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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Physiotherapist: You Need To Know This About Creatine! Melt Belly Fat With One Change! The Hidden Cost Of Getting Shredded! - Jeff Cavaliere
02:16:49
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- [00:00]
Jeff Cavalier
Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived high stress states. But there's some new research coming out showing its ability to slow prevent things like wow. Jeff Cavalier is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, mlb, WWE and even Sylvester Stallone. He's built a global reputation for science based training that delivers.
- [00:26]
Stephen Bartlett
What do people want?
- [00:27]
Jeff Cavalier
When we poll our followers, I found that for men they want their six pack abs getting bigger arms, develop their chest and for women they want to have better legs and well developed backsides. So we'll get into those exercises. But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started and in doing so become paralyzed by inactivity and say I'm not going to do anything at all. I get emotional. But it's sad when people don't ever find that drive and motivation because like the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking. Like if I take away your health, you're done. So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
- [01:05]
Stephen Bartlett
So if I was one of those people struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start? With me? I would start with and I'm not done yet. Lower belly fat. How do I get rid of that? Calories in, calories out. What's your view? You say that there are five key exercises to maximize your longevity and quality of life. Can you show me these workouts?
- [01:21]
Jeff Cavalier
Sure.
- [01:21]
Stephen Bartlett
And then why did you put bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?
- [01:24]
Jeff Cavalier
This is Raymond and I use him to show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.
- [01:31]
Stephen Bartlett
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button. Wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much helps. When you hit that subscribe button, the show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Jeff, you're very much known as the, the king and the OG of online fitness training advice, support. In terms of the mission that you're on in particular and how your perspective differs from other people out there in the market. What is it that you think makes your perspective different, unique and more important potentially than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates to how to. How to. How to build up our muscles, how to have a strong, healthy body and how to prolong our health.
- [02:46]
Jeff Cavalier
Spanish, everybody. That for the most part that's out there trying to put information out, they should have a level. There's a level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they're all trying to help people get better or improve themselves. I think where I was really heavily focused was on a more comprehensive, more multifaceted way to do that because my background wasn't just in, let's say strength training or, and aesthetic appeal of training, but also as a physical therapist and having a physical therapy background. I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying to aesthetically improve the body. So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort of, you know, make this their own journey, the benefits are so far reaching. It's not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve. It's so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves. Mental health is directly related to people's physical health. If you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves too. Every element of life is improved, I think, with improved levels of fitness and health. So my WHY has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even the smallest investments, it doesn't have to be every bit I do. And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like, you don't have to eat the way I do to get as lean as I am, to still benefit from being lean. You could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits in terms of overall health. So you don't have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to yourself. That to me is the most rewarding part of it. Because if I can show you how to do it, it's the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right? If I could do that, then I think I've done something right. I say all the time, I could take everything away from you. I could take all your money, I could Take houses. I could take everything away. I could take even relationships away, because we could always find another relationship potentially. If I take away your health, you're done. Health is everything.
- [05:02]
Stephen Bartlett
And what did you study?
- [05:04]
Jeff Cavalier
So, a few things. Physio neurobiology was my initial degree, and I became a physical therapist, which required another three years.
- [05:13]
Stephen Bartlett
And you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well.
- [05:16]
Jeff Cavalier
Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that regard. So you'd have to have a college degree, but then you'd also have to have a certification. In this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
- [05:30]
Stephen Bartlett
And over the last 25 years, since you got that certification, who have you worked with, who have you helped and how many people?
- [05:36]
Jeff Cavalier
The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to work for the Mets.
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Stephen Bartlett
What's the Mets for?
- [05:45]
Jeff Cavalier
Anyone that doesn't make it so. The Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team. So I work with some of the best baseball players in the world, had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world. Like, it's wrestlers. I'm a big wrestling fan. Growing up, you have a lot of wrestlers that come through. And that's a cool thing because wrestling, though some people may not like the storyboarding of wrestling, athletically, they're some of the most gifted athletes in the world. I mean, the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week, the rigors that they put their body through, whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined, but the bumps and bruises are not fake. And they also have to have that aesthetic appeal, too. So it's this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me.
- [06:30]
Stephen Bartlett
When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see how lean you are, it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme motivation and that's why you are the way that you are.
- [06:42]
Jeff Cavalier
Well, I think motivation is extremely overrated, right. Because motivation isn't what produces the results. It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym and initiate the work. But only discipline keeps you there. And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have. Now, discipline comes with finding success. So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success early, you do become motivated again, self motivated to continue on down that path. So my genetics were never great. My mom was five foot tall, my dad's five foot nine, five foot eight, 160 pounds. Not a lot of muscle. I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle, but I didn't come from this genetically gifted pool of cavaliers. There's no way. But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far as I could. But I really found the discipline through the fact that I liked it. And I found that this was feeding me in other ways. It was making me feel fulfilled, so it was easier for me to stick to it.
- [07:58]
Stephen Bartlett
You must deal with so many people that are struggling, that come to you and they say, listen, I've got these big goals. I'm overweight, I don't feel good, I've got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here, inflammation here. And they say to you that they want to change. You know, you can see it in their face. They're desperate, but they don't change. For whatever reason.
- [08:16]
Jeff Cavalier
We live in an age now where you have access to the Internet, you have so much access to information. Use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey, because the earlier you start, the better. But it's, it's, it is quite sad when people don't ever find that spark and trying to play catch up. There's no lie to it. You're not. It's going to be harder as you get older. Starting or initiating a training program in your 40s and 50s, though way better than not starting one, is much more difficult than if you had started in your teens and 20s, you know, to develop that habit, to maintain that habit. It's very difficult to initiate that the older that you get. But I do think that it's possible. So my best advice to people who have that struggle to get started is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking, because the longer you think, the more likely you are to not be able to do it. You know, the thing that stops most people, there's that saying the start is what stops most people, right? But the same token, it's not the obstacle that's in your way, it's the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting. So you wind up saying, well, I could just sit on the couch and watch this. I'm not going to go to the gym. And believe me, there's even nights now for me where I'll be with one of my sons and we'll be in his room putting them to bed. I might fall asleep in there, you know, and wake up and it's late at night. I don't even think. I let my dogs out. I Go right outside. I walk sometimes I'm literally half asleep as I'm walking. But I know if I can get to the gym, get in there, turn on the music and kind of put the lights on and do one warm up set, I'll be good. And if I even sat down for a second, I might find that path of least resistance to be a lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable. And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you probably enjoy it now, right? The process, it becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step. But there's still gonna be days, you know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you're gonna be like, maybe not today, but if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that's all it usually takes to get you through the door and you realize that, you know what you were set out to do.
- [10:28]
Stephen Bartlett
When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched your videos, I mean, it's actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content. You must hear a lot of different types of spark. When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone's life where they something happened and it stuck. It finally stuck. What are the kind of things that you hear?
- [10:48]
Jeff Cavalier
Oh man, they're life changing like that? It is, it's part of the why that keeps me going, you know, hearing some of these stories. I had a live event a few years ago, first one that we ever had. So I was, I was a rookie. I didn't know how it was going to go. But part of that event was a competition that we ran. So anyway, we had a guy who was in his late 50s first one to do the competition. So he drew number one. Okay, so he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle, which is just a 50 yard distance. They had to run to the cone and back, that's 100 yards, back and forth again and back and forth again. It was extremely hot that day. It was like 95 degrees. Because of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work out so well. So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run, he, he starts to windmill his arms, he's losing his balance forward. And I'm like, oh no. And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over the place. Okay, next kid comes up, he's up now, he goes by the second station, he's overheated. He tried so hard. He has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated from. I was ready to put a stop to the games because I said we just weren't prepared for this heat. And this first time anyway, we continued. So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push. And we had put £225 on the sled, but that sled was on the pavement out in the parking lot from this gym that we, that we hosted it at. And the friction of the, of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted for. It made it even more difficult. Well, again he's got the bloodied up knee, he's pushing it, he gets it to the end, struggling. And now he has to pick up at the end 100 pound kettlebell and walk it back. He goes down there, he grabs the kettlebell after a long multiple attempt to get the sled down there. And I finally run down there and I said his name was Craig. I said, craig, dude, you don't have to do this. You're good, you're good, it's okay. And he's like, no. He says, I'm going to do it. And I start walking and he's crossing the legs over each other. It looks like he's going to go down again. I put my arm around him, I said, man, listen, you don't have to do this. He says, and I get goosebumps. He goes, jeff, I have to do this. He goes, I was diagnosed with ms, you know, four years ago and I can't feel my feet. I gotta do this. And it's that kind of drive and motivation and you never know because you don't know what they're dealing with. You know, I get emotional, but it's like, that's the kind of stuff that gets me going. We had another guy who competed at our event and he was doing the push up portion of the competition. It's his second year and he was doing his push ups. Wasn't going all the way down, so got down to like, I don't know, two, three inches away from his chest. So I go over to him, I'm like, hey, dude, just a little bit lower. Get your chest down. He says, I can't because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer and I can't get all the way down because of the port. He wound up dying two months after the competition. So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don't like. It's not just to go to the gym to get a six pack, it's going there to for reasons we'll never know. And I think that those kinds of moments are more than touching to me, as you can tell, but like they're, they're just, they show the power of will. And that is something that we'll never be able to quantify.
- [14:31]
Stephen Bartlett
Within that as well. I was thinking about how that guy who wouldn't put that 100 pound kettlebell down for him, it was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself. It's something that he wanted to do do for reasons that are much more about one's identity and one's self story as we call it. And on that particular point, it's one of the things that I often think about with fitness and working out is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don't feel like it, then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the rest of my life when there's things I don't want to do and how that then shapes me over time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able to confront. The thing I think is like really understated. I actually was reading this, I think Andrew Huberman told me this. He said that they've. Neuroscience has found a part of the brain which is associated with doing hard things.
- [15:32]
Jeff Cavalier
Yes, I saw that.
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Stephen Bartlett
And I think he said basically that that part of the brain, and I'll put this up on the screen, grows the more hard things that you do. So you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things. And the minute I learned that, I went, oh, this makes a lot of sense because the more I was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick, and now my diet is like, as we sit here now, is extremely disciplined. I've like changed as a person in other areas of my life. Like I've got more organized with like my, my possessions and.
- [16:03]
Jeff Cavalier
Well, you realize what you're capable of too, right? Because I think we undersell our capabilities. And I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, when you're staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire than again, what level of fitness you have, you realize that there's a much deeper well that you can tap into to do things that you don't want to do. And I think the people that are lucky enough like yourself, to have found that. Have found the keys to the kingdom, to be able to take themselves to another level of awareness and self awareness that does 100%, like you said, play out in other areas of your life. When you can do the difficult thing, it's still not an automatic that you're gonna be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody. But you know that you have the capacity to do things that you didn't really think you could. And it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out. Interesting thing on that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that if you start to like the thing that you actually didn't like in the beginning, then it no longer challenges that area of the brain. That area of the brain starts to shrink again.
- [17:17]
Stephen Bartlett
Oh, really?
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Jeff Cavalier
So it has to kind of. Which is cool, because it means that you need to continue to seek challenge.
- [17:23]
Stephen Bartlett
I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year's. I sat down with one of my best friends and said to him, I said, what exercise and what thing do you dislike the most? And we basically made a list of them. And then we started doing those things.
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Jeff Cavalier
That's cool.
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Stephen Bartlett
It was actually running and it was leg day and squatting. It also made me. Cause when I asked him why he didn't do those things, the list of reasons he gave were things like, my legs aren't insert excuse. My brain insert excuse. And we both came to realize together that that was just a bunch of bullshit that we had like made our identities and it was now limiting us. Are there things like that in your life that you just.
- [18:00]
Jeff Cavalier
Oh, gosh, you avoid conditioning running. I try to address those things and do them knowing that I should do more of them. But there's always more to do.
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Stephen Bartlett
One of the things you must have figured out from all the content you've produced across all these channels is really the essence of what people want. And because you'll see from the views and the engagement and these things, you'll be this sort of mental pattern of, okay, people are really interested in this. So if you had to summarize for me the essence of what you think people are looking for, and when I say the essence, I mean like the why, why, why, why, why. The very bottom of that. What are those things?
- [18:37]
Jeff Cavalier
Oh, I think insecurity is definitely a factor. I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is part of that. I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable of. Because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are. You Know if the moment arose that they needed to, let's say, protect their family or do something that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be? And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our preparedness that way. So I think that's a driver.
- [19:12]
Stephen Bartlett
I heard this quote many years ago. It says, change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change. And I was thinking, if you were my trainer and I was one of those stubborn people who were struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me? Like, what would you do if I was super stubborn? I tried for three years. I'd never made it stick. But clearly there was health consequences playing out in my body. Where would you start with me to get me going?
- [19:38]
Jeff Cavalier
Probably the conversation I would start with. Always with the conversation. I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody. Because if you, if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do. But if you ask the question of, like, why do you want to get in shape? You might say, I'm too fat right now. And I would say to you, well, what would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you are? Well, it would be better because I'd have a six pack. What would be important if having a six pack? Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more. Why would it be important for you to like who you're looking at in the mirror? Because I don't feel like I'm enough right now because I'm letting myself down. Because I know that I'm not doing the things I need to do. Why is it important to not let yourself down? Right? So when you start to ask the question, keep digging, you find the why very quickly. And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood. It comes from pain of letting others down. It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was drilled into you from your parents or others, or because you just never lacked the self confidence to actually feel better about yourself. I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers, they all have some level of pain in their life that caused them to seek this out because it's the one thing they can control. It's the one area where it's like, I don't have to listen to anybody. I have to do what I have to do for myself and I'm in control of my body. And I think that a lot of times people or it's an escape, you know, where you benefit from the endorphins that are released through exercise and it's your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better. But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain. So if I had you had come to me in the very beginning, I would have started with that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can't stick with this. You've tried and you stopped. And I think that people need to understand that. And finding the why to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
- [21:43]
Stephen Bartlett
What about the very top then? Like how does it manifest? Like the title of the video or the thing?
- [21:48]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, I mean the top is abs, biceps, chest, and, you know, low back pain. I mean, people actually come to me for one of two things. Again, I think it's having the two hats of physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach. I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something. So we have lots and lots and lots of views obviously based around fixing issues, low back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain, and how it disrupts their ability to carry on in life or through their fitness pursuits. Then there's the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six pack abs and then they want their arms and they want their chest and I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because it's, you know, it's the beach muscles, but that's, it's a fact of life, people want to improve those areas. What I try to do when I bring people in through that track is to also make them aware that it's okay, this is cool, you want your abs, that's good, you know, but obviously it's going to require a healthier eating plan. So I know I can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life if I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now. So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interest might be. But my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there's more to it than that.
- [23:21]
Stephen Bartlett
I've kind of broken everything you've said into three sections, which is people want to look good, they want to perform and whatever that might be. And they also want to be able to do it for a long time. They want to live long.
- [23:32]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah.
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Stephen Bartlett
So if we start with looking good as a top line category, what are the things that you think are the subcategories of looking good?
- [23:41]
Jeff Cavalier
The Amount of fat that someone carries. So how lean they are, the aesthetic development of their muscles, what their bodies are shaped like, because, you know, you could lose weight. But as you've described before, skinny fat isn't really an attractive look. So I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.
- [24:01]
Stephen Bartlett
What is the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they want? What do men come to you and say that they want to.
- [24:08]
Jeff Cavalier
As a trainer of athletes, it's sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the lower body. They're not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have strong developed glutes. I mean, it's just not really high on the list. So pretty much everything's going to focus on from the waist up in terms of the aesthetic. Aesthetic desire, bigger neck for men. For women, it's the opposite, right? For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist. They want to have better legs, they want to have stronger legs, they want to have well developed backsides. They want to like. And there's probably, I mean, a cultural importance upon that. You know, people are, you know, men are being judged aesthetically on their upper bodies more than women are, and women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies. So we're feeding into those desires, especially one scroll through Instagram and you're just reinforcing everything I just talked about in.
- [25:00]
Stephen Bartlett
That category as well, of looking good.
- [25:02]
Jeff Cavalier
Nutrition, most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is gonna be impacted by nutrition.
- [25:07]
Stephen Bartlett
So let's start with fat and lean. If I wanna be lean like you and I wanna have low body fat, where does one begin?
- [25:16]
Jeff Cavalier
What happened with me, and what I always advise people to do is start just by looking at globally from 30,000 foot view. What do you know you're doing not well right now? Are you drinking excessively? Do you end every night with a pint of ice cream? You know that you're doing some things wrong. So you make one pass at the obvious stuff and you just do it for a couple weeks, you know, and you see how you progress. And what will normally happen is usually those are the most offending, they're the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.
- [25:57]
Stephen Bartlett
What do you think are some of the offenders that we don't realize are offenders? I've had so many in my life. Even like ketchup and. Yeah, I thought white rice was great.
- [26:06]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, I mean, white rice is actually. There's a place for carbohydrates in people's diets, I believe. But you have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be overeaten. Like, the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us. But you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some, or pasta and then some, because they are much more chemically pleasing to the body. So I think people need to be cautious of overconsumption of carbohydrates. And they're not aware of portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say, no, I had rice and pasta. And I would say, I have rice and pasta too, every day. But, like, I probably don't eat as much as that person does. So portion sizes, when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness about the kind of hidden offenders. I mean, there's sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing. Especially, you know, like yogurts. Right. People will have, you know, fruit on the bottom, yogurt, but it's like, loaded with sugar or. My first experience was oatmeal. I was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatme, oatmeal in the morning. So of course I was buying Quaker oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have brown sugar in the bottom, and it's like they're loaded with sugar. They were not the equivalent of Quaker Oats from a. From a, like a canister. And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right, but I'm not, because there was more sugar in that than there was in a bag or in a bowl of Trix cereal.
- [27:40]
Stephen Bartlett
What do you look for on the package?
- [27:42]
Jeff Cavalier
I always look for sugar and fat. That's what I look for. So dietary fat. There are 9 calories per gram of fat versus 4 calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. They're much more calorie dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, that dish is going to increase pretty quickly. So you have to be mindful of them if you want to lose weight and achieve a hypocaloric state. To get there, you're going to have to take in fewer calories than you're burning. That's why I would look at fat content. But sugar is just really not necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and tends to be too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating sugar. So I think that's one of the fastest ways to, to get yourself on track is to, is to try to minimize the sugar content in a food. And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you. So if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied and full faster than if it's just a carbohydrate based meal. So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around. Protein, sugar and fats.
- [29:07]
Stephen Bartlett
And what does your diet look like?
- [29:08]
Jeff Cavalier
I eat breakfast in the morning and I have usually again, I'll give you typical meals. I have oatmeal. I even put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin just for some additional vitamins and minerals, protein shake and some, maybe some egg whites so I get good amounts of protein. And for lunch I'll have like a grilled chicken wrap. Again, trying to prioritize protein at every single meal. And I'll try to have a Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it. Then I'll have a protein shake. Usually after work, only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at six o' clock, I come home, the kids are there, they want to play. I wind up just having something to tide me over, realizing that my dinner is going to occur later at night after my workout. What happens though is that workout occurs at around 10:30-11:00 clock at night. So dinner happens at around midnight. For me, that's always again based around a protein first. So usually chicken or steak or fish and then fibrous carbohydrates. So it's going to be something like I like edamame. It's, you know, it has good protein in it and I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there, especially in that limited amount broccoli. And then I have my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is sweet potatoes. So I'll have sweet potatoes or pasta or both.
- [30:33]
Stephen Bartlett
I'm still shocked that you're eating dinner at midnight. So what time do you train?
- [30:38]
Jeff Cavalier
So I train around 10:30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so.
- [30:43]
Stephen Bartlett
Is that suboptimal?
- [30:46]
Jeff Cavalier
It's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it. If I could change That I would probably work out at 5pm, you know, but I always find that there's still work going on. People still need me at that point.
- [30:59]
Stephen Bartlett
In the day, why not the morning?
- [31:00]
Jeff Cavalier
I have a very difficult time waking up. I'm one of those people that act like a zombie for probably 15 minutes before I'm feeling ready to go.
- [31:09]
Stephen Bartlett
I'm very much the same. I probably eat a bit too late, I train a bit too late, et cetera. And as I'm listening to you, I'm almost listening to myself. And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Stephen, if you went to bed earlier and you. Then you'd wake up and you'd be able to train in the morning.
- [31:25]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah. Well, how do you feel when you wake up? Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up or do you feel.
- [31:30]
Stephen Bartlett
No. Yeah, I'm very similar to you. I wake up late and if I wake up late, then I feel fine. But if you try and wake me up at 7 o' clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at midnight or 1am so there's not enough sleep taking place there. But having worn this whoop for a while. Hero sponsor I'm an investor in the company ADA asa. One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep, my body isn't actually asleep because I could see my resting heart rate so high through the night. So my body's actually just working on the food so it's not restoring my body. So one of my goals for this year is to try and not eat after 9pm I think it's a good.
- [32:13]
Jeff Cavalier
Goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the routine of sleep is what's most important. I believe even in cases of lower sleep totals, there's actually 27% of people report sleeping less than six hours a night and 20% of people sleep four to five hours. I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because I get to bed late and I get up around 7 o' clock each morning.
- [32:53]
Stephen Bartlett
Do you sleep track?
- [32:55]
Jeff Cavalier
I don't sleep track. I did for a while. I don't sleep track. I actually, I've tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now there is and I hold onto this as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleeper syndrome, in other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness and brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is that only 1 to 3% of the population has that. So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be playing a game that I ultimately can't win. But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep totals than others.
- [33:51]
Stephen Bartlett
On this point of being lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid of is lower belly fat. This stubborn belly fat that occurs right there, right there on our little mannequin here. You don't have a pouch. That's what we call it, me and my friends, we call it a pouch. We can be very lean elsewhere but still have a little bit of a pouch there. Some people think doing sit ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat. What is the answer in your view?
- [34:20]
Jeff Cavalier
It's the level of strictness of nutrition. And I mean the level of strictness, it's not just in the foods that you choose, but the consistency with which you choose them. So how long can you sustain this really clean diet? I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it's actually the first thing. It's a red flag that they don't. But I think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way. When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that you mentioned that I don't have one. But I mean, as ridiculous as this is going to sound, when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it's right there. And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on. The shamefulness of how your body does this and what it does to us is that it kind of works from this top down approach. You lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and the last place is here. So it works in this top down approach. Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you've lost the fat in your face, you've lost the fat in your neck. So like, you know, I sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, man, you're gone. You know, and I hate the way that my face gets sort of caved in. But it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially naturally, because that's how your body starts to lose fat, especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness, so it looks even more of a challenge. But this top down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to start to see, like the upper row abs underneath the chest or so when you start to get into better shape, you might have noticed this yourself. You start to see, like, okay, my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually starting to take some shape. Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation that, like, I want to keep going.
- [36:14]
Stephen Bartlett
I can see the top ab, right?
- [36:15]
Jeff Cavalier
I can see the top ab. There it is. I can see I have them. You know, I actually have them. I got a two pack, but I have them. Well, you continue down that path, sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more. Sometimes you take one extra night of socializing or drinking out of the schedule and you start to see it go even lower and you start to get that second row of abs. Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue and what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue. And that's the caveat that I always say I mentioned early on. Is it that important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat, you're going to look amazing and you're going to look better than 98% of all men. So whether you had that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you're still going to have your abs, you're still going to have defined shoulders and arms and, you know, some veins popping out in other places. Like, is that, is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits you already would? You'd be there. Aesthetically, you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you came from. And you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice to get there. And that's the battle people have to wage and ask themselves how worth it is.
- [37:37]
Stephen Bartlett
It to me is the game of weight loss, basically. Calories in, calories out, I. E. I just need to have less calories than I burn.
- [37:44]
Jeff Cavalier
Yes and no. So to lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie deficit. But if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say you ate Twinkies in a Deficit, you're not going to get the same outcome because the type of weight lost is going to vary depending upon what you ingest. So if you don't ingest enough protein, you're just eating Twinkies. You might lose weight, but you're also going to lose muscle in the process. So if you want to deter the loss of muscle and maximize the retention of muscle and maybe again even slightly build in that deficit, then you're going to want to prioritize protein. So it's not just the calories in, calories out that will get you to lose the weight, but when you. Ultimately, I think people aren't just talking about weight loss, they really want to make sure that they're maximizing lean muscle at the same time they're losing weight. If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it's going to matter.
- [38:43]
Stephen Bartlett
What are the big misconceptions we have about abs?
- [38:46]
Jeff Cavalier
To get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff that doesn't work. I think that's probably the biggest misconception. I always remember Laszlo. Laszlo was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building it. He would come up to me. He was the typical male. He was in pretty decent shape. He worked every day, active. He's like, I gotta get in shape, man. And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train? He said, well, I don't really train. I just, you know, do a couple push ups and stuff. I said, well, you're have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition? I kind of eat what I want. And I was like, all right. But he wasn't really overweight, you know, but he's the typical. And he goes, just tell me what I could. I just want to know what I can do for this. What's a good exercise I could do for this?
- [39:27]
Stephen Bartlett
For his belly fat.
- [39:28]
Jeff Cavalier
For the belly fat. It's just pointing at his stomach. And it's like there's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how, that's not how it is. Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise. It's always about nutrition. It's always about nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else. Now when you get lean enough, if you're not doing any type of ab training, you'll probably have less defined abs because you won't have the development of that muscle. There's nothing different about the Abdominals and the biceps or the quads, there's still muscles that can be developed. And because of the anatomy of the abs, there's that line down the middle in the packs. Right. That's just caused by a suturing down of something called linea alba. It's just a tendonous sheath when you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training. Right. Even weighted ab work is helpful in this case. The muscles are just growing, just like a bicep would grow. And as they grow, you can't change the suturing down of the tendonous sheath. So they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area so you get more visible abs. But that's the only way to really do that is through training to hypertrophy the abs. But you're not going to get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's over them. And that's only going to come from nutrition.
- [40:48]
Stephen Bartlett
You know, sometimes you see older bodybuilders, like former bodybuilders, and they kind of look a bit bloated. What is that?
- [40:56]
Jeff Cavalier
I mean, that's usually anabolic steroid use that causes that, or growth hormone. That doesn't generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within the abdomen, not just in the inguinal, in the groin area. That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you get there. That's really usually a telltale sign of growth hormone use, something that they've abused that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension pushing out of the belly.
- [41:36]
Stephen Bartlett
That's the organs growing underneath.
- [41:38]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, it's actually a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it's certainly not a healthy thing to have. And there's always a lot of repercussions to going down that path. They might look short term the way they want to look. And I would argue that even in those cases, you know, the large, super large Mr. Olympia look, I don't even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people, but it definitely leaves behind a lot of damage.
- [42:10]
Stephen Bartlett
And people do that at a variety of different ages. Now, I think even people that aren't training to be bodybuilders. I can think of several people that I'm aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth hormones pretty young. And I'm actually seeing a little bit of that same body shaping. I don't even know what it is.
- [42:30]
Jeff Cavalier
But yeah, I mean, I think it look at TRT is becoming such a prevalent path for people. I don't like that that's the prevalent path. I don't want to come across as somebody who is anti TRT because I've been. I've been reminded of that and that on some of the videos I've made about it, that. Look, Jeff, there's a lot of cases where people have extremely bottomed out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone that's not being made. I completely appreciate that. But as you've noted, the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people talking about their use of it and how it's physically changing them and they're doing it at a rate it's becoming. Option one, what about maximizing your natural potential first before declaring yourself as low testosterone, even at levels of 400 and 500, and then going and using testosterone, you're going to be on that for the rest of your life. If you pursue that path. Once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with exogenous testosterone, you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body's ability to produce testosterone, but that's not a given. So be prepared that once you go down that path, that's when you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life.
- [43:57]
Stephen Bartlett
Have you ever taken trt?
- [43:59]
Jeff Cavalier
No. No.
- [44:00]
Stephen Bartlett
Would you ever?
- [44:02]
Jeff Cavalier
If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe. I want to say, I want to, I'm aching to say 100% safe, because that's what I want. Then maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know, the loss or the change that my body was going through. Because I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can. But up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that it feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep going. And I'm going to be 50 this year.
- [44:38]
Stephen Bartlett
What about let's do living long then? When we think about longevity and what it's going to take for Me to be, live a long time, but be strong into my later years. Where, what areas do I need to focus on training and staying strong, and where do I need to invest my energy and time?
- [44:58]
Jeff Cavalier
So this is where I think when I say, if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an athlete. Because, like, the hallmark of their training is that it's multifaceted. So you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one dimensional, I'm not doing this saying this to put them down, but one dimensional as an arm wrestler. Right. They could have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength. You have to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor recovery, they're likely going to lose. Especially because your neurological output and grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don't have more than one element developed, you're not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population is looking to become healthier and feel better, it's not going to be one thing. First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes the building of muscle, so hypertrophy and strength building is going to be really important because we are going to. Again, like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose strength every passing decade. You know, up to 8 to 10% per decade as you pass the age of 50. So you need to make sure that you are doing something to stave that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment, because that's, again, neurologically, your neurons start to fire at a slower pace. You need to train these things. Reactivity, reactions, reaction skills. Again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He was in a. He had an obstacle course he built. I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he used to add. Every week or so, he'd add one more obstacle to his course. And he built it in his backyard. And it was like a balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day. Wow. And he said that he would try to Find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain guessing as to what's next. And again, whether or not he was finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do maybe is also feeding into his increases because he was doing the things he hated to do. But. But the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted and by incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach. Because it is important, the fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But you need to factor those types of things in. Flexibility and mobility feed into that. Like you can't. I always talk about there's a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom which is supposed to be represent all the things you're supposed to work on and then it kind of fine tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength. Right. You got to maintain your strength and then above that you got to maintain your muscle mass like the amount of lean muscle you carry and above that your ability to perform because of those two attributes. So to be able to actually do things and if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you're a baseball player, you know, how well do you swing the bat? You know, how well do you feel the ground ball? It's that top level skill work that comes up here.
- [48:54]
Stephen Bartlett
Is cardiovascular in there?
- [48:55]
Jeff Cavalier
Cardiovascular is in there as well as well. Yep. Your condition would be right. You know, depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play, it's going to fall right above or below strength. Now I would argue that there's a few things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots. And the pyramid sits on the ground, but what's underneath the pyramid, the roots, your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person that could squat 600 pounds, but now I'm going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability. And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility or you lack the flexibility, then I've also taken away and I've weakened the Strength that you have, it's there. Your strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root of longevity and fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility and stability. Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints and their full range of motion. So it's a muscle or joint thing still the same concept, but they're working on different elements.
- [50:17]
Stephen Bartlett
Do you think people realize that that's so important? And do you think they enjoy it?
- [50:21]
Jeff Cavalier
No, I think people hate it. And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you're into the practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the average gym goer, no, it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel. I think that when they talk about the fountain of youth, stretching and mobility is probably the thing that makes people feel the best. I've heard that people say that and I agree to almost a full extent. But I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I have this band to sort of show that like if somebody was just completely flexible, right, and you were trying to shoot this band across the table, I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to get any kind of force to do that. On the contrary, if somebody was strong, right, maybe even muscle bound, I don't have any flexibility here to again, really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of force generation. But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of flexibility, but also the strength in this case the muscles, the tension, I can shoot that band a lot further with a lot more force and a lot more ease. Our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this, but our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and mobility, because that's only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance possible.
- [52:17]
Stephen Bartlett
How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility?
- [52:22]
Jeff Cavalier
Not much. It just has to be consistent. So, I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to ten minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight. And again, this is very individual. Like one thing that I always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program, and it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I would go through the assessment of each player and you would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type, you would find certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others. People have to be willing to, A, seek out where these the deficits are, and B, to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be an hour a day of doing those things. You prioritize that list and you focus on five to 10 minutes of extra work with it. It's funny, I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning. But it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them off. That's not necessary. You find the ones that have the biggest impact. But I don't think that having stretching requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.
- [53:50]
Stephen Bartlett
You say that there are five key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity and quality of life. That kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift, the squat and reach, the sumo stance, hold the posterior chain, push up, and hip abductions. Can you show me these workouts?
- [54:07]
Jeff Cavalier
Sure. As you can see from the space I'm in, you don't need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible. They're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry. So no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do them all right. So the first exercise up here is pretty simple, but it does demand some balance. And it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it's called the single leg rdl. What you want to do is you want to hinge pretending that there's a drawer behind you that's open. You're going to close it with your butt. Then you reach forward, but at the same time you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without losing your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground. Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach. What we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position, and we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. From here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate and follow it with your head as you go up as high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this, right? With our devices at our computers, we, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine. Doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking. So the next thing is something we call a sumo squat stance. It's a squat stance hold and it's based off of something called the horse stance, which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability, Right? And again, we're still going to work on the hip in all three planes. So what we do is we get down, feet wide, and squat down into this position here. Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs for a little bit of support. But what I want to see, as tall of a chest as I can get, the same way that we just did through that rotation, to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine, and getting extended, because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it and the posture will get away from this position and more to this open upright position. If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is cross the hands over, OK? Get in that down position, reach up and out, OK? That is a 30 second hold, up to a 60 second hold, depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is you've got to work on that upper body a little bit, so the upper body, he should still be able to do the exercise. That is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the pushup. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits both front and backside. So we call this a posterior chain pushup. For a pushup, you want those hands underneath the shoulders. I'll demonstrate one, then we'll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes. So you squeeze your butt together. You straighten your knees out by contracting your quads, and then you get a good firm holding plank position here. Now, when you go down, normally people would stop here or they wouldn't come up all the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you, point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed tight, and then lift up into what we call a superman. Right from here, you're going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers, right? Come down, slide it back, come up into that good firm push up. Don't lose any of that stability. Come down, slide up and lift. The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover. We're talking about just a side lying hip abduction. What we do is we get in this position here. We position our toe down in front of us. So you want to basically point your toe down into the ground. From there, you're going to slide your leg back behind you as far as you can take it, and then lift up, right? When you do that final lift, you're going to feel a contraction right here in the glutes. In particular in the glute medius. That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that's needed to propel your body, even on a regular walk, without your hips dropping down side to side. You don't want to let that happen to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make is in order to feel like they're getting a lift, they'll just rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius to do the lifting. So you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. And that's it. There's the five essentials. Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment, no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now back to the Diary of a CEO Studio.
- [59:24]
Stephen Bartlett
This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train, and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the diary of a CEO he explained how modern shoes with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Viva Barefoot shoes, so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength. But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had where suddenly my feet feet started hurting all the time. And after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the vivobare foots. And research from Liverpool University has backed this up. They've shown that wearing Vivobarefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vivobarefoot.com doac and use code DIARY20 from my sponsor for 20% off. A strong body starts with strong feet. And what is the context there with those workouts? Why do you choose those workouts and what do these kind of signal. Are you saying that if I'm able to do those, then there's a probability that I have the strength and flexibility with longevity?
- [60:36]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will measure at a high level how much of a deficit you've acquired over the years from not doing them. So you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're going to reflect the global approach, at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip abductors. Because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is the lunge. Right. I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here. Getting exercises that work the other two planes and mostly through rotation. But working this frontal plane this side to side is really important to producing a complete person. Right. With complete levels of strength. And because they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that side lying hip raise that I show you is not one of the big exercises that are most important that are going to be up on your list. You're going to do your squats first and you're going to maybe never do those, but it doesn't mean that that muscle didn't matter. Right. Those muscles are there for a reason and they need to be developed. I remember so many Times taking some of the most powerful baseball players leading home run hitters and then testing their hip, internal or external rotation strength and it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. And you're saying to yourself, how is that even possible? Because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a carryover? Obviously, they're doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field. I still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field. But more importantly, one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his career. And there are missed games because of knee pain. What could his career stats have looked like? They're already hall of Fame worthy, but what could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those games? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller movements are really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them. Like, it doesn't require a gym, doesn't require an elaborate setup. They're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.
- [63:12]
Stephen Bartlett
Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?
- [63:15]
Jeff Cavalier
The bow tie. I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I'm thinking of my T shirt. But this is Raymond. So X ray is his full name. And then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out. God, probably in 2011 or 12. And he became a fan favorite pretty quickly. But I think people like the visual. And for me, he's not the most mobile guy. He's lost his lower arm. He doesn't have another arm on this side. He doesn't really move that well. But what it is important is he's.
- [63:45]
Stephen Bartlett
Also lost his legs.
- [63:46]
Jeff Cavalier
He's lost his legs. I got a leg over there if I need it. But the spine. See, for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit. It's what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because the area of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine. So what that is is anybody that wants to measure on the self is right at the bottom of the. Of the neck. So the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders, and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the thoracic Spine ends. It has so many far reaching implications because it shares its range of motion between two different directions. So its ability to go front to back. Again, he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward, we can go back. Right. You want to have ideally about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just us sitting here alone. You know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out when you use up motion in this direction. And imagine what that looks like when people are on their phones or at a desk all day. You're going to start to lose the motion into extension. You're going to get two flex. Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a direct degree into rotation. So you're. Because you're sharing that motion. The motion is only available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there's going to be less motion available here. If I have a thing, if you let me grab this, put this over your back.
- [65:30]
Stephen Bartlett
Over my back?
- [65:31]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah. Just like this? Yeah. Now allow yourself to slump forward. Pretend you're on that phone. Right. Get there. Now just turn from the shoulders in one direction. Slumped over. Okay. Now take a peek down the barrel of that thing, you know, behind you and see where you're pointing. How about how far rotated you are?
- [65:50]
Stephen Bartlett
Yeah.
- [65:50]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, cool. Now come back. Reset yourself. Now take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine.
- [65:57]
Stephen Bartlett
So I'm getting cramp in my arms.
- [65:58]
Jeff Cavalier
There's just a rotator cuff. So get yourself up right now, nice posture. Act like I'm watching. Right. So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that direction. How much more did you get?
- [66:09]
Stephen Bartlett
Yeah, I got another like it's like 20%.
- [66:13]
Jeff Cavalier
So maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most important functional requirements we have when you're, when you're falling. As you get older, you're likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash down and maybe break a hip. Functionally, as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You know, you don't usually just move in one plane like this. If you're a football player, American or not, you're rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know, by kicking across your body. Right. By throwing a baseball. It's all about rotation. You need to hold on to rotation but what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60, people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.
- [67:11]
Stephen Bartlett
You see it as well. You see it when people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic.
- [67:15]
Jeff Cavalier
Awful. My grandmother, God bless her soul, she lived at 97 years old. Wow. But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally. She had a walker. She was completely bent over at that walker. Could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her extension, so she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it's the most important movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso, to be able to do things. So I think that people need to focus on. Again, you go back to that whole concept of, like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength, but if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation, I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.
- [68:05]
Stephen Bartlett
Because I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable because you see it in so many older people. They often are bent over and you kind of think, well, why don't they just stand up?
- [68:16]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, well, it's impossible because, you know you're losing that. That fight to gravity. Right. Gravity is going to win ultimately, but it doesn't have to win completely. So the more that you work on maintaining your ability to extend through the thoracic spine, then you don't develop those downstream adaptations that happen from always being there. So what happens once you get in this position? You lose flexibility through other joints again. If you get. Get in that position again, actually turn a little bit. Try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay. Now just straighten yourself out. Go up tall. Now raise your arm up again, like.
- [68:57]
Stephen Bartlett
Yeah.
- [68:57]
Jeff Cavalier
Why? Because you've literally mechanically blocked your shoulder. Because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead.
- [69:09]
Stephen Bartlett
I can.
- [69:09]
Jeff Cavalier
A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now. And Just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top. So when you realize that this epicenter of dysfunction can have these far reaching benefits where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead, and then what happens then if you can't move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, steven, get your arm up over your head. And you're like, I can't. No, get your arm up over your head. You'd go like this, you'd lean your body back because your arm can't get any higher. So you're going to lean your body back. Well, what are you leaning from your low back? So now all of a sudden you're asking an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable, the low back, the lumbar spine is supposed to be a stable area of your body. You're asking it to now become a mobile area of your body and you're asking for motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn't give it to you, right? The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you. So now what does that happen? Now you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become spasm, you can damage the joints in your low back. Now you're causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has all these far reaching benefits. Another thing that can happen too is when you're down like this. I mentioned that this area of the spine we talk about is actually connected to the ribs. If you're in this compressed position where you're rounded forward, hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open. You can't get the lungs to inflate properly. Lack of properly operating lungs are going to cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day and they cause you to feel less rested at night. So this area has so many up, up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it. And it's one of those things. Again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on this area? 10% at most.
- [71:22]
Stephen Bartlett
What if I got to be doing that at my age? So I'm 30, in my early 30s now. What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I'm not hunched over and I am. I do have that full range of mobility.
- [71:32]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, there's a few things. Like, again, anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, you know, we talk about the mobility flexibility part being the, the foundation of that. But then there's also a strength component because, like, you can free up the mobility and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is just going to help you to maintain it. From a mobility flexibility standpoint, you can simply go up against a wall, right? And what you, what, what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back against the wall, and your butt against the wall. So you're going as flat as you can and you put your arms back up against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is going to have good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles. Because your rotator cuff, as it gets tight, wants to internally rotate your arms. Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward? But your, your arms, you're doing a pretty good job. But you can see, I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position when I'm there, Can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension. Because what's going to happen is if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it's just going to fold you forward from the wall and you're not going to be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that dowel, that's that that we had there. You would lay on the ground face down, dowels over your, over your back like that. You spread your legs so you look kind of like a, like a, maybe an X with your hands out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling. That dial is going to travel back behind you and you're pretty much isolating the rotation through the low, through that mid back, through that thoracic spine. So you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this and lean backwards. There's another exercise I have, this is called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach over is you push up through, you're on your back. You do a regular bridge, like a glute Bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you over the opposite shoulder. So, again, what are you getting there? You're getting extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can combine those movements and again, take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions. These are all things that anybody can do, like, anybody can do them. And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning because you are restricted, but these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don't look for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel what happens when you start to become less restricted here.
- [74:14]
Stephen Bartlett
So if I just did five or ten minutes a day of some of these drills, you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound?
- [74:20]
Jeff Cavalier
Very, very. I think that, again, I think people don't realize the minimal time investment that's required. It just needs to be done each day. Right. Those little deposits have to be made each day, and they pay off in big dividends if you do.
- [74:37]
Stephen Bartlett
And is it important for me to train for a long time or for a more intense but shorter period? How do you think about that?
- [74:43]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah. So I always say you can train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. Right. And I think that especially as you get older, I think you need to minimize the rotations on the tire. Right. How many tire rotations are you getting? Because even if I just raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I'm still moving my arm up in that position. And every time I move it up, even on here, in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like, you're still getting some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint. And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder, and this is rubbing up against that each time, it's like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back over sort of a sharp edge. Right. Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray. I'd rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity, because the. The tension delivered to the muscle with the higher level of. Of weight they're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is going to have bigger benefits in a. In a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high Repetitions. Now, that's not to say that you can't actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle. You can. They've actually shown recently that anywhere between 5 and 30 repetitions taken close to or all the way to failure can stimulate muscle growth. The absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there. But I believe that as you get older, you got to kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. Ultimately, you're going to have to change the tires, and we might not be able to change these tires as easily.
- [76:33]
Stephen Bartlett
What about the importance of form when we're training? It's one of the things you're known for, is emphasizing that form really matters. And, you know, there might be another school of thought that says, listen, it hurts, so it must be doing something. Yeah, people think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting. So clearly it worked.
- [76:49]
Jeff Cavalier
Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one, it keeps you safe. You know, most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you're in command of the weight that you're. You're lifting, and therefore it's likely going to do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it. In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve muscle growth, I'm a big believer that muscle growth is not given, it's taken. And you need to force yourself, you need to force your body to make a change. Because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same. And getting it to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding. It's creating more tissue that's going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn't want to do that again. Homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that. And the only way to take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now. That's why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute failure is 100% necessary, but it's the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I'm pretty comfortable in saying, well, Steven, you Went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop at an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, passable, same result potentially. How do I know it was really one or two reps? I don't. I don't. Because I think if there's a gun to your head, you might say, oh, I could do two more. Well, now, it wasn't one to two, it was four. And four is completely not as effective, if not at all, compared to the one to two in reserve. So when you do these exercises to this degree of effort, there's going to be a little bending of form. Now, I'm not saying that the form should break down. You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me, as long as it's still controlled. If the exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you're not doing it right. Your form has broken down to a point where I don't think you're getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train. You might have shifted the focus where you started the exercise. It was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you're done, it's for everything but your chest, because you're just kind of moving your body through space. That's not effective. If you're trying to build muscle, you want to direct attention into the muscles you're trying to build. And sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you're actually taking it off of the muscles.
- [79:35]
Stephen Bartlett
Again, this is just jumping a bit backwards. But a conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck. And is there a consequence to the fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like, for this whole conversation, I'll be looking up at you, but most of the time I'm also staring downwards at my notes and stuff. And if I'm not here, then I'm on my phone and I'm staring downwards and we spend most of our lives now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you. How you think about that.
- [80:05]
Jeff Cavalier
It is a good connection back to what we talked about, because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic spine. Because when you go like this, right, you're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that's the external rotation. If I do it the way we were just doing it, up against the wall, that's external rotation. More difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction when you start to round here. Nerd neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there. Because when you're here, what do you got to do? Yeah, gotta look up. Right. Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it's not that your neck is necessarily being pulled in that direction or the fact that you're looking down. It's the fact that your body's following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way, and I've lost that mobility into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I got to look up. So now I'm walking around looking like this. And that's that sort of nerd neck. I think nerd neck is less of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.
- [81:20]
Stephen Bartlett
You've made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we're working out and training. What are the most common but avoidable injuries, and how do I avoid them? Because I care a lot about this now that I'm getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I've pulled some ligaments in my ankle, and I was at the physio yesterday, and I've been on crutches, and I've got this big boot I have to wear. And it's not until you get injured that you realize how imperative it was for you to avoid this. Yeah, because it puts you. For me, it's completely changes my whole. It changes my whole life. Not only can I, like, just move through a space normally, but then I can't train. I'm going to get weaker. It's going to have an impact on my metabolic health. It's going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition, and everything downstream. So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention. So what are the most commonly occurring injuries, and what advice would you give me to avoid them?
- [82:16]
Jeff Cavalier
Let's see. So, first of all, I take personal offense to you calling yourself old at 32.
- [82:20]
Stephen Bartlett
Well, I'm getting older.
- [82:21]
Jeff Cavalier
I don't know what that makes me, but I feel like the crypt keeper.
- [82:24]
Stephen Bartlett
But you just start to like you do, though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three, four hours. I didn't stretch, and I was fine. These days, I have 100% injury rate. If I don't stretch and if I don't warm up and if I don't really, really think about it, 100% injury rate, I'm like, I'm on my way downhill, you know.
- [82:41]
Jeff Cavalier
Well, I mean, you're certainly going in the wrong direction. But I think when it comes to injury preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it. It doesn't. It's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm. But when it comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either built to be mobile, that aren't being controlled, or built to be stable, that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right, it's a ball. Again, we can look at that. It's a ball and socket, right? It's got the ball inside the socket. It's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the leg, right, we don't have the other part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball and socket. It's meant to be able to go in all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip, are uncontrolled, meaning you're lacking strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint. That's when you actually wind up having issues. So what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about one of those smaller exercises before, the glute medius. That muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So not just in this front to back, squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane, it controls the movements of the hips. This way, if you don't train them, they're not going to magically get strong. Like they. They have a function. And if you're not challenging that function, then you're not strengthening that muscle.
- [84:16]
Stephen Bartlett
It seems like a lot.
- [84:17]
Jeff Cavalier
It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So you could do some of the sideline hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you perform a lunge. But interestingly, all you have to do is weight it on one side. So if I were to say, all right, Steven, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunges? How much weight do you hold in your hands when you do a regular lunge or do you not do lunges?
- [84:45]
Stephen Bartlett
I don't do many lunges.
- [84:46]
Jeff Cavalier
So let's say you're doing or Bulgarian split squat. Another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench, I would say hold the weight in one hand. So now if you're doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side and then you go and you lunge out that weight, you're in the split position now with one leg out in front. The weight on this side totally wants to pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I could say I'm going to make this even harder. Go slow, go really slow. So now you're stepping out, you're on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down or the, you know, the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction. I've just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these things accomplished. At the same time you're training something else. So it's not always an extra thing that you have to do. You can actually do this in a way that is sort of part of what you do.
- [86:03]
Stephen Bartlett
So what you do then, if I were saying to you I want to have a comprehensive workout and you were designing my seven day workout plan, what would you give me to do?
- [86:11]
Jeff Cavalier
One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push pull legs, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps there, right? Because it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work. And again as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day.
- [86:33]
Stephen Bartlett
So Monday, what do I do Monday?
- [86:34]
Jeff Cavalier
So you could do push there. Right. But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that tends to be a lot, right? Like you're, you're doing shoulders Chest, triceps. Some people don't like that amount of. Of volume. Right.
- [86:51]
Stephen Bartlett
Push. When you say push, someone that doesn't know.
- [86:54]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah. So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So if you look at a bench press, is pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action that you're doing. If I looked at a lat pull down, I'm pulling the weight towards me. That's the concentric part of it. If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards me. Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I'm pushing away this way, pushing away that way. Push up, I'm pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs. I'm in the name itself. I'm pushing down through a tricep push down. I'm doing tricep lying extensions. I'm pushing the way they would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the function of that because it's optimal recovery. So why that's good if you could tolerate. I'm asking if that's okay for you to do that because you're not naturally adding shoulders in. If you were okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your push workout. And then what I would do is know that I'm getting enough recovery in between workouts, because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday, come back and do Wednesday legs. Right.
- [88:01]
Stephen Bartlett
So Monday I'm just doing. Push upper body.
- [88:04]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, just push upper body.
- [88:06]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay. Tuesday, you're gonna give me the day off.
- [88:08]
Jeff Cavalier
Tuesday, you get the day off. Yeah, I'm giving you two variations of this.
- [88:11]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay.
- [88:12]
Jeff Cavalier
And when I say day off, we could. If you were with me, you'd be doing conditioning. All right, so we'll get into that. But that. But it would be. Yeah, it's not a day off. No, you give me seven days, I'll take a ball of seven, even if I'm just doing ab work on some. But you. You then on Wednesday would come back and do your leg workout.
- [88:29]
Stephen Bartlett
And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?
- [88:31]
Jeff Cavalier
So it's gonna be anterior, posterior. So I'm gonna train your hamstrings, your glutes and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you'd have another day off.
- [88:38]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay.
- [88:39]
Jeff Cavalier
Again, likely not a day off. Some conditioning, and then the Friday could be your pull workout. Now, what's nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others, and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really Good amount of recovery between those workouts. If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light on the pole. Cause you just did that, right? You did it the day before.
- [89:14]
Stephen Bartlett
So my whole body on Saturday, you.
- [89:16]
Jeff Cavalier
Could do it when. I mean, like, I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of including as many muscles as possible at one time.
- [89:26]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay.
- [89:27]
Jeff Cavalier
And I could shy off a little bit, back off a little bit off of the pull that you were doing, because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day before. So I would. If I trained you on. And this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday in a pull workout, remember, I have different planes of motion. I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff like a pull up or, or a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises like a seated row or bent over row. Right. So I could shift the focus a little bit.
- [89:55]
Stephen Bartlett
And then Sunday, Sunday, a break.
- [89:57]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I, I definitely don't advocate seven days a week of full training.
- [90:02]
Stephen Bartlett
Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this, in this particular week?
- [90:05]
Jeff Cavalier
So in that, in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- [90:09]
Stephen Bartlett
Thought I had a break.
- [90:10]
Jeff Cavalier
And if you were gonna. If you had, you know, your goals were more aligned with fat loss and overall conditioning and you feel like you're, you know, not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that. But if your priority was the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage of that Saturday as my, my flex day to do training.
- [90:32]
Stephen Bartlett
And you don't put the cardio on the same day as the upper body legs workouts.
- [90:36]
Jeff Cavalier
It could be. But if your priority again is to build muscle, then prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio conditioning work. At the end of that workout, something might suffer. And the thing that usually comes second is what suffers.
- [90:48]
Stephen Bartlett
If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push day. So that's me doing, like, chest and is it triceps? Triceps and shoulders. How many. If I'm training for one hour, how many reps are you trying to do per muscle and how many, like, sets?
- [91:05]
Jeff Cavalier
So set count, you know, if you can get in. And again, this is a little bit determined by whether you're going to train on that Saturday. So if you're going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I. I know I have an opportunity to maybe do bench again on Saturday or a variation of bench, an incline bench, so I don't have to get all of my chest volume in in that first day. But typically, you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you were going to do, let's say, the one workout for chest and you're doing, say, three sets per exercise, you're in that range of around three exercises. Right. For chest. Now, you don't have to have that. The volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because you're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put something. My favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension, where I lay on my back on the bench and I do. Some people call them skull crushers or nose breakers.
- [92:07]
Stephen Bartlett
If we just take bicep as an example, how often do I need to train, and how intense do I need to train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take for me to lose the muscle?
- [92:21]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah. Interesting. So I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I actually discussed this with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people. From person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between muscles. Like, you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every three days, but I could never train my back every three days or I could never train my chest every three days. It's just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different for every person. And even at a holistic one level, you're just not going to find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body. So a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training intuition to say, hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift? Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I'm probably recovering well. And you can experiment with, like, hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be.
- [93:58]
Stephen Bartlett
You have this contraption on the desk in front of us, this thing here.
- [94:05]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah.
- [94:06]
Stephen Bartlett
So many people talk to me about this device, and it's quite strange how important people say that this device is and what it tells us. I was doing some reading beforehand. It's a grip strength.
- [94:17]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah.
- [94:17]
Stephen Bartlett
Read a monitor and there's some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015 Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every 5 kilogram decrease in grip strength, it was associated with a 16% higher risk of death, a 17% higher risk of heart disease and a 7% higher risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that people with low grip strength had a 68% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. There was another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues, and another study that shows that older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be hospitalized with their injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the Journal of Gerontology. Grip strength.
- [95:16]
Jeff Cavalier
Pretty important, huh? A lot of that research has been determined to be more correlative than causative. But the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so because they're regularly engaging in physical activity. Likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy weights, they're having to manipulate their body in space if they're doing calisthenic exercises. So there's a level of activity that remains in their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues as they age.
- [96:12]
Stephen Bartlett
So it's not the strength in which we can grip that matters, necessarily, but the thing that matters is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So it's just one. It's almost like a symptom of something upstream which is positive.
- [96:25]
Jeff Cavalier
Right. Or lacking. Right. You're not doing enough of that being said, you can actually directly relate or measure your ability to recover from exercise based upon having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the over, you know, weeks or months of training. So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the morning, five mornings in a row, and average it out at a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is.
- [96:59]
Stephen Bartlett
What's a good grip strength?
- [97:01]
Jeff Cavalier
So most men would be somewhere between a hundred, I'll talk in pounds, 100 to 120 pounds. So if you look at that, that's around 46 kilos to 54 kilos if you want to give a shot. See where you stack up? So to do this now, there's some rules here. Yeah, don't go like this, you know, keep it in here. Don't touch your arm to the table at all. 90 degrees like that? Yep. And then you're just going to squeeze one good effort as hard as you can.
- [97:30]
Stephen Bartlett
Wish me luck.
- [97:31]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, don't blow out now. All right, let's see.
- [97:35]
Stephen Bartlett
Gosh, my head nearly exploded.
- [97:38]
Jeff Cavalier
130. So you're above average, so doing well on grip strength. So now what you would do is and you would test both sides. You could average out the sides. Sometimes you're going to have one, obviously one side stronger than the other. You would then have a good baseline. If you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the morning.
- [97:55]
Stephen Bartlett
Can I try this? I'm just gonna. So this is my weaker.
- [97:59]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, here we go.
- [98:00]
Stephen Bartlett
My weaker hand.
- [98:00]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, you gotta beat it though, now.
- [98:04]
Stephen Bartlett
Gosh, it's a bit slippery.
- [98:07]
Jeff Cavalier
I think you did.
- [98:08]
Stephen Bartlett
Did I beat it?
- [98:09]
Jeff Cavalier
Oh, my God. Wow. 160.
- [98:12]
Stephen Bartlett
You're joking.
- [98:13]
Jeff Cavalier
160.
- [98:14]
Stephen Bartlett
What?
- [98:14]
Jeff Cavalier
The 160. So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did the other side again.
- [98:21]
Stephen Bartlett
You think I'd beat it?
- [98:22]
Jeff Cavalier
No, no, you're not gonna beat. You're gonna beat your old performance, but you're not gonna beat. You're not gonna beat the left side. Are you left handed?
- [98:30]
Stephen Bartlett
I'm right handed, so that was strange.
- [98:34]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, let's see what you got. 150. Now see, I had my prediction, right? So a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the stress of doing that.
- [98:45]
Stephen Bartlett
What's your grip strength?
- [98:46]
Jeff Cavalier
I don't know, I haven't tested in a while. See, now you're gonna show me left and right. All right, let's see.
- [98:51]
Stephen Bartlett
We're gonna ask some of my team members if they want to give it a shot.
- [98:54]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, here we go.
- [98:56]
Stephen Bartlett
Wow.
- [98:58]
Jeff Cavalier
Crunchy. 130.
- [99:01]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay. On that side and your left side.
- [99:03]
Jeff Cavalier
All right, let's see.
- [99:04]
Stephen Bartlett
Anyone else want to do it better? You want to give it a shot?
- [99:07]
Jeff Cavalier
Try to do with all the popping without a popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way. 110.
- [99:16]
Stephen Bartlett
Okay, so you're right.
- [99:17]
Jeff Cavalier
I'm right handed. So it was 130. Right. 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not. Not superhuman. For sure.
- [99:26]
Stephen Bartlett
Bertie, you want to try? You're most certainly way stronger than me. Not in grip strength, but you're stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press, and everything else.
- [99:36]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, I mean, this is again, underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually. All right, so now hold it like this. Yep. And then you're just gonna one, one hand. Right. Squeeze as hard as you can for kind of a short burst. Okay. All right, There you go. Let's take a look. Wow. 100. Now, women's average grip strength is 60 to 80 pounds. So you're actually much stronger than the average woman.
- [100:05]
Stephen Bartlett
I started my first business at 12 years old, and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketeer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully, there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you. Our sponsor today, which is Shopify, because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design, and enhancing your products images, not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the inventory. And if you're looking to get your business started, go to shopify.com bartlett and sign up for a $1 per month trial. That's shopify.com bartlett. This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world's top CEOs. All the time, people say to me, they say, can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor me? How do I find a mentor? So here is what we're going to do. You're going to send me a question. And the most popular question you send me is I'm going to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top CEOs in the world, running $100 billion companies. And then I'm going to reply to you via email with how they answered that question. You might say, how do you hold onto a relationship when you're building a startup? What is the most important thing? If I've got an idea and don't know where to start, we email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality. But then I saw what the founders were replying with and their willingness to reply and I thought, actually this is really good. And all you've got to do is sign up completely free and can I train my grip strength individually if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip?
- [102:04]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old fashioned little grippers, you know, that you just squeeze and they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels. Now for people that have worked on it and actually improved when I was young, they're pretty easy to conquer. With a little bit of training you'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resistance high enough. But now it's definitely something that you could be challenged by.
- [102:30]
Stephen Bartlett
The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we've touched on briefly, but I think is important to talk about because I don't think people realize how prevalent it is, is back pain. I was looking at some stats beforehand and it says that 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. It's actually the leading cause of disability worldwide. And in the UK, over 10 million work days are lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain are related to back pain. It's the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor. And chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the uk and there's five of us in this room now in total. And so one of us probabilistically is gonna have chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I ask this in part because I spoke to some, I think the anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa and they find that back pain just doesn't exist there. It's not a thing.
- [103:23]
Jeff Cavalier
I think the likelihood that you're gonna experience back pain at some point in your life is high. But that recurring back pain and that chronic back pain, I think that's, that's entirely avoidable. 26% of the time at any one time in the United States, people are going to be dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there, the other thing I find interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least four or five times to the doctor for respiratory infection. It starts to. It's an eye opener, like, wow, and this is something that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come from so many different causes. We talked about before, how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could and therefore cause strain there. Now, here's the good part about this, though. 80% of the people, or 85% will have low back pain in their life. Only 27 to 35% of the time is it disc related. So we're talking about, you know, if we look back on this guy, again, it's the, it's the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? The, the vertebral disc that create that spacing and the cushioning between the, the vertebrae and bar spine when one of those discs, actually this is one of them, dislodged itself. But when the disc that sits above and below these two levels pushes outward or herniates, it could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward. Anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure, in this case the disc, you get the radiating symptoms that go down. Whatever dermatome this is, what that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower body or some sensory area of the lower body, depending upon where people complain of pain like, oh, I feel it in my hip, or I feel it in my leg, around my knee, or I feel it down behind my knee, down to my foot. You pretty much know what level of disc problem they have because it's representative of the level of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like L5S1, right, the last lumbar vertebrae in the first sacral vertebra, it's going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your calf, underneath your foot, if you get something more around the hip, you know, and a lot of times people complain of hip pain. They think they have, they have a hip issue. It's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that's an L2, L3 or L304. You get indicators of where that's coming from. Again, the good news is if you don't have this neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling, numbness, weakness, it's mostly muscle in origin. Now, again, even of the disc related issues, the 27 to 35%, 96% of those are not operated on. So think about the impact you can have. If we're saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed through non operative strengthening or stretching intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what are, what's the cause of the dysfunction? Is it coming from that thoracic spine? Lack of extension? Cool. Okay, well, let's work on it. So let's try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute? Right, having weak glutes. Because again, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other words, kick the leg back behind you. If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body by doing that, when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again, I could do it from the low back by over exaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to. Always remember, the low back is supposed to be the stability center of your spine. It's supposed to provide stability. If you're not getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above, you know, above it or below it, it's going to say to the low back, please help out. Give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it, but at an expense. And that's where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses. You have to address hip, hip mobility issues.
- [107:59]
Stephen Bartlett
This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch issue. When they say mismatch issue, they mean that there's a way that we're living our lives these days that is at odds with how we were, quote, unquote, supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it's interesting cause I've interviewed David Richolin, who is an anthropologist, but also Daniel Lieberman. They've both spent time with the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why we get back issues and the Hadza tribe don't really get them is because we spend a lot of time like just sedentary. However, David Richarlin said that they, the Hadza tribe still spend 10 hours a day in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J shaped spine, not the curved S shaped spine common in the West. They squat, they walk, they carry loads, a lot. And they aren't in chairs. They're doing more active motions. Now I'm, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it's at a desk doing this or whether it's in an office. I'm wondering from your experience if you thought it would be better to have a standing desk or if there's no.
- [109:05]
Jeff Cavalier
No, no. I think standing desks are great. And I hate to say it because it might actually, I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it would be beneficial for me too. I think that too much time sitting, right. There's people that call sitting the new smoking. Like the detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have on your body, especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go to sleep, 8, 9, 10 hours. How much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day? You're working all day, there's a big chunk there, maybe 8 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you got another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing. Your body wasn't meant to be that immobile. I think there's an actual compression. So when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space, you're actually getting a bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that's in these joints, like let's say your knees, that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed again with your knee. You're weight bearing and then you're off of it. You're weight bearing, you're off. It's like squeezing and bathing that joint in the synovial fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant and when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions. Being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the load that we're getting from the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture that comes from sitting and doing this standing in the mat. You're likely going to at least improve your posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above like we talked about, but at least from below you're going to improve that. But I still think that the inactivity, just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people need to get up and walk around just a little bit. Five minutes every 30 minutes or so would be ideal. But if you're gonna take a phone call, go walk while you're on the phone. One thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I'm gonna be on a call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call, just as an excuse to get up and move. I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the chair. Anything you can do, you know, I know they're cliche, but, you know, park a little further when you're at a store, so you have to walk a little bit more. But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking, which is the main. The main problem. I think that even if you added up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time that you're not active, it's. If it was the same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects than you do if you're just grouping it. I'm going to be inactive from this period. I'm going to be active from this period because, again, of that effect of intermittently bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that then to different stresses than just compression, compression, compression. It's one of the reasons why I talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar. Right. To decompress your body, even just minimally, again, not that much. One arm hang or so, two arm hangs a day is enough to give your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. And nobody does that. Nobody hangs from a bar.
- [112:21]
Stephen Bartlett
What about. Let's talk about supplementation. I've got a bunch of Supplements here with me now. And there's so much said about supplementation, but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking every day, frequently versus the ones that maybe aren't so important. But also just like the call outs of, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter going viral the other day where someone had screenshotted the top creatines on a certain website and then they had tested them in a lab and found that a lot of them weren't actually creatine in the doses that they'd said and in the form that they were selling.
- [112:53]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah.
- [112:53]
Stephen Bartlett
So I have this, I now have this skepticism around the supplements I'm taking. I've got some supplements here, I've got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be taking, Alex?
- [113:02]
Jeff Cavalier
Explain to me why, for building muscle, the two that rank at the very, very top of the list are gonna be creatine monohydrate or creatine, any form of creatine. There's different forms of creatine, we can get into those. But creatine and a protein powder and some people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder. And I guess if you're getting enough through your diet, you don't have to take it. It's not a necessity. You're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are, that you're not getting through your food. It's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost if you look at the price of protein these days. I mean, it's certainly becoming a little bit unrealistic to think you're going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is around at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 grams per pound of body weight if you're active.
- [113:50]
Stephen Bartlett
Creatine has become all the rage recently, it seems. I was looking at should be Google search data and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine is increasing from the early 2000-20-2025 now.
- [114:03]
Jeff Cavalier
It's exploding and it's been around forever.
- [114:06]
Stephen Bartlett
Forever.
- [114:06]
Jeff Cavalier
And the benefits have been known forever. Right. So that's interesting because that's all related to the neurological benefits that creatine is showing in terms of depression and degenerative neurological diseases and its improvement, its ability to slow prevent things like Ms. And Parkinson's and you know, by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable bioenergetic state, meaning being able to feed the neurons of the brain with the energy that seems to be lacking in some of these degenerative diseases.
- [114:44]
Stephen Bartlett
Also the other thing that I think has happened, and I did a little test in my office a couple of, couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creatine and every hand that raised was a man. And I asked the women in my office why they didn't take creatine. And the overarching sort of misconception, which also my girlfriend told me about when we were in Cape Town a couple of years ago. And I said, baby, you should take creatine. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it. And she was like, no, it's gonna make me. I think she. Yeah, she saw it as, like she saw it as a steroid. Yeah, she was like, it's what bodybuilders take.
- [115:15]
Jeff Cavalier
Well, that's gonna change quickly. Cause I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take it. She is chronically sleep deprived because of my boys. So she has definitely operating at a higher stress level. It's been shown to actually improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived and in stressed high stress states. From a depression standpoint, it's being shown to be very effective even when kind of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression through pharmaceuticals. It's just got a lot of promise. And the good thing is that there's really no downside. They haven't really identified a downside to taking it. There's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video recently where I talked to them and I addressed head on what they were. Jesse of course, played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked. But like, there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to. People think it's a steroid and they think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are. It can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. Sure, because the outcomes are the same as, let's say anabolic steroid use. Doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same or the magnitude of what you're going to see from them is the same, or even the legality of the supplement itself is the same. You're talking about two completely different. Two different mechanisms completely. And two different things that the body are going to react much differently to. When it's an anabolic steroid. It's going into the muscle cell binding to antigen Receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression to basically convert, as I did in that video. I said, you're taking an iPad and making it a MacBook. Right. You're completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monohydrate, you're just talking about providing a more constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that occurs? You're able to generate more work in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload. You're also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle cell with the creatine, because osmotically, when you pull anything into the cell, you're going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated, and that's a great thing. A more hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better, longer in the long run. Just like a flower of water would grow better than one without.
- [118:01]
Stephen Bartlett
And there's lots of different types of creatine, right? There's like gummies now, there's monohydrate, there's all kinds of creatines. Over New Year's, again, I was looking at different types of creatine, so I went to the shop and this sounds crazy, but I bought like 30 types. And I just started researching it, and I realized that there's like a better form of creatine. And there's some creatines which aren't so good, I. E. Ones that have many things added to them, et cetera.
- [118:27]
Jeff Cavalier
Yeah, creatine is pretty simple. I always present it in sort of of two forms to people because there's a. There's one creatine monohydrate, and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference is what it's bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule, and the hydrochloride is bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that's ingested in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other. So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taken at a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that. I used to think that it was just five grams for everybody. But now they're finding that people that are like upwards of £200 or more, they might benefit from like 8, 9, 10 grams per day. So bigger dosages there in people who are at £120 or so, and maybe some of the females and female athletes, they might benefit from even just 2 to 3 grams of creatine. Monohydrate hydrochloride is usually in lower dosages anyway, so a comparative dose of 5 grams of monohydrate might equal out to 2 to 3 grams of hydrochloride.
- [119:31]
Stephen Bartlett
What's all this stuff about loading? Because when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding, he would tell me that you had to load up, ie, you had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage.
- [119:42]
Jeff Cavalier
It's just so your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. So if you want to get there faster, you load it's 5 grams, 4 to 5 times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in a day, some people are going to find that that's a little bit of an overload for them on their, on their gut. There is a byproduct of creatine breakdown. Creatinine is what it's called. We get it measured whenever we get our blood test done. That can sometimes pull along with it some extra water, and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't, you wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown, the creatinine. So you might get less of that bloating. Bloating. That's the only indication why I would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity to that, and a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it. So what happens if you don't load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to 35 days or so, you're going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you're taking it because you want to see benefits in performance like power output and performance, let's say, leading up to an event that's, you know, a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those full capacities sooner. But I don't really see a need to have to load if again, in the long run you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level anyway.
- [121:20]
Stephen Bartlett
And what about the proteins I've got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than others?
- [121:25]
Jeff Cavalier
I mean, I like to say since that's mine, that's, that's better. But they, you know, the fact is that anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein, so in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They're still protein, but there's more. On a gram per gram basis, it's 90% versus 80% by volume. If it's isolate versus concentrate. So you're getting more protein per volume.
- [121:53]
Stephen Bartlett
But they're not all as advertised, are they?
- [121:56]
Jeff Cavalier
No, no, there's, I mean, look, I don't ever want to disparage other brands or, you know, I'm not in the practice of doing that. But like there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers, you know, they don't, they're in it to make money, they're not in it to provide high quality. And again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be.
- [122:25]
Stephen Bartlett
How do I spot garbage?
- [122:27]
Jeff Cavalier
I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like, there's something called amino acid spiking. People will, will actually include a lot of glycine in their proteins, like adding glycine to it because they can get the label benefit of increasing protein content, but it's actually not a complete protein. So you're not getting the actual quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein.
- [122:52]
Stephen Bartlett
What are some foods that you would just absolutely never let go near your mouth? The real ones where if your kids asked or you know, you just say there's no way we're eating that.
- [123:02]
Jeff Cavalier
I really hate the dyes in food, the food dyes. I think that's a really. I'm glad that things are being done as we speak to try to eliminate them from our foods. I don't know how our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it has in Europe. They've known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes for a decade or more. And we're still eating these in our foods all the time. For what benefit? So it looks more attractive on A package like that's bullshit.
- [123:34]
Stephen Bartlett
What about melatonin? I've got a little jar of it here that I found. A lot of people are taking melatonin now, and I've got a friend very close to me that's encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have a view on it?
- [123:45]
Jeff Cavalier
My view is I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be helpful for people that. That are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. We actually do give it to our children at night because they do have issues with sleep. But honestly, the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know you're on the right track, you generally don't need an alarm clock to wake you up. If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock.
- [124:29]
Stephen Bartlett
Have you thought much about how we're supposed to sleep, I. E. We talked about lower back, back pains, et cetera. Is there an optimal way to sleep? Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side?
- [124:39]
Jeff Cavalier
So again, I think this is individual, you know, and again, there's a lot of conditions that can sway somebody in one direction or another. But in general, I think the position that has the less, the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side or crossed over your belly like this. If you're able to tolerate even more and kind of up in this position here with your. With your arms up, just because again, that actually helps a little bit with some of that internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you were demonstrating up against the wall with that position before. Not as big a deal, but you have to understand that at what other time, really? Again, we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you're getting up to go get a meal. At least you're getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty much statically in the same position? I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach, you're pretty static for 7, 8, 9 hours. There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant. Like There are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something during the night and they all. I must have done something when I slept, right? People say that all the time. Because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it, or they position themselves over an arm. And it kind of, you know, was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren't conscious of it. But then there's the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position. They pull their knees up. The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It's like sitting. Like you're getting from a chair. You're creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that position. Like, lengthen them out, get some flexibility or at least get some elongation at that joint and those muscles. Sleeping with a pillow that is too fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You wake up the next day. Most of the back pain sufferers you Talked about before, 82%, I believe, of people that report sleep disturbance say it's from back pain. And what happens, they feel it. Mostly 77% of them feel it upon waking. So they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse, because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon waking and it goes back again. What we were talking about earlier, you see, it all relates this back pain seems isolated, and we're talking about the thoracic spine, and that's back pain. But now I'm talking about sleeping, and that's back pain. All these things relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of excess flexion of your neck, which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time. So you might like to do that. But I'm telling you, the healthier position is to sleep with a really flat pillow. A really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about 1 or 2 inches high, just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again. You're not abnormally propping it up, not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or Breathing issues at night, the on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you're closing down your airway a little bit more. You know, there are some cases where, again, that apnea patient might want to be on their side. You know, it's going to be easier for their breathing, but in most cases, on their back and also too, interestingly, you know, look, most people have tight calves. Their ankles are. Again, we sit all day, we're not pulling our ankles back towards our head. We're not maintaining that mobility towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well, what happens in a bed, you get in bed, the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom. They're pulling your ankles straight down like that, and your feet are pointed the whole night, further tightening those calves because they're just shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day and your muscles repair and regenerate at night, you're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are pointed down. I always say, if you're going to get in bed, loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you at least get the ability to move your toes backwards or they're freely moving, they're not being forced into this position. So lots of little tweaks you can make. And some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important, given how long you stay in those positions. Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much time in that position. Position.
- [129:18]
Stephen Bartlett
Jeff, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity, and I guess just more broadly just living a good life.
- [129:28]
Jeff Cavalier
I think that you don't want to stress yourself out thinking of all the things that you need to do, because there's many. And in doing so, become paralyzed by inactivity and say, I'm not going to do anything at all because I can't do all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do, is they talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think that the commitment's going to be too much more than what they're doing right now, too much to ask, and they can't do it. That's a mistake. Chip away. We talked about nutrition again. Make that first pass. Take away the obvious stuff, the stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life. Then make another pass when you're ready. From a fitness standpoint. Get yourself to the gym, Try to do that first thing we said to take that first action, get yourself out the door. Get a habit of doing that over a period of a couple months. You want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine after, don't worry about it. The most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. I'm really noticing that my thoracic spine is not mobile enough. Like Jeff said, I mean, hang from the bar, do that one little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will pay big dividends when added up. But don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going to be healthy. Any investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, you're realizing now at 32, it's going to matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by doing what you're doing now, you're making the right step in the right direction. That can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do more is going to be so much easier than when you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing rather than making that big departure from what you're doing now and thinking you're just going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you're not. And you're likely going to wind up, you know, making yourself not want to do it.
- [131:37]
Stephen Bartlett
Jeff, thank you for doing what you do because as I said to you before we started recording, you've been the go to resource for me over the years. And in fact, whenever I've got a challenge, whether it's like how to build my triceps or how to avoid an injury or other challenges relating to strength, longevity, all these kinds of things. I'm always happy when I find your videos because you're someone that everybody trusts. You're someone that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you know, you're famous for drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the range of motion. But you've helped me for free for a long, long time. Like, I think, I think probably a decade. I think I spent about 10 years as you, as you being my sort of personal trainer. And because this information is Free. And it's on YouTube. You would have helped literally billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your channel. I think you've got almost 3 billion views. It's might even be more now just on that one channel alone than the clips and everything else and how that's inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those people, but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is what would you change about you? First and secondly, now answer, why haven't you.
- [133:00]
Jeff Cavalier
Okay, what I changed about me? And then why have I not? Wow. Oh man. You know, there's not much and I'm thinking off the top of my head here. So when I identify something that I want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job of putting in place steps to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal about myself. There are things that from a relationship level, there are things from a self improvement standpoint, I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those changes and I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I've wanted to do, I think I always wanted to be more adventurous. I think that I'm a bit of a homebody and I think that I might. My wife is a big traveler and I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous and taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go to. If I'm looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to want to do that with me. So I think perhaps I wished I would have changed that. I could certainly use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy and there's a lot of reasons why I haven't. But it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back to the same places all the time.
- [134:38]
Stephen Bartlett
You got to give me two, it says first and secondly.
- [134:42]
Jeff Cavalier
I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time and if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be open to hearing the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think is more of wanting to be heard. Maybe in a time when I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid, so I was probably not heard as much as I often thought I wanted to be. So the opinions come out first as a reflex. But if I could do that, I. I still wish I could. I could get a little better.
- [135:13]
Stephen Bartlett
Thank you.
- [135:14]
Jeff Cavalier
Thank you.
- [135:17]
Stephen Bartlett
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button. Wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work time tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps. When you hit that subscribe button, the show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time, Sam.