The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)

He created YouTube’s first-ever fitness channel and spent decades training pro athletes, now Jeff Cavaliere reveals the truth about creatine, fat loss, and real muscle growth. Jeff Cavaliere is a renowned physical therapist, strength coach, and founder of ATHLEAN-X, one of the world’s most trusted fitness brands blending science-based training with real-world results. He is also the author of books such as, ‘AthleanX's Train Like an Athlete: Intelligent Training to Build the Ultimate Body’. He discusses: The science behind creatine and how it really supports muscle growth and recovery. Why you’re struggling to lose belly fat, and the simple fixes that actually work. The most harmful fitness myths that keep people weak, tired, and injured. Small but powerful changes that help burn fat and preserve lean muscle mass. Why grip strength predicts overall health and how to train it effectively. How “nerd neck” and poor posture can destroy your gains, and how to fix it fast. 00:00 Intro 02:16 Jeff's Mission 05:43 Training the World's Best Athletes 06:30 Motivation vs. Discipline 07:57 Advice for People Struggling to Get Started 10:27 What Motivates Jeff's Audience? 14:29 The Impact of Doing Hard Things 17:23 Are There Exercises Jeff Avoids? 18:11 Deepest Motivators for Fitness 21:43 Surface-Level Motivators for Fitness 23:20 How to Look Good Physically 25:07 How to Lose Body Fat and Get Leaner 25:57 Less Obvious Nutrition Offenders 27:40 What to Look for on Food Labels 29:06 What Jeff Eats in a Day 33:50 Getting Rid of Stubborn Belly Fat 38:43 Misconceptions About Abs 40:47 Long-Term Consequences of Steroid and Growth Hormone Use 44:38 Training for Longevity 50:17 Top 3 Overlooked Elements of Training 52:16 Improving Flexibility and Mobility 54:07 Workout Demo: 5 Key Exercises for Longevity 59:24 Ads 01:00:24 Why These 5 Exercises Matter for Longevity 01:03:11 Most Important Functional Movement: Thoracic Spine Rotation 01:11:21 Exercises to Prevent Hunching with Age 01:14:36 Train Longer or Harder? 01:16:32 Importance of Proper Form 01:19:35 What Is Nerd Neck? 01:21:20 Common and Avoidable Gym Injuries 01:24:15 How to Do Less and Achieve More 01:26:54 7-Day Comprehensive Workout Plan 01:30:48 Sets and Reps for These Workouts 01:32:07 Growing Biceps 01:33:57 Grip Strength and Its Link to Longevity 01:39:26 Women's Average Grip Strength 01:41:58 Can Grip Strength Be Trained Individually? 01:42:30 How to Avoid or Improve Back Pain 01:47:58 Jeff's Opinion on Standing Desks 01:52:20 Jeff's Advice on Supplements 01:53:49 Creatine Benefits and Misconceptions 02:01:20 Are Some Protein Powders Better Than Others? 02:02:51 Foods Jeff Would Never Eat 02:03:33 Jeff's View on Melatonin 02:04:29 Is There an Optimal Way to Sleep? You can follow Jeff, here: YouTube - https://bit.ly/4mfLt1B Instagram - https://bit.ly/3YKF58s Athlean-X - https://bit.ly/4dnOU2k You can purchase Jeff’s book, ‘AthleanX's Train Like an Athlete: Intelligent Training to Build the Ultimate Body’, here: https://amzn.to/4j6g6Up 100 CEOs: Ready to think like a CEO? Gain access to the 100 CEOs newsletter here: ⁠https://bit.ly/100-ceos-megaphone⁠ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Research document: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/DOAC-Jeff-Cavaliere-Independent-Research-further-reading.pdf Sponsors: Vivobarefoot - https://vivobarefoot.com/DOAC with code DIARY20 for 20% offShopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived, high stress states. But there's some new research coming out showing its ability to slow, prevent things like.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Jeff Cavill is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, MLB, WWE, and even Sylvester Stallone. He's built a global reputation for science based training that delivers.

• 0:26Steven Bartlett?

  What do people want?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  When we poll our followers, I found that for men, they want their six pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest. And for women, they want to have better legs and they well develop back sides. So we'll get into those exercises. But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started. And in doing so, become paralyzed by an activity and say, I'm not going to do anything at all. I get emotional, but it's sad when people don't ever find that drive and motivation. Cause like the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body. They call it the new smoking. Like if I take away your health, you're done. So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.

• 1:04Steven Bartlett?

  So if I was one of those people struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  I would start with.

• 1:10Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm not done yet. Lower belly fat. How do I get rid of that? Calories in, calories out. What's your view? You say that there are five key exercises to maximize your longevity and quality of life. Can you show me these workouts?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  And then why did you bring this skeleton with you with the bow tie?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  This is Raymond and I use him to show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the backend of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  Jeff, you're very much known as the king and the OG of online fitness, training, advice, support.

• 2:25Steven Bartlett?

  In terms of the mission that you're on in particular and how your perspective differs from other people out there in the market, what is it that you think makes your perspective different, unique and more important potentially than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates to how to build up our muscles, how to have a strong, healthy body and how to prolong our health span?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Everybody that, for the most part, that's out there trying to put information out, there's a level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they're all trying to help people get better or improve themselves. I think where I was really heavily focused was a more comprehensive, more multifaceted way to do that because my background wasn't just in, let's say, strength training or in aesthetic appeal of training, but also as a physical therapist and having a physical therapy background, I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying to aesthetically improve the body.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort of, you know, make this their own journey, the benefits are so far reaching, it's not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve. It's so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves. Like, mental health is directly related to people's physical health. If you feel, if you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves too. Like, every element of life is improved, I think, with improved levels of fitness and health. My why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even the smallest investments, it doesn't have to be every bit I do.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition. Like you don't have to eat the way I do to get as lean as I am to still benefit from being lean. You could be, you could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits in terms of overall health. So you don't have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to yourself. That to me is the most rewarding part of it because if I can show you how to do it, it's the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right? If I could do that, then I think I've done something right. I say all the time, I could take everything away from you. I could take all your money. I could take houses. I could take everything away. I could take even your relationships away because we could always find another relationship potentially. If I take away your health, you're done.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Health is everything.

• 5:02Steven Bartlett?

  And what did you study?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  So a few things, physio neurobiology was my initial degree. And I became a physical therapist, which required another three years.

• 5:12Steven Bartlett?

  And you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that regard. So you'd have to have a college degree, but then you'd also have to have a certification. And in this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

• 5:29Steven Bartlett?

  And over the last 25 years since you got that certification, who have you worked with, who have you helped and how many people?

• 5:36Speaker 00

  The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to work for the Mets. And that-

• 5:44Steven Bartlett?

  What's the Mets for you?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  So the Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team. So I worked with some of the best baseball players in the world. I had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world. Like it's wrestlers, I'm a big wrestling fan growing up. I have a lot of wrestlers that that come through. And that's a cool thing because wrestling, though some people may not like the storyboarding of wrestling. Athletically, they're some of the most gifted athletes in the world. I mean, the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week, the rigors that they put their body through, whatever you want to say. The outcome might be determined, but the bumps and bruises are not fake. And, you know, they also have to have that aesthetic appeal too. So it's this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me.

• 6:30Steven Bartlett?

  When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see how lean you are, I, it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme motivation. And that's why you are the way that you are.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Well, I think motivation is extremely overrated, right? Because like motivation isn't what produces the results. It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym and initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there. And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have. Now, discipline comes with finding success. So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success early, you do become motivated, again, self motivated, to continue on down that path. So my genetics were never great.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  I didn't, my mom was five foot tall, my dad's five foot nine, five foot eight, 160 pounds, not a lot of muscle. I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle, but like, I didn't come from this genetically gifted pool of Cavaliers. There's no, there's no way. But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far as I could. But I really found the discipline through

• 7:48Speaker 00

  the fact that I liked it and I found that this was feeding me in other ways. It was, it was making me feel fulfilled. So it was easier for me to stick to it.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  You, you must deal with so many people that are struggling that come to you and they say, listen, I've got these big goals. I'm overweight, I don't feel good, I've got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here, inflammation here. And they say to you that they want to change.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  You know, you can see it in their face, they're desperate, but they don't change for whatever reason.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  We live in an age now where you have access to the internet. You have so much access to information. Use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey. Cause the earlier you start, the better. But it's, it's, it is quite sad when people don't ever find that spark in trying to play catch up. It's no lie to it. You're not, it's gonna be harder as you get older. Starting or initiating a training program in your forties and fifties, though way better than not starting one, is much more difficult than if you had started in your teens and twenties. You know, to develop that habit, to maintain that habit. It's very difficult to initiate that the older that you get. But I do think that it's possible. So my best advice to people who have that struggle to get started

• 9:02Speaker 00

  is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking. Right? Cause the longer you think, the more likely you are to not be able to do it. You know, the thing that stops most people, there's that saying, the start is what stops most people. Right? But the same token, it's not the obstacle that's in your way. It's the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting. So you wind up saying, well, I don't know. You know, I could just sit on the couch and watch this. I'm, I'm not gonna go to the gym. And believe me, there's even nights now for me where I'll be with one of my sons. We'll be in his room, putting on the bed. I might fall asleep in there, you know, and wake up and it's late at night. I don't even think, I let my dogs out. I go right outside. I walk, sometimes I'm literally half asleep as I'm walking, but I know if I can get to the gym,

• 9:47Speaker 00

  get in there, turn on the music and kind of put the lights on and do one warm up set, I'll, I'll be good. And if I even sat down for a second, I might find that path of least resistance to be a lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable. And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you probably enjoy it now. Right? The process, it becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step. But there's still gonna be days, you know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you're gonna be like, ah, maybe not today. But if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that's all it usually takes to get you through the door. And you realize that, you know, what you're, what you were set out to do.

• 10:27Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched your videos. I mean, it's actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content. You must hear a lot of different types of spark. When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone's life where they, something happened and it stuck. It finally stuck. What are the kind of things that you hear?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Oh, man, they're life changing like that. It is, it's part of the why that keeps me going, you know, hearing some of these stories. I had a live event a few years ago, first one that we ever had. So I was, I was a rookie. I didn't know how it was going to go, but part of that event was a competition that we ran. So anyway, we had, we had a guy who was in his late 50s, first one to do the competition. So he, he drew number one. Okay, so he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle, which is just a 50 yard distance they had to run to the cone and back. That's 100 yards back and forth again and back and forth again. It was extremely hot that day. It was like 95 degrees because of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work out so well.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run. He, he starts to windmill his arms. He's, he's losing his balance forward and I'm like, oh no. And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over the place. Okay, next kid comes up, he, he's up now. He goes by the second station, he's overheated. He tried so hard, he has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated from, I was ready to, to put a stop to the games because I said, we just weren't prepared for this heat in this first time. And anyway, we continued. So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  And we had put 225 pounds on the sled, but that sled was on the pavement out in the parking lot from this gym that we, that we hosted it at. And the friction of the, of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted for, it made it even more difficult. Well, again, he's got that bloodied up knee, he's, he's pushing it, he gets it to the end, struggling, and now he has to pick up at the end, 100 pound kettlebell and walk it back. He goes down there, he grabs the kettlebell after a long, you know, multiple attempt to get the sled down there. And I finally run down there and I said, uh, his name was Craig. I said, Craig, dude, you don't have to do this. You're good. You're good. It's okay. And he's like, no, he says, I'm gonna do it. And I starts walking and he's

• 12:55Speaker 00

  crossing the legs over each other. It looks like he's gonna go down again. And I put my arm around him. I said, man, listen, you don't have to do this. He says, I get goosebumps, but he goes, Jeff, I have to do this. He goes, I was diagnosed with MS, you know, four years ago and I can't feel my feet. I gotta do this. And it's that kind of drive and, and motivation and you never know, cause you don't know who the, what they're dealing with, you know? And I get emotional, but it's, it's like, that's the kind of stuff that gets me going. We had another guy who, uh, competed at our event and he was doing, uh, the push-up portion of the competition. It's the second year. And he was doing his push-ups.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  He wasn't going all the way down. So got down to like, I don't know, two, three inches away from his chest. So I go over to him like, um, hey dude, just still a little bit lower, chest down. He says, I can't because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer. And I can't get all the way down because of the port. He wound up dying two months after the competition. So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don't like, it's not just to go to the gym to get a six pack. It's, it's going there to, for reasons we'll never know. And I think that those, those kinds of, um, moments are more than touching to me, as you can tell, but like they're, they're, they're just, they show the power of will.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And that is something that we'll never be able to quantify.

• 14:30Steven Bartlett?

  Within that as well, I was thinking about how that guy, he wouldn't put that hundred pound kettlebell down. For him, it,

• 14:39Steven Bartlett?

  it was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself. It's something that he wanted to do for.

• 14:50Steven Bartlett?

  Reasons that are much more about one's identity and one's self-story, as we call it. And on that particular point, it's one of the things that I often think about with fitness and working out is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don't feel like it, then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the rest of my life when there's things I don't want to do and how that then shapes me over time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able to confront the thing, I think is like really understated. I actually was reading this, I think Andrew Huberman told me this. He said that they've, neuroscience has found a part of the brain which is associated with doing hard things.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yes, I saw that.

• 15:33Steven Bartlett?

  And I think he said basically that that part of the the brain, and I'll put this up on the screen, grows the more hard things that you do. So you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things. And the minute I learnt that, I went, oh, this makes a lot of sense because the more I was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick and now my diet is like, as we see here now, is extremely disciplined.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:55Steven Bartlett?

  I've like changed as a person in other areas of my life. Like I've got more organised with like my my possessions and.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Well, you realise what you're capable of too, right? Because I think we undersell our capabilities. And I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, like when you're staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire than, again, what level of fitness you have, you realise that there's a much deeper well that you can tap into to do things that you don't want to do.

• 16:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  And I think the people that are lucky enough, like yourself, to have found that, have found the keys to the kingdom to be able to, you know, take themselves to another level of awareness and self-awareness that does hundred percent, like you said, play out in other areas of your life. You know, when you can do the difficult thing.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  It's still not an automatic that you're gonna be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody, but you know that you have the capacity to do things that you didn't really think you could. And it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out. Interesting thing on that, that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that if you start to like the thing that you actually didn't like in the beginning, then it no longer challenges that area of the brain, that area of the brain starts to shrink again.

• 17:16Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 17:17Speaker 00

  So it, it has to kind of, which is cool because it means that you need to continue to seek challenge.

• 17:22Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year's. I was, I sat down with one of my best friends and said to him, I said, what exercise and what thing do you dislike the most? And we basically made a list of them and then we started doing those things.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  That's cool.

• 17:35Steven Bartlett?

  It was actually running and it was like day and squatting. It also made me, because when I asked him why he didn't do those things, the list of reasons he gave were things like my legs aren't insert excuse, my brain insert excuse. And we both came to realize together that that was just a bunch of bullshit that we had like made our identities and it was now limiting us. Are there things like that in your life that you just?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 18:00Steven Bartlett?

  You avoid.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Conditioning, running, I tried to address those things and do them knowing that I should do more of them, but there's always more, more to do.

• 18:11Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things you must have figured out from all the content you've produced across all the, these channels is really like the essence of what people want. And, and I, you know, because you'll see from the views and the engagement and these things, you'll build this sort of mental pattern of, okay, people are really interested in this. So if you had to summarize for me, the essence of what you think people are looking for, and when I say the essence, I mean like the why, why, why, why, why, the very bottom of that. What are those things?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, I think insecurity is definitely a factor. I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is, is part of that. I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable. Right, because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are. You know, if the moment arose that they needed to, let's say, protect their family or do something that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be? And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our preparedness that way. So I think that's a driver.

• 19:11Steven Bartlett?

  I heard this quote many years ago, it says, "Change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change." And I was thinking, if you were my trainer and I was one of those stubborn people who were struggling to get the ball rolling.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:25Steven Bartlett?

  Where would you start with me? Like, what would you do if I was super stubborn? I tried for three years, I'd never made it stick. But, but clearly there was health consequences playing out in my body. Where would you start with me to get me going?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Probably the conversation. You know, I would, I would start with always with the conversation. I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody. Because if you, if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do, but if you ask the question of like, why do you want to get in shape? You might say, "I'm too fat right now." And I would say to you, "What would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you are?" Well, it would be better because I'd have a six pack. What would be important about having a six pack? Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more. Why would it be important for you to like who you're looking at in the mirror? Because I don't feel like I'm enough right now because I'm letting myself down because I know that I'm not doing the things I need to.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Why is it important to not let yourself down? Right? So when you start to ask the question, multiple, keep digging, you find the why very quickly. And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood. It comes from pain of, of letting others down. It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was, you know, drilled into you from your parents or, or others, or because you just never lacked the self-confidence to actually feel better about yourself. I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers, they all have some level of pain in their life that caused them to seek this out because it's the one thing they can control. It's the one area where it's like, I can, I don't have to listen to anybody.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  I have to do what I have to do for myself and I'm in control of my body. And I think that a lot of times people, or it's an escape, you know, where you benefit from the endorphins that are released through exercise. And it's your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better. But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain. So if, if, if I had, you had come to me in the very beginning, I would have started with that conversation and tried to find out, why is it that you can't stick with this? You've tried and you stopped. And I think that people need to understand that. And finding the why to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.

• 21:43Steven Bartlett?

  What about the very top then? Like, how does it manifest? Like the, the title of the video or the thing?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the top is abs, biceps, chest and, and, you know, low back pain. I mean, people actually come to me for one of two things. Again, I think it's having the two, the two hats of physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach. I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something. So we have lots and lots and lots of views, obviously based around fixing issues. Low back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain, and how it disrupts their ability to carry on in life or through their fitness pursuits. Then there's the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six pack abs and then they want their arms and they want their chest.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  And I, I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because it's, you know, it's, it's the, it's the beach muscles. But that's, it's a fact of life. People want to improve those areas. What I try to do when I, when I bring people in through that. Track is to also make them aware that it's okay. This is cool. You want your abs. That's good, you know, but obviously this can require a healthier eating plan. So I know I can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life. If I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now. So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interest might be.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  But my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there's more to it than that.

• 23:20Steven Bartlett?

  I've kind of broken everything you've said into three sections, which is people want to look good. They want to perform and whatever that might be. And they also want to be able to do it for a long time. They want to live long.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:32Steven Bartlett?

  So if we start with looking good as a top line category, what are the things that you think are the subcategories of looking good?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  The amount of fat that someone carries, so how lean they are.

• 23:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  The aesthetic development of their muscles, what their bodies are shaped like. Cause you know, you could lose weight, but as you've described before, skinny fat isn't really an attractive look. So I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.

• 24:00Steven Bartlett?

  What is the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they want? What do men come to you and say that they want to?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  You know, as a trainer of athletes, it's sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the lower body. Right. They're not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have, you know, strong developed glutes. I mean, it's just not really high on the list. So pretty much everything is going to focus on, you know, from the waist up in terms of the aesthetic desire. Bigger neck for men. For women, it's the opposite, right? For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist. They want to have better legs. They want to have stronger legs. They want to have well-developed backsides. They want to like, and there's probably, I mean, a cultural importance upon that. You know, people are, you know, men are being judged aesthetically on their upper bodies more than women are. And women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  So we're feeding into those desires, especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you're just reinforcing everything I just talked about.

• 25:00Steven Bartlett?

  In that category as well of looking good, nutrition?

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition.

• 25:07Steven Bartlett?

  So let's start with fat and lean. If I want to be lean like you and I want to have low body fat, where does one begin?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  What happened with me and what I always advise people to do is start just by looking at globally from 30,000 foot view, what do you know you're doing like not well right now? Like, are you drinking excessively? Do you end every night with, you know, a pint of ice cream? Like, you know that you're doing some things wrong. So you make one pass at the obvious stuff and you just do it for a couple of weeks, you know, and you see how you progress. And what will normally happen is usually those are the most offending, the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition, that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.

• 25:57Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think are some of the offenders that we don't realize are offenders? I've had so many in my life, even like ketchup and

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Steven Bartlett?

  I thought white rice was great.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, white rice is actually, there's a place for carbohydrates in people's, in people's diets, I believe, but you have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be overeating. Like, the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us. Like, you're, but you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some, or pasta and then some, because they're, they are much more chemically pleasing to the body. So I think people need to be cautious of overconsumption of carbohydrates and they're not aware of portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say, no, I had, I had rice and pasta. And I would say, I have rice and pasta too, every day. But like, I probably don't eat as much as that person does. So portion sizes, when

• 26:50Speaker 00

  it comes to that, is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness about. The kind of hidden offenders, I mean, there's sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing, especially, you know, like yogurts, right? People will have, you know, fruit on the bottom yogurt, but it's like loaded with sugar. Or my first experience was oatmeal. I was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in the morning. So of course I was buying Quaker Oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have brown sugar in the bottom and it's like, they're loaded with sugar. They were not the equivalent of Quaker Oats from a job, from a, like a canister.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right, but I'm not because there was more sugar in that than there was in a, in a, a bag or in a bowl of Trix cereal. What do you look for on the, on the package? I always look for sugar and fat. That's what I look for. So but dietary fat, there are nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. They're much more calorie dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, the, that dish is going to increase pretty quickly. So you have to be mindful of them if you, if you want to lose weight and achieve a hypocaloric state to get

• 28:13Speaker 00

  there, you're gonna have to take in fewer calories than you're, than you're, than you're burning. That's why I would look at fat content, but sugar is just really not necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and tends to be too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating sugar. So I think that's one of the fastest ways to, to get yourself on track is to, is to try to minimize the sugar content in a food. And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you. So if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied

• 28:57Speaker 00

  and full faster than if it's just a carbohydrate based meal. So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around, protein, sugar and fats. And what does your diet look like? I eat breakfast in the morning and I have usually, again, I'll give you the typical meals. I have oatmeal. I've been put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin just for some additional vitamins and minerals, protein shake and some, maybe some egg whites. So I get good amounts of protein and for lunch, I'll have like a grilled chicken wrap. Again, I'm trying to prioritize protein at every single meal and I'll try to have a Greek yogurt with, that has limited sugar in it.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Then I'll have a protein shake usually after work, only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at six o'clock, I come home, the kids are there, they wanna play. I wind up just having something to tie me over, realizing that my dinner's gonna occur later at night after my workout. What happens though is that workout occurs at around ten thirty to eleven o'clock at night. So dinner happens at around midnight for me. That's always, again, based around a protein first, so usually chicken or steak or fish. And then fibrous carbohydrates, so it's gonna be something like, I like edamame. It's, you know, it has good protein in it.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  And I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there, especially in that limited amount, broccoli. And then I have my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is sweet potatoes. So I'll have sweet potatoes or pasta or both.

• 30:33Steven Bartlett?

  I'm still shocked that you're eating dinner at midnight.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:35Steven Bartlett?

  And that, so what time do you train?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  So I train around ten thirty or eleven until around quarter to twelve or so.

• 30:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is that suboptimal?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  It's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it.

• 30:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  If I could change that, I would probably work out at five P M. You know, but I always find that there's still work going on, people still need me at that point in the day.

• 30:59Steven Bartlett?

  Why not the morning?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I have a very difficult time waking up. I'm one of those people that act like a zombie for probably fifteen minutes before I'm feeling ready to go.

• 31:09Steven Bartlett?

  I'm very much the same. I probably eat a bit too late, I train a bit too late, et cetera. And as I'm listening to you, I'm almost listening to myself. And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Stephen, if you went to bed earlier and you ate earlier, then you'd wake up and you'd be able to train in the morning.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, how do you feel when you wake up? Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up or do you feel?

• 31:29Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:32Steven Bartlett?

  I'm very similar to you, I wake up late.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:34Steven Bartlett?

  And if I wake up late, then I feel fine. But if you try and wake me up at seven o'clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at midnight or one A M. So there's not enough sleep taking place there. But having worn this whoop for a while, who are a sponsor, I'm an investor in the company, hashtag Ida, hashtag S A. One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep, my body isn't actually asleep. Because I could see my resting heart rate so high through the night. So my body's actually just working on the food. So it's not restoring my body. So one of my goals for this year is to try and not eat after nine P M.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  I I think it's a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or or or time to go to bed. Because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the the routine of sleep is what's most important, I believe. Even in cases of lower sleep totals, there's actually twenty seven percent of people report sleeping less than six hours a night and twenty percent of people sleep four to five hours. I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because I get to bed late and I get up around seven o'clock each each morning.

• 32:53Steven Bartlett?

  Do you sleep track?

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't sleep track. I did for a while. Um, I don't sleep track. I actually, now I've tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now, there is, and I hold on to this um as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleeper syndrome, in other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness and brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is that only one to three percent of the population has that.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be, you know, playing a game that I ultimately can't win. But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep totals than others.

• 33:51Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of being uh lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid of is.

• 33:59Steven Bartlett?

  Lower belly fat, this stubborn belly fat that occurs right

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Right there.

• 34:03Steven Bartlett?

  Right there on our little mannequin here. You don't have a pouch. That's what we call it, me and my friends, we call it a pouch. And we can be, you know, very lean elsewhere, but still have a little bit of a pouch there. Some people think doing sit-ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat. What is the answer in your view?

• 34:19Speaker 00

  It's the level of strictness of nutrition. And what I mean, the level of strictness, it's not just in the foods that you choose, but the consistency with which you choose them. So how long can you sustain this really clean diet? I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it's actually the first thing, it's a red flag that they don't. But I think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way. When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don't have one, but I mean, as ridiculous as this is going to sound,

• 35:02Speaker 00

  when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it's right there. And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on. The shamefulness of how your body does this and what it does to us is that it kind of works from this top-down approach. Like you'll lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down. And the last place is here. So it works in this top-down approach. Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you've lost the fat in your face, you've lost the fat in your neck. So like, you know, I, I, sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, man, you're gaunt, you know, and I hate the way that my, my face gets sort of caved in. But it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially naturally, because that's how your body starts to lose fat.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  And especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness. So it looks even, it's even more of a challenge. But this top-down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to start to see like the upper row abs underneath the chest. Or so when you start to get into better shape, you might've noticed this yourself. You start to see like, okay, my, my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually starting to take some shape. Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation that like, I want to keep going.

• 36:14Steven Bartlett?

  I can see the top ab.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Right, I can see the top ab, like there it is. I can see, I have them, you know, I actually have them. I got a two-pack, but I have them. Well, You continue down that path. Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more. Sometimes you take one extra night of, you know, uh, socializing or drinking out of the schedule and you start to see it, you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row of abs. Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue. And what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue? And that's the caveat that I always say, I mentioned early on, like, is it that important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat, you're gonna look amazing

• 36:56Speaker 00

  and you're gonna look better than 98% of all men. So whether you had that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you're still gonna have your abs, you're still gonna have defined shoulders and arms and, you know, some veins popping out and other places. Like, is that, is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits? You already would, you'd be there. Aesthetically, you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you came from and you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice to get there. And that's the battle people have to, have to wage and ask themselves, what is, how worth it is it to me?

• 37:37Steven Bartlett?

  Is the game of weight loss basically calories in, calories out? I just need to have less calories than I burn?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Yes and no. So to lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie deficit. But if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say you ate Twinkies in a deficit, you're not gonna get the same outcome because the type of weight lost is going to vary depending upon what you ingest. So if you don't ingest enough protein, you're just eating Twinkies, you might lose weight, but you're also gonna lose muscle in the, in the, in the process. So if you wanna...

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Deter the loss of muscle and maximize the retention of muscle and maybe again even slightly build in that deficit, then you're going to want to prioritize protein. So it's not just the calories in, calories out. That will get you to lose the weight, but when you ultimately, I think people aren't just talking about weight loss. They really want to make sure that they're maximizing lean muscle at the same time they're losing weight. If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it's going to matter. What are the big misconceptions we have about abs to get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff like that doesn't work, you know? I think that's probably the biggest misconception. I always remember Laszlo, Laszlo was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building it.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  He would come up to me, he was like the typical male, right? He was in pretty decent shape. He worked every day, active. He's like, I gotta get in shape, man. And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train? And he said, well, I don't really train. I just, you know, just do a couple of pushups and stuff. I said, well, you're gonna have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition? I kind of eat what I want. And I was like, all right, but he wasn't really overweight, you know, but he's the typical. And he goes, just tell me what I could, I just want to know what I can do for this. What's a good exercise I could do for this? For his belly fat. For the belly fat. He's just pointing at his stomach and it's like, there's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how, that's not how it is. Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  It's always about nutrition. It's always about nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else. Now, when you get lean enough, if you're not doing any type of ab training, you'll probably have less defined abs because you won't have the development of that muscle. There's nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads. There's still muscles that can be developed. And because of the anatomy of the abs, there's that line down the middle in the tacks, right? That's just caused by a suturing down of something called linear alba. It's just a tenderness sheath. When you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right? Even weighted ab work is helpful in this case. The muscles are just growing, just like a bicep would grow.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  And as they grow, you can't change the suturing down of the tenderness sheath. So they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area. So you get more visible abs, but that's the only way to really do that is through. Training to hypertrophy the abs, but you're not going to get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's over them and it's only going to come from nutrition.

• 40:48Steven Bartlett?

  You know, sometimes you see older bodybuilders, like former bodybuilders, and they kind of look a bit bloated. What is that?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  And that's usually the anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone. That doesn't generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within the abdomen, not just in the inguinal, you know, in the groin area. That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you get there. That's really usually a telltale sign of like growth hormone use, something that they've abused that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension pushing out of the belly.

• 41:35Steven Bartlett?

  That's the organs growing underneath.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually, this is a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it's certainly not a healthy thing to have. And, you know, there's always a lot of repercussions to going down that path. You know, they might look short term the way they want to look. And I would argue that even in those cases, you know, the large, super large Mr. Olympia look, I don't even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people, but it definitely leaves behind a lot of damage.

• 42:10Steven Bartlett?

  And people do that at a variety of different ages now. I think even people that aren't training to be bodybuilders, I can think of several people that I'm aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth hormones pretty young. And I'm actually seeing a little bit of that same body shape. I don't even know what it is, but.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think, look, TRT is becoming such a prevalent.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Path for people, I don't like that that's the prevalent path. I don't want to come across as somebody who is anti TRT because I've been, I've been reminded of that and that on some of the videos I've made about it that, look, Jeff, there's a lot of cases where people have extremely bottomed out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone that's not being made. I completely appreciate that. But as you've noted, the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people talking about their use of it and how, you know, they, it's, it's physically changing them and they're doing it at, at a rate like it's,

• 43:20Speaker 00

  it's becoming option one. Like, what about maximizing your natural potential first, you know, before declaring yourself as low testosterone, even at levels like a 400 and 500 and then going and using testosterone? Like, you're going to be on that for the rest of your life if you pursue that path. You know, once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with exogenous testosterone, you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body's ability to produce testosterone, but that's not a given. So be prepared that once you go down that path, that's one you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life.

• 43:57Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever taken TRT?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 43:59Steven Bartlett?

  Would you ever?

• 44:02Speaker 00

  If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe, I, I want to say, I want to, I'm aching to say a hundred percent safe because that's what I want, then maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know, the, the, the loss or the change that my body was going through. Cause I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can. But up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that it feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep going and I'm, I'm going to be 50 this year.

• 44:38Steven Bartlett?

  What about, let's do living long then. And when we think about longevity and what it's going to take for me to be, live a long time, but be strong into my later years. Where, what areas do I need to focus on training and staying strong? And where do I need to invest my energy and time?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  So this is where I think when I say if you want to look like an athlete, you gotta train like an athlete because like the hallmark of their training is that it's multifaceted. So you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one dimensional, I'm not doing this, saying this to put them down, but one dimensional as an arm wrestler, right? They could have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength, you know, to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor recovery, they're likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output in grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  If you don't have more than one element developed, you're not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population is looking to become healthier and feel better. It's not going to be one thing. First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes the building of muscle, so hypertrophy and strength building, is going to be really important because we are going to, again, like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose strength every passing decade, you know, up to eight to 10% per decade as you, as you pass the age of 50. So you need to make sure that you are doing something to stave that off.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment. Cause that's again neurologically your neurons start to fire at a slower pace. You need to train these things, reactivity, reactions, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man, he was in a, he had an obstacle course he built. I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he used to add every week or so. He'd add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard. And it was like a balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day.

• 47:23Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  And he said that like, he would try to find new ways to challenge his body. So that he would keep his brain guessing as to what's next. And again, whether or not he was, he was finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do. Maybe it was also feeding into his, his, his increases because of, he was doing the things he hated to do. But the, but the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted. And by incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach. Because it is important, the fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  But like, you need to factor those types of things and flexibility and mobility feed into that. Like you can't, I always talk about, there's a, there's a pyramid, right? If you look at the, the, the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom, which is supposed to be represent the, like all the things you're supposed to work on. And then it kind of fine tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength, right? You gotta, you gotta maintain your strength. And then above that, you gotta maintain your, your muscle mass, like the amount of lean muscle you carry. And above that, your ability to perform because of those two attributes of be able to actually do things. And if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you're a baseball player, you know, how well do you swing the bat? You know, how well do you feel the ground ball? It's that top level skill work that comes up here.

• 48:53Steven Bartlett?

  Is cardiovascular in there?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Cardiovascular is in there as well, as well. Yep. Your, your conditioning would be right, you know, depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance. And the sport you play is going to fall right above or below strength. Now, I would argue that there's a few things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots. And the pyramid sits on the ground, but what's underneath the pyramid? The roots, your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person, they could squat 600 pounds. But now I'm going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility or lack the flexibility, then I've also taken away and I've weakened the strength that you have. It's there, your strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root of longevity and fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility and stability. Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints in their full range of motion. So it's a muscle or joint thing. It's still the same concept, but they're working on different elements.

• 50:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think people realize that that's so important? And do you think they enjoy it?

• 50:21Speaker 00

  No, I think people hate it. And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you're into the practice of yoga, lattes, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the average gym goer, no, it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel. I think that when they talk about the fountain of youth, stretching and mobility is probably the thing that makes people feel the best. I've heard that, people say that, and I agree to almost a full extent.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  But I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I have this band to sort of show that. Like if somebody was just completely flexible, right? And you were trying to shoot this band across the table. I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to get any kind of force to do that. On the contrary, if somebody was...

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Strong, right? Maybe even muscle bound. I don't have any flexibility here to again, really create much of a elastic output here, or to get a lot of force generation. But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of flexibility, but also the strength, in this case, the muscles, the tension, I can shoot that band a lot further with a lot more force and a lot more ease. Our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this, but our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and mobility, because that's only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance possible.

• 52:16Steven Bartlett?

  How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Not much. It just has to be consistent. So I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to 10 minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight, and again, this is very individual, like one thing that I always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program. And it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I would go through the assessment of each player, and you would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type, you would find certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  People have to be willing to, A, seek out where these deficits are, and B, to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be an hour a day of doing those things. You prioritize that list, and you focus on five to 10 minutes of extra work with it. It's funny, I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning. But it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them off. That's not necessary. You can, you find the ones that have the biggest impact. But I don't think that having, you know, doing stretching

• 53:44Speaker 00

  requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.

• 53:50Steven Bartlett?

  You say that there are five key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift, the squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain push-up and hip abductions. Can you show me these workouts?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Sure. As you can see from the space I'm in, you don't need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible, they're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry, so no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do them. Alright, so the first exercise up here is pretty simple, but it does demand some balance and it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it's called the single leg RDL. What you want to do is you want to hinge, pretending that there's a drawer behind you that's open, you're going to close it with your butt. Then you reach forward, but at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  So your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without losing your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground. Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach. And what we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position, and we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees, okay? And then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate, and follow it with your head as you go up as high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this, right? With our devices at our computers, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper

• 55:34Speaker 00

  portion of the spine. Doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking. So the next thing is something we call a sumo squat stance. It's a squat stance hold, and it's based off of something called the horse stance, which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability, right? And again, we're going to still work on the hip in all three planes. So what we do is we get down. Feet wide and squat down into this position here. Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs for a little bit of support. But what I want to see is tall of a chest as I can get, the same way that we just did through that rotation, to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine, and getting extended.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it. And the posture will get away from this position and more to this open, upright position. If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is cross the hands over. Okay, get in that down position, reach up and out.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Okay? That is a 30-second hold up to a 60-second hold, depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is we've got to work on that upper body a little bit. So, the upper body, you should still be able to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the push-up. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits, both front and backside. So, we call this a posterior chain push-up. For a push-up, you want those hands underneath the shoulders, okay? I'll demonstrate one, then we'll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  So, you squeeze your butt together, you straighten your knees out by contracting your quads, and then you get a good firm, holding plank position here. Now, when you go down, normally people would stop here, or they wouldn't come up all the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you, point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed, tight, and then lift up into what we call a Superman. Right from here, you're going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain, from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers. Right, come down, slide it back, come up into that good firm push-up. Don't lose any of that stability, come down. Slide up and lift.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover. We're talking about just a side lying hip abduction. Okay, and what we do is we get in this position here. We position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground. Okay, from there, you're going to slide your leg back behind you. Okay, as far as you can take it and then lift up. And right when you do that final lift, you're going to feel a contraction right here in the glutes, in particular in the glute medius. That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip joint and the stability and the

• 58:46Speaker 00

  strength that's needed to propel your body even on a regular walk without your hips dropping down side to side. You don't want to let that happen to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make is in order to feel like they're getting a lift, they'll just rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting. Remember, you don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius to do the lifting. So you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. And that's it. There's the five essentials. Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment, no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now, back to the Diary of a CEO studio.

• 59:23Steven Bartlett?

  This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train, and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of a CEO, he explained how modern shoes with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet, and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Viva Barefoot shoes. So I showed them to Daniel Lieberman, and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength. But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time. And after that, I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Viva Barefoots. And research from Liverpool University has backed this up.

• 1:00:06Steven Bartlett?

  They've shown that wearing Viva Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vivobarefoot.com/DOAC and use code DAILY20 from my sponsor for 20% off. A strong body starts with strong feet.

• 1:00:24Steven Bartlett?

  And what is the context there with those workouts? Why, why did you choose those workouts? And what do these kind of signal? Are you saying that if I'm able to do those, then there's a probability that I have the strength and flexibility conducive with longevity?

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will measure at a, in a high level, how much of a deficit you've acquired over the years from not doing them. So you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're going to reflect the global approach, at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip abductors. Cause the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is the lunge, right? So I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Getting exercises that work the other two planes and mostly through rotation, but working this frontal plane, this side to side is really important to producing a complete person, right? With complete levels of strength. And because they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that side lying hip raise that we, that I show you is not one of the big exercises or most important that are going to be up on your list. You're going to do your squats first and you're going to maybe not, never do those. But it doesn't mean that that muscle didn't matter, right? Those muscles are there for a reason and they need to be developed. I remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball players, the leading

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external rotation strength and it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. And you're saying to yourself, how is that even possible? Because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a carryover? Obviously they're doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field. I still think it would have a carryover to improved performance on the field, but more importantly, one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his, his career. And there are missed games because of knee pain. What, what could his career stats have looked like? They're already Hall of Fame worthy, but what could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those games?

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller movements are really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them. Like it doesn't require a gym, doesn't require an elaborate setup. They're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.

• 1:03:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  The bow tie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I have my T-shirt, but this is Raymond. So X-Ray is his full name and then Raymond became his short name. So I, I broke him out. God, I probably in 2011 or 12 and he became a fan favorite pretty quickly, but I think people like the visual. And for me, he's not the most mobile guy. He's lost his lower arm. He doesn't have another arm on this side and he doesn't really move that well. But what it is important is

• 1:03:45Steven Bartlett?

  He's also lost his legs.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  He's lost his legs. I got a leg over there if we need it, but the spine. See for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit. It's what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because the area of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine. So what that is, is anybody that wants to measure on themselves is right at the bottom of the, of the neck. So at the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders, and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the thoracic spine ends. It has so many far reaching implications because it shares its range of motion between two different directions.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  So it's ability to go front to back. Again, he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward, we can go back, right? You want to have ideally about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just us sitting here alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out. When you use up motion in this direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are on their phones or at a desk all day, you're gonna start to lose the motion into extension. You're gonna get too flexed. Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a direct degree into rotation. So you're, because you're sharing that motion.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  The motion is only available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there's gonna be less motion available here. If I have a thing, if you let me grab this, put this over your back.

• 1:05:29Steven Bartlett?

  Over my back?

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, just like this. Yeah. Now, allow yourself to slump forward. Pretend you're on that phone, right? Get there. Now, just turn from the shoulders in one direction, slumped over. Okay, now, take a peek down the barrel of that thing, you know, behind you and see where you're pointing. How about how far rotated you are?

• 1:05:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  All right, cool. Now come back, reset yourself. Now, take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine.

• 1:05:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'm getting cramp in my back.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  There's just a rotate cup. So get yourself up right now. Nice posture. Act like I'm, I'm watching, right? So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that direction. How much more did you get?

• 1:06:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I got another like, it's like 20%.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. So maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you're, when you're falling as you get older, you're likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash down and maybe break a hip. Functionally, as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You know, you don't usually just move in one plane like this. If you're a football player, American or not, you're rotating all the time.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  You generate force as a soccer player, you know, by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it's all about rotation. You need to hold on to rotation, but what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60, people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.

• 1:07:10Steven Bartlett?

  You see it as well. You see it when people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  Awful. My grandmother, God bless her soul, she lived to 97 years old.

• 1:07:18Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally, she had a walker, she was completely bent over at that walker, could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her extension, so she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it's the most important movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things. So I think that people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength, but if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation, I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've, you've, you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.

• 1:08:04Steven Bartlett?

  Because I, I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable, because you see it in so many older people. They often are like bent over and you, you kind of think, well, why don't they just stand up?

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's, it's impossible because, you know, you're losing that, that fight to gravity, right? Gravity is going to win ultimately, but it doesn't have to win completely. So the more that you work on maintaining your ability to extend through the thoracic spine, then you don't develop those downstream adaptations that happen from always being there. So what happens, once you get in this position, you lose flexibility through other joints. Again, if you get, get in that position again, actually turn a little bit, try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay, now, just straighten yourself out, go tall, now raise your arm up again.

• 1:08:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Why? Because you've literally mechanically blocked your shoulder, because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead.

• 1:09:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now and just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more than here, because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top. So,

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  we realize that this epicenter of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits where all of a sudden, a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead. And then what happens then? If you can't move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, "Steven, get your arm up over your head." And you're like, "I can't." No, get your arm up over your head. You'd go like this. You'd lean your body back, because your arm can't get any higher, so you're gonna lean your body back. Well, what are you leaning from? Your low back. So now, all of a sudden, you're asking an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable. The low back, the lumbar spine, is supposed to be a stable area of your body. You're asking it to now become a mobile area of your body. And you're asking for motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you, because this area didn't give it to you, right?

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you. So now, what does that happen? Now, you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become spasmed. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now, you're causing a problem somewhere else. So, this area has all these far-reaching benefits. Another thing that can happen too is, when you're down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talked about is actually connected to the ribs.

• 1:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  If you're in this compressed position, where you're round and forward, hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open. You can't get the lungs to inflate properly. Lack of properly operating lungs are gonna cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day. They cause you to feel less rested at night. So, this area has so many up, up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it. And it's one of those things, again, if you were to ask me, how many people do I think directly work on this area? 10%. At most?

• 1:11:21Steven Bartlett?

  What if I got to be doing that at my age? So I'm thirty, in my early thirties now. What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I'm not hunched over and I am, I do have that full range of mobility?

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a few things like again, anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, you know, we talk about

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  the mobility flexibility part being the the foundation of that. But then there's also a strength component because like you can free up the mobility and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is just going to help you to maintain it. From a mobility flexibility standpoint, you can simply go up against a wall, right? And what you what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back against the wall and your butt against the wall. So you're going as flat as you can. And you put your arms back up against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is going to have good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles because your rotator cuff, as it gets tight, wants to internally rotate your arms.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward, but your your arms, you're doing a pretty good job. You can see, I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position? When I'm there, can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension because what's going to happen is if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it's just going to fold you forward from the wall and you're not going to be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that dowel that's that that we had there, you would lay on the ground face down. Dowels over your over your back like that. You spread your legs. So you look kind of like a like a maybe an X with your hands out here and your legs spread.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  And all you do is you rotate around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling that dowels going to travel back behind you. And you're pretty much isolating the rotation through the low through that mid back, through that thoracic spine. So you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this. Lean backwards. There's another exercise I have. This is called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach over is you push up through you're on your back. You do a regular bridge like a glute bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you. Over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? You're getting extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  combine those movements and again, take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions. These are all things that anybody can do, like anybody can do them. And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning because you are restricted. But these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don't, don't look for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel what happens when you start to become less restricted here.

• 1:14:14Steven Bartlett?

  So if I just did five or 10 minutes a day of some of these drills, you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound?

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  Very, very. I think that, again, I think people don't realize

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  the minimal time investment that's required. It just needs to be done each day, right? Those little deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do.

• 1:14:36Steven Bartlett?

  And is it important for me to train for a long time or for a more intense but shorter period? Or how do you think about that?

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I always say you could train long or you could train hard, but you can't do both. Right? And I think that especially as you get older, I think

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  you need to minimize the rotations on the tire, right? The, how many tire rotations are you getting? Cause even if I just raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I'm still moving my arm up in that position. And every time I move it up, even on here, in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like you're still getting some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint. And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've occurred, if you've acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder and this is rubbing up against that each time. It's like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back over sort of a sharp edge, right? Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray. I'd rather you trade that in, the repetitions for the intensity,

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  because the, the tension delivered to the muscle with the higher level of, of weight they're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is going to have bigger. Benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions. Now, that's not to say that you can't actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle. You can. They've actually shown recently that anywhere between five and 30 repetitions, taken close to or all the way to failure, can stimulate muscle growth. The absolute load is sometimes not even as important, as long as the effort is there. But I believe that as you get older, you've got to kind of spare some of those repetitions

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. Ultimately, you're going to have to change the tires. And we may not be able to change these tires as easily.

• 1:16:33Steven Bartlett?

  What about the importance of form when we're training? It's one of the things you're known for is emphasizing that form really matters. And you know, there might be another school of thought that says, listen, it hurts, so it must be doing something.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Steven Bartlett?

  People think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting, so clearly it worked.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one, it keeps you safe. You know, most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you're in command of the weight that you're lifting. And therefore, it's likely going to do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it. In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve muscle growth, I'm a big believer that muscle growth is not given, it is taken. And you need to force yourself, you need to force your body to make a change. Because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  And getting it to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding, or it's creating more tissue that's going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn't want to do that. Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that. And the only way to take that is to put forth an effort and an intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now. That's why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute failure is 100% necessary, but it's the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I'm pretty comfortable in saying, well, Stephen, you went to failure.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, passable, same result potentially. How do I know it was really one or two reps? I don't. I don't. Because I think if there's a gun to your head, you might say, oh, I could do two more. Well, now it wasn't one to two, it was four. And four is completely not as effective, if not at all, compared to the one to two in reserve. So when you do these exercises to this degree of effort, there's going to be a little bending of form. Now, I'm not saying that the form should break down. You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me, as long as it's still controlled.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  If the exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you're not doing it right. Your form has broken down to a point where I don't think you're getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train. Right? You might have shifted the focus where you started the exercise. It was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you're done, it's for everything but your chest because you're just trying to move your body through space. That's not effective if you're trying to build muscle. You want to direct attention into the muscles you're trying to build. And sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you're actually taking it off of the muscles again.

• 1:19:35Steven Bartlett?

  This is just jumping a bit backwards, but a conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck. And is there a consequence to the fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like for this whole conversation, I'll be looking up at you, but most of the time I'm also staring downwards at my notes and stuff. And if I'm not here, then I'm on my phone and I'm staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you, how you think about that?

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  It's a good, it is a good connection back to what we talked about because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic spine. Because when you go like this, right, you're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this, this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that's the external rotation. If I do it the way we're just doing it up against the wall, that's external rotation. More difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction. When you start to round here, nerd neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there because when you're here, what are you gonna do?

• 1:20:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Gotta look up, right? Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it's not that your neck is necessarily being pulled in that direction or the fact that you're looking down. It's the fact that your body's following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way and I've lost that mobility into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I gotta look up. So now I'm walking around looking like this and that's that sort of nerd neck. I think, I think nerd neck is less of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.

• 1:21:20Steven Bartlett?

  You've made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we're working out and training. What are the most common but avoidable injuries and how do I avoid them? Because I, I care a lot about this now that I'm getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I've, I've pulled some like ligaments in my ankle and I was at the physio yesterday and I've been on crutches and I've got this big boot I have to wear. And it's not until you get injured that you realize how imperative it was for you to avoid this.

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Steven Bartlett?

  Because it puts you, for me, it's completely changes my whole, it changes my whole life. Not only can I like just move through a space normally, but then I can't train, I'm gonna get weaker, it's gonna have an impact on my metabolic health. It's gonna therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition and everything downstream. So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most commonly occurring injuries and what advice would you give me to avoid them?

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Let's see. So first of all, I take personal offense to you calling yourself old at 32.

• 1:22:20Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm good old.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  I don't know what that makes me, but I feel like the Crypt Keeper.

• 1:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  But you just start to like.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  You do, though.

• 1:22:26Steven Bartlett?

  When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three, four hours. I didn't stretch and I was fine. These days, I have a hundred percent injury rate if I don't stretch and if I don't warm up and if I don't really, really think about it. A hundred percent injury rate. I'm like, I'm on my way downhill, you know?

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you're certainly going in the wrong direction, but I think when it comes to injury,

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it. It doesn't, it's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm, but when it comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either built to be mobile, that aren't being controlled, or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right? It's a ball. Again, we can look at that. It's a ball and socket, right? It's got the ball inside the socket. It's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the leg, right? We don't have the other part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball and socket.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  It's meant to be able to go in all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip are uncontrolled, meaning you're lacking strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint, that's when you actually wind up having issues. So what are the, what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about one of those smaller exercises before, the glute medius. That muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So not just in this front to back squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane. It controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don't train them, they're not going to magically get strong.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  Like, they have a function, and if you're not challenging that function, then you're not strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot, but I mean, you could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction, so you could do some of the side lying hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you perform a lunge. But interestingly, all you have to do is wait on one side. So if I were to say, all right, Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunges? How much weight do you hold in your hands when you do a regular lunge? Or do you not do lunges? I don't do many lunges. You gotta do lunges. So let's say you're doing like Bulgarian split squat. Another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench. I would say, hold the weight in one hand.

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  So now, if you're doing a lunge, and I put a 50 or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side, and then you go and you lunge out, that weight, you know, you're in the split position now with one leg out in front. The weight on this side totally wants to pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I could say, I'm gonna make this even harder. Go slow. Go really slow. So now you're stepping out, you're on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down, you know, the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  I've just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise, front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these things accomplished at the same time you're training something else. So it's not always an extra thing that you have to do. You could actually do this in a way that, you know, is sort of part of what you do.

• 1:26:02Steven Bartlett?

  So what you do then, if I were saying to you, I want to have a comprehensive workout and you're designing my seven day workout plan, what would you give me to do?

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push pull legs, I would, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps there. Right. Cause it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work. And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day.

• 1:26:32Steven Bartlett?

  So Monday, what do I do Monday?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that it, it tends to be a lot, right? Like you're, you're doing shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don't like that amount of, of volume.

• 1:26:50Steven Bartlett?

  What's push? When you say push, someone that doesn't know?

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So if you look at a bench press, it's pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action that you're doing. If I looked at a lat pulldown, I'm pulling the weight towards me. That's the concentric part of it. If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards me.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I'm pushing away this way, pushing away that way. Push up, I'm pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs, it's in the name itself. I'm pushing down through a tricep push down. I'm doing tricep, you know, lying extensions. I'm pushing the weight away. They would all go on a, a similar day. Again, I like the, the function of that because it's optimal recovery. So why that's, why that's good, if you could tolerate, and I'm asking, you know, if that's okay for you to do that, because you have, you're not naturally adding shoulders in. If you were okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your push workout. And then what I would do is know that I'm getting enough recovery in between workouts because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  Come back and do Wednesday legs, right?

• 1:28:00Steven Bartlett?

  So, so Monday, I'm just doing push upper body?

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, yeah, just push upper body.

• 1:28:05Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Tuesday, you're gonna give me the day off?

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  Tuesday, you get the day off?

• 1:28:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  And then there's, I'm gonna give you two variations of this.

• 1:28:11Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  And when I say day off, we could, if you were with me, you'd be doing conditioning. All right. So we'll get into that, but that, but it would be, yeah, it's not a day off. No. You give me seven days, I'll, I'll take a ball of seven, even if I'm just doing ab work on some, but you, you then on Wednesday would come back. And do your leg workout.

• 1:28:28Steven Bartlett?

  And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  So it's gonna be anterior, posterior. So I'm gonna train your hamstrings, your glutes and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you'd have another day off.

• 1:28:38Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  Again, likely not a day off, some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your pull workout. Now, what's nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others, and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those workouts. If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light on the pull because you just did that, or you did the day before.

• 1:29:14Steven Bartlett?

  So my whole body on Saturday?

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  You could do it, you know, when I mean like, I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of, including as many muscles as possible at one time.

• 1:29:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  And I can shy off a little bit, back off a little bit off of the pull that you were doing because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day before. So I would, if I trained you on, and this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday in a pull workout, remember I have different planes of motion I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff, like a pull up or a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises, like a seated row or bent over row, right? So I could shift the focus a little bit.

• 1:29:55Steven Bartlett?

  And then Sunday, Sunday, a break.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I definitely don't advocate seven days a week of full training.

• 1:30:01Steven Bartlett?

  Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this, in this particular week?

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  So in that, in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

• 1:30:09Steven Bartlett?

  Thought I had a break.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  And if you were gonna, if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned with fat loss and overall conditioning, and you feel like you're, you know, not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that. But if your priority was the Training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage of that Saturday as my, my flex day to do training.

• 1:30:32Steven Bartlett?

  And you don't put the cardio on the same day as the upper body legs workouts?

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  It could be, but if your priority again is to build muscle, then prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio or conditioning work at the end of that workout. Something might suffer and the thing that usually comes second is what suffers.

• 1:30:48Steven Bartlett?

  If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push day, so that's me doing like chest and is it?

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Triceps.

• 1:30:56Steven Bartlett?

  Triceps and shoulders. How many, if I'm training for one hour, how many reps are you trying to do per muscle? And how many like sets?

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  So set count, you know, if you can get in, and again, this is a little bit determined by whether you're going to train on that Saturday. So if you're going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I, I know I have an opportunity to maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation of bench, an incline bench. So I don't have to get all of my chest volume in, in that first day. But typically you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you were going to do, let's say the one workout for chest and you're doing, say three sets per exercise, you're in that range of around three exercises, right? For chest. Now you don't have to have that, the volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  you're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I will put something, my favorite exercise for triceps is the line tricep extension where I lay on my back on the bench and I do the, you know, they, some people call them skull crushers or nose breakers.

• 1:32:06Steven Bartlett?

  If we just take bicep for, as an example, how often do I need to train? And how intense do I need to train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take for me to lose the muscle?

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, interesting. So I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I actually discussed this with, with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's like, it's very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people. From person to person.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  We know that there are different recovery rates between muscles. Like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every three days, but I could never train my back every three days, or I could never train my chest every three days. It's just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different for every person. And even at a holistic one level, you're just not going to find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body.

• 1:33:29Speaker 00

  So a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training intuition to say, hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift? Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I'm probably recovering well. And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be.

• 1:33:57Steven Bartlett?

  You have this contraption on the desk in front of us.

• 1:34:03Steven Bartlett?

  This thing here.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Steven Bartlett?

  So many people talk to me about this device and it's, it's quite strange how important people say that this device is and what it tells us. I was doing some reading beforehand. It's a grip strength.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Steven Bartlett?

  Reader monitor. And there's some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015 Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every five kilogram decrease in grip strength, it was associated with a 16% higher risk of death, a 17% higher risk of heart disease and a 7% higher risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that people with low grip strength had a 68% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. There was another, another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues. And another study that shows that older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be hospitalized with their injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body strength by 70%.

• 1:35:02Steven Bartlett?

  And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the Journal of. Geronology. Grip strength.

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  Pretty important, huh?

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  A lot of that research has been determined to be more correlative than causative. But the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so because they're regularly engaging in physical activity. Likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy weights, they're having to manipulate their body in space if they're doing calisthenic exercises. So there's a level of activity that remains in

• 1:36:00Speaker 00

  their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues as they age.

• 1:36:11Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not the the strength in which we can grip that matters necessarily, but the thing that matters is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So it's just one, it's almost like a symptom of something upstream, which is positive.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  Right, or lacking, right? You're not, you're not doing enough of. That being said, you can actually directly relate or measure your ability to recover from exercise based upon having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the, over, you know, weeks or months of training. So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the morning, five mornings in a row and average it out in a, at a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is.

• 1:36:59Steven Bartlett?

  What's a good grip strength?

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  So most men would be somewhere between a hundred, I'll talk in pounds, a hundred to a hundred twenty pounds. So if you look at that, that's around forty six kilos to fifty four kilos.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  If you, you want to give a shot, see where you stack up? So to do this, now there's some rules here.

• 1:37:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  Don't go like this, you know, keep it in here, don't touch your arm to the table at all. Ninety degrees like that, yep. And then you're just gonna squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard as you can.

• 1:37:31Speaker 00

  All right, don't blow out now. All right, let's see. Oh, gosh, my head nearly exploded.

• 1:37:38Speaker 00

  130. So you're above average. So doing well on grip strength. So now what you would do is, and you would test both sides. You could average out the sides. Sometimes you're gonna have one, obviously one side stronger than the other. You would then have a good baseline. If you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the morning. Can I try this? Yeah, go ahead. This is my, so this is my weaker. All right, here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You gotta beat it though now.

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  Gosh, it's a bit slippery.

• 1:38:07Speaker 00

  I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh, my God. Wow. 160. You're joking. 160. What the? 160. So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did the other side again. You think I'd beat it? No, no, you're not gonna beat, you're gonna beat your old performance, but you're not gonna beat, you're not gonna beat the, the left side.

• 1:38:29Speaker 00

  Are you left-handed? I'm, I'm right-handed, so that was strange.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  All right, let's see what you got.

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  150 now. See, I had my predictions right. So a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the, to the, the stress of, of doing that. What's your grip strength? Uh, I don't know, I haven't tested in a while. See, now you're gonna show me. Left and right? All right, let's see. I'm gonna ask some of my team members if they wanna give it a shot. All right, here we go.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  Wow. A lot of crushing there. 130. Okay. On that side. And your left side? All right, let's see. Anyone else wanna do it? Bertie, you wanna give it a shot? Tried to do it with all the popping, with all the popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way.

• 1:39:15Speaker 00

  110. Okay, so you're right. And I'm right-handed. So, so it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not, not superhuman for sure. Bertie, you wanna try? You're most certainly way stronger than me. Not in grip strength. But you're stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press, everything else. Yeah, I mean, it is, it is, this is again underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually.

• 1:39:42Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  All right, so now hold it like this. Yep, and then you're just gonna, one, one hand, right? Squeeze as hard as you can for as, kind of a short burst.

• 1:39:50Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:39:50Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  There you go. Let's take a look. Wow, 100. Now, women's average growth strength is 60 to 80 pounds. So you're actually much stronger than the average woman.

• 1:40:05Steven Bartlett?

  I started my first business at 12 years old and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully, there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you. Our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design and enhancing your product's images. Not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the inventory.

• 1:40:49Steven Bartlett?

  And if you're looking to get your business started, go to Shopify.com/Bartlett and sign up for a $1 per month trial. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett. This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world's top CEOs. All the time, people say to me, they say, can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor me? How do I find a mentor? So here is what we're gonna do. You're gonna send me a question and the most popular question you send me, I'm gonna text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top CEOs in the world running $100 billion companies. And then I'm gonna reply to you via email with how they answered that question.

• 1:41:32Steven Bartlett?

  You might say, how do you hold on to a relationship when you're building a startup? What is the most important thing if I've got an idea and don't know where to start? We email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality. But then I saw what the founders were replying with and their willingness to reply. And I thought, actually, this is really good. And all you've got to do is sign up. Completely free. And can I train my grip strength individually if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip?

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, they, they, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old fashioned little grippers, you know, that you just squeeze and they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels now for people that are, have worked on it and actually improved. When I was young, they're pretty easy to conquer with a little bit of training. You'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resistance, resistance high enough. But now it's definitely something that you could, you could be challenged by.

• 1:42:30Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we've touched on briefly, but I think is important to talk about because I don't think people realize how, how prevalent it is, is back pain. I was looking at some stats beforehand and it says that 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. It's actually the leading cause of disability worldwide. And in the UK, over 10 million workdays are lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain are related to back pain. It's the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor. And chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the UK. And there's five of us in this room now in total. And so one of us probabilistically is going to have chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I asked this in part because

• 1:43:15Steven Bartlett?

  I spoke to some, I think anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa and they find that back pain just doesn't exist there. It's not a thing.

• 1:43:23Speaker 00

  I think the likelihood that you're going to experience back pain at some point in your life is, is high, but that recurring back pain, that chronic back pain, I think that's, that's entirely avoidable. 26% of the time, at any one time in the United States, people have, are going to be dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there. The other thing I find interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least four or five times, you know, to the doctor for respiratory infection. It starts to, so an eye opener like, wow, you know, and this is, and this is something

• 1:44:06Speaker 00

  that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come from so many different causes. You know, we, we talked about before how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could and therefore cause strain there. Now, here's the good part about this. Though 80% of people or 85% will have low back pain in their life, only 27 to 35% of the time is it disc related. So we're talking about, you know, if we look back on this guy again, it's the, it's the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? The, the vertebral discs that create that spacing and the cushioning between the, the vertebrae and bar spine.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  When one of those discs, actually, this is one of them, dislodged itself, but when the disc that sits above and below these two levels pushes outward or herniates, it could, it could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward. Anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure, in this case, the disc, you get the radiating symptoms that go down, whatever dermatome this is. What that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower body or some sensory area of the lower body. Depending upon where people complain of pain, like, oh, I feel it in my hip, or I feel it in my leg around my knee, or, or I feel it down behind my knee, down to my foot.

• 1:45:34Speaker 00

  You pretty much know what level of disc problem they have because it's representative of the level of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like L5S1, right? The last lumbar vertebrae and the first sacro vertebrae, it's going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your calf, underneath your foot. If you get something more around the hip, you know, and a lot of times people complain of hip pain, they think they have, they have a hip issue. It's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that's an L2, L3, or L3, L4. You get indicators of where that's coming from. Again, the good news is if you don't have this, this neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling, numbness,

• 1:46:17Speaker 00

  weakness, it's mostly muscle in origin. Now, again, even of the disc related issues, the 27 to 35%, 96% of those are not operated on.

• 1:46:29Speaker 00

  So think about the impact you can have if we're saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed through non-operative strengthening or stretching intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what's the cause of the dysfunction? Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool, okay, well, let's work on it. So let's try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute, right? Having weak glutes? Because again, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other words, kick the leg back behind you.

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body by doing that, when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again, I could do it from the low back by over-exaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to. Always remember, the low back is supposed to be the stability center of your spine. It's supposed to provide stability. If you're not getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above it or below it. It's going to say to the low back, please help out, give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it, but at an expense, and that's where you get injured.

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  So you got to address hip weaknesses, you have to address hip mobility issues.

• 1:47:58Steven Bartlett?

  This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch issue. When they say mismatch issue, they mean that there's a way that we're living our lives these days that is at odds with how we were quote unquote "supposed" to live or how our ancestors lived. And it's interesting because I've interviewed David Richallan, who is an anthropologist, but also Daniel Lieberman. They both spent time with the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why we get back issues and the Hadza tribe don't really get them is because we spend a lot of time like just sedentary. However... David Richarlison said that they, the Hadza tribe, still spend 10 hours a day in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J-shaped spine, not the curved S-shaped spine common

• 1:48:43Steven Bartlett?

  in the West. They squat, they walk, they carry loads a lot, and they aren't in chairs, they're doing more active motions. Now, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it's at a desk doing this, or whether it's in an office. I'm wondering from your experience, if you thought it would be better to have a standing desk?

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  No. No, I think, I think standing desks are, are, are great. And I, I hate to say it because I might actually, I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it, it would be beneficial for me too. I think that too much time sitting, right? There's, there's people that call sitting the new smoking, like the detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have on your body, especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go to sleep, eight, nine, 10 hours, like, how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day? Like, you're, you're working all day, there's a big chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you've got another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing. Like, your

• 1:49:45Speaker 00

  body wasn't meant to be that immobile. Like, I, I think the, there's an actual compression. So when your, when your, when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space, you're actually getting a bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that's in these joints, like, let's say your knees, that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed. And, you know, again, with your knee, you're weight bearing, and then you're off of it, you're weight bearing, you're off. It's like squeezing and bathing that, that joint in the synovial fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant. And when we, when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions. Being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  compression and the load that we're getting from the the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture that comes from sitting and doing this. Standing in that, you're likely going to at least improve your posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above, like we talked about, but at least from below, you're going to improve that. But I still think that the inactivity, just standing alone, is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people need to get up and walk around just a little bit. Five minutes every, every, you know, 30 minutes or so would be ideal, but like, if you're going to take a phone call, go walk while you're on the phone. Like, one thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I'm going to be on a call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call, just as an excuse to get up and move.

• 1:51:12Speaker 00

  I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the chair. Anything you can do, you know, I know they're cliche, but you know, park a little further when you're at a store, so you have to walk a little bit more. But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking, which is the main, the main problem. I think that even if you added up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time that you're not active, it's, if it was the same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects than you do if you're just grouping it. I'm going to be inactive from this period, I'm going to be active from this period. Because, again, of that effect of intermittently bathing and giving these joints a break and

• 1:51:55Speaker 00

  subjecting to that, then to different stresses than just compression, compression, compression. It's one of the reasons why I talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right, to decompress your body. You know, even just minimally, again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so, you know, two arm hangs a day is enough to give your, your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. And nobody does that. Nobody, nobody hangs from a bar.

• 1:52:20Steven Bartlett?

  What about, let's talk about supplementation. I've got a bunch of supplements here with me now. And there's so much said about supplementation, but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking every day, frequently, versus the ones that maybe aren't so important, but also just like the call outs of, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter, we're going viral the other day where someone had screenshotted the top creatines on a certain website. And then they had tested them in a lab and found that a lot of them weren't actually creatine in the doses that they'd said and in the form that they were selling.

• 1:52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Steven Bartlett?

  So I have this, I now have this skepticism around the supplements I'm taking. I've got some supplements here, I've got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be taking? And explain to me why.

• 1:53:03Speaker 00

  For building muscle, the two that rank at the very, very top of the list are going to be creatine monohydrate or creatine, any form of creatine. There's different forms of creatine, we can get into those. But creatine in a protein powder. And some people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder. And I guess if you're getting enough through your diet, you, you don't have to take it. It's not a necessity, you're not, you're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are,

• 1:53:29Speaker 00

  that you're not getting through your food. It's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost. If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it's, it's certainly becoming a little bit unrealistic to think you're going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is around at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 grams per pound of body weight, if you're active.

• 1:53:49Steven Bartlett?

  Creatine has become all the rage recently, it seems. I was looking at some Google search data and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine is increasing. From the early 2020s to 2025, now it's exploding.

• 1:54:04Speaker 00

  And it's been around forever.

• 1:54:05Steven Bartlett?

  Forever.

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  And been, and the benefits have been known forever. Right? So that's interesting because that's all related to the neurological benefits that creatine is showing in terms of depression and degenerative neurological diseases and its improvement, its ability to. Slow, prevent things like MS and Parkinson's and, you know, by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable bioenergetic state, meaning being able to to feed the neurons of the brain with the energy that seems to be lacking in some of these degenerative diseases.

• 1:54:43Steven Bartlett?

  Also, the other thing that I think has happened, and I did I did a little test in my office a couple of couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creatine?

• 1:54:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52Steven Bartlett?

  And every hand that raised was a man. And I asked the women in my office why they didn't take creatine? And the overarching sort of misconception, which also my girlfriend told me about when we were in Cape Town a couple of years ago, and I said, baby, you should take creatine. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it. And she was like, no, it's gonna make me. I think she, yeah, she thought it as like, she saw it as a steroid.

• 1:55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Steven Bartlett?

  She was like, it's what bodybuilders take.

• 1:55:14Speaker 00

  Well, that's gonna change quickly because I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take to take it. She is chronically sleep deprived because of my boys, you know? So she has, you know, she has a definitely operating at a higher stress level. It's been shown to actually improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived and in stressed, high stress states. From a depression standpoint, it's being shown to be very effective, even when kind of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression through pharmaceuticals.

• 1:56:00Speaker 00

  It's just got a lot of promise. And the good thing is that there's really no downside. All right, they haven't really identified a downside to taking it. There's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video recently where I talked about it, kind of addressed head on what they were. Jesse, of course, played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked. But like, there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to. People think it's a steroid and they think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. Sure, because the outcomes are the same as, let's say, anabolic steroid use, doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same, or the magnitude of what you're gonna see from them is the

• 1:56:43Speaker 00

  same, or even the legality of the supplement itself is the same. We're talking about two completely different, two different mechanisms completely, and two different things that the body are gonna react much differently to. When it's an anabolic steroid, it's going into the muscle cell, binding to antigen receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right? To basically convert, as I did in that video, I said, you're taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You're completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monohydrate, you're just talking about providing a more constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that occurs?

• 1:57:27Speaker 00

  You're able to generate more work in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload. You're also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle cell with the creatine, because osmotically, when you pull water, anything into the cell, you're gonna bring along with it water to kinda keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated, and that's a great thing. A hydrated muscle cell is gonna likely grow better, longer, in the long run, just like a flower of water would grow better than one without.

• 1:58:01Steven Bartlett?

  And there's lots of different types of creatine, right? There's like gummies now, there's monohydrate, there's all kinds of creatines. Over New Year's again, I was looking at different types of creatine, so I went to the shop, and this sounds crazy, but I bought like thirty types, and I just started researching it, and I realized that there's like a better form of creatine.

• 1:58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:21Steven Bartlett?

  And there's some creatines which aren't so good, ones that have many things added to them, et cetera.

• 1:58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, creatine is pretty simple. I always present it in sort of two forms to people, because... There's a, there's one creatine monohydrate and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference is what it's bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule. And the hydrochloride is bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that's ingested in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other. So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taken in a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that, I used to think that it was just five grams for everybody. But now they're finding that people that are like upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might benefit from like eight, nine, 10 grams per day.

• 1:59:12Speaker 00

  So bigger dosages there and people who are at, you know, 120 pounds or so, and maybe some of the females and female athletes. Like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatine monohydrate. Hydrochloride is usually in lower dosages anyway. So comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate might equal out to two to three grams of hydrochloride.

• 1:59:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's all this stuff about loading? Cause when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding. He would, he would tell me that you had to load up.

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Steven Bartlett?

  I had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage.

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  It's just, so your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. So if you want to get there faster, you load. It's five grams, four to five times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in a day. Some people are going to find that that's a little bit of an overload for them on their, on their gut. There is a byproduct of creatine breakdown. Creatine is what it's called. We get it measured whenever we get our blood test done. That can sometimes pull along with it some extra water. And that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't, you wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown of creatinine. So you might get less of that bloating, bloating. That's the only.

• 2:00:25Speaker 00

  Indication why I would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity to that. And a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it. So what happens if you don't load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to 35 days or so, you're going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you're taking it because you want to see benefits and performance like power output and performance, let's say, leading up to an event that's, you know, a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those

• 2:01:07Speaker 00

  full capacities sooner. But I don't really see a need to have to load. If, again, in the long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level anyway.

• 2:01:20Steven Bartlett?

  And what about the proteins I've got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than others?

• 2:01:25Speaker 00

  I mean, I like to say since that's mine, that's that's better. But the, you know, the fact is that anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They're still protein, but there's more on a gram per gram basis. It's 90% versus 80% by volume. If it's isolate versus concentrates, you're getting more protein per volume.

• 2:01:53Steven Bartlett?

  But they're not all as advertised, are they?

• 2:01:55Speaker 00

  No, no, there's, I mean, look, I without, I don't ever want to disparage other brands or, you know, I don't, I'm not in the practice of doing that. But like, there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers. You know, they, they, they don't, they're, they're in it to make money. They're not in it to provide high quality. And again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be.

• 2:02:24Steven Bartlett?

  How do I spot garbage?

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  Uh, I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like, there's something called amino acid spiking. You like people will, will actually include a lot of glycine in their, in their proteins. Like adding glycine to it because they can get the label benefit of increasing protein content. But it's actually not a complete protein. So you're not getting the actual quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein.

• 2:02:51Steven Bartlett?

  What are some foods that you would just absolutely never let go near your mouth? The real ones where if your kids asked or, you know, you just say, there's no way we're eating that.

• 2:03:01Speaker 00

  I really hate the dyes in foods, the food dyes. I think that's a really, um, I'm glad that, that things are being done as we speak to try to eliminate them from our foods. I don't know how our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it has, you know, in, in Europe. They've known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes for a decade or more. And we're still eating these in our foods all the time for what benefit? So it looks more attractive on a, on a package like that's bullshit.

• 2:03:34Steven Bartlett?

  What about melatonin? I've got a little jar of it here that I found. A lot of people are taking melatonin now, and I've got a friend very close to me. That's encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have a view on it?

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  My view is I, I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be, um, helpful, you know, for people that are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. We actually do, uh, uh, give it to our children at night because they do have, they do have issues with sleep. But honestly, the, the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know you're on the right track, you generally don't need, uh, an alarm clock to wake you up. If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock.

• 2:04:29Steven Bartlett?

  Have you thought much about how we're supposed to sleep? I, we talked about lower back, back pains, et cetera. Is there an optimal way to sleep? Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side?

• 2:04:38Speaker 00

  So again, I think this is individual, you know? And again, there's a lot of conditions that can sway somebody in one direction or another, but. In general, I think the position that has the less, the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse, corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side or crossed over your, your belly like this. If you're able to tolerate even more, you're kind of up in this position here. With your, with your arms up. Just because again, that actually helps a little bit with some of that internal rotateness, internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you were demonstrating up against that, the wall with that position before. Not, not as big a deal, but you have

• 2:05:21Speaker 00

  to understand that at what other time, really, again, we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you're getting up to go get a meal. At least you're getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty much statically in the same position? And I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach, you're pretty static for seven, eight, nine hours. There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant. Like there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something during the night and they all, I must've done something when I slept, right? People say that all the time because they probably did. They probably

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  did. They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it, or they positioned themselves over an arm and it kind of, you know, was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren't conscious of it. But then there's the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position. They, they pull their knees up. The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It's like sitting, like you're getting from a chair. You're creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that position. Like lengthen them out, you know, get some, get some flexibility or at least, you know, get some elongation at that joint and those muscles. Now, sleeping

• 2:06:45Speaker 00

  with a pillow that is too fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most, most of the back pain sufferers we talked about before, 82% I believe of people that, that report sleep disturbance say it's from back pain. And what happens?

• 2:07:03Speaker 00

  They feel it mostly, 77% of them feel it upon waking. It's like they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon waking. And it goes back again, what we were talking about earlier. You see, it all relates. You know, this back pain seems isolated and we're talking about the thoracic spine and that's back pain. But now I'm talking about sleeping and that's back pain. Like all these things relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of excess flexion of your neck, which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time. So you might like to do that, but I'm telling you the healthier position

• 2:07:47Speaker 00

  is to sleep with a really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high, just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again. You're not abnormally propping it up. Not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at night, the on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you're closing down your airway a little bit more. You know, there are some cases where, again, that apnea patient might want to be on their side. You know, it's going to be, it's going to be easier for their breathing. But in most cases on their back. And also too, interestingly, you know, look, our, most people have tight calves. Their ankles are, again, we sit all day. We're not pulling our ankles back towards our head.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  We're not maintaining that mobility towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well, what happens in a bed? You get in bed, the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom. They're pulling your ankles straight down like that and your feet are pointed the whole night. Further tightening those calves because there's shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day and your muscles repair and regenerate at night. You know, you're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are pointed down. I always say if you're going to get in bed, loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you can at least get the ability to move your toes backwards or they're freely moving, they're not being forced into this position. So lots of little tweaks you can make and some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important, given how long you stay in those positions.

• 2:09:14Speaker 00

  Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much time in that position.

• 2:09:18Steven Bartlett?

  Jeff, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity? And I guess just more broadly, just living a, living a good life?

• 2:09:28Speaker 00

  I think that. You don't want to stress yourself out thinking of all the things that you need to do. Because there's many and in doing so, become paralyzed by an activity and say, I'm not going to do anything at all because I can't do all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do is they, they talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think that the commitment is going to be too much more than what they're doing right now. Too much to ask and they can't do it. That's, that's a mistake. Chip away. Do make those, we talked about nutrition again, like make that first pass. Take away the obvious stuff, the stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life. Then make another pass when you're ready. From a fitness standpoint, get yourself to the gym.

• 2:10:11Speaker 00

  Try to do that first thing we said, that take that first action, get yourself out the door. Getting a habit of doing that over a period of a couple of months, you want to, you want to start to adopt a more intense training plan. Or you want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine. After, don't worry about it. Like the most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. You know, I'm really noticing that my, my thoracic spine is not mobile enough. Like Jeff said, I mean, you know, hang from the bar. Do that one little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will pay big dividends when added up. But don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going to be healthy.

• 2:10:52Speaker 00

  Any investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like you're realizing now at 32, it's going to matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by doing what you're doing now, you're, you're making the right step in the right direction. That can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do more is going to be so much easier than when you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing. And rather than making that big departure from what you're doing now and thinking you're just going to all of a sudden start loving all these things. You're not, and you're likely going to wind up, you know, making yourself not want to do it.

• 2:11:37Steven Bartlett?

  Jeff, thank you for doing what you do because as I said to you before we started recording, you've been the go to resource for me over the years. And in fact, whenever I've got a challenge, whether it's like how to build my triceps, or how to avoid an injury, or other challenges relating to strength, longevity, all these kinds of things, I'm always happy when I find your videos because you're someone that everybody trusts. You're someone that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you know, you're famous for drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the range of motion. But you've helped me for free for a long, long time. Like, I think, I think probably a decade. I think this, I spent about 10 years as you, you being my sort of personal trainer. And because

• 2:12:20Steven Bartlett?

  this information is free and it's on YouTube, you would have helped literally billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your channel, I think you've got almost 3 billion views, it might even be more now, just on that one channel alone, than the clips and everything else, and how that's inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those people, but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what would you change about you first and secondly? Now, answer, why haven't you?

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  Okay. What would I change about me and then why have I not? Wow.

• 2:13:06Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 2:13:11Speaker 00

  You know, there's, there's, there's not much, and I'm thinking off the top of my head here. So when I identify something that I want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job of putting in place steps to, to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal about myself. There are things that, from a relationship level, there are things from a, you know, self-improvement standpoint, like, I always seek to identify areas that I can improve, and I do make those changes. And I take, I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I've wanted to do.

• 2:13:54Speaker 00

  I think I always wanted to be more adventurous. I think that I'm a bit of a of a homebody. And I think that I I I might. My wife is a big traveler. And I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous and taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go to. If I'm looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to want to do that with with me. So I think perhaps I I wished I would have changed that. I could certainly use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy. And and there's a lot of reasons why I haven't. But it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away. But we tend to go back to the same places all the time.

• 2:14:38Steven Bartlett?

  You've got to give me two, it says, first and secondly.

• 2:14:41Speaker 00

  I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time. And if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be be open to hearing the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think, is more of of wanting to be heard. Maybe in a time when I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid. So I was probably not heard as much as I often thought I I I wanted to be. So the opinions come out first as a reflex. But if I could do that, I I still wish I could I could get a little bit better.

• 2:15:13Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 2:15:14Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:15:16Steven Bartlett?

  I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.