#314: Training Modifications During a Diet

Summary

Podcast Summary: 3D Muscle Journey #314 – Training Modifications During a Diet

Main Theme:
This episode dives into the art and science of modifying training during a diet phase—whether that’s for contest prep or a casual fat loss phase. The coaches discuss autoregulation: how lifters should adapt their training on the fly as fatigue, motivation, and recovery capacity fluctuate, especially when calories decrease and stress rises. Drawing upon decades of personal and coaching experience, they stress the importance of experience, self-awareness, and individualized approaches to optimize both performance and longevity in the sport.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Role of Autoregulation During Dieting

• Contextual difference: Contest prep and recreational dieting each present unique recovery demands and motivational challenges.
• Alberto Nunez (B):
  “It starts with, am I going to train today or not?... The most catastrophic injury I’ve ever had took place on the day where I shouldn’t even have been at the gym in hindsight.” (02:11)
• Takeaways:
  • Deciding if you should train is an important first step (02:30).
  • Newer athletes must learn to distinguish between true fatigue and fleeting lack of motivation.

2. Autoregulation Evolves with Experience

• Experience is key: It takes years and multiple diet/training cycles to become highly proficient at reading one’s own signals.
• Eric Helms (B):
  “If you’ve only been in the gym three or four years... you’re not going to be as good at taking your prior experiences and intuitively going well, this is my 8th contest prep and I know where I’m at...” (05:21)
• Jeff Alberts (A):
  “I got 40 years of experience... my judgment on myself is probably like 90% accurate at this point.” (07:55)
• Takeaways:
  • Rigid programs create a valuable baseline; only with this can you learn how changes truly affect you (09:10).
  • Autoregulation only works well after a baseline is established and experience is accumulated.

3. The Process of Learning Autoregulation

• Structured learning: Initially, stick with a set program; learn to reflect when things feel off and why (08:30).
• Analyze feedback from rigorously-followed programs to know when and why adjustments are needed.
• Quote:
  “If you keep all your variables very consistent, it’s easy to start pinpointing the reasons why things are off or... working.” (A, 08:10)

4. Variability and Program Design

• Balance between rigidity and fluidity: Static programs too long = stagnation; constant program hopping = no learning.
• Try different paradigms (volume, frequency, exercise type) over a career to know what truly works for you (13:40).
• Eric Helms:
  “They’ll know really well how they respond within that specific paradigm, but if they never changed paradigms, then how could they know what might be better?” (12:18)

5. Coaching Strategies to Build Autoregulation

• Learning best happens when well-fed: Experimenting in a surplus is safer and more instructive than when deep in a deficit (24:10).
• Assess personality: Are they prone to doing too much or too little? Tailor “assignments” to address this (25:50).
• Communication is key: Regular deep-dive conversations with athletes help triangulate the optimal approach (31:05).
• Notable practice:
  “Instead of giving 10 darts to hit a bullseye, I’m only giving them two—focus and intention levels up.” (A, 31:20)
• Using checklists and feedback: Weekly questionnaires on motivation, sleep, and session difficulty help both coach and athlete reflect and spot trends (45:37).

6. Managing Supply and Demand

• Analogy: Digging a fence post—don’t expend three feet of energy if you only need two (34:30).
• Early in dieting, little modification may be needed; as deficit deepens, more recovery strategies (e.g., diet breaks, lower volume, rest days) become necessary.
• Quote:
  “If your supply is outpacing that demand, you will be productive... But the degree of how productive you will be, there's so many variables to that.” (A, 35:53)

7. Practical Examples & Memorable Moments

• Barb’s Training Adaptation:
  Eric recounts how his wife, also a competitor, normalized splitting workouts to suit energy, challenging his ‘never stray from the plan’ beliefs (53:00). “She cut the workout short and said, I'll just come back and get the rest in the evening. And I was like, you can't do that... She didn't have any of those bullshit hangups.”
• Personality-fit assignments:
  Berto gives “permission” to sandbaggers to push extra hard (“do something stupid”) once a month to build self-efficacy; for chronic grinders, the task might be purposely scaling back—a form of exposure therapy for lifters (26:12).
• Ego and Camp Loyalties:
  The problem isn’t just lack of experience—it’s getting stuck in a “camp” (high vs. low volume, barbell vs. machine), which limits your growth and learning (18:35).

8. The Pitfalls: Intuitive vs. Autoregulated Training

• Autoregulation ≠ intuition (if you lack experience, “intuitive training” often means chasing whims and emotions rather than smart adaptations).
• True autoregulation means having a reason for deviations, and being able to explain it after the fact—based on data and accumulated trends (68:45).
• Quote:
  “People get autoregulation confused with intuitive training a lot... if it is actually autoregulation, you could then ask that expert, walk me through what you did, and they would have a reason.” (B, 68:45)

9. Managing Fatigue – The Big Picture

• Fatigue management isn't just about training and food. It includes life: job stress, relationships, sleep, etc. (58:00)
• Jeff:
  “If you don’t know a person’s situation, you're not managing their stress... you’re only managing training, nutrition, only a piece of the puzzle.” (58:13)
• Experience brings the wisdom to modify splits (from six to four days, etc.) to ensure you’re recovering and progressing. (60:52)

10. Final Takeaways: Growth Beyond the Gym

• Be humble and open to learning—not just from your coach, but from training partners, athletes, and even clients from different backgrounds and countries (56:22).
• Alberto:
  “It’s scary to leave [a plan] because it’s been so good to you... Sometimes people would rather fail under the flag of whatever sort of style of training they’ve made a part of themselves.” (62:35)
• Progress is not just about following a perfect plan—it’s about developing the ability to adapt as demands change.
• Rigidity and ego stagnate growth; flexibility and self-audit lead to both better results and greater resilience.

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Notable Quotes (Speaker Attribution & Timestamps)

• “Sometimes you just know... I just need to get in there, get that first working set in and, okay, like, I’m good. I should be here.”—Alberto Nunez (C), 03:00
• “You have to have a baseline to begin with in order to start [to] auto-regulate.”—Jeff Alberts (A), 08:41
• “Being around other people and exposing yourself to their perspectives... will unlock opportunities or options that you just wouldn’t even think of.”—Eric Helms (B), 48:34
• “You can’t hit a target if you can’t see it.”—Eric Helms (B), 48:42
• “If you don’t do anything with that information... during a time when your body is so volatile... how much do you change in regards to just flatness and fullness from day to day? That’s just the one visual on the outside.”—Alberto Nunez (C), 67:10
• “Autoregulation and intuitive training are very different... just going off program because you feel a certain way is not always adaptive unless it’s based on monitored data and experience.”—Eric Helms (B), 68:45

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Suggested Listening Timestamps

• [02:11] — The decision to train or not: insights into fatigue and motivation
• [07:55] — How experience transforms autoregulation
• [13:40] — The value of changing training paradigms
• [24:02] — Building autoregulation in clients: experience and personality-based approaches
• [31:05] — Coaching techniques: deep-dive conversations and program adjustments
• [35:53] — The supply and demand analogy for recovery
• [45:37] — Using weekly self-monitoring tools for progress and fatigue
• [53:00] — Learning from unlikely sources (Barb’s split sessions story)
• [62:35] — Why people fear leaving successful, rigid plans behind
• [67:10] — The next-level skill: adapting daily to body’s fluctuations

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Conclusion

The nuanced, unscripted discussion between Jeff Alberts, Eric Helms, and Alberto Nunez is a masterclass in the self-management of training during dieting phases. The overall message is to establish a baseline, develop keen self-awareness, experiment boldly but analytically, and above all—adapt. Success comes from marrying data with intuition, and from being humble enough to change course when needed.

For coaches and athletes alike, the skill of autoregulation is both learned and earned. It is forged in years of both triumph and error, and enriched by conversations, coaching, and exposure to diverse experiences and paradigms. For anyone serious about their lifting career, this episode provides actionable wisdom for becoming both a better athlete and a more adaptable human.

Transcript

[A]

Hey everyone. This is Jeff Alberts, Brian Miner, Alberto

[B]

Nunez, Brad Loomis and Eric Helms.

[A]

And this is the 3D Muscle Journey podcast where we bring you world class coaching and evidence based education for the natural bodybuilding community.

[B]

What's going on, everybody? This is Eric Helms, back with another episode of the 3D Muscle Journey podcast. And I am joined by coach coaches Jeff Alberts and Alberto Nunez. And today we're going to talk about autoregulating your training while dieting, which throws another element of a challenge, but also a rationale for why you might want to consider autoregulatory strategies. Now, there's obviously different types of dieting. There's contest prep or there's a more casual diet, if you will. And there's also different phases of a casual diet or contest prep. You know, you might be losing a large amount of weight but not getting incredibly shredded and you've been on the diet for a really long time and you don't quite have that same motivation as when you lost the first 10 pounds versus the last 10 of say 50 pounds. Likewise, losing the first 5 of say 25 pounds during contest prep, if anything you start to feel a little better. You're motivated, you know, still got plenty of energy, plenty of food. But the last five pounds, as we all know, take a lot of struggle. So what this might even look like changes. So let's talk about this from first, our, maybe our individual experiences which show where you can get to with a lot of experience as well as what it might look like with people with different personalities and different stages of their career. And then maybe we can go into the coaching side of it and then I can also drop a little science here and there's people understanding the aspects of it. So, Berto, when you think about your training during contest prep, I know you autoregulate regardless of whether you're off season or in season. What changes when you go through prep with the way you change your training on a day to day basis?

[C]

You know, I think it starts with, am I going to train today or not? Because there are times where the best thing is to just, you know, chill, take a nap, get my steps in for the day, eat my meals and recharge. Because as a matter of fact, like the most catastrophic injury I've ever had took place on the day where I shouldn't even have been at the gym in hindsight. So that is probably the thing, I wouldn't say I leverage it the most because I, something's wrong with my lifestyle if I'M constantly having to, you know, miss days with my training. But I, I'm starting off with that because that's before we even get into the gym. And I think with a lot of newer athletes, that's probably the first form of autoregulation you learn. Like, is it even a good day to, to be in there or not? I think that one is probably the one that's going to come feel the most natural to people at the start. But also you have to keep in mind that sometimes when you are deep into, especially a contest prep diet, there's just days where you just know, you feel like trash. But once I get in there and get to work and complete the session, this was probably the best thing I could have done for myself today. So you kind of have to learn to, you know, distinguish what both of those feel like, because all of us here could probably, like, we know, we know, like, both of you guys nodded your heads. It's like sometimes you just know. It's like I'm just, I need, just need to get in there, get that first working set in and okay, like, I'm good. I should be here. It's actually going to be a really good day by the end of this. So that is probably the first thing I keep an eye on. The next thing is probably I will adjust my volume. This is something I do in the off season as well. But there are days where it's like, hey, you know, that last set, we'll just, we'll just leave it, we'll just leave it. Or, or sometimes if I'm feeling really good, I will do a little more. But also keeping in mind that, hey, I still probably have more like, training days. Like, what is future me going to, to think about this? So, yeah, it's something that I use a lot. I can't see myself prepping without the ability to, you know, like a man. I hate using sports analogies, but it's probably the one sport where they do it the most where they just completely change a play. And that's football. Like, if the main guy, the quarterback, the guy in charge of, you know, where everyone's is and going to be on a play, if he doesn't like what he sees, he's like, hey, boys, plan B today. And that's, that's what they do. And, and of course that's something that I, in time, want all my athletes to learn how to do. And little by little, I keep giving them like, more things they're responsible for, basically. But, but yeah, probably the thing That I fluctuate the most is going to be like whether or not I'm in the gym to start or, or my, my, my training volume specifically.

[B]

Got it. No, I think that's, that's really helpful and I think I want to maybe just plant a couple seeds of things you pointed out. In my experience of autoregulating my training a lot, I've thought very deeply about autoregulation. It's actually for those who don't know what I did my PhD on. And that stemmed from a lot of my experiences. You talked about elements of autoregulation based upon should I train today at all, which is essentially a prediction of how things are going to go before you even get in the gym. Then you talked about also how does it feel when I'm in there? So autoregulating in the moment based upon what's going on on the ground. And then you also talked about I need to think about future me. So now you're basically thinking about what will happen in the future, which sounds like just a longer prediction, but that's actually based upon more experience over time. Like if you've only been in the gym three or four years and you've dieted, let's say one short mini cut and one long term cut, you're not going to be as good at taking your prior experiences and intuitively going well, this is my 8th contest prep and I know where I'm at and how lean I am, what I'm feeling like, and I know my work schedule and what's going on and when I have my low days and my high days. I'm pretty sure that if I go balls out today on Monday, Thursday is going to be a shit show. So I need to swap the intensity these two days, skip it or push it back or just change the exercises. So in many ways you briefly transition to what you would like to get your clients to is helping them build these skills. But I think that is one thing that a lot of people don't understand. It's autoregulation isn't just like RPE moving sessions around or like when we talk about it from kind of scientific lens, you lose the element of, well, you have to have the ability to monitor. And we're not like tracking every. You're not set up to some kind of like, you know, magic God machine or in a magic sports science lab that could tell you everything. You have to use your prior experiences, your best prediction going forward, and then kind of worm your way through your emotional response, which can either be a really good, informative tool or potentially cloud certain judgments. So I think that's really helpful. And the only thing I want to point out is, hey, the element of experience is quite important, and that's where I want to transition to the most experienced men on this podcast. Jeff, how does this play out in your training career? And I know it probably was different when you were your 30s versus your 40s versus now your 50s.

[A]

It's kind of like you said, Eric, is like, I got 40 years of experience, so I know myself extremely well. So it's. It's. I would say my judgment on myself is probably, like, 90% accurate at this point. But I take myself back to when I first started. Like, I didn't have any clue how to autoregulate. I only knew it was on a piece of paper. And I think it makes sense. Like, if you're programming for somebody new or even intermediate, hey, I need you to follow this really rigidly because that established baseline. How can you autoregulate if you don't have a baseline to compare off of? You know what I mean? So it's like, everything needs to be static at first. So if something does feel off, then you can kind of reflect. Why does it feel off? Because if you keep all your variables very consistent, it's easy to start pinpointing the reasons why things are feeling off or why things are actually working. And when I'm programming my athletes, it's like, okay, I want you to follow this rigidly. At least a couple months, a couple blocks of training. Don't change anything. I mean, unless you have pain, of course, change something or there's discomfort. But if you stick to it, then it starts to be easier to assess. And that's like, for me as a coach, I can help them assess. They might give me feedback. I feel a certain way during this workout or whatever. Like, okay, it's it. Using my experience now, okay, it's probably this thing or a few other things that might be going on. So then I'm like, okay, let's change this. So now it's like they get to feel the change. And then it get. Like you said, now it's experience. Now it's like, okay, I experienced that adjustment. Then it's like what Berto was saying. It's like, okay, now it's like, okay, we got this baseline going. Now when you start to feel certain things, I want you to make a judgment call, make a decision. Maybe you don't train that day. You're feeling tired or don't train. Okay. What's the outcome of that? Do you have a better performance the next day if you do great? Okay. No. Okay. That's a good judgment call. If you don't have better performance. Okay. Then you kind of know. It's like, okay, more than just needing a day off from the gym, there's something else there that's contributing to fatigue. So it's like you have to have, like, again, you have to have a baseline to begin with in order to start. Automated. That's like football. You have a game plan in place. In theory, you can look at, okay. That, you know, the Raiders suck, their defense sucks, but we're okay. So we're going to attack them this way. On paper, it sounds great. By halftime, you're like, okay, I'm down 20 to zero. That didn't work. Now, based off of what happened in the first half, I need to make these adjustments to try to make up for it in the second half. So it's like, for me, 40 years, it's like, yeah, it's easy for me because I got all this experience. So it's easy to kind of see things in real time while it's happening. But someone who's new or even intermediate, it might take them as a delayed response. So it's like some of the programming that's out there where it's like, okay, this is how you're setting up your mesos. You got three sets, four sets, five sets. It changes every week. It's like. It's great on paper, but what happens in week number three when you're all beat up and tore up? Like, do you just follow the plan or do you then make an adjustment? Well, if week one went super well with three sets, so why not make week five three sets? Then maybe. Maybe week, week, the next week could go to five sets at that point, because you're feeling so much better to attack it. I think we just get too caught up in, like, being super static with things when we start to gain more experience. We're afraid to make any adjustments at that point. And that's when you should be making adjustments. That's where you. Your. Your experience.

[B]

That's really good because you. There's a couple things that I really love that you said. One is you, essentially, you didn't love all of it. No, it's only about two things. The rest was trash. No, no, no. I loved all of it. I just didn't love it all equally. You know, your comments were not. My children. I can choose which ones to Love more. Which parents do anyway? They, they just lie to their kids.

[C]

They do.

[B]

They do. Now the good news is if you're an only child like me, then you get to grow up either hating everyone or hating yourself, depending upon whether your parents told you that you were the one special God or whether they were abusive and then you ingrained that negative beliefs. You can guess which one I was, but you'll never know the truth.

[A]

See what I started? I got you on a rant.

[B]

There you go. Sorry. And a stupid one. Nothing related to what we're talking about. So moving on. What I loved about what you said, Jeff, acknowledging that I did love all of it, was that you basically took a scientific concept and you showed how it is used in practice, is that if we want to not chase ghosts, right? If we want to not make adjustments based upon something that is actually unrelated to the thing we're focused on, we need to determine our natural change, what we often call variability in science. And that can be due to literally everything besides the thing we're interested in, right? So if we follow a relatively static system in your complex life, we have a known degree of variability. That's everything that isn't the training protocol. And then we can see what does your performance do on a day to day basis. And we're thinking, okay, are we progressing? Are we static? Are you experiencing a lot of stress in your life and do you have a large amount of variability or a small amount? And then from there we can go, okay, now I know what is the normal expected amount of unpredictability or things unrelated to your training program. And now I can start to say, oh, that was outside of what we've experienced. And you might say, okay, what's going on? Either looking inward or to your athlete. And then that also tells you when it might be time to change something. Pulling back, pushing forward, et cetera. So I think that's just a really useful perspective. And you even talked about why programs that have a lot of variability in them in short timescales, even if they might be theoretically better, ultimately end up delaying one's ability to develop autoregulation. And then on the other side of it, this is the other thing I liked about what you said, Jeff, is you're like, that doesn't mean you just follow a static program forever. You also have to be willing to try new things to see what types of different types of programs, approaches are going to work best for you at this stage in your life. So there's what's my normal variability? Cool. Then what do I expect from this program? But I can't just get lackadaisical, stay in my same lane or just stick with what works because I actually, if I'm competing or if I have pretty extreme goals, I've got to try other things. But that's not program hopping, because program hopping or highly variable programs that change on a day to day, week to week, or in more advanced athletes even like mesocycle to mesocycle basis, add variability and make it harder for you to learn this experience that we talked about to auto regulate. Likewise, a really experienced athlete who kind of just gets stuck in their ways won't have enough experience of doing other things to know that maybe they would do better with different exercises. Volumes, range of motions, modalities versus free weights and machines. And we see that a lot. There's some pretty experienced high level athletes who've gotten quite far, but they don't know what it's like to do a lot of machine based training because they've had a very heavy barbell basis. They don't know what their injury rate or regular, frequent, frequent occurrence of ouchies and niggles might be if they train differently or in higher reps or lower reps, or they don't know that maybe if their volume was say closer to failure and potentially using less stressful exercises or maybe spread across more different days that oh, there's actually a better way, I could reduce my overall perception of fatigue and the mental energy it takes to do this. Maybe do a little more quality work or less quality work. You can take your typical dogmatic high volume person or low volume person, or different frequency person or barbell or machine based person and they will not develop some of the skills that we have. They'll know really well how they respond within that specific paradigm. But if they never changed paradigms, then how could they know what might be better and what to take from one versus another? And I think your experience is great. You often talk about this on your Instagram. People don't follow it, especially your stories. You're like, hey, back when I did hit, I knew how hiit worked, but I'd never tried higher volumes. I never tried different exercises, right? So how could I know what was better? And now you're kind of like, you're like Bruce Lee, you're like water. You've tried a bunch of different things. You take what works, you discard the rest. And I think that's a really valuable takeaway from what you were saying. Did I characterize that right? Yeah, pretty Much love it. Okay, so more stuff to talk about. I think my own personal experience has also been very similar to what you guys are talking about and follows a similar trajectory, but obviously with different personality. And the interesting thing for me is that I have found, I have, it's taken me many, many, many years of training to see some of the longer term patterns. Like one particular one that I got stuck in for a long time was that when I followed low volume programs, I would have a window of making some pretty damn good progress in the weight room and it wouldn't necessarily show in my physique. And then I would plateau and then because I was stuck in certain circles, like an appropriate frequency or volume for powerlifting or a reasonable amount of how many times per week do you train a body part and how many sets or reps and what exercises do you do in bodybuilding? Some of the things that were important for me, moving the needle a little bit faster for my own development, I just wouldn't try. And I look back at when my physique and my strength was plateaued for a while, I just never got outside of a certain bound. But I understood pretty well what would happen when I would do certain things. And I just thought I was stuck. And I was like, God, why have I not benched more than three plates in eight years? You know, and why is it that I, I seem to have the same level of muscularity in certain muscle growth that's just kind of creeping along. And now fast forward 12 years after that point, I can tell that when I go through lower volume phases, I make that progress. And then when I go through higher volume phases, I have a lot more variability in my progress. Some bad days, some good days, and then when I finish that high volume phase and go through a lower volume phase and this is all relative, then I hit a slew of PRs and then it tapers off. And I think before I just didn't have enough successive blocks compared back to back to back to back to see that pattern. And I would get caught in the moment. And of course I would like, if I've only done that two or three times over two or three years, then you know, so would you say, how do I even tell?

[A]

So would you say like you, you didn't have the full understanding because like the same for me, a full understanding of supply and demand. Because I think, I think, because this is where the, like the camps get formed. High, high volume, low volume, this works. It might work temporarily till it doesn't, then it's like, what do you do? But because you're just ingrained in this camp, your ego's not allowing you to. Allowing you to go to the other side to explore. So it's like sometimes you can, okay, high volumes, like, that's what's driving more of a stimulus. But then at some point you need more recovery.

[B]

That, that was definitely an element of it. And for me, I think it. It was more. There was other elements too, because like this, this podcast is also about then how is it impacted by dieting? So, like throwing that kind of wrench in there. And then I think the other piece is that like, when you think about supply and demand, if you had like a warehouse, it makes more intuitive, easy sense because only so many boxes can fit in the warehouse. But in your body, not just does there become more boxes or less boxes or less or more workers, the warehouse changes size. Right. So one of the experiences I had which really took me outside of my comfort zone is when I decided to try to do in the same year a strongman competition, a weightlifting competition, and a powerlifting competition. And I was training for all of them and trying to balance the supply and demand of those. And when I was training more for strongman, it was the most resilient to injury I ever felt and also the most at risk for injury. I felt like every day I was ready to just, you know, pop a bicep, hurt my back. But I also knew that if I was to back off my training and just kind of do like quote unquote, more normal bodybuilding, I was a tank. Like, you could not stop me. I could grab anything, pick it up, you know, I'd be like, hey, let's do round back deadlifts to failure. And I would not be scared, right? Because I've been trying to lift stones for the first time, you know, so it's like you build resilience, but also you're risking yourself to do it. And then when you throw in dieting, it's like. And I can't focus. Yeah, yeah. So it is a tough thing to figure out. And I've only now really started to get that. And I'll give you one more example and we can start talking about how we coach people through this. I am very used to the signs and signals of when I start to get elbow tendonitis from certain types of training and what I do to cut that off at the pass. So I don't have like this three month arc of trying to do BFR and neutral grip only and only certain exercises But I was not used to that with me recently pushing up my volume on my quadriceps in my quad tendons. So I was like, that's weird. I sometimes get random knee pain. And then I was like, is it random knee pain if it's every day? You know, and then I was like, okay, fuck, maybe this is like quad tendonitis, I should pull back. And it was just too late. It was like three months. And it got to the point where I was doing like all this stuff to train around it. And now I can do the same thing. I can catch it, I can head it off the pass. And I know the amount of work, types of exercises that preceded that as well. So, like, I'm much more cautious when I go, all right, we're going to do, you know, some heavy, consistent, you know, hack squats and then also do sissy squats afterwards. Like there's a dosage there that I'm at least more aware of it. I can't predict exactly how many sets I should do or how many days per week, but I can catch it before it becomes an issue. And I just couldn't do that before. And we also can't really catch that with research because of how many things are changing and each person is different. So the only way to make a high level athlete, a high level athlete who has these skills is, is to build that experience. And I think that's where I want to talk to you guys. It's that there's a lot of high level athletes like we talked about, either due to ego, being stuck in a certain camp, maybe their personality gets in the way where they don't develop this skill as well as they could if they had someone going, hey, your program, hopping, hey. Every time you diet, you get really emotionally attached to maintaining your size or trying to get leaner and you plow through these signals that you could be aware of. I know that you guys, I'll say this about Berto. He specifically helped me develop some of my autoregulation skills much more intentionally. And essentially this changed my ability to gauge it. That's more so on the diet side. But I think about how do I develop the skill in my athletes quite intentionally. And I know that if they didn't have that, ironically, becoming more self aware requires someone else to point out things. So Berto, let's go to you. When you're trying to create the skill of autoregulation, specifically of training, and especially when you're in a more volatile state or less predictable state or state where you're purposely going through places of more fatigue like a diet. What are some of the tools, strategies or even just communication that you use to help your athletes develop that skill more rapidly than they otherwise would?

[C]

Well, kind of like on the dieting side, this is all best if learned when you're eating at least enough, right? Because you will be a little bit more tolerant to errors because that's the only way you find out is you, you need to f around and mess up and find out. That's, that's, that's unfortunately, that's, that's just how it goes. And I'd say this is where, yeah, you need an objective eye so that the person guiding you. And this is why I think training partners, a good training partner is sensational, right? Because you guys, you know, any good training partner you've, you've ever had, it's like they're really, really good. And I think a lot of us, like, oh, I mean our significant others, right. Like, I think they're pretty good at it. And in my opinion, just generally speaking, like when men and women partner up, oh, they do so good when it comes to, because one is overly aggressive and then the other one's like, come on, like you just, you just broke up with Yoboo or we're not gonna, you know, load up that squat and go for a 1 RM today, you know. So yeah, a good training partner, a good coach helps a lot because they can kind of categorize you and they understand how you are prone to getting in your own way. Because you have athletes on different sides of, for example, the grinder gradient. You have some people who they just sandbag and they don't realize it so they're more prone to underworking and they don't really understand just how adaptive the human body is, can be. And then you have other folks. It's just like, bro, you're off in La La Land. Like that's, that's, that's way, way, way too much. Like you need to actually slow down and be in tune with your feelings, your sensations and you can't be a dumb jock all the time. So I think that's probably the first layer I can. And again, when it comes to both nutrition and training, like people, how they sense hunger, appetite, very different. Same thing when it comes to, to the weight room. So my first strategy is, hey, let's learn this when we're in a well fed state because surely we're going to mess up. We're going to try some things here and there and not everything's going to work, but boy, are we going to learn from them. And this is much safer and easier to pull from when you're eating, at least enough. But it's really going to come in handy when we are dieting because, man, does your body fluctuate in all sorts, sorts of ways. So. So yeah, we learn it then. And then we learn what you're predisposed to and then based off what you're predisposed to, that is how I start. Like if they're a sandbagger, like, this is one. It's like, hey, you have permission once or twice a month to just do something really dumb and intensive, right? Like go to a widowmaker on your hack squat, you know, go, I don't know, pull deadlifts for a high rep set. I just want you to see that, like, you can push beyond what you think you can push and you're okay and you recovered on time on the other side. So. So, yeah, usually that's the order. It's like we learn it when we're well fed. I try to figure out what this person is missing, what their blind spots are, and then I give them assignments that are specific to our deficiencies.

[B]

Berto, you said three things that I really, really liked. The rest was trash. No, I'm just kidding. You only said three things. So this is good. This is good. This is good because you pointed out the three things at the end. So, okay. And I think this speaks to some of your specific strengths as a human and a coach. First off, you echoed what Jeff said to say. We need to kind of create a state of less variability. So I know what the kind of normal change is and that'll help you identify like, oh, the change was dieting. And man, that actually has thrown another variable into the equation which I can consider. So I don't mistake it for something else. If I'm doing it in a kind of semi, always in and out of many cutting, dieting state. The second thing you said is all about understanding people's personality and just all the things that make up who Berto is. You're very good at reading people. You're very good at understanding people's natural tendencies, the adaptations they have to be who they are. And then you're also quite good and you've developed it over time at learning what are ways that I can encourage them towards a better behavior that'll facilitate the progress they want to make. And I think that last piece is tough because even when you are good at reading other people if you don't understand behavior, motivation, or like, you get too kind of caught up in your own experience, you'll identify something and then you'll be like, well, what would I do? Who. What would I need to do if I was doing that? And sometimes that's. You'll get the coaches who aptly identify that someone's sandbagging. But the solution is, stop it. Try harder. You know, and that's like, that's because you're having. You're struggling to relate to why they would do that. And instead of you just saying, like, the example you gave was this person sandbagging, I give you permission to go hard, rather than, maybe you should identify that you're a fucking. Let's see. That's funny. I said the F word and then I bleeped the P word anyway. And then, like, just, have you thought about being harder? And instead what you're going is, let me give this person permission and encouragement and an opportunity to push themselves further than they normally do, and they'll come back and realize, hey, I'm okay. And in fact, I'm stronger than I think I am. And that's kind of like building that self efficacy and self confidence over time by getting limited exposure to the thing that they're clearly a little afraid of or had, not just simply haven't been exposed to. So I love that, and I think that is fantastic. Context and the, the element of personality, I think is a big one because different behaviors can come from different root causes. And if you try to fix it without understanding the root cause or what motivates someone or their background, then sometimes you're trying to use a. Like a wrench on a nail, right? So, Jeff, I know that you are also someone who coaches people through this process, but I know also you have different strengths as a coach and you have a different approach. And I know that you are a little more detail oriented. Roberto is more big picture and personality oriented. What is the process you use or some of the things that might complement Roberto already talked about to help your athletes develop the skill of autoregulation of their training in different contexts?

[A]

I like our video calls because I can basically talk to somebody for an hour to two hours to really take a deep dive into, like Berto saying their personality, like, what makes this person tick? You know, if we. And by asking questions, you know, if they're running high volume. Are you getting fatigued halfway into your training? You know, are you starting to sandbag your sets? Then if the answer is kind of yes and Usually you can get the truth out of people with a deep dive. Then it's like, okay, this person probably will do better on lower volume. And I'm gonna, you know, assign just a couple of sets. So basically instead of giving them 10 darts to hit a bullseye, I'm only giving them two focus and intention levels up. Like you only have two chances now. So it kind of coaxes them into working maybe a little harder. Or it could be the opposite. Somebody who's training with way too much intensity. It's like, okay, let's assign this person some more sets and say I want you to purposely back off. Because what's going to end up happening is either case you take them through, let's say, a complete training block, the results are going to be probably very similar, or there's not going to be anything that negative that came from it because they're still training, they're not going to see atrophy. You're not going to shrink because you're still in the gym training, but you're learning different tools and you're gaining more experience that way. But the communication aspect, like just getting in there and whether it's someone you're working with for the very first time, you can ask questions, get a sense as to their personality type, or it's someone like if let's say you sign somebody for a three month block, they come back, another video call to break everything down. You get to ask why things worked, why didn't they work, what was going on outside of the gym. That could obviously impact what's going in inside the gym. As far as like, you know, maybe sleep has been off, maybe they're having relationship issues, maybe they're working a lot of overtime at work. Like there's all these things that are going to impact what's going on inside the gym and then vice versa too. You know, if you assign, let's say this person does better on high volume, but I assign someone, you know, six training days a week. Now all of a sudden that's causing stress outside the gym. Is a good programming then? Because now I'm impacting someone's personal life in a negative way. So you have to take all these things into consideration. Also you look at nutrition too, because we're supposed to be, we're talking about training while we're dieting. Like obviously nutrition component's huge. You know, we're trying to lose weight. What's that rate of loss? Like? And this is where I think supply and demand. And maybe the science can, I don't know. That's something I've been wanting to ask you, Eric, is because I preach a lot of supply and demand and kind of thinking like if we're dieting down and we're in the early stages of dieting, chances are not a whole lot needs to change with training, especially if the rate of loss is very controlled. You get midway through, let's say, a contest prep, you're starting to notice more fatigue because you don't have the same type of supply. Calories have been cut. Maybe you're doing more steps so you don't have the same resources to recover from the workload that you're doing. And if you're trying to improve your performance, because that's our goal, whether we're off season or in season, we're trying to improve our lifts, load reps. Well, it's going to get harder and harder to increase that, especially with less fuel coming in. So the, it's going to cost more recovery. So the analogy I like to use, and maybe you can tell me if this is a good one to keep using or not, would be if, like here in the States, you got to dig two feet down to set your fence posts. So if you're doing, let's say, a little too much volume or you're doing too much intensity or a combination of two, but you're now getting too underfed, your rate of losses may be too significant. Well, it's costing more money because you're digging three feet down instead of two. It's costing more resources, it's costing more in labor, and it's also costing more in concrete dirt, whatever you want to call it, to fill that hole up. So it's understand, like to me, it's like understanding where you're at in relation to the phases that you're going through and whether your supply and demand is being matched up or obviously if we're in a deficit, the demand's going to probably outpace the supply. You just don't want it to get too deep. And that's where refeeds, this is where the autores comes in with nutrition refeeds, diet breaks. Maybe like Berto was saying earlier, take a day off from training, take a day off, have a refeed, take a day off, get a refeed, get in bed earlier. So that way you're, you're recouping, you're char. You're, you're charging those batteries so you can get yourself closer to that baseline. You need to be, to be productive. You get deeper into prep is Costing you even more to fill those holes up. So you have to. That's how I kind of look at whether I'm in season, off season, whether I'm running high volume, low volume, whether it's intensity or not. It's like you got to manage all these things and it comes down to supply and demand. I think any training split can work. If your supply is outpacing that demand, you will be productive. Now, the degree of how productive you will be, I mean, there's so many variables to that. But big picture, that's how I kind of look at everything. That's how I look at bodybuilding these days. Like probably the last five to 10 years. I've kind of looked at it through this lens.

[B]

I think, to answer your question, is it a good analogy? I would say yes, it is. And I think it's a great way to explain this to people.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

But that's the only thing I like about what you said. Everything else is trash. And let me tell you why. No, I'm just kidding. Well, screw you man. Screw you man. Well, screw you man. Hey, three DMJers this is Coach Eric Helms here to remind you that investing in expert guidance is one of the time tested hallmarks of serious athletes across all sports. And for competitive athletes striving for peak performance, working with an experienced coach isn't just a luxury, it's essential. At 3D Muscle Journey we understand the dedication it takes for you to reach your physique and strength goals. So we provide the programming and the support to get you there effectively and sustainably. But our craft isn't just for the stage of the platform. We create career spanning relationships with our clients to guide you along your lifting journey in a stepwise manner. We don't do quick fixes or rush transformations because those will always only be temporary. We know the art and the skill of becoming an advanced lifter takes years and we want to work with athletes who are willing to put in that time. If you want to learn more about all of our coaching plans, systems and prices, go to our website@3d musclejourney.com we offer weekly coaching for in season competitors and bi weekly coaching for off season or recreational lifters. We also have three different time frame options for one off video calls that each include a training program as well as a nutrition plan for every eight to 16 weeks. Our mission is to create athletic careers for serious lifters and our one on one coaching program is how we do just that. It's more than just workouts and meal plans. We deliver comprehensive support tailored to your individual needs. Don't let another training cycle pass without the expert guidance that you deserve. Invest in your athletic future now and sign yourself up for coaching@3d musclejourney.com thank you so much for listening and enjoy the rest of the show. Here's the thing I think a lot of people miss, and this is important because I know, like something like about a third of our audience does compete or plans to and the rest don't. And even more so, a lot of the content that is in the fitness space and bodybuilding space is about optimization when it's being applied to people who really are nowhere near optimizing. And I think it's because the people who create the content, it's people we look up to and it's people who are spending a whole lot of time thinking about this a lot. If you're more of the intellectual side and you like to follow this type of content or people who live this stuff and also push themselves very hard and also have pretty wild genetics, right? And then there's the dogma, the ego, all those things and what gets rewarded by the algorithm and then just making controversial content, it clouds things. And a lot of the time, and this is something you talk about a lot, Jeff, is that something that is true in one context is not in another, right? So I think where a lot of people go wrong, and this is true when you talk about deloads, this is true when you talk about periodization, and this is true when you think about people who are going through pretty extreme diets versus like other diets. Some of the stuff that bodybuilders do, like recovery diets or something, things that athletes do, like complex periodization protocols or deloads, they make a ton of sense from that perspective. But I think people forget like most of the training protocols out there and the things you do aren't that. So I'll be honest with you. I was probably overly aggressive in promoting the necessity and benefit of deloads. And the general kind of like, yeah, let's just do them every four weeks to be safe, was largely based upon like periodization and sports science. But we'll go back to the football analogy. The Raiders, or for our Berta, was doing a good job saying, let's not just use analogies that the people who are over the age of 35 and male who live in the United States will understand. Let's talk about a premier soccer league player. Let's talk about a Olympic level sprinter, middle distance runner, triathlete, in all these cases, people who are amateurs trying to become pro or full time athletes, they are quite literally in many cases doing as much as they possibly can to improve and sometimes too much. Right? And the necessity for training, planning, organization and changes is heavily influenced by their ability to adapt and recover without getting hurt or burning out. In training. Now, in fitness, in the real world, having been a personal trainer for many years and now also working online with clients, the typical constraint is not, I'm working so hard that I can barely recover and sometimes I overdo it because I have this crazy athletic drive. I'm part of a team and I have social cues, motivation, coaches, all this stuff. It is, I have life stress. I am trying to do a program that I'm not ready for because I don't have a background of building up my fitness and I have a limited schedule and I'm also jumping around a lot of different things and I'm sometimes going through these extreme phases of dieting. So when you try to apply some of these things, they really don't make sense. And one thing that I've seen is this is even true in kind of like your pretty serious but not crazy, committed bodybuilding community that's not competing like, okay, you train three days a week for an hour. You don't need a deload. Trust me. The training stress, no matter what you do for an hour, three days per week, the four days are deload, four

[A]

days off are deleted.

[B]

You got three days that are 23 hours of you not training and then four days of not training at all, bro. Like you're, you're, you're either not in good enough shape to, to recover from relatively easy training at the grand scheme of things, or that's maybe something is important.

[A]

So you get to the point where you're us, where it's like we don't, I don't program a deload for myself personally. And people ask, why don't you do that? Well, because one, I have experience and I have intuition, knowing when to back off, when to basically bring the demand down and bring the supply up.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So if you're training three days a week, I don't care how hard you're training. I mean, you should be able to recover with four in a perfect world, right? Four rest days, plenty of food, plenty of sleep, low stress, you're going to probably be just fine. Unless you're doing something very dumb.

[B]

Absolutely. So I think when I have now moved into different phases of my career to where I actually am pushing the amount of work that I can recover from and I've built that up. When I notice that I do something different, it's quite apparent. Taking a day off because I feel sick and I don't want to push it further. And I come back two days later and I'm like, oh, what happened? I feel amazing. Or I do a mini cut and I try to maintain my training because I'm pretty high in body fat, it's fine. And all of a sudden I'm bodied and I'm tanking. Halfway through a session, I'm like, oh, okay. So I actually am pushing the constraints of recovery from training. And now some of these strategies make sense and they don't have to be fixed. You know, I think having some tick marks or some tick boxes, some check marks of when you decide, you know, it might be time for a deload or even making a deload, have more flexibility to it based upon your experience, like, oh, I'm just going to take some time off. These heavy compounds that axial load me in low rep ranges because I'm feeling joint pain especially that are, you know, have a resistance profile while I'm also at a long muscle length and I feel like at risk, you know, or like, man, I have so much life stress at the moment and like the things that just take a lot of mental energy are the bottleneck and I need to maintain focus while I'm training. There are times where I go to the gym and the idea of doing a heavy set of six on leg press is like, I'm at risk not doing that today for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. But there's other times I go to the gym where I go, all right, not going to do that. But I do think I could do say maybe a set of 20 or 25 and then I do that and that's fine. But there's other days where I feel at risk. And I'm also so mentally burned out that the idea of pushing myself to a 20 or 25 rep set to like a 1 rir and a leg press is just like, that is not going to happen. Or if I do make it happen, the where I'm going to be at for the rest of my life for at least a couple days costs too much. Costs too much.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Exactly. So for me, I'll transition a bit into like, I kind of answered your question as to like, it's a great analogy. So long as someone is actually pushing boundaries, right. Whether it's socially from the diet, which is far more common, or from the total training load. And that's why a lot of studies on say periodization don't show a whole lot but observational research or in the trenches experience of sports scientists or strength conditioning coaches are like, of course I use periodization, but it is typically more fluid and it looks a little more like short to midterm planning. They're not predicting like oh, in the four year cycle of when I go to the Olympics, we're going to hit a PR by this much because we did, you know, successive phases of the appropriate phase potentiation. Like nah. They're like, all right, so how, how far out we are when we need to push, pull, how are you feeling? Green light, red light. And they have systems that are individualized, right. So the thing that I have done with like getting my athletes better at understanding this is I do a couple things is one, I help them just develop better skills of autoregulation. So what's your rir? Show me the video. High reps, low reps, different exercises, lower body, upper body, things you like, things you don't like. Fun. Thing I noticed during my PhD is that people's RIR ratings to me visually seemed a lot more accurate when they were doing bench versus squat. Because we had recreationally trained males, right? They don't want to go to failure on squat, so they don't do it. So they don't develop the skill, but they don't want to get just a double on 225. I'm going to get that third and my spotter is going to make me feel like I got that third. Right? Because I, I'm a 20 year old kid from Florida, right? So yeah, they have much more experience doing that. So we develop that skill of just gauging our ir and then I have some checklists. So after each week I ask you yes or no, do you feel more or less motivated than previously? Is your sleep better or worse than normal? And several other metrics that even if those don't dictate my decision or their decision, it forces some self awareness and some reflection on the week. Right. Which I think is valuable. And sometimes I ask them just what was the overall session difficulty? Kind of gestalt, not like how sore are you? But like how much did you have to dig to make that session happen? Because I have an idea of what that should be and I want them to have an idea of what that should be. I want them to match and then I want them to see when it really changes. Because sometimes you can force yourself through a really, really tough week during dieting. And sometimes you need to, but sometimes we're three months out and I'm like, I don't want you like creating a rocky montage when we still have 16 weeks to diet. Right. So those. I give them those awareness skills you're talking about, Brad. Well, this dude is all of us, right? You know, at certain phases of our career.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah, that's true.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then I think what I do is this is something I've definitely taken from Berto. He described it really well to me and I think to many and some of his content. It's like people who are quote, unquote, dogs. Oh, they got the dog in them, of course. They have that ability to push themselves to a point where they shouldn't, or sometimes they should, but they can. They have the ability to drive themselves to exhaustion, failure, starve themselves. They could force an eating disorder if they wanted to or if they thought they needed to. But they also know what is too much and what they can't do. And a lot of kind of wannabe dogs or dogs in development to take a more. Less judgmental perspective, they don't want to admit because it's an identity issue that they don't have that yet, that someone else can't push harder than them. You talk to 100 bodybuilders who are maybe a little more early in their career, a little more ego driven and more predominantly men. You'll get 100 guys who tell you they're the hardest worker in the room. And if they're all in the same room, that's not possible. Right. So knowing where you don't have another gear and admitting to yourself either right now, it doesn't have to be a statement about who you are, which I think where people get hung up, that it's a trainable skill. You can develop grit, but you can't hit a target if you can't see it. So when you deny the possibility that maybe you're a little softer in certain scenarios or for certain things or different times, you can't then go, oh, that's something I can work on, and then I can't help you. So some of it is helping them admit their blind spots, not framing it as a negative or a character flaw, making them know that I believe, as a coach and I've seen it, that this is something we can build because then if they can expose that weakness, now we have something to work on and now I can help them get to it. So that's Another thing I do with my athletes is let's try to build that self awareness and honesty so we have a target to aim at and let's create a strategy to get there and let's de risk it. This doesn't mean that you don't have the identity of a bodybuilder. This doesn't mean you're not an athlete, doesn't mean you're not a good person or you're weak or if it's tied into manliness or whatever. And that can sometimes be quite challenging. So those are the kind of the things I do is let's just build the skill. Because if you can't know whether you're five or two reps from failure or if you feel like crap or not, if you have really bad self awareness and ability to gauge your own body signals, which goes to autoregulation of nutrition, I can't really build that. Even if we could identify your weaknesses, you'd be like, yeah, took it to the house coach. And I'm like, yeah, you were five reps from failure. You know, so those are the steps. And then finally it's kind of like that individualized plan of once we are admitting what we need to work on and accepting it, then we also need to kind of grieve. Oh, I'm not maybe who I wish I was, but I can become it. This is a modifiable factor. I can build it. So that's really what self efficacy is. So that's kind of the approach that I take. Those are kind of the three buckets that I think of. But you can't get to the last one if you don't have the first two. Gentlemen, this has been good and I think there's probably more meat on this bone, but I do want to open it up. Are there things that you guys feel that perhaps we have not covered or maybe just useful tools? I think one thing you said that's great, Berto, is training partners. I think being around other people and exposing yourself to their perspectives, it sometimes, for not even sometimes, often will unlock opportunities or options that you just wouldn't even think of. And that's the thing about blind spots, you can't see them. And you mentioned male and female training partners. As you guys both know, for the longest time Barb and I were training partners. A little less so now as she's not in that same phase where she's really, really interested in competing and we both have kind of hyper fixated personalities. So she trains for health when she has time I am still me and always will not be me. But it doesn't mean Barb is not training. She's better at maybe being a more balanced human. But back when we were both in the shit and she did her 2011 powerlifting, cut to 52, that then became the one show she did where she ticked that box and said, no, not for me. We were in the gym one time, both deep into prep, her a little closer to the show than I was, and we were digging to get her in the shape she wanted, and she cut the workout short and said, I'll just come back and get the rest in the evening. And I was like, you can't do that. And I think I might have even said something like, you can't do that. And she was like, why not? And I was like, don't ask me questions I don't know the answer to. Like, you're not supposed to, you know? And I had to, like, in the moment, like, just kind of have this. I was like, oh. Because if I don't finish what I plan to do, that means I'm a weak person, not a man, a bad bodybuilder, and a terrible human, and I'm gonna fail. And I was like, okay, maybe that's not true. She didn't have any of those bullshit hangups. For her, it was like, I'm tired right now. I need a mental break, a physical break, a meal, and I'll come back at 7pm instead of this 1pm break I have, and I'll do the rest of my leg day. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. I could see how that could work. And here I am years and years later, and I purposely do that when I have time.

[A]

It's a strategy.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, God damn it. You know? So I just wouldn't. I would have got there eventually when I got exposed to Olympic weightlifting and some of the research. But this was. We're talking 2011, you know, I was finishing my bachelor's and I wasn't a scientist yet, so it fast tracked me to just another perspective. So I will say that that's one thing that I think I will kind of big up, Berto, is that you want to have someone who is not just like you to train with. Not that there's nothing wrong with having a similar mind. And, like, a football team, obviously, you watch them, they train really hard. But sometimes you're like, is no one in that room gonna tell that guy that it was the worst Power Clan in the world? You watched the high school football team training together. So there's downsides to that as well. So that is one thing I will say definitely is not necessarily just a workout partner, but exposure to different perspectives. Like I mentioned, strongman, weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, science and history have all given me options that I would not have thought about at all. Training with Jeff, doing his, actually getting exposure to legit hit and learning what is the depth of how much you can make one set hurt and then do forced eccentrics and shit like that, training higher volume, much further from failure, all of that has been critical for me. So it doesn't have to be a training partner. But I do think purposely exposing yourself to perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise think of on your own is uncomfortable as that sometimes can be, as confronting as it can be is a really good thing. And hey, it's fitness, it's bodybuilding. If you're so tightly held to your identity and your beliefs around lifting weights and purposely starving yourself, at least it's a, that's a not good. But this is a much easier thing to challenge than say like your religious beliefs, political beliefs, beliefs about the nature of people and relationships you have. And you can take that and, and maybe go, okay. I didn't explode when I decided that maybe high, high volume or low volume training wasn't the best thing and only thing for me. And I expanded my worldview, maybe I could do that in other aspects of my life. So I'll leave it there, that's my contribution. But I'd love to hear other things that you think can facilitate this process, that people should consider coaching.

[A]

I mean, I'm going to toot our own horns here, but I mean, obviously I've personally have gained so much insights working with you guys. Like when I got to you guys, you guys know, I was like bottled up, I was dogmatic. And it took you guys to get me to basically learn how to be humble, like bring those walls down. And then over time, I just started gradually learning more about bodybuilding, more about high volume, more about reps and reserve. You know, just all these different tools within training, within dieting. But also being a Coach now for 17 years, I've learned just as much from my athletes as they've learned from me. Because when you have those one on one conversations, and I'm going to keep saying that because those are so valuable in my opinion, I get to talk to somebody who lives in Singapore and I get to hear what their life is like, what their content, the constraints that they have, what their Personalities are like their home life, their work life, and trying to help them navigate progress with the way their day to day is. But also they're giving me a lot of perspective of like, because they are the ones that got to go through it. Well, I'm now becoming more empathetic towards certain people with different environments. Like I've worked with athletes in war torn countries and you know, when I got someone here living in Southern California with no real stresses compared to that situation, everybody feels their own situation and it's valuable, it's valid. But for me to have perspectives of like both parties, I'm like, okay, you can probably have a little more grit and I can use this person's perspectives to kind of share like, okay, this is what this person has to do and they have to level up. So it gives them inspiration, maybe it gives them a little boost. So just working with different people, like you said, Eric, just getting different, getting outside of yourself helps. And if you have, that's the difference in my opinion. If I'm hiring a coach, am I going to hire somebody who's like not say that young people aren't knowledgeable enough, but I want more perspective. You know, there's young people that have tons of perspective, so you kind of have to search out, okay, if I'm hiring a coach, young, old, male, female, whatever, how much do they really know about? Not just like the X's and O's of bodybuilding, but what do they, what's their, what's their life experience like? Because you're, as a coach, you're helping someone, you're guiding them for progress. Yes, but you're doing it under their environment, not our environment, their environment. So if I'm programming something and it's not based off of their context, then it's probably not going to be too successful or if it is, it's going to be very delayed. So I think that's especially when you're trying, because again, when you're trying to manage supply and demand, like if you're only just managing training and nutrition, you're not really. And if you don't know a person's situation, you're not managing their stress, you're not managing their outside stress, I should say their, their jobs, their relationships, if they're sleeping, not sleeping, all these things. So it's only training, nutrition, only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to fatigue management. And that's pretty much what we're kind of talking about this whole podcast is basically fatigue management because you're not going to you're not going to perform well. If you're tired, you can, you can push yourself. Yeah, you got to push yourself. Like you're saying, you got to push hard to generate that stimulus, but you also need to recover from it. And that's not always gonna look static. You can trust me. As you get older too, it gets a little more challenging to recover. So you have to learn yourself. But also it's very valuable to learn other people, other people's perspectives. It's like I've talked about this on this podcast. I don't just learn from bodybuilders, I learn from other sports. Olympic sprinter is like, like you said, Eric, four years to gain what, hundredth of a second or a tenth or whatever, all that. But the amount of work they have to do to gain that, what does that cost? A lot of money to do that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Costs a lot to generate that, that performance. And it means you got to recover from it too. So I think too is like, as you start out, you're a newbie. Yeah, you need to be rigid with things because you don't have the experience. But as you gain experience, you can start to auto regulate. You're going to make mistakes, but you're going to get better at it because you just, you can't be scared to do it. Sometimes people do, especially hardcore bodybuilders. I want to follow this rigid plan. I'm never deviating. I'm scared to deviate. And they could be all banged up and hurt. They're like, I'm going to keep doing it because that's what's on paper. But you have to be willing to drop your walls down the ego down and make the adjustments. And over time you gain experience. And when you get to the elite level, the Olympic sprinters, then everything you're doing costs so much more because it's harder to keep improving your overall performance. To go from a 400 pound squat to a 500 pound squat, it doesn't get easier, it gets harder. Every time you add a rep, it's not easier, it's harder. So what follows it? Recovery. And it costs more to recover. So that's where you need to learn supply and demand. Drop your walls down. It might mean you go from a six day training split to now a four temporarily. Okay, now you just recovered. Now I could go back to six and create that stimulus again. So when people ask, what's the best split? It's the one that you could, like you've kind of taught Eric. It's the one you can perform at your highest and recover from. And that's going to probably look different across your career.

[B]

Well said, Berto. Things that you want, either closing statements or pieces of advice to help someone be able to do this moving forward.

[C]

See, I think in part the reason that it's hard for bodybuilders to auto regulate to play that card is because it's not until you really stick to a plan, whether it's you stick to your macros for the first time ever for a prolonged period of time, or you stop program hopping and you stuck to something that was sensible and you made all sorts of progress, it's scary to leave that because it's been so good to you. And I mean, that is one of the things we see really often, especially on the training side, is that sometimes I feel that people would rather. Fail under the flag of whatever sort of style of training they've made a part of themselves, right? It's like they've. They got the phone case, they got the T shirt, saw the Broadway play, the interpretive dance. They're just fans of, you know, fsthst 74. Right? Let's try not to piss anyone off. So it's. So it's scary, right? But I, I think especially when dieting, it's a good time to remember that as much as we love training, like, it's pretty wacky what we do in there. I sometimes in the middle of a really crazy set, I'm like, wow, like, this is the equivalent of a lot of little bouts of fight or. Or flight. And today the, the biggest thing I could compare it to is like, this is like legit. What happens to your body? When there was a guy a few years back that he got in a fight with this like, juvenile mountain lion. Mountain lion. So he literally had to choke the thing to death like it was you or me, buddy sort of deal. But that's literally what's happening when I am trap bar rdling. It's just that I enjoy it so much that I forget it's a stress. And especially when we're dieting to these new places, this is, this is where like, we have to remember that, like, hey, if you had a really hard day with one of your relationships or a really hard day at work, all these other sorts of stressors that, you know, we don't frame the same way, how much harder does that make it to diet on that day? How much hungrier and how much more lethargic are you? And this is one of the reasons that when you can obviously you have some ranges in regards to like what you can do. Like, even for me, who I've doing this forever, like, like whatever I fluctuate to nutritionally or training wise. Like it's still within these ranges on most days. But you can see how, okay, training's the same thing as like those incidents I talked about where if you are not either leveraging the good days appropriately or learning to back off when you need to, the harder it is going to make it for you to do that thing. That is the number one objective right now, which is to get to your goal of leanness, whatever it might be. Whether it's contest prep or, you know, you just want abs for the first time in your life, it's going to make it a lot more difficult if you don't allow for some wiggle room on, on that end. And this last prep, one thing I did really well was I learned to fold hands. That was probably one of. That was probably the biggest lesson, especially on my pressing because the way it used to go was there was this threshold of performance decline performance that I would hit and I'm like, okay, well I guess from this point on I'm just getting weaker. And no, what I would do is I just, I'd play today's hand, I'd stay within that today's range of effort. And it was wild. It just kept fluctuating down and then coming up. And I just wasn't throwing all in on those like big bad hands of bodybuilder poker. I got on that day. And it is so wild how my pressing at the end stayed intact because I was kind of going with the ebb and flow the whole way. And the dieting was a lot easier because of that Same reason because on days where, man, I just, I have to bring it down a gear otherwise this really rough week and I'm still three days away from my next scheduled refeed. If I just go hard on this posterior ch bias lower body day, I am going to be a wreck. Not just with tomorrow's training session, but boy, is it going to make dieting tougher these next few days. So it's crucial, it's vital if you want to get the most out of, out of you. So it's great that you can adhere to something. It's good that you've been able to hold these variables still for these prolonged periods of time so you can gather data. But if you don't do anything with that information, especially during a time when you're buying body is so volatile and it fluctuates so much. I mean, how much do you change in regards to like just flatness and fullness from day to day? That's just like the one visual on the outside. There's just so many things moving in all sorts of directions. And if you can train yourself to have the proper reactions, a proper response, it's, it's only going to make you a better athlete. So it's absolutely like that is the next level of enlightenment after you just learning to stop like program hopping and just give something long enough time to work is to learn to take that data and use it to your advantage and learn to react accordingly as things happen in real time.

[B]

So much gold there. I'm going to try to summarize some key points from what both of you guys said and add just a little bit and then we can close out because I think there's a lot to reflect on and I don't want to overload the listener. So. One thing that I really liked about what you guys said was the emphasis on like going with ebb and flow, being aware and kind of quote unquote, listening to your body. And I think to some, like, that's something that all high level athletes talk about, but not all bodybuilders at a high level. And I think a lot of bodybuilders, they live like they're at war with their body. They're trying to make their body submit. And especially during prep, when it is actually fighting you and what you're trying to accomplish, it can kind of exacerbate that. But when you actually look at the athletes who are really, really successful in bodybuilding and incur only the necessary amount of suffering, they're not buying into that kind of bodybuilder aspect of the culture. They understand it, they did it. They know how to just like elite athletes know how to push at the right times, but they also understand the potential cost. And I think many bodybuilders reject that almost philosophically. Like, no, there maybe is some masochism, some trauma, some bullying, but life for them is kind of war. And they express that through bodybuilding and then they direct it inward. And I think that is almost antithetical to learning some of the skills we talked about, because it is denying, not even just, I'm not that aware of my body signals, which some people just, they don't have great, you know, ability. Like, it's not the, it's not, I'm not trying to not be able to tell how hungry I am. I just don't have good hunger signals. But there's some bodybuilders who not only have that, but then also stack on top of it. The belief of my body is the thing that I need to beat into submission. And they have an abusive relationship with themselves and the sport. And I think that is going to be a barrier for someone until they get over that. And they are probably going to experience more injuries. They may not get into shape, they may burn out from the sport, they may have major rebounds. And also when those failures happen, that often is going to make them feel like a worse person because their identity is so closely tied to it. So obviously a lot of things to unpack there, but that is just something to be aware of. The other thing I would say is that people get autoregulation confused with intuitive training a lot of the time or intuitive dieting. And you might have noticed that all three of us talked about the extreme importance of understanding your normal variability and monitoring specific things and having data. And autoregulation and intuitive training are very different. Intuitive training can be autoregulation if you have a ton of experience and you automatically recognize patterns and you do them. But if it is actually autoregulation, you could then ask that expert, that really experienced athlete, okay, well, walk me through what you did. And like, okay, hold on, let me think about it. And they would have a reason. And this is actually something I think advanced athletes need to audit because we have egos too. We don't like to be incredibly. No one likes to be incredibly uncomfortable for long periods of time, especially if they can't convince themselves it's in service of a goal. You might be like, all right, I didn't actually need a carb load. I was just really wanting to eat a lot of food. And I told myself that I was doing a refeed when I was actually just allowing myself to do that. Or I saw something on Instagram that really pissed me off. So I went hard in the gym. And maybe that shouldn't have been part of my decision making process. But no, I'm training intuitively. I went off program. I'm allowed to. I'm the experienced athlete. How dare you tell me things, right? We can all look back and recognize when our emotional state got the better of us and we made an intuitive training decision, which was actually due to some outside influence, not in the monitoring system we created. So the only danger when you do go full intuitive as an advanced athlete is if it starts to drift away from the things that are actually informing those decisions based upon the Data, your experience and the autoregulated system you have. And that's again where coaching can help, like Jeff brought up. And the last thing I'll say, because Jeff talks about this a lot and I think people get it twisted, is that when you have confidence and you understand yourself and you have the experience and you track this data, you can not consider outside sources with the same degree of gravity. And that can make it sound like, oh, I don't like I know what I'm doing, I'm the best and I have an ego and I don't listen to all this noise on social media and I'm just going to stick to what I want to do and it can masquerade that way and you should self audit. But there's a huge difference. If you do everything that we talked about and you've developed a skill, you have a system to know whether or not something you brought in from the outside worked or not. And that's very different than someone who does not have the experience. Program hops a lot, doesn't have confidence, takes in outside information and either follows it blindly and then just is either convinced by the confidence of the person, the physique of the person, and it replaces this lack of self efficacy, belief, experience and confidence and you're basically just becoming a dogmatic follower and then you get frustrated, confused because you're being pulled in every direction, you're being controlled by outside information rather than trying it, seeing if it works and then having a system to know whether or not it works and then incorporating into your own experience. And that's what Jeff is talking about. And I think some people don't get that or they use it as an excuse to just not listen to people, never take any other information or just rigidly hold on to what makes them comfortable. And I think some people think intuition, individualized training, self guided things is all about like, oh, I don't need the science or I don't need the coach or I don't need this, I got this, I can do it on my own too. That's what Jeff did. And I'm like, ah, that's not what Jeff did. Jeff has built experience and he's heavily detail oriented and he knows when things change so he can assess whether that tool is going to fit into his toolbox and when he will take it out. So anyway, I just wanted to provide that context and clarification and unless you two gentlemen want to add anything else, I think we can potentially close out this issue or episode, whatever the hell, what are we doing? Are we reading? Are we talking? I don't know.

[A]

I'm tired.

[B]

I need a recovery. Auto regulating the podcasting, folks. Berto, anything you want to add?

[C]

No, I'm good. I think we got our point across. We didn't give, like, no exact instructions, but hopefully it changes the way people view this.

[B]

I love it. Hey, folks, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the 3D Muscle Journey podcast. I know I learned a lot just having a chat with these two awesome coaches. And if you're interested in understanding more about what we do, make sure to check out our courses. And of course, like Jeff said. But if you really want to help someone identify your blind spots and become better at this, I would definitely consider some coaching. So we'll see you next time on the 3D Muscle Journey podcast.