle tissues, um, they have, uh, they have physical qualities that can be measured almost in like a fluid dynamics terms, like viscosity and hysteresis and all that stuff. And so when you're very cold, a lot of times the, uh, there's kind of a frailty implied there. As you're warming up, you're sending blood around the muscle. The muscle itself is literally becoming warmer, and a lot of those kind of tight structures that are, uh, they're proteins that are made of kind of a stretchy material, they loosen up a little bit, and that allows you to go through that full range of motion and training and not actually get hurt. And that's from the muscle perspective. You also get some kind of chemical stuff that happens. Certain structures fill up with chemicals, certain structures, chemicals go down, and that gets you ready to perform super hard work. But that's part of the story.

The other part is the nervous system because your nervous system is also getting warmed up. And in technical terms, it's called potentiation. When you just show up to the gym and let's say we said, "Look, okay, we re-engineered your tendons when you were asleep. You're not going to get hurt. It's impossible for you to get hurt. Like a car would have to hit you for you to rip your bicep off." You can just go and just hit the curls right away. You wouldn't get hurt, but it would feel really strange, and you wouldn't get four or five reps close to where you're supposed to be from last week because your nervous system was like, "What the hell is going on? I'm supposed to be doing something." So you need to warm up the nervous system. A part of that is literally like the actual nervous system itself, down to the cellular level, is flushing all kinds of metabolites through. The connections are getting stronger. You're, uh, sort of doing a little bit of kind of mini rewiring of primary motor cortex to say, "Go, oh, we're doing curls. This is how you execute this pattern." Another part is technical, like, "Oh, this is the technique I'm going to do." Because if you just get in the muscle and just do stuff, like imagine if I told you like, "Hey, here's a ball. Just like, go, go shoot some hoops. Just hit that, you know, three-pointer shot." You're like, "I need a couple shots to remind my body of what it's like to shoot the basketball." Same idea for lifting. You need to remind your body of what a curl motion is. And if you remind it a couple sets in a row, by the time you hit that real working set, that fourth set, your body's like, "I know exactly what I'm going to do. Which parts of the muscle I'm going to activate to contract, which other parts of other muscles I'm going to activate to relax and co-contract to make this whole thing happen."

What are the, the other sort of common mistakes people make when they, they go to the gym or they start training or they start exercising? So there, I've, I've kind of ticked off not stretching and taking on a heavy load too quickly, um, but also ramping up volumes and loads too fast, so that sort of overstrained before my body is ready for it. Are there any really other sort of common obvious mistakes people make that inhibit their progress? One of them is a failure to pay attention to good technique. Okay? There are sort of some universal principles of what is good technique in the gym for muscle growth. One of them is, are you moving in a way that properly activates, stimulates that muscle to actually get it to grow? Because if you do a curl that arcs up, it does a lot of bicep. If you do a curl that arcs back this way, because the bicep is being pulled one way and pulled the other way at the shoulder and the elbow, it ends up doing more of, um, stabilizing contraction than actually being the prime mover for the movement. So when you see people curling at the gym and they're just kind of doing this, you're like, "Yes, that is training your biceps," but if you just moved a little bit differently, it would be so, so much better.

Here's another example: squatting, right? For your legs, if you squat really far back and not so far down, like you're, your glutes get hit, okay? Your lower back and upper and mid-back is going to get hit a lot. But because there's not a huge change in your knee angle, you're not getting a ton of quad stimulus. If you stay more upright and your heels and toes are on the ground and you allow your knees to go way forward beyond your toes as you stay upright and sink down really low so that your knee goes into one of these, oh my God, it's all quads all day long. So you want technique that is targeting the muscle, it's very similar rep to rep to rep, and it puts the muscle consistently through a range of motion that is in that deep, painful, uh, length and stretch position. If you just have all those three, everything else we can say about your technique is just nuances and finer points. Those are really the big ones.

We talked about nutrition earlier as well. So if I want to make my bicep grow and also drop off the weight around the bicep so you can see, see it even more, what should I be putting into my mouth? The number one requisite for muscle growth is protein. Foods with lots of protein in them, ideally, should be consumed three to five times per day at roughly equidistant intervals. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, totally fine. Even better, breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening snack. The average person needs a little bit less than, let's say, a gram per pound of body weight per day of protein. Actually, considerably less. That's kind of the top limit and a cool, aspirational thing to shoot for. So if you weigh, let's say, 200 lbs, you should be consuming something like 150 to 200 grams of protein per day. And 150 for almost everyone's totally enough. But if you're real serious and hardcore and just want that insurance policy, 200 grams of protein per day. So then if you're eating four times a day, that's, oh yeah, 30, 40, let's say 40 to 50 grams of protein per meal.

Can I eat too much protein and then it becomes fat or something? Uh, that's, so protein by itself, no. If your protein is so high that your carbs and fats are the same, and you jack up your protein super high, but your carbs and fats stay where they are, your calories become excessive. That will cause fat gain over time. But if you're doing a diet where you take a ton of protein, but you dropped your carbs and fats and your calories are at maintenance levels, you're not going to gain any fat. It's not bad for your kidneys. It's not bad for any other part of your body. Excessive protein as a health malady has been a myth the entire time. And that's one of those, um, notions that people carry with them that too much protein is bad, right? Like, yes, if you've had kidney surgery, absolutely. Short of that, you're probably good to go. You'll fart a lot and people will hate you. But, you know.

You mentioned three to five meals a day. A lot of people are now in this camp of of fasting, an intermittent fasting, and not eating often. Is it possible to fast but also to gain muscle mass in the way that you've described? Yeah, totally. It just won't happen at as impressive a rate. So you have to make a trade-off for yourself. If you want, you know, most jacked Steven that you can be, three to five meals a day consistently spread. In almost to an individual, competitive bodybuilders eat that frequently and eat high protein. How often did you eat? Uh, I eat five, five times a day, four or five times a day, usually. And do you eat before or after you train? Both. Okay. So before you train and after you train, do you do different things? Sometimes I'll train early in the morning and so I won't train at, I won't eat at all. I'll wake up and I'll have like a protein and carb mix shake with my training. Totally optional, super extra credit, may not do anything at all if you look at the literature. But I find it a little bit compelling to do a little bit of that. And then afterwards, I have my first post-workout meal, second meal, third meal, fourth meal, bedtime. Wake up, do it again.

What do you take to get you going? Do you do pre-workout? No. Why? No. Uh, I don't do any stimulants of any kind. Why? Uh, I'm just kind of coked up all the time naturally. So like, if you give me stimulants, it's just going to go into the not-so-pleasant side of side effects. Like, I'm just going to be like this and way too amped up, super high anxiety, and my thoughts get to be like, I have less fluidity of thinking and stuff. So I just, it's just a lot of me, I guess. And so when I wake up in the morning, I don't need anything to get me going. I just go. And a couple warm-up sets later, I have all the energy I need. That's not everyone. And so some green tea, some black coffee, or some pre-workout 30 minutes before the, the gym is great advice for a ton of people. I feel like pre-workout can't be healthy if you're doing it five, six, seven times a week because some of that stuff is so unbelievably strong. Like I've had it before, I've got literally like heart palpitations. When I've had a pre-workout, and you know, you talk about anxiety, that anxious feeling, it can't be, it can't be healthy for people to be doing that frequently.

It seems to be quite fine. It seems to be quite fine now at the extremes. And for some individuals, it's not ideal. But, um, the upper limit dose of caffeine in milligrams per day at which we can confidently say most people will experience the beginnings of health maladies is 1,000 milligrams. And a cup of coffee has, depending on which cup, 50 to 100. Now, some pre-workouts have 250 milligrams of caffeine, some have 500. Last I checked, Ronnie Coleman's pre-workout has 550 mgs of caffeine per scoop or per serving. And so that's kind of a lot. Uh, I, if I took 550 mgs of caffeine, you don't take me to the gym, just take me right to the hospital, put me in the psychiatric ward. 36 hours later, I'll be okay. But for some people to get so accustomed to high doses of caffeine that is supposed not unhealthy for them to consume, and also, they feel quite fine. So I would say start with as little as you need to get you going. And if you need to titrate and work up from there, that's a good thing. The other thing I would say is I would have a compelling case for pre-workout or stimulant if I ask you like, "Hey, how much energy do you typically have at the gym?" You're like, "Well, that's super great." And they're like, "Should I take pre-workout?" I'd be like, "No, there's no compelling case for that at all." If you're like, "Look, I wake up in the morning, some days I just don't get a ton of sleep, and I need something to get me going." Not every day, but sometimes. I'll be like, "Hey, look, consider green tea, black coffee, some diet soda, or all the way up to pre-workout if you need it." But some people take it kind of a like, um, a like a religious thing, as a habit, as a ritual. And it's like, "Dude, you're training your forearms and biceps for 20 minutes total at 9:00 PM. You do not need three scoops of pre-workout for that." I don't even know where it's going at that point. So some people get a little crazy with the pre-workouts. At the end of the world, it's at, at best needless.

What's your stance on the whole idea of calories in, calories out? A lot of people just focus on that as their, their sort of their script to lose body weight, lose body fat, and gain muscle. Is that a useful frame to use, and why do so many people fail at it if, if it is a useful frame? Most people fail at it because they don't consider both the calories in and calories out of the equation. And a lot of people fail because they're very bad at estimating food amounts and calories. They, someone will say like, "A tablespoon of peanut butter." Stephen, if you ever actually seen a tablespoon measuring cup, it does not look like Mom's tablespoon where she takes the peanut butter and goes, "That's like four tablespoons." And so like, "But I'm eating the calories." Blah, blah, blah. Every time you take people into what's called a metabolic ward, which is a study center where you're not allowed to have visitors that bring you food, the workers only give you the food that you need, and all of your exercise and your output is controlled and monitored, and so is your intake. No one has ever violated laws of thermodynamics. We give you a certain number of calories, and we expect you to lose a certain number of weight. There's a variance about that, but it, you're going to lose the weight that roughly we predict. If we account for all variables, you're going to lose almost exactly the weight that we predict. So calories in, calories out is incontrovertible. In among 90-something percent, 98% of people who do research in the field and are scientifically literate and educated, calories in, calories out is not controversial. It never has been. There are some people who say, "Well, calorie counting didn't work for me." That's probably because you did it wrong, or you weren't even concerned about how much protein you're taking in, or how many carbs, or how many fats. There are other details that matter. Like if you say, "I need a V8 engine in a car." That's all that matters. Like, "Okay, well, there's no steering wheel, there's no pedals." Cool. Well, okay, I need those things too. So calories in, calories out is the very core because without an engine, you're not going anywhere. But what types of foods you're eating matters a little bit. Are you getting enough protein, carbs, fats? That matters a bit too. So people like to just bash calorie balance and calories in, calories out is, well, it's, it's totally myth, it doesn't work. No, no, it works great. It's just not always enough to get you in the best shape you can. But if you do it right as far as net balance, weight gain or weight loss, calories in, calories out is actually the only thing that matters. Tissue-wise, is that gain mostly muscle or mostly fat? Is the loss mostly muscle or mostly fat? That has not so much to do with calories. It has much more to do with proteins, carbs, fats, the quality of food you're eating, nutrient timing, and all the rest of it. So calories in, calories out is amazing, super explanatory, critical, but it's just not the whole picture. And that's really it, I guess, because so many people say they've heard about calories in, calories out, but they fail at maintaining it. Now, that's really about motivation and the psychology of doing such a thing. Um, some people have said to me that our bodies want to defend our weight. So if we start eating less, we'll become a little bit more hungry. If we go for a run, after the run or after physical exertion, our body will try and make up for it because it's programmed to try and defend its weight because its weight correlates to our ability to survive. Why do people fail at it? One of the reasons you said is because, you know, that they're not actually measuring the calories correctly. But the psychological reasons that it hasn't worked for some people, can you think of many? Because when I, when people talk about calories in, calories out, if you look at the comment sections on those videos, people say, "I've tried this and it didn't work." Okay, first of all, I typically don't look at comment sections of videos because comment sections are not representative of the population. It's not representative of the people that watch your videos. It's not representative of the hardcore demographic that watches your videos. So just as a statistical artifact, every single claim by people against calorie balance in that comment section could be true for them, but they represent 1% of the population. So 99% of people, it works just fine for. 1% they get into some kind of trouble. Usually that trouble is they didn't count calories properly, they didn't account for macronutrient profile, proteins, carbs, fats, they didn't account for nutrient timing, or the kinds of food that they're, they're doing, and so on and so forth. And another one is like you said, sustainability. How long do I have to count calories for in my life for me to get the body that I want and keep it? Is sure [ __ ] not going to be forever. So what I'll do is I'll count calories for a few months, I'll lose a lot of weight, then I'll go back to eating on vibes and the weight comes right back. Absolutely. So better than just counting calories, what we want to do is instill people with good eating habits. If you learn how to construct meals made of lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, you know roughly how to see how much food you need, and how much food looks at least like it's what you eat per day. If you're checking your body weight relatively often, and when your body weight starts to get a little higher, you kind of clean up your diet a little bit. And when your body weight's nice and low, you couple cheat meals, couple kebabs, you know, burgers and stuff, that's all good. If you do that and you have those healthy habits, whatever weight you lost on calorie restriction, you can maintain with very, very little work, not counting a damn thing, just on good habits. But if you counted calories, do some weird diet where you only eat like two with orange slices and protein shakes or something, yeah, the calorie counting will get you wherever you need to go. But then afterwards, like the diet's over, and you're like, "Now what do I do?" Like, uh, good luck going out in the world and eating the same diet that got you fat in the first place. That's the big kicker.

People might say it takes too much time to count calories. It leads to an unhealthy relationship with food. I think there's a big movement at the moment to trying to get calories off menus because it's said to increase the amount of people that have eating disorders and things like that. Is that a conversation worth entertaining in this regard? Sure, sure. Very few people will develop eating disorders based on increases in information they are presented. I would actually call that eating order instead of eating disorder. Most people who get eating disorders are highly at risk genetically and with a few other social circumstances. Eating disorders are, for example, the most, uh, deleterious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, seen not exclusively, but almost exclusively in females of reproductive age. They ain't calories on a menu doing that. That's something you bring to the table, usually because you have the genetic proclivity for it. And additionally, because you've been in a social and cultural circumstance where not only were you the wrong person to get ridiculed for your weight, but also a lot of people ridiculed you for your weight. And then you go all careening off on this path where no one can even tell you're super skinny anymore because you don't believe it. So the idea that you're going to see much higher prevalence globally in eating disorders from putting menu calorie labels on things is true by this much, at the margins. And it's just largely not the case.

Adjacent to that is this idea of muscle dysmorphia, which affects a lot of people, but specifically men, roughly 87% of men that are between 15 to 32 years old that experience muscle dysmorphia. Which is what? So muscle dysmorphia generally is, for whatever level of jacked that you are, you think you are considerably less jacked, both in reference to yourself and your own desires, and in reference to an ethereal, make-believe comparator population in your head. So if you were to ask, like, "Hey Mike, do you feel jacked?" And I'm like, "Nope." You're like, "Ooh, not good. Not a good sign. Clearly he's jacked." And then you can ask me, "Mike, compared to other 40-year-old Ashkenazi Jewish men, how jacked are you?" And if I'm like, "I'm probably like bottom 50% for sure, probably bottom 25." To be like, "Okay, he's mentally ill. Take him away." That is high-level muscle dysmorphia, a disassociation from any objective reality about how much muscle you actually have. Do people overestimate or underestimate their appearance as it relates to their muscles? Dysmorphia is almost always cataloged as an underestimation. But from your experience working with people, do people think they're more jacked than they actually are? It really depends on the individual. Most people that are in gym culture that are very invested, if you catch them on their not-so-great days, they think they're substantially less jacked than they really are. And if you tease it apart via conversation, they'll end up being like, "Yeah, no, no, I know I'm jacked, but I'm just saying like, and then it's aspirational, like, for my goals, I'm not as jacked as I would like to be."

It's interesting because we typically think of women, I think stereotypically in society, as caring more about their body image. But I've, I've read a lot of stats lately that suggest men care equally about their body image, but just in slightly different ways. And about the correlation between their perception of their body image and their own mental health, and the link between the two. Sure, sure. Do you see a lot of that? Do you see this link between health in male body image? Yes. Huge proportion of psychological proclivities are genetic. The others are very individually acquired. They change through time. It's not as easy as saying upbringing or family environment. So the one consistent thing about how you relate to the world and your own thoughts is genetics. And a lot of the traits tend to aggregate together. So it is true to say on a spectrum, very nuanced, that some people aggregate a lot of negative psychological traits, and some people aggregate a lot of positives. And there absolutely people, everyone's a mixed bag somewhere in between. But there's a little bit of this kind of, I don't want to use a term for another mental, a bipolarity to the distribution, right? And so a lot of people that are generally neurotic, they feel consistently, uh, unsafe and unsure of themselves, are going to be also the type of people that when they get more jacked through lifting, they're still not going to believe that they're as jacked and accomplished and awesome and alpha male as they really are because they're always like, you know, to use the old Jewish joke stereotype, like, "I'm never going to be big." And it's like, "You're already big." Like, "Oh, I don't know, it could get, it could get worse tomorrow." And a lot of people just bring that to the table. And so when you get neurotic people jacked, they don't think they're that jacked. They're always like, "Oh my God, it's always going to end." But if you take not neurotic people and make them jacked, one week of lifting into those people, and they're like, "Dude, I'm like, do you think I should turn pro in bodybuilding?" "Get out of here, you're just over on." So it really depends on who's doing the thing. Now, cultural stuff, social, who's in your circle. I'll give you a good example. I have a lot of my closest friends have no relation to fitness whatsoever. A bunch of them are actually neuroscientists, just randomly people I knew in college that ended up being my friends for life. And so when they assess their muscularity relative to myself and my bodybuilder friends, they're like, "I'm in terrible shape and I'm not remotely jacked." And they have such a weird comparator population that I always remind them like, "Dude, dude, not everyone looks like this." They go to the store, they go to school, they go to the bank, and they're like, "Oh crap, you're right. I'm actually the most jacked person at the bank." It's just not like Gold's Gym where everyone's enormous. So if you happen to be in an environment, let's say you're a university student and you go to the university gym and there's lots of jacked people there and you're there all the time trying to do your best, you may, if you're neurotic to begin with, more neurotic, start to develop a sense that you're just not nearly as jacked as you should be or could be or whatever. But if you like hang out at an old people's home with your grandma and grandpa all the time, you're going to feel like Superman all the time because holy [ __ ], you're like, you can do real things and move furniture around and and so then go back to that point about weight loss.

If I'm trying to lose weight, what are the biggest, biggest myths around weight loss that hold people back and inhibit them? One is, you have to be perfect. If I'm on my diet, I'm good. If I'm off my diet, not only am I bad, but as soon as I'm off my diet, I have sinned, and there is no solace for me. Um, I, a lot of people have that falling off the bandwagon thing where eat clean food, whatever that means, diet food for weeks and weeks and weeks. They have one kebab, they have one cheeseburger, and they're like, "Do it. That's it, man. I'm done dieting. I'm not a good person anymore." It's like that whole dichotomizing and kind of a religious approach that hurts a lot of people because in reality, if you just eat a cheeseburger, your body's like, "Oh, sweet. Like I got a little bit more carbohydrates stored in the muscle. I recovered a little bit more. My diet fatigue is actually a little lower because you fed me some food. Tomorrow I'm back on the diet. I'm making even better gains than if I didn't have that cheeseburger. I was so exhausted." And so a lot of people have that approach completely backwards. And they're like, "I'm either good or I'm bad." And and that's really tough.

Another one is people think that the approach to lose weight is the same as the approach to maintain it. Um, this is really, really, really nasty because so my wife is a, uh, board-certified, uh, Family Med Sports Med doctor. And she does a lot of work, international Olympic teams, all that stuff. And she is looking at these formal recommendations from the medical literature and it's like, "Here's the kind of diet you need to get to lose weight." And then she was like, she followed up with some of the professionals and she's like, "And so what about maintenance?" And they're like, "Uh, yep." "What do you mean, yep? What are you talking about?" That's not the conversation. So people think, "Okay, I'm going to clean up my diet. No more ice cream, no more, no more crisps, no more Cheetos. I'm gonna eat super healthy." And then when I get to the weight that I want, I eat continuously super healthy, never have ice cream again. What kind of bizarre world is it? And so they'll flop back to the other one. Well, they'll try for a few months after they've gotten to the weight they like to just eat completely super healthy, clean, everything like that. They lose a little bit more weight, they're exhausted, they're tired, they're food-focused, it's driving them nuts. They'll eat some ice cream and they'll go, "I'm a sinner." And then ice cream, ice cream, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, up they go. And then they regain all the weight. So a huge myth is the fact that, yeah, when you're, you're losing weight, you got to pay a little bit more attention to what you eat. But once you've gotten to that weight, you both need some time. Roughly every three months that you diet hard to lose weight, you should be taking about at least two months at maintenance, just maintaining it. So if you weigh 100 kilos, I'm down to 90 after three months, for about two or three months, just stay at 90. Eat mostly the healthy stuff that you were, but throw a little junk in there. Maintenance again is much easier than losing. When physiologically and psychologically, your diet fatigue comes down after those two or three months, you're able, if you'd like, to start dieting really hard again to get to that next goal that you have, or you just live in balance for the rest. But if we tell you like, "Here's your diet to make you lean and healthy," and you're like, "Okay, how long do I have to do this?" And the doctor's like, "Forever." "What, what am I supposed to do? I'm never, I'm never allowed to have tiramisu after dinner ever again?" I'm like, "Well, probably not to that." That's terrible advice. And not only do medical people too often say that, most people have that in their heads, and it's, it's a very, very untenable situation.

One of the big sort of narratives that I was exposed to for most of my life about weight loss is that 80% of its diet. What do you think about those ratios? How much of weight loss is determined by diet versus exercise? Yeah, diet has a bigger effect than exercise. As a heuristic, I'm very comfortable with 80/20. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is there's a constrained energy hypothesis. It's also called the Pono Paradox, based on Herman Pono's work in physical anthropology. And so basically, they realize that the amount of physical activity that humans can do has a range. But if you try to get people to like, double their physical activity, you say, "I'm not going to change my diet. I'm gonna work out twice as much as the next guy." Your body becomes so fatigued so rapidly, and your metabolism adjusts itself, your physical activity that's not planned exercise, like how much do you get up when someone calls you? Are you still on the couch talking to them? Or how much do you get up and walk around your kitchen a bunch? Your body makes all these adjustments. So if you try to really outwork a bad diet, it doesn't work. And usually, you just come back to the same physical activity because you're too exhausted to continue. And then you failed. Whereas with diet, you can make some dietary changes, principle-based, like stop eating junk food every day and just eat two pieces of junk food on Friday and two pieces of junk food on Saturday. Just that alone is sustainable. Your body, as long as these are filling foods, a lot of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, you're not hungry. You're just like, "Damn it, I want a bag of chips." That's not a reason. That is mostly psychological. It's not physiological. And thus dieting is just able to take bigger chunks out of your calorie balance equation without completely destroying it. That has limits as well. You can't diet it forever. So you have to take it in chunks.

Another thing is this, in order to burn a lot of calories to lose a lot of weight, you got to do some serious work. The average person will burn something like 100 to 150 calories per mile run. Oh my God. You start thinking about it like a donut has 300 calories. How fast, Stephen, can you eat a donut? Five seconds. Five? No problem. Boom. You're going to run three miles after each donut? It's insane. So taking your diet, cleaning it up, reducing the junk, reducing the calories is not that hard. But if you try to fight off the nasty extra junk food calories you're taking in with exercise, it's kind of like a three-to-one fight. You, you eat two donuts at your work function. After work, you got six miles to run that day. Nobody doing that. And that's why diet is such a huge factor. It's so easy to do, quote unquote, damage with it, and it's much easier to take control of it versus exercise. The boundary layers are just smaller. And what you would have to do to fight the bad diet is just grotesquely large and outside of those boundary layers.

I think this a lot because I think people typically assume that the way to lose weight is to go do a run. Yeah, that's typically, you know, you'll see people in the gym, and if you ask someone why they're on the running machine, they'll probably say, "I'm trying to lose some weight." Yeah, it helps a little bit. But if you run and you burn 200 calories extra per day, three days per week, then it's 600 extra calories you're burning through the week. That's good stuff. You can lose some decent weight like that. Are you just going to be more hungry though afterwards? Typically, exercise does not dependably increase your hunger in most people. So, uh, uh, depending on the context and the individual, it's not a dependable thing to say that doing more exercise necessarily makes you more hungry, which is kind of cool. Because usually you're not really any more hungry. And if you stick consistently exercise, but you control your diet, you're good to go. However, is there a psychological component to that where because I've done the run, I now feel like I deserve it? Oh yeah, that's huge. And some people do have a hunger response. But what you put in your body after that could be really healthy stuff that doesn't have a ton of calories, is really filling, or it could be like, "We're done running. Pizza and beer." And then that's really bad news. But real quick, so let's say you're burning 600 calories extra per week by running two miles at a time or whatever, or whatever you run an extra four miles per week, right? 600 calories per week. Okay, what is that? Well, to burn a pound of body fat, you need to get 3,500 calories per week out of your diet or do 3,500 extra calories of activity per week. 600s a drop in the bucket to that. You'll never notice. I mean, yeah, after a year, you'll lose like two or three pounds or five pounds or whatever. Nobody thinks in terms like that. But if they were to simply alter their diet and keep training to keep the calorie burn at a moderate to high level, but take food out of their diet, especially through junk food, the total calorie deficit they can make for themselves is now in the hundreds of calories per day. Now you're losing a pound of fat every week. Now you're having big results.

Is there a preference between doing cardio or strength as it relates to long-term weight loss? Because I'm thinking if I've got more muscles, then surely my body's going to need more, it's going to burn more calories just by a small margin, almost unnoticeable. So your, your body versus my body, you're not burning more calories. I, how much do you weigh? Uh, 90. I don't even know it in pounds. It's about 92 kilograms. Okay, solid. So I currently weigh, which about 98 kilograms, 202 pounds. So 202. So I weigh like 216 to 220 right now. So we weigh not too far off. You, not too far off. So even though I have considerably more muscle, in your opinion, my, in my very biased opinion, that, um, no dysmorphia here, uh, I would be burning a teeny bit more fat or more calories per day because of my higher muscle mass. But it's mostly my absolutely higher weight. So for example, the people in the world that burn the most calories and need the most calories to sustain their body weight are the fattest people in the world. That, like, lady that weighs 800, 900, 1,000 pounds, like, just to keep her the same size, it's 15,000 calories a day. W. And if it was all muscle and no fat, somehow she was a 1,000 pounds of muscle, which would be sweet to look at, she would be burning like maybe 6, 16,000 calories per day instead of 15. And probably even that's an exaggeration. Muscle mass doesn't help you burn tons of calories. That's not what it's there for. It is incredibly good for your health. It is incredibly good for how you look. Those things by itself make muscle mass an awesome thing to do. But it is neither true to say that cardio reliably over the long term burns lots of weight off, and it is not true to say that gaining lots of muscle burns lots of weight off. What is really, really critical is do you have a well-controlled, nutritious diet? And do you have an average, moderate to high level of daily physical activity? Dancing and swimming and running and having fun and chasing your kids. If you're on the higher end of activity, not psychotically high to where you get super tired, just not being a total slouch, and making sure you're aware of your body when your diet, that's what really pays these massive dividends in long-term weight control. It's not like if I put on a ton of muscle, that's great for everything else. It makes you super healthy. It makes you look really awesome. It gives you the ability to like, I don't know, like do real-world stuff, defend yourself, things like that. That's what muscle is there for. It's not the greatest like calorie sink in the world. I wish it was. I'd beat cheeseburger right now.

So in terms of supplements, are there any supplements you suggest that I take if my goal is to lose weight but also to gain muscle mass? For the average person, no. There's no supplements. I mean, creatine. Creatine will not help with weight loss. And for most people, it'll temporarily gain you about two kilos of body weight because it attracts body water into the muscle. It's a cool look because it makes. I'm on creatine right now. Can you tell? Mhm. Yeah, really. All right. So creatine doesn't help you lose weight in any meaningful extent. So I'm aware of no over-the-counter supplements that simultaneously help you burn fat and gain muscle. There are supplements that are not over the counter that do that quite well. But what, what if I'm just trying to gain muscle? Then what supplements, what supplements would you recommend the average person to be taking? Really, regardless of, I guess, goals, if their goal is to be a little bit more lean with their muscle mass, if their goal is to build muscle, is it different types of supplements you'd suggest? Or creatine works to build muscle. It's got awesome cognitive benefits. It's just healthy for you and it's great. So five grams per day for most people of creatine monohydrate, super awesome. Have you got to load creatine? I remember when I used to load creatine. That's basically like a corporate scam that's just trying to get you to consume more creatine so you buy it more. Yeah. After, if you load your creatine, which is like taking 20 grams per day for a few days, you get to intramuscular creatine stores that are optimal like in four or five days. If you don't load creatine, you get there in like seven to 10 days. Because you're taking creatine either for months or for life, it's just a moot point. So creatine loading is a gigantic waste of time in almost every case. Okay. So creatine works. Whey protein, casein protein can be an excellent way to conveniently get protein. So they're more like foods rather than supplements. Those are totally cool, but not mandatory. If you talk to me like you are now for just several hours at a time, let's say we're sitting on a plane together and you're like, "I'm just a guy who's trying to get like a little bit more this, a little that, what supplements do I need to take?" Is the wrong time to ask that. The time to ask that is like, "I want to take a run at a natural bodybuilding show. What supplements do I need?" Okay, then they pay some dividends that are worth noting. But supplements are just not in the conversation for important things that health-conscious people should have in even in their top 10 of important things to do. The top 10 important things are like getting adequate sleep, managing your stress really well, consistently lifting weights, consistently doing a high level of physical activity, etc., etc., etc. Those are the big rocks, not supplements. Supplements are insanely overrated as a general rule.

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What about steroids? They're great. What am I allowed to say? That what, what, what are steroids? And you, you take steroids? Mhm. Um, do you take steroids all the time? And mhm. What is the impact? So say if you weren't taking steroids, how different would you look? I know this because I, I used to not take steroids. And when I wasn't taking steroids, I, uh, weighed about, at at a body fat similar to this, uh, I would have to weigh probably 180 to 190 pounds. More like 180. And at this kind of body fat level, I currently weigh, uh, 216 pounds because I'm on a moderate amount of steroids. A few weeks ago, actually earlier last week, I was on higher amounts of steroids. And with the same level of body fat, I weighed 227 pounds. So we're talking about 30, 40 pounds of muscle tissue difference between steroids and not steroids. Have you got a picture of before and after? Before when you didn't use steroids and you trained, and then after? Yeah, it's got to be somewhere. We'll try and get it. Just, just for visual context. Sure, sure, sure. You said they're great. I was kidding. Oh, right. They're great for putting on muscle if you want to jettison your long-term health and longevity to some extent, yes. And your current psychological stuff. As someone that's never done it, give me a window into what you do. You inject it somewhere? You can take steroids orally through pills or you can inject it into muscle. So, uh, usually you would inject it into your quads. A lot of people do their shoulders, and some people, if they're flexible enough, do their glutes.

And how quickly do you notice a difference? And how big is the the difference? Just to give me sort of like your, as far as jackness is concerned. Yeah. So if I start taking steroids now, yeah, how, how long would it be before I notice the difference? And how extreme would the difference be in your opinion, visually? After a few months, he would be like, "Oh wow, okay, this is some other [ __ ]." After after a week or two, you'd be like, "I don't know, my workouts feel pretty good." Psychologically, if you're especially introspective and perceptive, and you're sensitive to the psychological side effects, which I'm greatly sensitive to, um, I notice in 30 minutes of taking steroids. And would I, if I did the same exact workout but took steroids, would I get different results? Or would I have to ramp up the workout that I'm doing to see those different results? Both. Okay. If you have the same workout and you take plenty of steroids, you can literally double your muscle gain from that workout. If you understand that steroids also allow you to recover faster and better and more completely, you can take your workout and magnify it, more sets, etc., more sessions per week, and then you would grow like two and a half times as much muscle. Sounds exciting, but there's always a downside for these.

Things in life, isn't there? There are a few downsides, yes. What are the downsides that no one's talking about? That no one's talking about.

So, there's cosmetic downsides. You get an increase in body hair growth. This is especially profound if you're female, but if you're a male, that's a thing. I have hair that grows on my ears. I have hair that grows on the outside of my nose. I have to shave the front of my nose now. A lot of that's just being a Russian Jew and this hair just grows out of our eyeballs, but [ __ ] happens. You get pimples, you get stuff like that.

Over the longer term, you get a substantially increased risk of heart disease. If you're smart, you take blood pressure drugs to counteract the blood pressure increase. If if you're dumb, you take it on the chin and you have a high probability, much higher, of kidney failure later in your life and losing your limbs and your vision and all that good stuff that comes with that. There is an increased probability or severity of cancer. Uh, steroids increase the probability of damn near every disease, kind of central systemic disease that you can have. But that usually happens much later. And so, while you're on them, you deal with the cosmetic side effects, increased probability of balding, uh, and the psychological side effects, which are highly unpleasant. I can get into in a bit.

If you're a teenager, there's an entire class of steroids that close your growth plates early. So, if you're under the age of definitely 22 as a male and you take steroids, there's a very good chance you will never reach the adult height you were supposed to reach if you just let nature do the thing. So, when teenagers take steroids, I this almost always categorically a super, super terrible idea. Also, they're not intelligent enough, uh, yet. Some teenagers are very smart, they're not wise enough yet to be able to make that trade-off appropriately. M-hm. And so that's a huge sort of different topic. But, um, the psychological side effects are a lot of times the things that are the approximately most displeasing part of taking steroids.

Some people like them, but they're they're also a mixed bag. Tell me about the, before we get on to the psychological effects, what about libido? Because I've heard all kinds of things. I've heard it shrinks your balls, your willie. Something like half of all people will experience testicular shrinkage while using steroids. Your boy got lucky, my [ __ ]'s all the same size. A lot of people, roughly half, will experience a decrease in ejaculate volume and a profound decrease in fertility. That does not mean you're not infertile. I know many people, I know many people's children that were fathered when the people were on steroid. So some people are like, "Ah, I'm on gear, I could just bang away and nothing happens." Like, that's not true. Uh, steroids have never been shown to, uh, change the size of your willie. Uh, there is no mechanism by which really they can do that. Um, so that's not a problem.

But steroids, depending on the steroids you take, depending on your own individual biology, depending on the ancillary drugs that you take along with it, uh, steroids can either have no real effect on your libido, have a profoundly upregulating effect on libido, or like hunger, like you would not believe. And for other people, you get, um, an increase in libido. But some steroids, for example, Deca Durabolin, and some people, it's a type of steroid, radically escalates your libido. You turn in just as hungry and at the same time gives you in many cases, dependable, um, uh, inability to, uh, sustain an erection. So erectile dysfunction risk goes up a lot. That's a real big problem because like, you want it, but it's not around. It's not around for the picking there. So there's all that kind of stuff plays plays a huge role.

And a lot of the other side effects are increases in anxiety, increases in aggression, um, increases in disagreeableness and probability of confrontation. Steroids have been shown decently well, this isn't super confirmed, to at least proximately while you're taking them, substantially reduce your fluid intelligence. And, uh, they may in the long term reduce your overall intelligence. But it seems that if you stop taking them, you get most, if not all of that back. But maybe not all of them. So they do make you dumber. As a, as a general heuristic, that's probably true.

Of those psychological implications, which ones have you suffered with the most? Decrease in fluid intelligence, for sure. Radical increases in anxiety, radical increases in aggression. Um, I pride myself on never losing my cool. I've never screamed at anyone. I've never gotten physical with anyone. But the ideas in my head that tell me to do things, tell me to do unspeakable things. Like, what? They're unspeakable. I'd have to speak them. You really want to know? M-hm. Um, I'm also [ __ ] weird. So just remember that. No, we're all a bit weird. Most people, uh, probably don't have this severity. But I'll read a comment on social media directed at me, I guess, about me, um, and it's from like, you know, nameless, faceless profile. And I begin to fantasize about what it would be like and how much sublime pleasure I would receive in, uh, hurting that person at a deep physical and emotional level, badly hurting them in such a way that they're never going to walk right again, and they're always going to remember me and how they dared to cross me.

Do you know what honor culture is? No. Like the idea that like in the hood, you step on someone's, like a gang member's Nikes, and he just blasts you away and goes to jail for 20 years over what? Steroids? The honor culture comes from maleness, it comes from testosterone, and all brain structures, of course. But the more testosterone and steroids are all testosterone-like molecules, if you have 10 times the testosterone-like action affecting your brain, your proclivity to falling into honor culture, like behavioral patterns and thought patterns increases to an enormous extent. So tend to take things that are not meant in any poor way as affronts. If they're actually meant as affronts, you tend to catastrophize them in your head. And like, this is the thing. Like, I'll be brushing my teeth in the morning, in the shower, and like thinking about people in my life that have wronged me. I've never been wronged in any real serious way. And I'll just be like, those uncontrollable fantasies of rage and aggression and righteous anger and revenge. I hate that. Like, as a philosophical-minded person, I just want to hug everyone in the world right now. I'm on not so high levels of steroids. I'm just, man, I make jokes with everyone. I'll start a conversation with random people in the street, no problem. And so when these thoughts consistently enter my mind on higher doses, I'm just like, "Oh, why?" And I'm never like, "I should be feeling like this." I'm like, "This is really annoying and really terrible."

So, if there are all of these physiological and psychological implications, which, you know, you said it basically increases your chances with all of the major diseases, from cardiovascular diseases to cancers to, um, other diseases, but then also there's this ongoing psychological consequence of taking steroids, what's the point?

That's a good question. Recently, I've taken a probably several year backseat away from competitive bodybuilding precisely because I have a lot of good things going on in my life and I'm going to need my brain and my, um, more fluid civility to deal with them best. Uh, and for a couple of other reasons. So, right now is an interesting time to ask me why I do it because I'm kind of like winding that down, big time. But, um, the real reason is, uh, one of the reasons that I started steroids is I was drug-free for a long time and I was starting to become kind of an educator in fitness, a promulgator of opinion. And a lot of the people who were in the industry at the time, this is not as true anymore now, drug-free bodybuilding and fitness is exploding, which is a beautiful, wonderful thing. But back when Nick and I came up to be relevant in the fitness industry, you sort of had to be like super, super jacked and super, super lean. It's nothing we were going to accomplish drug-free. So we were like, "This is where the road leads to being taken seriously as a, a thinker in the space. Let's do it."

Another thing is, um, I really like, like being, or at least for a long time liked being enormous and ripped. Why? And, um, just like a, like, you ever see how a four-year-old looks at, like, a garbage truck or a tank or an airplane? Like, just that. Why? It's as simple as that biology. And I'm at the extreme end of masculinity, brain-wise, to begin with. And so you see a movie where, like, the Hulk rips off an airplane wing and throws it. Some people be like, "Whoa." Some people are like, "I hate this movie." And some people are like, "Oh my God, I want to just be that." That whole thing. Why? I want that. It just feels good.

But you know why? Because have you got any hypothesis as to why? Why you versus someone else? Because the average person doesn't have that feeling. So have you, have you been able to figure out in hindsight why you were so taken by being big?

I have a few ideas. I'll, I'll, I'll caveat this idea with the following, um, retrospective analysis of why we do things is almost always grotesquely flawed. Most of why we do things is a combination of variables we don't understand and genetics. And so, like, the whole life story arc, "Well, it all started when a teacher in the third grade." Like, that's [ __ ] that's a backwards justification you made up. So the following statements are backwards justifications I'm making up as just tentative, very, not, not sure hypotheses. Um, here's a fun story. This will be fun. Um, when I was, uh, small, uh, young, my dad would wrestle with me a lot. And, um, he would always, uh, let me win in the end. He was great, he's a great person. And he would always tell me that I was strong and capable. And then, uh, in like, end of elementary school all the way through the beginning of high school, I was bullied. Honestly, like, literally a few times. I think I was just the wrong person to bully because that very temporary state of disenfranchisement and powerlessness, um, I'm never going to be bullied again, to put it simply. I wish I was logical enough that when, like, if I was getting robbed by someone at knife point, or not even knife point, just like, just a guy tried to be like, "Hey man, get out of my way." No, I said, "Get out of my way. I'm going to die here before I move out of your way. You either going to treat me with respect, or one of us is either going to jail or the morgue or the hospital." M-hm. It's a terrible thing to think. It's stupid beyond belief. Just be like, "Sir, my apologies, please keep going."

But what were you bullied for? Nothing. Nothing. Just kid, just wanted to bully people. We want to understand the con, what was going through your brain at the time? Like, what you were thinking in that moment? Because I think we can all think back to, well, too unfortunately, too many people can think back to a time when they were bullied in some way, whether it was a day or whether it was something that was a bit more prolonged, you know, and it be, and they started to, it started to embody that sort of pain and shame and that feeling of, "I'm different from these other kids." Some of my best friends have talked, you know, they've been to therapy and their therapists have, I think, figured out through some of that retrospective analysis, which obviously a lot of the time isn't accurate, that much of their adult behavior today correlates back to an early experience in such a way where they were made to feel a certain way in that social environment where we're so sort of formative. Yeah.

How did it make you feel? I felt scared and I felt like I, um, wasn't brave enough to stand up for myself. Later, I began standing up for myself, and that felt very nice. But it, I felt like I was out of control. And a part of my brain that I didn't consent to made me frown and dipped my head down for me. It was almost like musculature and my neck just deactivated. It's an ancestral, uh, mechanism that everyone has. Kids all the way up through teenagehood and adulthood sort themselves, male children, into dominance hierarchies. It's just the dominance hierarchy sorting itself. And someone confronted me, and I automatically sorted myself beneath them. I felt beneath someone. I felt weaker, more inferior, less apt, less capable, less confident, less strong. And I didn't even have consent to it. It's not something I chose. I was a, "Go, this kid will beat me up, I better not." It was totally, uh, a subconscious behavior. And looking back on it, I did not enjoy how that made me feel.

Do you remember a specific day where a specific thing happened? Because I can think back to a spe, a couple of specific days when I was younger that I think shaped me in that regard. Where I was pretty much the only black person in the school. I remember an evening where this particular kid called Sam had like cornered me and called me the N-word, and everyone was there. And, you know, I'll never forget those days. They're like etched into your mind as, you know, unforgettable memories of pain, of shame, of that, that feeling. M-hm. Do, do you have those? A particular day?

Yeah, sure. Could you share that with me? This is getting deep, huh? Um, I have a, a few incidents. One probably stands out the most. So it was a kid named Darren, and he was black, um, almost certainly fatherless, um, preternaturally physically developed for his age. He was 10, so was I. We were just wrestling. I wrestled with everyone. He beat me in wrestling. He was the only person, I believe, to beat me in wrestling my whole childhood, cuz like, he was like a 14-year-old kid in great shape, and I was a 10-year-old kid. And he beat me in wrestling. And that was cordial, cuz like, it just is wrestling. But he had braces, I think, and he cut himself while wrestling with me, and he was bleeding out of his mouth. And then he got really upset about that, and he like, kind of stood over me, and he was like, like, "You know, you little this and that, like, you did this to me, like, I'm going to [ __ ] you up," and all this other stuff. And that's when that mechanism switched. When he did that to me, my whole perspective on the world changed. For years, I was like a confident, happy kid. And then after that, for four or five years, maybe longer, all of my confidence drained out. I became introverted. I am not naturally introverted. And, um, that his presence alone, uh, reminded me that I need to keep my head down, or else I get real scared. And I didn't want to be scared. And so that's how that worked. And it wasn't like he got something like, "Your [ __ ] is racial." That's deep, bro. My [ __ ]'s not deep at all. It's just two kids, and one of them punked it out. I was just the wrong person for that to happen to. And I remember fantasizing when I was in like sixth grade, I think, like a year later, like, "Wouldn't it be great if I brought a baseball bat to school and just broke his legs and just kept hitting his legs to where he'd never walk right ever again, 'cause he wronged me that bad?" I felt that deep and true.

I'm going to keep the statement as contextual as I can with full understanding of respect for the gravity of what I'm seeing. When the Coline people did what they did, I thought it was egregious and terrible. I also understood how you could be pushed to do that. Now, in their particular case, I don't even know how they were pushed or whatever. But enough bullying makes you consider doing terrible things to regain your honor. And so that was probably like the most pertinent. I was bullied in other situations. Again, like, I might have been bullied three or four times my whole life, but it just, it just did not sit well with me at all for a long time. It changed how I expressed myself to the world. And even right now, as I talk to you, I'm getting pretty emotional. I say, like, if I see that guy again in real life, if he's even around, I have a brown belt in Jiu-Jitsu now. I'm almost certainly bigger and stronger than him. Is he safe around me? Probably. Can I guarantee his safety? If he brings it up, no. If he watches this and hits me up and goes, "Hi, I got you, little [ __ ]." If I see him in real life, I might take something from him. Medical science can't give him back within the next five or 10 years. What a terrible idea. I'd go to jail. I have a lot of really good things going for me. It would be wrong in every single way. It wouldn't even be ethical because he never, like, beat the crap out of me or anything like that. It was that, like, he brutalized me. And my God, like, I'm going to [ __ ] someone over some [ __ ] childhood. He also, Steph, he was 10. The gravity of how deeply it feels to me, even right now at age 40, he, like, man, yeah, that [ __ ] definitely meant something.

It's interesting because, um, I think for the first, I'm 31 now, so I think for the first 27 years of my life, if you'd asked me why I do what I do, I would have, in hindsight, probably told you a story that sounds a little bit heroic. I have this drive and I have this motivation and I had this goal and I went after it and it was all like self-agency and all that stuff. But the more and more I've learned about, I think, psychology generally and how humans, as I often say, are sometimes driven and they're dragged, and it's hard to tell the difference. M-hm. Like whether something is drive or whether it's like you're being dragged. M-hm. Compulsion, like compulsion that you just can't explain, because of maybe a trauma or an experience you went through, or maybe the household you grew up in. I think I'm, I'm leaning more now towards the dragged side of things in most areas of my life, especially where I exhibit atypical behavior. Like what? Like, for the fact that I work like seven days a week and I can just, and I'm, I've always been absolutely obsessed with like achievement and success. So why do you think that is? Because I think I grew up in a context where the thing that invalidated me was that like, we were the poor family that didn't have things, and I was black in an all-white area. Um, and I was just full of shame growing up. And I think I saw the, the medicine to the, to the shame as being material success. It was the thing that I lied, cheated, and stole to try and achieve. And, you know, it's been my orientation for my whole life. I think deep within me is this, this story that success and material success and all those things make me enough. M-hm. And I, I didn't feel like, inside. Yeah. And I didn't feel like I was enough. And as much as I'm aware of that now, it doesn't mean that it's going to stop.

Did it, so it didn't, do you feel like you're enough? Well, it's interesting because if you ask me, "Do I feel like I'm enough?" I'd say yes. Like, I'm very comfortable with who I am. Like, I think I have somewhat of an accurate reflection of, of who I am to some degree. But I'm, but then I also, I contrast that with the fact that why am I still just like obsessively driving towards these ever bigger goals in a way that's really, really atypical, like, not average person, you know? And why does it matter so much to me? You know, that's where I go, "Okay, there's something different in my wiring." It's still an element, this sort of proving my worth to myself, or, you know, proving to the kids back on the playground that, you know, they should respect me in some way or whatever. Yeah. And it's complicated. And I say this not because it sounds, makes me sound great, because it certainly doesn't. I just say it because I really believe that the more honest I can be with myself, the closer I can get to everything that I want. Oh, sure. You know, like the closer I can get to holding the steering wheel, not being dragged with a rope at the back of the car. I'm trying to hold this steering wheel in my life. And that starts with, like, an honest self-self-awareness. And one that honestly has only come from, uh, being more and more confident and caring less about what people think. I wouldn't have said this on camera. There's like millions of people probably listening right now. I wouldn't have said these things about myself. It sounds icky. Oh, I've never told this bullying story to anyone but a few people. I was like, when you brought it up, like, "Tell me about when you were bullied." In my head, I was like, "Holy [ __ ], all right, like, this is where this goes."

Well, I just think it's everyone I've met. It's not, you're not, you're the same as everyone I've met in that regard. Probably. If I had to write that fake backstory arc explaining my life, the bullying thing is like, kind of a little bit minor. I have a really gnarly story about having really severe attention deficit disorder when I was younger, while at the same time growing up in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. For Ashkenazi Jewish Russian immigrants to the US, you were either good at school or you were worthless. And it's not just my parents thought that. They didn't really think that at a deep level. They didn't believe it at a surface level. I thought that. You can't make fun of someone for being fat if they're cool with being fat. They're like, "Yeah, I'm [ __ ] big, hell yeah." And you're like, "It didn't work." But if they believe that being fat is terrible, you can be like, "Hey, uh, how much do you weigh?" And that's it. Everything changes. So for me, I believed I had a destiny to be at least competent at school. And up until I was 14, I was like, in contention for being the worst student at any single school I attended at any single time. And the bittersweet element was, my dad is a PhD in mathematical modeling of atmospheric physical phenomena, and my mom was a translator of the Russian language, or translator English to Russian, and got a master's degree in social work in our second language in America a few years after we got in. That's the legacy I'm dealing with. And like, I can't do math problems three grades younger than the kids I, I got held back in school a grade. And so I took that not so well. And so later, because I was medicated, uh, for attention deficit, it was a revelatory experience as I came up and sort of grew into the idea that I was actually fairly intelligent. Um, I had something to prove. And it's getting better now because I've taken enough IQ tests, and you can only write so many books and be on so many podcasts until people are like, "You're pretty smart." And you, you got to start believing it unless you're totally irrational. At some point, that sinks in.

So one thing I will say is, is there are ways of dealing with demons and insufficiencies that you've developed through your childhood. Some of them are just having a real deep personal journey in your own head, consistently reinforcing good attitudes, not reinforcing the bad ones. Others are talking to friends, family. Other ones are therapy, which is excellent for this. But I got to tell you, Stephen, I'm not sure if this is true, but there's got to be something to proving the opposite is true through to doing it all, to getting, I don't know, the top or whatever. But to like, no one in the right mind, with this point, be like, "This guy is below average intelligence." That would be preposterous to say. I've, uh, taken the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices test and I pegged at scale high. So I get every single question right. And so my IQ is above 160. We don't know how high because they don't do standardized IQ tests above that. You do that enough times, you enough PhD programs, enough books, enough teaching awards, enough authorship, enough all the stuff, enough millions and app designs and all the stuff, and dealing with otherwise really smart people, and they walk away being like, "[ __ ] that guy's real smart." Enough of that makes you swim in a warm, comfortable sea that heals you in a way that maybe therapy can. But goddamn, there's something to just doing the [ __ ] thing. You take a skinny little kid who's bullied, you make a Muhammad Ali, champion of the world, enough title fights later, you're like, "Hey, Muhammad Ali, what you going to do about this?" He doesn't even flinch. Come at me. So yeah, it's nice to say, and I think it's true that therapy and self-care and all these things can heal the soul. There's something about overcoming and becoming superlative to that thing you used to fear that might heal your soul to a huge extent. I think maybe I've witnessed that. Again, maybe this is all just make-belief. It sounds real nice.

No, I completely agree. And it's perfectly what I've experienced in my own life. And as you were speaking, I was thinking, it's just so clear to me that when you're young, you get evidence. You get like a stack of evidence about who you are and what the world is. And what you then have done for the next 10, 20, 30 years is to counteract that evidence with new evidence. I think about it like a library. I think everything that I went through and you went through when you were younger just added like one book to this shelf. And the interesting context of the library is, those books are both informative, they're both, you know, non-fiction books, but they're also fiction books, and they're also instruction manuals for what you'll do in the future. If you think about those first 18 years of your life, what you did is you filled this library full of in books, stories, self-stories. And this library that you've you've collected is just a bunch of stories that you believe about yourself. Now, if you want to change some of these stories, unfortunately, you have to get new books. Yes. So what you did in your life is you pursued, um, hard things that would put new books on the shelf. And when a new book comes on the shelf that counteracts another one, you have to take the old one off. But you can't, you can't just sit around willing it. It's, as you say, as an, I've experienced in my life, the only way I can put books up there is to go and get first-party evidence with my own eyes that something else is true. And not just once, over and over, depending on how stubborn the existing. For sure. And if they're real stubborn.

Here's my question to you. Do you think that childhood experiences build the kind of books that are hardback, Lord of the Rings type of [ __ ]? Whereas adult experiences that completely countervail a childhood experiences are like little magazines you read on a plane?

I got so in the analogy, when you're a child, you put books on the shelf very quickly. They, they're all very cheap books because there's nothing on the shelf. So you're just grabbing, "Your mom says, uh, pigs can fly." On the shelf. As you get older, actually, because there's so many books on the shelf already, and so if I just focus on this analogy of pigs flying, there's already a book about aviation on the shelf. M-hm. Which means it's harder to believe that pigs can fly. There's a book already about animals and their anatomy. So you can't add a new one because there's so many counteracting ones already. So this is why they often say that young kids adopt, you know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks because there's so much existing evidence there of something else being true. So kids throw them on the shelf without much interrogation because there's less counteracting books there already. Whereas adults, they take a little bit more time to add a new one because they've got six other books which might tell a different story. Yeah. And so this is, you know, we think about neuroscience and neuroplasticity, it becomes a little bit harder sometimes for adults to, I mean, I had a neuroscientist here yesterday saying this to me, that it becomes after you get to past 25 years old, neuroplasticity becomes a little bit more stubborn. It's still possible up until you die, but it's a little bit more stubborn. So you just need more reinforcement. You need more reinforcement, more evidence, more repetitions. And he, he described it as more focus. More focus on the thing.

One thing that I found maybe is helpful is my, my wife is similar to me. She's like an insane, super goal-driven, psychotic person. And we have real trouble taking a step back and telling ourselves, like, "Man, we're doing pretty well." So every now and again, like evenings and weekends, especially weekends, we'll do some, like, sounds super lame, but gratefulness, uh, discussion. Lame at all, depending on who you talk to, I guess. To my old childhood bullies, that's lame. But, you know, it's really weird to say some of these things out loud to yourself. And there's some resistance, especially early, admitting to yourself, like, uh, "I won. I won. I won. I won. I did the thing." Maybe it doesn't work quite that simply, but I think it's good to try. Because it's a really weird thing to go and be 60 years old and look back on your life and someone's like, "So, what have you accomplished?" Like, "Ah, not much." It kind of ain't [ __ ]. Like, "I've seen you on book covers." Right. Oh, that's right. Okay. So I accomplished a lot, but I don't feel like I have. How dare you rob yourself of being able to sit in that beautiful, warm sea of self-actualization? I think it's worth it for people to focus. When you do good, let yourself bask in that glow. Get your time under the sun. Amen.

And it's all about subjective progress. It's all about like this. I was going to do a post last night. I was thinking, like, so many people spend their lives. I was just, I was scrolling through Instagram and I was, I wrote the post and I just didn't post it. But so I noticed that so many people go through their lives like looking for an enemy, like looking for the person or the system or the government or the political party that's currently wronging them. And they commit their whole life to just this, this focus of, "Who's wronging me? And I need to point them out and call them out and scream at them." And I've never, I've never fallen into that trap. But, um, I do have a competition with myself. And I feel like that's very healthy because what I'm actually looking for in myself is some form of progress. Whether it's how I show up, or with my, my fitness, or with my muscles, or whatever. This constant, um, search for progress in myself. And there, when I do discover progress, I can celebrate it and I can have that gratitude we talked about. And so anyone's progress, whether it's when I went from being a university dropout to getting my first investor, that is like, "Oh my God." And it's only in hindsight and with some aging wisdom that I start to realize that those moments were so unbelievably important. They're so motivational. Identifying your progress. And I've done, there's two kind of data points that I've really, um, shed a light on this for me. One of them was Sir David Brailsford, who took the British cycling team from being down and out and depressed to the greatest team of all time, winning all the gold medals. And he said, "Yes, the marginal gains thing that he's known for, that's in the front chapter of Atomic Habits, was key." But actually, he said to me, he went, "When you can get a group of people or a person to feel like they're going somewhere because they have a sense of progress, he, that's what made us stay in the bike shop till 2:00 AM in the morning." And I read another study from Harvard Business Review where they asked people in their, to keep work diaries. And then at the end of the study, they said, "Point at the day where you had your best day in work." And people always pointed in their work diaries to a day where there was a feeling of subjective progress, even small. Yes. And that makes you motivated. You feel like you are going somewhere, which means you, you're more likely to do it. So gratitude serves a happiness, um, role, but also just a motivational one.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that has been left for you. Oh, crap. What is the most meaningful dream (brackets nightmare) you've ever had and why?

I don't know if this is the most meaningful dream, um, but Jesus Christ, I'm really going to say this. Fine. [Music] Um, as I was, when I was a young adult, I was starting to experience success with the opposite sex. And I just did not ever experience that when I was younger, or already of age, but younger. It's just probably like a bit of a hang-up, you know, for most people. It's kind of like when you're not getting and you feel kind of out of it. And when I started experiencing success with women, my dreams at night changed. And one of them was, uh, go, the following dream has nothing to do with females and sex, but it had to do with power. And it had to do with, um, an ability that you can. I ran out of my childhood home into the street. And, um, I, uh, it wasn't the street anymore, it was just a black empty void. And it became a lucid dream. So I kind of knew a little bit that it was a dream. It was like, "Oh, I'm going to do cool Dragon Ball Z stuff." You know what Dragon Ball Z is? The anime show. And I opened up my hand and I wanted to make a fireball. And I made an energy ball that was like a singular size, but it was made of people's screams. It was like, and then I woke up and I was like, "That was so cool." Not victim screams, just Viking screams. And I was like, "That is the coolest [ __ ]." And I had multiple other dreams in my young adult life after success as a woman, which were dreams of power. And I was like, "God damn, if I can have those dreams every night, I'll be super happy."

That's the most, uh, interesting dream I've ever heard about. Following someone losing their virginity. I didn't say I lost my. Get out of here. I still haven't lost my virginity. I've been a good person. Dr. Mike, thank you so much for your, your wisdom and your, um, your information and all the work that you've done in your life because it's formed a wonderfully important perspective on a subject that so many people struggle with. I'm going to ask you, I'm going to leave you with my, my last question, which is, what is the most important thing that we didn't talk about today as it relates to the subject matter of getting in shape, building muscle, that we should have talked about? Is there anything we left off the table?

There's a lot to this. So we left a lot out. Um, I have a lot more to say about body dysmorphia and how people do relate to their bodies and how they maybe shouldn't or try to weave their thoughts away from various ideas and how maybe they should try to relate to their bodies better. And it's a conversation I love to have. I just don't ever get asked about it super often. So I think that in, in body dysmorphia in general, in self-esteem as it relates to bodies of, uh, guys that grew up too skinny, of girls that grew up too fat, I think a combination of getting the body that you want, soaking in the sun, and really being like, "I'm the hot girl now. This is really happening." And how to relate to your body. There's a plethora of wonderful information around that that, um, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and interrupt you and just be like, "Let's talk about that instead."

Maybe we can save that for another time. Sure. Dr. Mike, thank you so much. Huge honor and pleasure. Thank you so much.

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Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in The Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at thediaryofaceo.com. They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. [Music] Oh. [Music]