What Is The Fitness Menopause? | Modern Wisdom Podcast 173

Today I am joined by Jonny & Yusef from PropaneFitness. The Fitness Menopause is a concept we've been talking about for a while. It describes the transition from bro (or chick) lifting to a more rounded fitness regime as you leave your 20's or 30's behind and start to fully indulge your true exercising passions. Expect to learn why you might lowkey hate the exercise routine you're following, the story behind each of our journeys through TFM, why you have to serve your time doing brolifting first, why girls who are dancers should change their training immediately, and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Check out Jonny & Yusef's site - https://propanefitness.com/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #fitness #bodybuilding #zyzz - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So I've got quite strong views on this, which is that everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weight.

• 0:08Jonny?

  Have you ever spent weeks trying to improve your hammer kill? For example, because you were, you were read an article on T Nation that spoke about how it attacked the biceps slightly differently and you felt like that was what your life was missing. If you know who Ziz is.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  If you know who Ziz is, yeah, that's it.

• 0:22Jonny?

  That's it. Like, that's the, that's the certificate. Like, if you know who Ziz is, this will all completely make sense to you and you'll just be sat there nodding along.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Did the squats and milk program, which is, so three times a week, you take your 10 rep max, you do a set of 10, and then you keep the bar on your back and you take five to 10 deep breaths, you do another rep, and you keep doing that until you hit 20. And then you have a gallon of milk a day. So I was having a gallon of whole milk, 4.7 litres of whole milk every day, just sat in class. And I remember doing this and like throwing up raspberry whey down my top while I had the bar on my back, doing these like squats and milk, being so out of breath.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Jonny and Yusef from propanefitness.com. Look at that.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  So good to see you. Are you doing some boxing?

• 1:10Jonny?

  I was just enjoying the, the effect.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  You're like a cat. Today, we are talking about the fitness menopause. It's something that we've dropped on podcasts for the last couple of years. I'll start off, I'll try and give a broad definition so everyone knows what we're talking about and then we'll, we'll take it from there. So fitness menopause was something that I'd identified within myself toward my late twenties, when I'd been doing bro lifting, fitness stuff, bodybuilding for a while and realised, as I became chronically aware of my own mortality as I approached 30, realised that I was getting out of breath going up a big hill and I was kind of a little bit bored of just doing,

• 1:55Chris Williamson?

  you know, chest Mondays and chest Tuesdays and chest Wednesdays and curls and stuff like that and training purely for aesthetics. And I was just disenchanted. I kind of lost my love with training, certainly lost the motivation to do it without really grinding myself to get out of it. Out of bed and go to the gym. So then just started trying to do different things. The fitness menopause describes a period, I think, in a lot of fitness people's lives, who perhaps have just entered into the world of training by doing bodybuilding or bro style lifting from just the age of teens or early twenties or whatever, and then never tried anything else.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  And as they approach their late twenties, they think, oh, hang on, like this, this maybe isn't fulfilling me in quite the way that I thought. How do you think about that as a definition? You reckon that's about right?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  I mean, that's about right. It applies to a very specific subsection of people. And are we millennials? Or are we?

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  No, technically, yes. Eighty four, eighty four till ninety six.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so I think in that case, then millennials tend to fall into this bracket quite well because there was this surge of the popularity of weightlifting, bodybuilding, that kind of stuff, kind of coinciding with like T Nation's Rise and Fall and then Bodybuilding.com and all of these like, like Simply Shredded, do you remember that? Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  So all of those kind of things. And so most eighteen to twenty two year old guys got swept up in this. And usually it was the only kind of physical activity they did, apart from maybe five-a-side, which is the other like most popular young male activity.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  I've heard.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I think most people will have gone through a few years of that. And Johnny and I always say that the minimum entry requirement to even consider having been in the fitness menopause or gone through it is you have to have done three to five years of peck deck and leg press.

• 4:07Jonny?

  That's, that's just how I think like anyone that like, you know, when you feel like you're one of these people who did something before it was cool. So I think we all did fitness before it was cool. And now there's loads of people wanting to do fitness because it's a bit cool. So like people are getting into the strength sports and starting and you just think like, you're just missing.

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  Real, real fitness. You haven't had the induction.

• 4:26Jonny?

  You haven't had like the, like, have you ever spent weeks trying to improve your hammer kill? For example, because you, because you were, you were read an article on T Nation that spoke about how it attacked the biceps slightly differently. And you felt like that was what your life was missing.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  Did you, did you practice two kilogram Arnold press just so that you could really get the form down? Yeah. So you, you're totally right. Here's my reasoning for why I think people fall into bodybuilding. Timing is one of them. So definitely if you're anyone probably now in 2020, between the age of 26 and 34, probably you'll have been a, seen this rise, T Nation, bodybuilding.com, muscle and fitness, stuff like that.

• 5:12Jonny?

  It's if you know, if you know who Ziz is.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  If you know who Ziz is, yeah, that's it.

• 5:15Jonny?

  That's it. Like, that's the, that's the certificate. Like, if, if you know who Ziz is, this will all completely make sense to you. And you'll just be sat there nodding along. If you don't know who Ziz is, this will be like, why? I quite like fitness.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  Go Google him. Yeah. So here's my reasoning. Timing is one of them. But my other reason, and this is why I, I think the front end of the bodybuilding and fitness training, that kind of fitness training funnel continues to get good traffic in the front end, is that it's the type of training with the lowest mechanical barriers to entry and the lowest amount of skill requirement of any physical sport on the planet. Like I can take anyone who's listening, I can take your mum into the gym tomorrow, teach her a supinated bicep curl to probably within about 80% of the compliance and proficiency that I can do it in after 15 years of training.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  And you can increase her back weight, get her a sick taper.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Get her jacked, get your mum jacked so that she looks real mean when she's walking the dog. But yeah, the barriers to entry to doing bodybuilding are so, so low. And people don't like doing stuff that they suck at, you know, like, think about weightlifting. The snatch is essentially an impossible movement. That is completely ridiculous.

• 6:30Jonny?

  Physically impossible.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  And, and some people just do that and another one all their life. You know, Klockoff, Klockoff just does variations of snatch and clean and jerk. And he's like, he's in his 40s and he, and still massive, but you get my point. Like, people don't like doing stuff that's challenging mechanically because they feel silly. Whereas you can go into a gym tomorrow and get externalized rewards, socialized rewards. Don't really need to worry about what the, what the internalized gains are. It's like, oh, well, I can't really touch my toes anymore and maybe my shoulder aches a bit. But look at that, I've gained an inch on my chest.

• 7:07Jonny?

  Well, we've all been involved in hand, like a big guy in the gym, you're like 19, big guy in the gym. Who's been like strutting around, working up to a big set of incline dumbbell press. He comes out, he goes like, yeah, you just hand off the dumbbells first, please. And you have to pick up the dumbbell and give it to him and then you watch him go.

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  Partial rep.

• 7:26Jonny?

  Yeah, because he feels good at it because he can just set his own rules. Like, no one's checking his form on his incline dumbbell press. It's like, well, I lifted the biggest dumbbells in the gym, mate.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  So that's, that's like the, the entry level, isn't it? The way you can, you can even set your own rules for range of motion and everything else. Powerlifting is kind of the next level up, but it still is very much unfortunately like the, the sport for non-athletes.

• 7:50Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  And it's, it's why it's got the, um, the reputation of like, at least a beginner and kind of low intermediate level is that it, it's just got the reputation of like people who were never any good at any other sport or athletic activity and.

• 8:05Chris Williamson?

  It's not wildly athletic, is it?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Well, no, and it allows people to justify being, being fat, not being able to touch their toes. Like all of the kind of things that would normally just not fly in another sport. But instead.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  Diet, too much caffeine, Haribo during training.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Like at competition, you see people that clearly do not need like intra-workout or intra-competition. Haribo and burgers and stuff. And then they go, go out for McDonald's at the end of the, having done nine reps that day for the competition.

• 8:36Jonny?

  So I'm gonna be, I am gonna defend powerlifting here. I feel like people will be expecting me to. I completely agree with that until you reach like national level, especially like national level in the US and then international level.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 8:50Jonny?

  Like when you, when you bump into a Polish bloke who's pulling like four ten with like next rations.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  What's happened there is that you, you've got someone who actually, yeah, that's someone who is an athlete and has, you've put them into a sport.

• 9:03Jonny?

  Well, often when you look at it, like when you look at their background, it's like, so like Tom Martin, you look at his background and you're like, ah, yeah, a hundred meter sprinter. Yeah, of course, of course. But like people who like fell out of, it's, I think the people who, who tend to like get like, like were doing rugby at a really high level. Stop playing rugby and then they're like, oh, well, I lift weights, I might as well just do that. And then before they know it, they're like podiuming at a national level and they can't really figure out why. The, uh. It's like, where's the competition gone?

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a good, it's a good point about the low end level on powerlifting, but being honest, like watch a shite Sunday league football team play. You know, you're not exactly going to be watching fucking Cristiano Ronaldo go at it. So you're right, at the bottom end of that. But at least those football players aren't just picking the ball up and running with it and saying, oh, well, mate, this is actually a little bit better for my PEC development. So, um, it doesn't really matter. So, yeah, I think that's why the, the two main reasons are a path of least resistance. That it's kind of quite well known and easy to do and easily accessible and you can get a, a membership at some big corporate gym for like fifteen pounds a month.

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  Which, which is phenomenal, right? Like, you know, the fact that you can get twenty four hour gym memberships in a city for fifteen quid a month is just insane.

• 10:17Jonny?

  Insane.

• 10:17Chris Williamson?

  Um, but they're going in there to do, you know, what do you think a typical bodybuilding program consists of? Maybe twenty five movements, like twenty five main movements?

• 10:31Jonny?

  Yeah, five days a week, five exercises a session.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Jonny?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Jonny?

  I mean, yeah. It's, I, I, I just think that like, people who are starting the fitness journey now, it's just shit for them. Like, it was way back, back when no one really knew what the crack was. And there was, there was

• 10:49Speaker 00

  You could go years without making any progress.

• 10:52Jonny?

  But like, in the back of your mind, like, I remember spending forty quid on Surge workout fuel from T Nation, pretty, pretty confident that it was bullshit. But there's that thing in the back of your mind of like, yeah, but what if it is the type of carbohydrate in there? Like, what if it is the fact that it is loose and rich? And this is gonna be the thing for me. This is gonna be like, when everyone's looking at me going, fuck, have you seen the progress Johnny's made? It'll be because of Surge workout fuel.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  I remember thinking like, oh, it's got cyclical dextrin in, maybe that's exactly what, and you, you look it up and it's like, it's the main component in Febreeze spray.

• 11:31Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  And you're like,

• 11:32Jonny?

  I remember reading, I remember figuring out like, is it anthocyanin? The ingredient in A Go 3G. When you look at like some blueberry yogurts and they've got anthocyanin and you're like, mm, okay mate. Like, maybe it's not that, when like my Oncon yoghurt also has a bit of it in, like, it's probably not that special.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  But then you look over and your mum's eating some and just, just got like striations in her bicep and you're like,

• 11:55Jonny?

  Like, separation between a bicep and tricep.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Can I have some of that?

• 11:58Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  Mum, how long have you been eating that blueberry yoghurt from Oncon?

• 12:02Jonny?

  I don't know.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fucking massive. Uh, well, you better go clean your room. Um, yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Okay, mum.

• 12:09Chris Williamson?

  So, okay, so that's, that's why I think people fall into kind of, let's say, this path of least resistance. And here's the question that I want most people that are listening to try and answer, and it is,

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  if you're doing a bodybuilding program, or if most of your training career has been spent doing bodybuilding, typical bro style training as a guy or a girl, do you like bodybuilding? Or do you like exercising? Because those are not the same thing.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, I've got quite strong views on this, um, which is that everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weight. No, my, my, my thought is that everyone has.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

  Johnny's lost it.

• 12:58Jonny?

  It's one of the ancient axioms, isn't it, of like, written in stone by Ron Coleman.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  Ronald.

• 13:05Jonny?

  Ron Coleman.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  Coleman.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Ah, so the reality is that everyone has bodybuilding goals. There is such a small percentage of the world and that they're like a weird kind of like fetish group, aren't they? Like feeders and that kind of thing that don't want less fat and more muscle. So they, yeah, they're like 0.01% of people that have this weird fetish, have like an inverse bodybuilding goal. But.

• 13:32Jonny?

  Still a bodybuilding goal.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay, let me rephrase, let me rephrase the way that I put it. Do you like bodybuilding training? Or do you like exercise?

• 13:43Jonny?

  So I, I think that probably most people, I think the number of people who like exercise probably don't like it because it's exercise.

• 13:55Jonny?

  If you see what I mean, like they don't, no one likes bodybuilding necessarily. No one really likes even like the more modern stuff, like I know people get really obsessed with certain aspects of powerlifting, certain aspects of CrossFit. They just like what they think it's going to do for them or what they kind of get out of it. So like they get a little bit of props on social media. People share their new lift, they hit a new Fran time. And I, my experience has been throughout fitness, like I desperately wanted abs because I was convinced that that was going to improve my life. Got it. And I was like, mm, all right. And then I desperately wanted a 300 kilo deadlift because I was like, well, that means I win. If I go 300 kilos, I've got it. I was like, mm, mm, okay. And then like the goals just kind of drift past and you're like, well, I could get lean again, but

• 14:39Jonny?

  doesn't really do much for me. Like I could add 10 kilos to my deadlift, but like that'd be a proper faff.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  That's maybe what fueled the fitness menopause for you is that you have to, you have to hit all these big achievements. And then you're like, didn't really, yeah.

• 14:51Jonny?

  So I think that people go, people attach onto a mode of exercise because they. They believe that the outcome of it will be a huge deal for them. And to be honest, it is like, I think that probably what what I've gained from fitness is is a big deal. But you kind of hit these milestones and then you think, all right, well, I'm kind of done with bodybuilding now. Like I've I've done it. I've taken a progress photo. I'm really happy. Maybe I should start doing something that's competitive. Maybe I'll get into triathlons or.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  I think I think there's a good point to be made there about the fact that you kind of do need to pay your dues. If you've got this unticked box with regards to physical development in some other area, it is a good idea to tick that first. It's that Naval Ravikantism where he says it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to recount them. And it's like, I would much sooner not what not be bothered about being lean because I've been lean than not bothered about being lean just because I gave up.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, because you'd always have that like sense in the back of your head. What it's like if I'm single digit body fat. Yeah, so like, like Johnny definitely takes that box hard in the like, you know, you you went to you competed at Worlds and then, you know, then realized that actually like placing at Worlds and winning Worlds is so much more effort compared to getting there than like, because the curve of like

• 16:17Speaker 00

  return on investment suddenly. For the people that don't know, what is Worlds? World champion.

• 16:23Jonny?

  It's just the top. It's just the most like the highest level in IPF. But like honestly, like, which is what?

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  What's IPF?

• 16:31Jonny?

  Oh, um, so there's the International Pilot and Federation, which is often seen as being like the like the the best one to be in because the the rules are the most strict. They've got stringent drug testing and all that sort of stuff.

• 16:43Jonny?

  I think they're technically like the most strict on depth and like what you can and can't do in the bench press and all that sort of stuff. Then there's the GBPF. And there's the EPF, which is the European Pilot and Federation. So if you place at Nationals, you go to Europeans. If you do all right Europeans, you can sometimes be selected for Worlds.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  And you made it to Worlds and you've got GB, uh, singler, T-shirts.

• 17:03Jonny?

  I do the whole thing. To be honest, I think it's because Tom Martin couldn't do it that year. Like seriously. But you know, at least I'm honest about that. I think I get really riled up by people who, I'm going to offend some people here. I get really riled up by, you've got like people who are legit, like really strong, been training a long time, like should be at Worlds. And then you've got people who get to Worlds because a sort of an administrative process that where a box needed to be like a form, someone needed to fill a form in. So you've gone to Worlds. And like, I just don't think they're the same thing, personally. But anyway.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  I can hear you. I can hear your tiptoeing around the issue that you're trying to get to.

• 17:48Jonny?

  So the reason is, the reason is, I watched Tony Cliff in the GBPF Facebook group say something like, I can't remember exactly what he did, but it was something like, everyone's like, everyone's a paper champion these days, or everyone's got like a, everyone's got a medal and everyone's been a Europeans because of like, they competed where there's only two people in the weight class. And he really, really like, people got really offended. And I can see why they got offended because he's, he is like discrediting a lot of people. But the reason why I don't really like sort of saying, like, I went to Worlds, because I honestly, I don't really feel like I deserve to be there. Because I think I went there because Tom Martin, like if Tom Martin had gone, he'd have probably medaled. Whereas I didn't. So like.

• 18:30Chris Williamson?

  You have the singlet from that year and not Tom Martin.

• 18:33Jonny?

  That's true.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Say it however you want.

• 18:35Jonny?

  I don't think Tom Martin actually has that singlet at all.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered getting it framed? Or is it framed?

• 18:42Jonny?

  Yeah, you told me. No, I have it like, so I have my European one. And then I have when SPD realized like, oh, we should really put some money into this. And it stopped just being like a Union Jack, like ironed onto a singlet and it started being like a full, you couldn't buy. It's just in my drawer.

• 18:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you should do it. So I told you this story. Sonny Webster had his from, I think the Commonwealth and from the Olympics.

• 19:07Jonny?

  So fair enough.

• 19:07Chris Williamson?

  Framed with that, with like a special bracketed light, downlighting it. And like, fuck it, man. I think, you know.

• 19:15Jonny?

  I think if I'd been to the Olympics, I'd do that too. I just don't.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  You have made it to the peak of the sport that you chose to put most of your fitness career into. I think you deserve it.

• 19:24Jonny?

  Okay. Well, thank you. I. I I see why you think that. That's that's nice.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Can we just do a little aside just about Tom Martin? Just because he

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  Can we explain who he is briefly, please?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Because he's dropped his name about 20 times.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  He's a guy who he went a bit viral like a good few years ago now, probably six, seven years ago. Because at 83 kilos, he deadlifted 340 and everyone was

• 19:51Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  340 kilograms. Yeah. So

• 19:54Jonny?

  Think of the heaviest thing you've ever moved in your life, ever. Probably even the heaviest, like, single object that isn't like a car you've ever seen in your life, heavier than that. Think like small cow.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  And so and and he he didn't look like a lifter. He was he was like, came straight out sprinting and just happened to have a freak deadlift. Like, obviously, a lot of training as well. And then people were commenting, being like, this isn't real, or this is on drugs or whatever. And and then he started to go up a weight class, competed against Johnny. There's a great video on Instagram of him on the podium doing a like a juddery deadlift and then puts it down and the camera just pans to Johnny and he's just going.

• 20:36Jonny?

  Because I'd just come off. So I'd just come off the platform after having tried to pull 300 kilos and farted at Nationals. So like, it didn't even budge. It didn't even budge because he like and then

• 20:51Jonny?

  Yeah, I think you should have heard it because you were standing behind me, but no one else heard it. Thank God.

• 20:54Chris Williamson?

  Why did? I mean, what happened there? Did that mean that you lost your bracing tension or what?

• 20:58Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Because a little bit of fart came out.

• 21:01Jonny?

  You put it. You put a belt on. You're trying to create all this like intra-abdominal pressure.

• 21:05Chris Williamson?

  How much fart was there?

• 21:07Jonny?

  Just enough to just just hit the edge off.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And you're like, ah, because you don't want to

• 21:11Jonny?

  To do a max deadlift.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  What's it called? Turtle head? Like, you don't want that.

• 21:15Chris Williamson?

  Prairie dogging. You don't want it to be prairie dogging. Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  So

• 21:18Jonny?

  I just missed 300 and then Tom comes and has his go, his turn.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  And so this guy, like, he he hit his kind of sprinting menopause, probably probably at the top of his game regionally with that. Found that he had a a

• 21:35Speaker 00

  What do they call it, a penchant? Pon- penchant?

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  Pon- penchant.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  For deadlifting. Went up a weight class. Hit very good levels in the, in the IPF. Got sick of all of the, the bollocks around that. Got loads of drug accusations. Left the IPF. Went up like two more weight classes. And just got absolutely huge and increased his deadlift by like a hundred kilos.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  And then started competing in a non-tested federation. Yeah.

• 22:03Jonny?

  And I don't, I don't think he's ever. He's never come out and said like, I've started taking drugs now, but it's quite clear when you leave a tested federation and go and compete in a non-tested federation.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  And all your lifts go up.

• 22:14Jonny?

  It's fairly clear. Hugely as well.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Jonny?

  It's ins- he's squatting, I think over 400 now, he's pulled 420.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  Tom, shout out, man.

• 22:22Jonny?

  Few most impressive things he's, I've ever seen him do. One was at that competition where he comes out, no hype at all. Not even, barely even a facial expression. Misses like a 270 squat in the bottom. So like goes all the way down, tries to drive up, can't even bludgeon, you're like, ah, hard lines, Tom, good try. Third attempt comes out exactly the same weight and smokes it.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Sounds impressive, guy.

• 22:44Jonny?

  Who is this man?

• 22:44Chris Williamson?

  A lot of caffeine that he's had in between the lifts.

• 22:47Jonny?

  There's a video on Instagram of him passing out mid squat and like mid, mid rep and he still nearly locks it out. Like that's, that's why people say, or when you said, powerlifting is sort of full of people who aren't very athletic. Like there's a video of Tom cleaning 180, like it's nothing.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:04Chris Williamson?

  Fucking crazy.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  So what, yeah, what, what I'm saying is like at the beginner and intermediate level, like the, the barriers to entry are very low. And then as you approach the top, the curve flattens so quickly. And to then go from, even at like world's level, as you said, to go from attending worlds to placing at worlds. It comes like.

• 23:22Jonny?

  Different league.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  It defines the difference.

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  Insurmountable task.

• 23:25Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So, okay, so that's, that's, I think, a nice little bit of framing. So I think, again, for the people that are listening, my, my main question is, do you enjoy a bodybuilding style of training? Do you enjoy chest on a Monday and legs on a Tuesday and shoulders on a Wednesday and blah, blah, blah? Five sets of fucking 10 to 14 or whatever it might be. And I'll do me warmups and I'll do me external rotations and all that.

• 23:46Jonny?

  Sevens.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Everyone loves that.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Partial.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Two kilo plate.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Like, is that what you enjoy? Do you enjoy exercise? Because especially for a lot of guys that are listening, but some girls as well, you'll have done a bunch of sports at school, probably after school clubs, something like that. Maybe you played football or rugby or cricket or, you know, America, baseball, American football, whatever it might be. And then you get to college or uni and realise that there's distractions of drinking and partying and getting in relationships and stuff like that. And then you think, well, I need something which is flexible in terms of time, doesn't have very many barriers to entry and bolsters my confidence in a very socialised way, rather than in an achievement sized way.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  And I just think what it leads a lot of people to do is get to their mid to late twenties and think, fucking hell, I haven't really actually indulged my desires in terms of a physical output for a very, very long time. The type, the domain that I've been operating within hasn't actually made me feel that much better at all. I've looked jacked, do whatever, but now I'm going to try, I wonder what yoga's like, I wonder what fighting's like, I wonder what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu's like, I wonder what CrossFit's like. And then inevitably, what you see when people pivot and make that transition is that because it's firstly because there's novelty effect, but secondly, because they

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  perhaps genuinely have found something that they enjoy as a sport or as an athletic pursuit, their compliance goes up. And when their compliance goes up, the training volume goes up. And when the training volume goes up, their condition and their progress increases. So you actually realise that perhaps stopping doing a bodybuilding programme, which you low key hate, might be one of the best things you could do for your bodybuilding goals by switching to something else. Now, there's a couple of caveats. If you want to keep on making growth and gains, you need to make sure that whatever you're choosing to do has some form of loading. It also needs to have some form of progressive overload in there, also needs to have some form of intensity, you know, like no one's

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  getting jacked doing yoga unless it's a very specific type of yoga, which is like a lot of power yoga with, you know, Yin yoga isn't getting anyone jacked. But yeah, my point is, I just think a lot more people than realise it would be significantly happier doing a different type of sport.

• 26:19Jonny?

  I think it kind of depends on.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Been through the initial phase. Why do they need, why do they need to do that? Why do they need to go through the initial phase? Everyone has to gain a, a basic level of muscle mass and strength. And there's so like 99% of people who I see who are untrained, like most of their problems could be fixed by just getting a body weight squat and a body weight. But you know, like just hitting basic targets with e- even like rehab injury type stuff. You, you know, when you see, we've talked about this on other podcasts, I think, when you see girls wearing UG boots and they're like, they've got like valgus knee and their hips just, oh, and, and they just look really like floppy and,

• 27:00Speaker 00

  and, and they're always complaining of hip issues. And, and you're like, if you just could squat 60 kilos, so much of your life would be sorted out.

• 27:09Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Clam shells twice a week.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Those things with the bands and.

• 27:15Jonny?

  I think it's like, it's just, it's just general gaining general body awareness and what it feels like to, to push yourself physically. I think it's really easy to gain experience with that with like a barbell or machine based resistance training. So something that I saw when I did CrossFit for, I'm like six months was there's people in there who clearly like found CrossFit off the, like, like you, Chris, like found it off the back of having spent a lot of time doing like bodybuilding based training. And a lot of it, like someone gives you a dumbbell, you're like, no problem.

• 27:52Jonny?

  Seen a dumbbell before, done a lot of shit with a dumbbell. Dumbbell's fine. Like the, the more sort of, and kind of the, the base layer, like of, of Mazo's hierarchy and CrossFit is, is sorted. Like they can give you a barbell, they can give you, they can say, Chris, jump onto that and you're fine. But if you, if.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I just, just love like the concept of being given a dumbbell and be like, I'm familiar with one of these. I, I know, I know, I know how this works.

• 28:14Jonny?

  Well, that's, that's just how I felt about, like if, if there was a CrossFit workout where like Tim stands up and goes, barbell here, dumbbell there. And I'm like. I can do that.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  Got it.

• 28:24Jonny?

  But if it's like run, like whoa, whoa.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I didn't fucking, I didn't fucking sign up for this.

• 28:31Jonny?

  Hold on, hold on. Rub that out, mate. Just rub that line out.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:36Jonny?

  Um, but yeah, so like, I think when people, you, you also see the person who's like, it's a first crossfit session, they've never, maybe never trained before. And the idea of doing like a push press, if I said to either of you, do a push press, you're like, yeah, fine. I may, I've done push press. Like you've said, done the eye bodybuilder, shoulder spec.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 28:53Jonny?

  Like, we've all done a push press.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Jonny?

  So like you put, you put that, and we've also all like taken a set to failure. Don't like pushed ourselves physically beyond where we thought. And I think you do.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  I think I've push pressed one ten. That's my, that's my PB.

• 29:06Jonny?

  There you go. So if someone gives you a barbell with one ten on and you're like.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  No.

• 29:12Jonny?

  I, I, I firstly, I kind of know what I'm capable of here. Secondly, I know what it feels like to miss. Thirdly, I, I know sort of, I have a few technique cues in my mind. Give someone who's never touched a barbell before and say, push press that. They're like.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  What's a push press? What's a barbell? How do I pick it up? Can I do it with a mixed grip?

• 29:31Jonny?

  Yeah. You know, yeah, there's, there's something about watching someone who's moved a lot of our bells around. There's a certain kind of.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Grace.

• 29:39Jonny?

  Yeah, like you never see this.

• 29:43Jonny?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  I think the big, honestly, man, like a big, a big part of that just comes from doing athletics as a kid. But again, with that, like if there's people listening who did some, you know, especially with girls, fucking tons of girls at my school were doing like dance or other kind of like dance associated outputs. And you think like your, your proprioception, your ability to understand where your body is in space and how to move it from A to B is so much more advanced than a fucking donkey kickback. Like, why, why are you doing like three kilo tricep extensions like this?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's a real regression, isn't it?

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  When you've got tons and tons of biomechanical, uh biomechanical control just sat latent in your brain.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  So is that, I, I wonder if that's just people like compartmentalizing their, that, cause yeah, like to have a background in dance, like the amount of proprioception you need, like I'm, you know, I, I've done gymnastics for years and I still look at the dancers and think. Bloody hell, that's that's a whole nother level. So yeah, it like if you can cross over those skills and I like, I'm so grateful that I had a background in gymnastics because I see so many people at my age or even five, 10 years younger that are like, oh, I wish I did a bit more of that stuff when I was younger and it's really hard now and and they feel really creaky. And to have just had some lower level gymnastics skill when you're younger just means that yeah, like you pick up any new skills so easily, except anything with a ball. I'm terrible at

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are bad with everything with the ball. But I mean,

• 31:15Jonny?

  Oh, with the frisbee.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Oh, just anything like that.

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  Bad with the frisbee, yeah.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's again, that's another, that's another really good point, though. Like, think about what your athletic base is, especially go back to guys, a lot of guys might have done, like you say, football or rugby or something as a kid, like you have a really solid aerobic base, really solid, you'll understand how to run, you'll understand how to cut and change direction. And like, you know, even just going from that to just doing five Ks is probably not maximizing what you're what you're capable at doing, you know, obstacle racing or something like that would actually be maximizing your fitness inheritance, I suppose, a little bit better.

• 31:57Jonny?

  Hmm. I think, yeah.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I'll say, I just think, why don't you, um, why don't you both give us a 30,000 foot view of your fitness careers and how the how the menopause hit? I think that would be interesting.

• 32:11Jonny?

  Okay.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Go for it, Johnny.

• 32:14Jonny?

  All right.

• 32:16Jonny?

  Fifteen, sixteen, fat kid, start getting bullied. I was like, right, well, I'm not having that. So started, started, watched a Rocky film, started running, realized running wasn't the answer, read a couple of copies of Men's Health, Men's Fitness, started doing loads of kills, like loads of curls and like press ups and all that sort of stuff. Then gym sort of progressively worked its way through, like, that's when I met Yusuf for the first time when he was doing like, Squats three times a week and drinking a gallon of milk a day, I think. Just, yeah. Lots of that stuff. So like lots of like, lots of, I remember like the first time trying creatine and all that sort of stuff, just in this desperate attempt to get lean for the first time. Got lean for the first time, then realised actually like being strong and training. So then like did my first bulk ever.

• 33:01Jonny?

  And realised that gaining weight, gaining weight and gaining strength was actually more exciting than losing weight and losing strength. So did like thirteen, thirteen blocks of five, three, one, hit my first ever like five hundred pound deadlift, squatted two hundred kilos the first time with Yusef in. Where were we? Ashington, was it not? No. Oh, Kenton. Kenton, Kenton Gym. Um, and then like that. With, with security cameras and cages around the security cameras. I squatted two hundred kilos in the corner of that gym. Um, and that kind of became an addiction. So I got into, did my first powerlifting competition because Yusef suggested I did. Um, and it literally went like first competition, first squat I ever did, set a regional record.

• 33:44Jonny?

  Second squat I did, broke my own regional record, won that competition, went to nationals, came third, went to Europeans, went to Worlds. There was something to this. Yeah, so like there was like my first six powerlifting competitions. I was like, this is quite fun, this. Like I get like the GB kit and all this is mint. Um, but then. And why are you here? Twenty five, twenty four? Probably, yeah, twenty, yeah. Twenty fifteen, I went to Worlds, so twenty five. Yep. Um, and then kind of after that, um, trying to juggle it around, like propane taking off and, and like doing more work in the business.

• 34:22Jonny?

  Um, and you've kind of scratched that itch, so it starts to become less and less interesting. And probably go back a year was when that came to a head and I was just like, man, like I just cannot motivate myself to. So I moved up a weight class as well. So for the first time in my life, about two years ago, stopped being lean all the time. And I was like, I'd gained quite a lot of weight. And I was dealing with this other like.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  Tactically.

• 34:42Jonny?

  So what?

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  You tactically gained weight.

• 34:45Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't like yourself. It wasn't like you'd gone to seed or something. It's that you decided that you wanted to move up a weight class.

• 34:51Jonny?

  So I'd had four or five consecutive competitions in the ninety threes where my total hadn't moved. Um, and I was having to like aggressively wake up for the competitions and all that sort of stuff. So moved up a weight class. Hit bigger numbers. So hit like a two fifty squat, three twelve deadlift, one sixty bench, ripped my adductor in the bottom of a squat. And when that happened, I was like, fuck me, man. Like all this work.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  Got a video of that, haven't we?

• 35:15Jonny?

  Yeah, of my adductor, actually. Yeah. Awful. Um, I then had to chase Dexter, who was a puppy at the time, round a roundabout with a torn hamstring an hour later. Which I'm convinced was like the, that was it.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  The, it was just reminding you.

• 35:31Jonny?

  I still remember though, I remember limping out the house. Dexter slipping out his harness and then just like bang, and you're like before you know it, you've like got him in your arms, you know.

• 35:41Jonny?

  I just ripped my adductor a minute ago, but it was fine there.

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Jonny?

  Weird. But yeah, so that led to, I remember sat watching a CrossFit documentary. Like the latest one that had just come out at the time. Don't know what it would be.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Redeemed in the dominant maybe or road to the, road to the fittest. Yeah.

• 35:58Jonny?

  Yeah. And I was like, man, like, cause you were at the time where you'd been doing CrossFit for maybe two years or something at that point. Um, so I did. What's the CrossFit workout? It's like ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, squat, bench, deadlift, bench, cleaning jerk.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was at regionals that year. I can't remember, but I, I know the one that it was.

• 36:16Jonny?

  It's like Cindy or no, Margaret.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  Whatever. Yeah. Joanne.

• 36:22Jonny?

  Did that and I was like, man, that would like, that was actually really good fun. Then did six months of CrossFit. Then I injured myself again, twice in, uh, the open. So I was doing.

• 36:34Jonny?

  Twenty one fifty nine, twenty one fifty nine with the deadlifts and handstand walks. Um, and I just approached one forty, like it's just one forty. How bad can this be? You get like seven reps in and you're like, yeah.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

  Quite bad.

• 36:47Jonny?

  Quite bad, yeah. And I think I like ding my hamstring a little bit, did my wrist doing cleaning jerk. And now I'm kind of like, honestly, at the moment, I'm kind of just, fitness is just like these totally deprioritized for me. It's a bit of a shame, but it does feel like what where I am at now is the thing that I'm aggressively chasing. So if I go back to like nineteen year old me, I was aggressively chasing fitness. I was aggressively chasing being leaner, getting stronger. Um, because of what I thought I'd get from it. Um, and now I think probably the same thing for me is business and like other areas of personal development and all that sort of stuff. Um, just because I think I know that if I put more effort into my fitness, what I'd get out of it's probably not what

• 37:30Jonny?

  I maybe once expected. So that's kind of my journey.

• 37:36Chris Williamson?

  No, I, I think it's cool. Seth, what do you give us yours?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  So yeah, um, met, I think met Johnny in like the school gym at age of sixteen. Um, I was doing all sorts of stupid stuff, like all the like Pavel Satsalin. And I can't even remember the name of the guy who was making you do like a thousand Hindu squats and Hindu press ups every day. It was called like a com- combat core conditioning or some, something like that. Um, I, I've got an image of Johnny trying a pre-workout for the first time, like it, it became as like a free sample in like a magazine. And then had like, Matt, yeah, had like two cables behind him. Um, so holding on to the cables and doing like a loaded sprint and then stepping back and doing that again. Um, then I discovered the strong lift five by five program.

• 38:23Jonny?

  You do, sorry to interrupt, didn't you do like an arm program that was like arms MX five thousand or something?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Oh, probably, yeah, like all kinds of.

• 38:30Jonny?

  Sure, there's it because your original like transformation article, you were talking about doing like really high volume arm work.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I've I've basically done every like free ebook and and like ridiculous programme that and surprisingly, none of it worked. One, because I ate like an absolute pigeon. Then I bought some whey and had like one scoop of it or like almost a scoop of it. Once, once every day that I was training and I was thinking like, oh, that'll be it. Like despite eating maybe eight hundred calories a day. Started the Strong Lift Five by Five Programme, which that's when progress started to move up. Just because I was using a barbell, doing some kind of progressive overload. Did the Squats and Milk Programme, which is where you take, so three times a week, you take your ten rep max with a squat, which there was no squat rack, so I had to just set up the bar on to like.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Gymnasium horses, wasn't it? School, yeah, school gymnastics. It's like get underneath it, like squeeze underneath. And then start my set. You do a set of ten, which is your ten rep max. And then you keep the bar on your back and you take five to ten deep breaths and you do another rep. And you keep doing that until you hit twenty. And then you have a gallon of milk a day. So I was having a gallon of whole milk. Four point seven litres of whole milk every day, just sat in class. And I remember doing this and like throwing up raspberry whey down my top while I had the bar on my back.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Doing these like squats and milk, being so out of breath and just like. And like this was in a, this was in like a gym where again, no squat rack. You just have to like fashion together a bunch of kit. So I must have just looked a bit mental. Then went to uni, got, got a coach based on Johnny's. No, in fact, this was, sorry, before this, so I was fifty nine kilos, stayed around that weight. Went to uni, gained thirty one kilos over three months. So that is half my body weight. By basically drinking a pint of cream, pint of double cream every night before bed.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Glasses of olive oil between meals, cheesecake in the blender, just like. Quality weight then, real quality weight. A real quality weight. My lifts didn't go up at all during that period. Oh yeah, it's all muscle because my t-shirts were fitting tighter. So did that, had.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Mutant mass as well, like a weight gainer that's like 2000 calories per serving. Lots of vomiting throughout this period, just from like, not from like purging, but just from like being so full mechanically that if you make any sudden movements. It all just comes out.

• 41:14Jonny?

  It comes out.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, if you, if you're carrying a really full pint across a, a busy bar and someone knocks into you, right? It goes, it goes all over the floor. Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Whoop. And so after that, got lean.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Later on, started to gain more weight again.

• 41:32Jonny?

  Do you remember why you got lean?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Uh, just because this is when we were setting up propane, we were like, oh, we, we need a, uh, we need a transformation. And then I was like, I'll, I'll give it a go. I'm probably like two weeks off being lean.

• 41:45Jonny?

  You were at 90 kilos at the time.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  90 kilos.

• 41:47Jonny?

  I remember sitting in the kitchen of my like uni accommodation with the two of us and Dan. And we're like, yeah, we'll start a fitness website. And then we all looked at each other like, ah, one of us is going to have to get in shape for this. And you were like, I'll do it. And then you, I remember you did a rapid fat loss program. You were eating peppers and doing like high intensity interval training and.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Physically, it was a protein sparing modified fast. Yeah, like 700 calories a day of just protein. And yeah, if, if, I, I think I was just so deeply experimental and just wanting to just try anything for, for giggles. Later on, start, did a powerlifting competition. Johnny and I started doing, going to different competitions.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Then hired a coach on Johnny's recommendation, who was Eric Elms. We've had him on the podcast multiple times now. Got very lean, like silly lean by this point, like could see pancreas secreting insulin. Like would walk past the window and just see like. Like striations and fasciculations in like the top of your chest and stuff and like, you know, when you start to see like in your jaw as well. Had that got pretty unwell with how lean I was, like just always rundown, like super food anxious. Super like just dysfunctional.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  Sceptical or being ill, erectile dysfunction, all the stuff that.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  All of that, yeah, like really wired all the time as well. Did an Olympic lifting competition, did multiple powerlifting competition, like smashed the powerlifting competitions in that weight class because I was just, I just wasn't a seventy four kilo lifter. I was a eighty three kilo lifter hiding in in the weight class below because I've managed to like eliminate all body fat.

• 43:29Jonny?

  You got you got drug tested because you just had such tight delt separation. When it's like everyone else comes off the platform, like a bit out of shape. And then there's Yusuf when you like, as soon as he tensions to pull the bar off the ground, there's like, like chest just like fans out.

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  Fucking peacock, yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  It's it's quite funny in that situation because in clothes, you don't look like you lift. Out of clothes, people are like, no way are you seventy four kilos.

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a big dichotomy, right?

• 44:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  So then did we're continuing to doing doing gymnastics like throughout that. And that was kind of what initially got me into weightlifting in the first place, like to condition for gymnastics. Then had an ongoing disc issue, which I remember Chris came to my house and brought like a gift package, which was like an innocent smoothie.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  I believe soaring, like a bunch of drugs.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Volterol.

• 44:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Like that, that was lovely because I.

• 44:27Jonny?

  That was, I remember the the pain was so bad, you like couldn't walk. You were like, you were tearing up because you were moving, it was hurting so much.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Constantly, yeah, like just like spent a few days just lying on the floor. And like, if you have to go to the bathroom, you're like, oh no, it felt like such a journey to take like an hour to like support yourself over.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  That culminated in getting ill in hospital with an infection, but then got kind of, I think a dysitis or a just worsening of that. Vagitis, lost function of my left leg for a bit. Because over about six months, um, lost sensory motor function of the the S one derm tone of my left leg.

• 45:03Jonny?

  Yeah, me too, mate.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  So it was like, sort of like shuffling around for a few months, like I couldn't, couldn't extend my left foot. Thinking like, well, that's it. I've finally done it. Like I've ignored all the pain signals, deadlifting and, you know, and it's because. Well, and it's actually totally because of this, this like bravado attitude you see online of like, if you don't squat every day to a max, you're a pussy. And if, if you're in pain, it's, you know, you just kind of train through it and all this stuff. And I just, like, there was literally, I've got a screenshot of like, some marketing thing from T Nation of a guy saying, I was taking this micro PA supplement and I gained 15 pounds of muscle even while I was so ill that I had to drag an oxygen canister around the gym with me and mate, you're like.

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  If that's not irresponsible marketing.

• 45:54Jonny?

  Do you remember the video that was like Sebastian Corset gained 400 pounds on his leg press and dropped 25% body fat and you're like, oh my.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  That's what I need.

• 46:06Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. So did, did that program, bodybuilding, well, I, I bodybuilder.

• 46:11Jonny?

  I bodybuilder. That was developed out of a black ops bodybuilding project, do you remember?

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Really well produced.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  You couldn't get away with that now. In the, in the, in the era of GDPR, there's no way.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  Excuse me, have you got my leg press data?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  The era of, yeah, GDPR and COVID and complaints and like. Postmodernism.

• 46:40Jonny?

  At a time.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Kids, kids today will never know.

• 46:44Jonny?

  When, when you could watch a video like that and actually be legit convinced that like this is all you needed was the eye bodybuilder program, like how nice life was.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  When, when the Jack, Jack 3D pre-workout had illegal compounds in it, like literally had.

• 47:00Jonny?

  It's powerful stuff. Yeah. 13 Darmeth or Amaline, I believe it's called.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  Was that the derivative of amphetamine or something?

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Do you remember the first time you took that?

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Very itchy face. I also was, because I was taking a lot of NOX- NOXplored at the time. That was my. NOXplored was my, was my boy because I just thought that the more nitric oxide that I had in my body, the, the, the bigger I was. So I was just taking that and I'm like, oh, fucking hardest. Fuck me. Fuck off. Um, so I put two of it in and it was actually, it was, the taste is not too bad. It's like lemon and lime sort of.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Flavor. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty easy to get down. Definitely over measured it. And I remember spending most of that training session just desperately scratching my face.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  Like you get the, the, um, blood capillaries dilate, right? Is that correct, Skum? Is that why?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  You, I mean, like all of the effects of an amphetamine, like there's, there's always people talking about pill Willie from, from Jack, Jack, Jack 3D. I think I got a, I got a seven rep PB. So I hit my three rep max for squat for 10.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  And, and then I was really unwell for a week afterwards. Like I, I kind of stumbled home from the gym. Like, you know, when you start to see the, the tunnel vision start to kick in.

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  closes in.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Your peripheral, and, and then I was like, oh, and I just went to bed just ill for a few days.

• 48:26Chris Williamson?

  For a long time.

• 48:27Jonny?

  I remember looking at the, because I think I'd gone by this point, I'd been taking, I'd been, we'd been trying like NOXplored and all these different pre workouts. And I'd even gone like off piece because this is back when in the good old days when my protein, the way they worked was, you could just buy bags of individual supplements and sort of make your own thing.

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, my protein. Yeah.

• 48:46Jonny?

  Exact, yeah, like back, like before they were releasing like the My Vegan Bars, you know, when, when it was done properly. So I was, I was already like mixing like arginine and caffeine and like stirring it all up and like necking it before the gym. So.

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  Horny goat.

• 48:58Jonny?

  Looking at the, yeah, like Tribulus, all the stuff you could possibly get in your pre workout. Looked at the tub. I was, I'm sure it said like no more than three scoops. I was like bollocks. Like I, I have a lot of coffee. I have a lot of stuff. I'll just, I'll try four. There's no way it's more caffeine than a normal pre workout. Hit a, I think I got like.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Pupils just.

• 49:18Jonny?

  Two thirty for six deadlift, which at the time was meant to like way over similar to use of. Then went to the cinema and it was also my high carb day. Went to the cinema, had two bags of wine gums. And then just got debilitating cramp in the cinema.

• 49:34Jonny?

  So I remember like, I remember standing outside, I had to leave the cinema, standing outside the showing with my leg on a bin, trying to stretch out my hamstring, like in like seething, like really bad pain. And everyone's walking past going like, I'm just like.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  You see how long his legs are?

• 49:51Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  Looking for you. So here's, here's something that I can see that's a universal across both of yours, which is the um, part of the inflection point where you changed your training methodology occurred due to injuries of one kind or another.

• 50:07Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  Um, a disenchantment with training, um, a lack of novelty in the training that you were doing because you'd done a lot of it already. And then, um.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  I think realising that like, all that we've been doing was aggravating the injury and just continuing to ignore the fact that it was just making it worse. And being like, why am I just pursuing loading my body with more and more weight with no particular end point?

• 50:34Jonny?

  Cause you can get away with it when you're 18 and you're just basically made of like, you're just like one of those packs of jelly. Yeah. Jelly that you drop in water. You're just like.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  It's incredible. I remember being able to do like heavy, like I snatch and then deadlift to a max and then go to gymnastics that evening and then wake up the next day feeling absolutely fine. Like just normal, no doms or anything. Now like, I feel like I've been hit by a bus.

• 50:56Chris Williamson?

  Let's remember, remember what I said during my definition. This is, this is why the fitness menopause is such a robust concept. Because it is as you become chronically aware of your own mortality. Maybe you get injured once or twice. Maybe your bounce back from the injury doesn't quite happen as quickly. Maybe you realise that um, your fitness, like actual genuine cardiovascular fitness hasn't been cared for apart from only in service of a cut. Um, for like a long time. Like if the only time that you ever get your heart rate up is in the months of May, June and bit of July before the lads holiday, or like the girls, the girls trip away and stuff. And um, yeah, the, I, I think there's, and

• 51:37Chris Williamson?

  the same for me, right? The, all of the different categories that you guys identified there from. Training to just have externalized, socialized rewards to then getting a little bit bored with it, to then getting a little bit injured, to then trying a few things, to then finding something that I'm happy with, and then dialing my training back and then actually finding a sense of fulfillment and pleasure where training becomes integrated into my life as opposed to being my life, which it was for quite a long time. And I think that it's actually part of a broader menopause which occurs. But if I need to, if saying menopause so much is triggering, I don't know whether

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  menopause is like a word that we really shouldn't be using, but it's the one that we've chosen. We are going to be in a bit of trouble.

• 52:25Jonny?

  People know, I think people know what we mean.

• 52:27Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 52:27Jonny?

  Don't they?

• 52:28Chris Williamson?

  Good. Thank you. Voice of reason there. Yeah. I think it's part of a broader menopause that you go through again, you know, especially, I think particularly for guys, because we mature so much, so much more slowly. Like, there's so much latent maturity that should have occurred in men under the age of 25. And then it kind of like, it's, you know, when you pull a spring, and it's starting to load up and load up and load up. And then the thing holding the spring at the back lets go and it goes.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Well, except for the fact that you can, I think you can make a fart joke to a man of any age. It's still funny.

• 53:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got latent, like, old school grandfathered in jokes like that, haven't you? So, but yeah, I think it's a part of that as well, because it was at the same time that I made that switch to CrossFit. That was like, oh, I'm going to play around with a little bit more self-development. And maybe I'm going to question whether I should deprogram the way that I use alcohol. And maybe I should see if I can start working on my sleep routine. Or maybe I should do this podcast and start reading and do, you know, a bunch of other things. So I think it all is part of a wider change that people go through in their lives. But I genuinely believe that by looking at different ways to integrate fitness into your life, you can potentially

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  service some of those other changes, you know? If you start to now train for something which is genuinely internally enjoyable to you, which has objective measures of performance, which I think is a really big thing, like if all that you're doing is subjective measures of of progress, i.e. aesthetics and bodybuilding, you're never ever going to actually know if you're making progress. And that's one of the reasons that I think people have anxiety about their training, that they never actually know if they're better. You know, it's like, am I actually like, well, I mean, do my delts look, my delts look a bit better than last year, but like, maybe my glutes are a bit more down and blah, blah, like.

• 54:28Jonny?

  So it's one of the most depressing things about bodybuilding as a sport, that like, even if you're a professional bodybuilder, yeah, you can go by measurements, but really, like, the way that it's ultimately judged is by a subjective panel of judges.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Profess.

• 54:42Jonny?

  And there are Mr. Olympias that have been busting themselves for ages to try it, and they'll just never win because the judges don't happen to like their physique. And you're like.

• 54:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, I prefer a physique that's got a little bit more traps. And you're like, well, what the fuck does that mean?

• 54:57Jonny?

  Yeah, I know.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that? Whereas, again, if you've got CrossFit, this is one of the, definitely one of the things that you can say about CrossFit, powerlifting, weightlifting, 100 kilos is 100 kilos. Like, it's always going to be 100 kilos. And if you lift it 10 times last week and then 11 times this week, you have made definitively, by definition, you have made progress.

• 55:20Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah. The thing, the thing that is good about, so the thing that's a challenge about most strength sports, most barbell based sports, probably not including Strongman, is you are trying to improve such a narrow range of things that it's quite easy to have, like, especially once you've been training for three, four years, it's quite easy to have, like, six months, years where you maybe don't make any progress at all. Like, I think my bench stalled for like, four years. Like add up the reps done, which means nothing, like objectively, nothing. And you think, well, what's the point where something like CrossFit? Because the, it's just this broad plane of things you could improve on. Um, it's a, I think mentally it's easier.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's why you start slacklining, Chris, isn't it?

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's a perfect example of something that is for no gain other than I think it's quite fun. And Seth, you got, you got to do it with me.

• 56:19Jonny?

  It's hard.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  It's real challenging, but I'm not doing it because I think it's going to improve my glute gains. I'm not going to lie and say that, um, it is, there's not a little bit of me that wants to be good at it so that I can show off. I'm aware, I'm aware that that's probably in their deep.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  That's why we do anything.

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but I, I genuinely like that slacklining for people that don't know slacklining. It's kind of like less weird. Um, uh, what's that thing they used to do in the circus?

• 56:49Jonny?

  Tightrope.

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  Tightrope. It's like less weird tightrope, isn't it? Um, but you could, it's a flat piece of material that you can stand on and walk along and kind of the real good people can go like this. But, but, but, but, but, but, yeah, wiggle from side to side. Um, but that with a podcast on in the sunshine for an hour is for me. What like beautiful way to spend an afternoon, especially if it's a rest day from more heavy, heavily loaded training. But if you told 21 year old Chris that my idea of a good Sunday afternoon would be to go and listen to a couple of fellas talk in a room in a pair of wireless headphones and stand on a flat piece of material in between two trees in the park next to my house. I'd have been very, very disappointed.

• 57:34Chris Williamson?

  But I show, I guess that shows how our preferences and stuff.

• 57:37Jonny?

  I, I think most people get into it to begin with because they just want to be more attractive and like more impressive. Like they want to impress their mates or impress.

• 57:44Chris Williamson?

  Bodybuilding, do you mean?

• 57:45Jonny?

  Yeah, or like just fitness in general, like most people, it's because they want to improve how they look and they want to improve how they look to be more impressive. But I think once you've like the, we've all entered the phase at which like it actually stops being impressive and starts being a bit weird.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  So how much do you lift mate? 300.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, even just someone telling you you're too lean. To get there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. How much work? How much have they had to sacrifice to get there? When you see someone that is that lean, you know that they can't have that much else going on in their life. So this is the bizarre thing about what signaling does. Signaling in any form tells you a lot more than just that one signal is. So, okay, what are the second, third, fourth order effects back upstream from whatever I'm seeing in front of me? Like, this particular person who's unbelievably lean, strong, big, whatever it might be, they have to have some deficiencies elsewhere, or they have to have some side effects, just say, not necessarily deficiencies, because there's been some sacrifices that have had to be made for that. And yeah, as your preferences

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  change across time, I think it, it's, and the other thing as well is,

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  gym bros especially, they select, or they identify a very particular type of caricaturistic, caricature, that girls don't actually find all that attractive. Like, if you gave a lad that was just a normal fella who was confident because he'd worked on being socially capable, and a guy who was much more reserved, didn't have any of the social capabilities, but did 531 for a couple of years, the guy that is able to laugh and joke and go on with people in a group is going to be significantly more popular socially and also significantly

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  better with the opposite sex. And the same, I think, goes for girls as well.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Not, yeah, that's a good point. Like, in terms of attractiveness, like, from selecting for the things that you're training for, but even within that as well. So we've just posted an Instagram post of.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  The the attributes that people typically train for in terms of so that men typically train for when they're when they're wanting to to look better is biceps, abs, shoulders, triceps, like whereas the attributes that women on average prefer physically in men are glutes, back and legs. So

• 1:00:17Chris Williamson?

  Is that a study somewhere?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll try and find the citation, but it's it basically says that like we are optimizing for the wrong thing. If you're if you're training to to look better for the opposite sex, like the things that you think are important are not the things that people find attractive in you.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  Do the opposite.

• 1:00:34Jonny?

  I was saying this to Becca the other day. We were just walking, dexter and I just had this realization of like, you can tell a lot about someone by how much they barbell row.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Jonny?

  Like, you meet someone with a huge barbell row and like that person, very patient.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Wasn't an accident.

• 1:00:53Jonny?

  Well, definitely wasn't an accident. What isn't doing it really for any kind of approval because like who brags about their barbell row? You can't see the effect of a barbell row in the mirror. It is pure, just like I am in the pursuit of self-improvement here. And that's all I'm after. I just want to slightly improve my barbell row over time.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  And the

• 1:01:15Jonny?

  I just don't think there are very many other

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Makes you more attractive as well.

• 1:01:17Jonny?

  Well, exactly. Yeah. I just don't think there are very many other exercises you can say that of. Maybe a dumbbell, so any rowing movement, chin up probably as well. But even that's a bit, it feels a bit more bicep. Yeah, a bit more showing.

• 1:01:28Chris Williamson?

  I mean, deadlifts.

• 1:01:31Jonny?

  I don't know. I think like, that's the most way you can move, isn't it? On an exercise, pretty much. Yeah. So when people are doing like three inch rack pulls, you're like, come on, mate.

• 1:01:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's going on here?

• 1:01:40Jonny?

  Stop.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  Look at that. So yeah, I think, like I say, part of a broader change that people have where they start to remember that they used to do art as a kid. Ah, maybe I'm going to go and take an art class. And maybe I'm going to start doing another language. Or I'll repick up the guitar. I haven't played that in however many years. Or, you know, and this is to some of the

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Listeners who are older than we are, this might just sound like we're going, yes, mate, that's what getting fucking older is. Whereas to us, we're like, oh, look, my body, my body's changing and my injuries aren't going away as quickly. And it's like, yeah, welcome to my age, you motherfucker.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Well, I would quite like if there's anyone listening who is over the age of 35, 40, and thinks that we're just spouting absolute obvious truisms, then please comment and let us know.

• 1:02:28Jonny?

  But everything's, everything's obvious to someone, isn't it? Like, if we were, if we were genuinely putting out, like, groundbreaking information here, then that's quite something.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  I think fitness menopause is fairly groundbreaking.

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  I think when you map, I think when you start to map, and man, I hope that we've red pilled the shit out of some people today. I hope that there's some listeners who will go away and think, I'm actually gonna try a different form of training because I don't feel that engaged with my bro style split anymore. I don't really feel like it's benefiting me across the board. I'm sick of having my progress judged purely subjectively by myself, like, not even by other people.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  There is something a bit like that. So that's very important for people that are at the, the full side of the curve, the end of the curve. There are also people who are pre this curve and should not assume that they've hit the fitness menopause. If you've been training less than two, three years, you are nowhere near the fitness menopause. And if anything, if you don't lift weights and you, and you're doing other stuff, you will always benefit from getting, you'll still get a lot of the, the, like, the low hanging fruit from lifting weights, just for a bit, just get a basic level competence. And then you can do whatever you, whatever you like.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's coming from a proper, proper doctor. I mean, not

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Proper doctor.

• 1:03:51Chris Williamson?

  Not your doctor. We are not, we are not your doctor.

• 1:03:55Jonny?

  A doctor.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  But he is a doctor. And yeah, what was it that you said before that a lot of the biomechanical problems and health problems that you get would be fixed if someone could do a body weight squat and a push up?

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Oh, in terms of soft tissue, niggling injuries and like all that kind of stuff, absolutely. But there is also just a pure Mortality improvement, like all cause mortality, one of the biggest factors is grip strength. And yes, that's correlation and it might be the people who are dying have weaker grip and so on. But if you improve your grip strength, if you improve your total muscle mass, there are so many metabolic, cardiovascular and just overall mortality improvements and reduction in risk that you can get from that. Plus you look better, you feel better, like it's a no brainer to lift weights for a bit and just get basic levels of strength.

• 1:04:45Jonny?

  I bought a rolling thunder. Have I told you about this? Do you know what rolling thunder is?

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:04:50Jonny?

  No. So it's a spinning handle, it's a big spinning, I think of fat grips.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:04:56Jonny?

  Everyone who's going through fitness menopause knows what a fat grip is, that's another thing. So think of a fat grip. So it's a handle that that comes down and clips on to a lifting pin that you plate load and then you, so that you've got, you've got plates, a pin and a handle that spins. That's, that's wide and you have to pick that up, pick that up and get it up to a certain height. Now that is one of the most, it, it's got the weirdest like strength curve. So I can do like sets of five, sets of 10 with 50 kilos, but I cannot make 60 kilos leave the floor at all. And it's just grip. It's like pinch and support grip.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Why are you trying to improve your grip?

• 1:05:36Jonny?

  Banter.

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Because why not?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Banter.

• 1:05:38Jonny?

  Well, it's just, it's just something I've not tried. So I was like, I saw that, I was like, oh, that's pretty good. I wonder, I wonder what I could do on that. And then lo and behold, a lot harder than you think.

• 1:05:45Chris Williamson?

  Did you get retargeted with the discount at some point on a pixel?

• 1:05:48Jonny?

  It was actually, it was actually Martin Berkhan. So he's someone who's just been right the whole time. And still is right. But he started working on his grip because I think he couldn't deadlift or something. Or he had maybe had golfers elbow or something, like something happened. So he was like, I'm going to work on my grip. And he's gone full deep end with it, like he's, I think he's competing in Iron Mind competitions and things with it. So Iron Mind are the people who make the, the proper lifting straps. Like, have anyone seen a set of blue lifting straps? Does anyone know what I mean?

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're great. I've got some.

• 1:06:23Jonny?

  Rated R, like that, you know, that you, they'd never snap. Put it that way. Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Have you all got a captain of crush as well, a cock?

• 1:06:30Jonny?

  No.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Have you used one, Chris?

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't, I do not need to do more forearm work.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:06:38Jonny?

  Your grip's really impressive, actually, Chris.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'd be ridiculous.

• 1:06:40Jonny?

  We should test your grip.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  But.

• 1:06:43Jonny?

  There's like, there's crush, there's pinch, and there's support, three aspects of grip.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  You've really gone deep on grip, haven't you?

• 1:06:51Jonny?

  Yeah, by accident, though.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Chris has got turgid, turgid, and turgid, doesn't he?

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Full lean and striated.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  So a captain of crush is like a, one of those old school grip trainers, it's like, looks like that, and you squeeze it together. And.

• 1:07:07Jonny?

  Try checking it in.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  There's five different difficulties. I, I was like, I'll go for a three, like, that'll be, I can barely move it, like, it's so, they're clearly not just made for, like, one to five difficulty for general population, it's like, I think number five, like, two people in the world have ever closed it or something.

• 1:07:27Chris Williamson?

  Well, number five's just a solid object, isn't it?

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  It's just a metal box.

• 1:07:32Jonny?

  Just a metal box.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  What's this for?

• 1:07:35Jonny?

  Well, so like, I think the world's record rolling thunder lift is like, 120, 130 kilos, and you hear that and you think, doesn't sound that bad. That was literally what I thought, I was like, I wonder whether, I wonder, could I do 100 kilos? Not even close, not even half of that lift, I can even budge off the ground.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  And you're like, you can deadlift.

• 1:07:56Jonny?

  Well, you're like, what can I improve here? Like, am I honestly going to try and hypertrophy my forearm? Like, you know.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Who's that made for? Like, if, if, if you are, you've been to Worlds powerlifting, like, and you've got, and your deadlift is your strongest movement.

• 1:08:12Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  And you still can't, like.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  You're the guy that can't get half of the world record in that.

• 1:08:15Jonny?

  It's people who are doing like five by five with 300, isn't it? It's, it's the, it's when you, when you think you're strong, like, you're strongest out your mates, you go to a powerlifting competition, you're like, not that strong. And then you win a powerlifting competition, you're like, I'm pretty strong, and then you go to Worlds, and you just stand at the entrance and just go.

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  And you see, there's a fellow with a checkered shirt who walks in and cut off jean shorts and high military boots on.

• 1:08:41Jonny?

  But that's the thing. That's what you expect, but none of them are like that.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Just to finish things off, Johnny, can you talk to us about the Chinese lady at Finland?

• 1:08:50Jonny?

  Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Okay. So warm up room. Well, so like it's like Lane Norton, Christoph Wazbicki, like Ray Williams, all these like people you've seen in on Instagram. Warming up in this room and in the corner is a is an old Chinese lady. Wearing like bandages, like medical bandages around her knees, doing tempo squats with 170. And she must have been like, she must have been 60 odd kilos. But it was just like, straight line, straight line.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Just grooving, just high bar.

• 1:09:22Jonny?

  Yeah. And like, when you've got like Polish world champions, like.

• 1:09:29Jonny?

  What's that? You know, like, you're like, who are you? And no one really, she wasn't competing. She was just in the warm up room, getting a session in.

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:09:40Jonny?

  But yeah, none of them are, none of them are that. They're all just like totally unassuming. Like you, you see them afterwards, sort of in the Finnish supermarket, buying some like weird cheese and a sausage or something. And like, they all just look like completely normal people. But on a platform. Monsters.

• 1:09:56Chris Williamson?

  Would you not think that's, that's the most interesting thing about people that do these physical pursuits? It's that you could see them out at the supermarket and just think, oh, he's a normal, he's just a normal fellow. Yeah. It's like, you know, the people who have done MMA but don't have cauliflower ear. You're like, you're the really dangerous bastard.

• 1:10:17Jonny?

  You're the one to keep away from.

• 1:10:18Chris Williamson?

  Cause I can identify someone who's done BJJ for 10 years because they've got, they've got the ears. But like, if you're one of the people who's managed to protect his ears, you're just a nuclear warhead, a complete lethal weapon, just walking around.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  It's very Fight Club.

• 1:10:34Chris Williamson?

  It is very Fight Club. Look, we've done it. Fitness Menopause. We'll see if anyone's been red pilled by that. Let us know if any of those points resonate with you. I know that they do. They either do resonate with you, or you're lying to yourself about the fact that you don't think they resonate with you, or you're

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  You're just not trained long enough.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's the, okay, so final thing. How long does someone need to do a push pull leg split before they're allowed to enter the Fitness Menopause Club?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Three to five years of pack deck and leg press.

• 1:11:03Jonny?

  Or do something like 531, where like, you want to be regularly thinking, Monday, you want to be worried about your Friday squat session.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Thursday night, you want to be really like struggling to sleep.

• 1:11:16Jonny?

  Thursday night, you want to be like, no, no, I can't go out tonight because tomorrow, like I need an early night. Why? Well, it's like six, it's the sixth wave of the three's week of 531. What do you, what do you, what do you mean? Why do I need an early night? If that's how you start thinking and you start and you're going into the gym terrified, and if you miss the rep, you're devastated. Sit in that phase of time for at least a couple of years, then you're allowed to do something else.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Fitness Menopause Club. Look, gentlemen, thank you very much. Propanefitness.com/podcast will, no, slash modern wisdom.

• 1:11:53Jonny?

  Unbelievable. Gets it wrong every time.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Sorry. Propanefitness.com/ModernWisdom. Good.

• 1:12:00Jonny?

  Well, that's for people who want to do online coaching, or you can go to forward slash calculator if you want some macros.

• 1:12:09Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you very much. I'll get you on again soon. But for now, bye bye.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Bye bye.