Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
Unveiling the Complexities of Fasting, Fitness, and AI in Personal Health
Discover the nuances of health and fitness as I, Simon DeVere, guide you through the latest Mind Muscle journey. Could intermittent fasting be a double-edged sword, with potential cardiovascular risks lurking behind its popularity? We sift through a recent American Heart Association study to bring you the full picture, balancing scientific data with personal stories. And don't worry, we're not here to preach; instead, we unpack the research, offering a well-rounded view that respects the unique health landscapes we all navigate. Plus, I'll share a friend's tale that exemplifies the importance of considering individual contexts when evaluating diet strategies.
Lifting weights isn't just about building muscle—it's a powerful ally against depression. In our thoughtful discussion, learn how adjusting the knobs of exercise volume can fine-tune your mental health. I'll share insights from my own program design, highlighting the journey from a minimal effective dose to a regimen that fully harnesses the mood-boosting benefits of strength training. But it's not all about lifting spirits; we also explore how higher training volumes can help overcome muscle growth plateaus, especially pertinent for mature fitness enthusiasts.
Wrap your mind around the tantalizing prospects of AI's role in personal fitness regimes. I recount my foray into using ChatGPT to tailor a strength program, illuminating the broader implications of AI in professional settings. Alongside our tech talk, we explore 'information fasting' as an antidote to the deluge of data we face daily. By the end of this episode, you'll see how intertwining intellectual and physical growth is vital for achieving peak fitness levels. So, stay tuned, and let's elevate our understanding—and our deadlifts—together.
Producer: Thor Benander
Editor: Luke Morey
Intro Theme: Ajax Benander
Intro: Timothy Durant
For more, visit Simon at The Antagonist
Welcome to the Mind Muscle Podcast. Here's your host, simon DeVere, and welcome back to Mind Muscle, the place where we study the history, science and philosophy behind everything in health and fitness. Today I am Simon DeVere and there's nothing new, except all that has been forgotten and whatever that was. But yeah, actually today I do want to talk about the news, a few articles that I saw come out just in the last week. We're going to survey a few different topics, from intermittent fasting to the dose-dependent relationship of resistance training to gaining muscle and fighting depression, and then also fun story about using chat GPT as a personal trainer. Maybe I should be scared that my replacement is upon us, but, yeah, got a few fun articles that I wanted to actually just break down individually, even though I do admit that I probably lament from time to time being excessively focused on the news. I get the irony in having a show. But no, a couple of these actually popped in some real world conversations. I saw them pop in my feed, so I know they're out there and they might even be in a conversation near you. So, anyway, this one actually came to me via my feed and friend at the park.
Speaker 1:But the American Heart Association released a study that was linking an eight-hour time restricted eating window to having a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular disease of cardiovascular disease. This one shook a buddy of mine. I run into at the park, but no, I'll get to at least my end of our conversation. But the study was looking at over 20,000 adults that had followed the eight-hour time-restricted eating schedule. I got introduced to that by the name Lean Gains, I don't know almost another lifetime ago now, but it's a very, very popular form of intermittent fasting where you have the 16-hour fast with the eight-hour eating window. In the group they observed a 91% higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease. So up front that obviously looks bad grabs headlines. People with heart disease or cancer also had an increased risk of cardiovascular death, and this was compared with a standard schedule of eating across a 12 to 16 hour per day protocol, if you will. So limiting food intake to less than eight hours per day was not associated with living longer, one of the benefits that you often hear spoken about with intermittent fasting.
Speaker 1:But now here gets to an important bit in the sample group and obviously it's going to figure into our commentary on the study. But the average age was 49 years old and the study participants were followed for a median length of eight years, maximum length of 17 in the group. There are some very big limitations in that the study did rely on surveys, and you've spoken on this in the past but any study that relies on surveys is always going to be difficult to trust, just because the lack of control on what our different people were eating. If I wanted to defend intermittent fasting, which I don't, I just want to point out some obvious things that we can't control, for Some person could be eating fast food, another person could be eating whole foods. There's no way to know what was going on there. So this is a very big limitation in reading all that much into the results. One other thing and I slightly flagged it on the way through, but I didn't point out what I was thinking With the average age being 49, there's a significant number of people in here that are probably going to be older than that, obviously.
Speaker 1:So I actually think that with a lot of the older adults I work with, it's not like fasting or caloric deficits are what doctors are recommending for older people in general. So that could also be why we're seeing that number with the cardiovascular death the way we are is that the sample group maybe is skewed towards people who really shouldn't be limiting calories, whether or not they're fasting at all. But no again, I don't really have an interest to defend fasting in any regard. I've consistently tried to speak to that middle ground on fasting because it's very often getting well at least recently, it's been mostly getting exaggerations for its positive health benefits. This might obviously rein that in, but I think it swings wildly back and forth between a health panacea and a health threat, and I don't know if either one is true.
Speaker 1:So I actually have a friend that I talk with at the park and our kids are playing and he's been using intermittent fasting for or he was using it for weight loss. Um, I had actually talked him off of staying in that, for he'd basically been doing it for excessive amounts of time, like we've discussed on uh here, you know, talking about how people get stuck in fat loss. So he was exactly one of those guys stuck in fat loss. He'd been excessively using fasting. In my opinion He'd gotten to that plateau stage. So the first thing that I convinced him of was that he actually needed to bump calories and that it wasn't going to feel cool at first, but that his metabolism was struggling so that if he bumped calories for a little bit, kept his weight level, then he could rebuild his metabolism and then get back to fat loss later. So it was actually fun when I overheard him introducing me as the guy who fixed his diet to some other people at the park one day. But anyway, we've got him off one plateau in the past, but he does like using fasting when he's in fat loss mode and that's probably still the main goal that he's chasing after.
Speaker 1:So he was actually upset. He's like oh, did you hear about the fasting study? And I had, and he was just claiming bullshit. Basically he likes fasting, so he didn't want to hear any of this. I wasn't going to, you know, flip around and tell him like, hey, fasting is dangerous and you should stop. But I did just remind him. You know, similar to what I'd already explained here is that there's a lot of hype and conjecture on both ends of fasting, whether it's being claimed to be healthy on a given day or dangerous on another. I've been following this for a long time and that's generally what you're going to see are wild claims on both ends of the spectrum on the issue. I told him not to look too deep into this study as he wasn't really the age cohort that they were looking at and you know, obviously didn't control for quality of food, anything like that.
Speaker 1:But I also did remind him that you know, on the other end, if you're just fasting for weight loss, it really is only about caloric deficits and nothing else, in that people often and regularly try to convince themselves for a myriad of reasons, that a calorie is not a calorie, or if you eat this type of food it's a negative calorie, or these enzymes cancel this. Nobody has really overthrown thermodynamics and you know, although I had mentioned last week, it's not useful in terms of practical knowledge to tell people simply to eat less. That's why we do talk about various strategies, psychological impact, what's easier, but again, calories in actually still works. So for anybody who's ever done fasting and lost weight, you achieved a caloric deficit. You can also do it a number of other ways. So just kind of seeing how attached to you know one protocol my friend was, I just wanted to remind him that it you know wasn't wasn't the only one that works, that I've used countless, including the one he's using now. I've used and I've also used many others and coached the same. I've coached them all. They all work.
Speaker 1:There's nothing magic with fasting Again to remind everybody that there's going to be, you know, a new story, kind of popping, who knows, maybe in two weeks we'll have a full reversal. But again, I've been following this long enough to see that with every new study there's going to be an exaggeration, there's going to be a subset of people that are going to overuse it and with those people that's where you start to see some issues. My buddy actually did reference that he had done a seven-day fast and people had told him it was dangerous, this and that and that was one. He was again minimizing it, but I did just remind him. I was like, well, I could never do a seven-day fast and it's not about willpower and, you know, psychological discipline.
Speaker 1:I'm like my lifestyle actually just burns too much energy and there would be real-world consequences if I were to, you know, ever adopt a strategy like that is, if I were to ever adopt a strategy like that. And so I just reminded him, if the time and space is right and that's something you feel you need to do for some reason, sure if it's a spiritual or religious thing, but if you're talking about it for the benefit of your body, from a physique or a metabolic standpoint, that's probably not true, and I know there's people out there saying it. But we've actually seen these things go wrong a fair bit and I just reminded them if you actually have energy demands, don't try something like that. There would be real world consequences if I were to under fuel and do the job that I have for a week straight. So, yeah, anyway, long and short though with if you guys did see the American Heart Association study that came out, I don't think there's actually any new risk to see here.
Speaker 1:In all honesty, I think this is kind of why people have cautioned for certain populations, why you maybe shouldn't be fasting. If most of the older people that I work with, in general, their doctors are not really going to be recommending caloric deficits to them, they need to obviously eat less than they did when they were more active and younger, but in a sense, getting proper nutrition gets more important, and if you're chronically under fueling, the chance that you're actually getting all of the nutrients and other things that you need to get from your diet is also just probabilistically significantly lower. So, yeah, this is why, periodically, I have tried to pivot to the genuine middle ground, if you will, on fasting. I think there are both ends over-exaggerations of the dangers. Obviously, food just wasn't abundant for most of human history, so living with abundance is the new feature and the thing that we're actually struggling with. That's perhaps why the fasting discussion comes and goes. Obviously, I think it's a strategy that, psychologically, is easier for people to get into and you know, to be honest, I'm not a fan, as you know, of all or nothing strategies. I think that's what makes it attractive, quite frankly. So I think that's why it also comes back and will never really goes anywhere. But you're going to find some people who get success with these types of strategies. In general, these aren't going to be the people who achieve it for long periods of time, and this is the genuine boom-bust pattern again. So this is again why I just always try to temper expectations and throw a little bit of cold water on both ends of the fasting discussion. It's a tool that definitely has uses from time to time. That being said, I think is just wildly overused and, frankly, over-discussed. So, yeah, hopefully we can actually put that one to bed for a little bit, but no another one that we have spoken about this issue. So this is probably the reason this one jumped off my radar. But psychiatry research has a study, well, meta-analysis, so this is a good one.
Speaker 1:Strength training has an antidepressant effect in people with depression or depressive symptoms. So you know, just highlights from the study. Isolated strength training has a moderate and significant antidepressant effect. I could have told you that and have, but so strength plus multi-component training has a small and significant antidepressant effect. Frequency, number of sets and number of repetitions are the variable that impact the antidepressant effect. So that is the part that I find the most interesting in all of this. And, yeah, it's actually that essentially, we're basically getting to the point where we're basically getting to the point where strength training has a dose-dependent relationship with creating an antidepressant effect.
Speaker 1:Effect of a workout is all of the training variables that we've always talked about when describing workouts the frequency, the intensity, the number of sets. You know, just basically, because I've actually been doing this, I think, longer than them. We're talking volume. So, yeah, what these researchers have basically said in a more long-winded way is that volume is the variable that you're going to want to alter to change the impact of your workout, and I guess since I also have a few years of experience in this one basically you're going to introduce this the same way they would any other drug is that you're going to try to start with a low dose, right? So when you first do your first workout, if your goal is doing it for mental health, um, you're going to want to do it at, you know, essentially the lowest dose possible. So minimal effective dose is where you're going to be starting, and what's cool about that is all that work has already been done for you.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to run through it here, but, but no, you can actually find out what is the minimal effective dose, and it is communicated in terms of sets for any muscle group, and fortunately too and we've probably laid out all these guidelines before in order to do your minimal effective doses for all of the muscles in your body, it really doesn't take that long. Um, you'll start there. See how it feels, uh, if you don't notice anything, obviously up the dose, and so that is basically the way you would prescribe uh, um, workouts for, uh, treating depression, um, and then again, just since we're doing that, just, you know, let's that's just conjecture what I just said, um, so we'll see, but obviously we're getting closer towards that. This is something at least people in the well it's going to be self-serving. But I consider myself like in the evidence-based training milieu, if you will, and in that community we've talked about a dose-dependent relationship of exercise and treating any goal, whether it's hypertrophy, whether it's depression, anxiety, and what the optimal dose we typically would communicate it in terms of sets is for any specific goal. So anyway, studies like this meta-analysis, that's a good one, but them noticing that relationship between volume and the antidepressant effect, I think again conjecture, but I think it's going to open the door for people to be able to prescribe exercise in a way that hasn't been. It's out there but it hasn't been the norm, and I think this might become a little bit more mainstream and I think that is a move in a positive direction. So very cool to see that study pop.
Speaker 1:And then again, since we are on the topic of that dose-dependent relationship of resistance training and your goals, the Journal of Applied Physiology had an interesting one Higher resistance training, volume offsets muscle hypertrophy and non-responsiveness in older individuals. So, like I was saying, we've already known, science has known this. Bros figured it out a long time ago, even before science codified it. But to build muscle, it's basically the sets that count, or volume. There's a lot of different ways that we can account for volume but again, particularly in a research environment, it's most going to be easy to control that with sets. The best way to turn on muscle building adaptations We've known this for quite a while and it's pretty straightforward it's just simply add more sets or, again, add more volume.
Speaker 1:Just because I want to be closer to being technically correct and they even said as much in this study is that it was demonstrated that older adults who do not respond to low volume training that the most simple and effective strategy to induce muscular hypertrophy, increasing muscle and strength, was again simply to add sets. And I want to break that down because this is again something that I've actually observed training older adults for a number of years now. So, first off, they have their delineation of older adults who do not respond to low volume training. So there's, first off, a couple different ways that you could do low volume training. So, obviously, if you were using higher reps, you're going to be using a lightweight to keep the volume of the workout low. That in general, just even though it's a popular style of workout to market, that's not a very effective workout. Obviously you see a lot of light work with light weights, simply because it's easy and it's a good desire to market to. The other way that you could be going low volume would actually be with heavyweights with low reps.
Speaker 1:So, because this study was focused on older adults, something that just jumps out to my brain is working with older adults over many years, you typically aren't going to be doing like a low volume, high intensity adults over many years. You typically aren't going to be doing like a low volume, high intensity. You know that's going to be like powerlifting or you just don't see a lot of older adults who want to do that training, and not only you know do they. Even the ones who do want to quite frankly tend to have joint issues that are probably going to restrict the amount of of truly, you know, intense. So all that just to say whether or not, if you're an older adult, low volume training typically isn't really a good strategy or a viable option for for the vast majority of people. Handful of exceptions, but just not not something that would be a good strategy. Um, so exactly what they observed in this study has been exactly how I typically have progressed.
Speaker 1:Uh, strength training with this demographic and um, so again, just by simply adding sets. When you are working with an older athlete, one of the main things I want to make sure is that they can recover from the workout and that we're not messing up any joints. The chance that they already have existing joint injuries is probabilistically much higher if they're older. That's just kind of the nature of time, I guess. If they're older, that just kind of the nature of time, I guess. And so, yeah, it was never a great idea for me to go grab super heavyweights. You always want to work with really manageable loads, but if we're going to get people any of a stimulus with a lighter load, obviously we have to have sufficient volume. Still, it can't be just lightweight. Light work is not going to be enough to elicit a stimulus.
Speaker 1:So, again, the easiest way that I had found to progress an older adult. We've talked about the numerous ways you can progressively overload. It's always easiest to actually just add either a few reps, like, let's say that you start somebody working with a set of eight. You can scale them up to 10, 12, possibly as high as 15. And then by that point you know joke. But now we're doing cardio, we're not doing strength anymore, there's gonna be no hypertrophy stimulus, so let's up the intensity so we can scale back down to something like eight and progress that way. But then we also have the other option which they were doing in the study here would just be to simply add another set so that we make sure the total volume continues to increase.
Speaker 1:What they observed in this study was that it again was all about the volume. When you increase the volume of training over time muscles grow. So again this study, in a sense it's just telling us things that we already knew, essentially volume's relationship to increasing muscle. But at least we did get like some fun little detail, at least for older adults, obviously not a good idea to be looking at a low volume approach to be adding muscle one, because you should be in higher reps anyway to add muscle. But even for strength, which you're normally going to see a low volume approach applied to, it's not going to be the best way for an older adult to train for strength. Ironically, because this isn't like the cohort that typically comes and asks you for this. But some of the techniques of bodybuilding are surprisingly relevant for this demographic. Obviously, I'm not talking like anabolic steroids, supersets, any of the crazy stuff, but just almost the general rep ranges that they're working in and the basic linear progression that people do with overload, I think is actually something that beginning bodybuilders and actually aging adults share, or should share, in their programming, and I don't know if those are two cohorts that know that their programming should be relatively similar for wildly different reasons, but it's funny how it works out like that. For wildly different reasons, but it's funny how it works out like that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, wall Street Journal, they actually arrived at my AI take from over a year ago. So, yeah, I just wanted to highlight people circling around to what I know we said here first, and that was that AI will replace humans that don't learn AI. How did they put it? I actually jotted it down. So Wall Street Journal said that, regardless of your profession, the sooner you gain experience with AI, the better off you will be, and it might just be vital for your employment.
Speaker 1:Today's AI almost always automates individual tasks, not whole jobs. Some jobs consist mostly of tasks that can be automated, like customer service content, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, what again I found interesting about this was that early on, when people were kind of doing the doom or boom, and it's probably still going on in the AI space, and again, I know that there's going to be a massive change in the state of work. But as this was one of the few times in history where there was a starting gun that was fired, there is a race to go out and learn these skills and for once, everybody was told when to start. So, yeah, if you are worried about AI replacing jobs which pretty much everybody should be ironically you should probably be learning how to train or how to use AI.
Speaker 1:Actually, I didn't even plan on talking about this part of it, but the other part I find funny too is that the one thing you probably shouldn't be doing if you're worried about AI replacing people is tweeting about it or whatever you call a post on Facebook or any you know of the platforms that you're probably using to share those opinions, because all of them are being actually used to train chatbots. So that's just a funny thing is that that's probably the worst thing you could do If you're worried about AI replacing all of us. I would just say don't share those thoughts on social media. You're training your replacement, I'm afraid. But no, I'm not trying to be smug at all Because obviously my job is in the crosshairs too. This could be me, so I can't make like dare the universe with a podcast episode that it'll just almost have to come crush Los Angeles trainers first.
Speaker 1:But no, there was an article that I saw from Time, an article that I saw from Time I used ChatGPT as my personal trainer. It didn't go so well. So yeah, I guess, where GPT is currently at, maybe it's not ready to replace a trainer. A couple of the notes I just jotted from the article that so a writer felt that ChatGPT is not much of a coach. It generated some decent exercise ideas, but the chatbots workouts are boring and uninspired. I actually just I don't know. So are programs designed by humans and sold online right now.
Speaker 1:So no, not defending the machines just yet. I want to be in good graces with our overlords, so I'll issue a formal rebuttal in a second. But no, I honestly think that, to be fair, any program, even programs written by humans and then just sold online, of course they're boring, they're just like a static thing. So that's you know. Even I'm a real good trainer in person. I think even if I drew you up a program of the exercises that we're going to do in the session, I don't, I'm not so bold to think that it would be super fun and engaging in in that format. So, yeah, I don't know, maybe that's a bonus for us trainers, maybe we'll still feel, but, yeah, just the critique that the exercises felt cookie cutter and it was boring. I could offer the same critique of every workout program written by a human. So that's not a new AI feature to slightly defend there.
Speaker 1:But oh and then, yeah, so I guess another critique that it said was turn to a human if you get injured, which actually this one I actually think should have some pretty serious subtext. Yeah, definitely, of course you should go to a doctor when you need a doctor, but, like, while you're sitting in the weight room, you could like take a screenshot and upload the document to GPT and say, hey, I need help understanding this document so I can be an advocate for myself. And yeah, that would probably take all of I don't know, it would take you longer to tweet. So I don't know why you wouldn't get that. I don't know if it even counts as a second opinion, but I don't know why you wouldn't grab that information. It costs you nothing and you can have it in seconds. I've, unfortunately, had to do this a lot lately. So, no, this isn't an endorsement to say like, oh go, use whatever GP says about a medical thing, but in one situation that I was dealing, I was able to hand it some terms and it very accurately predicted the actual course of treatment that was chosen by real life doctors, so I was actually able to get versed on that very, very quickly. Um, so, yeah, obviously, if you get injured, go to a human, but, um, I don't know why you wouldn't, uh, just you know, basically inform yourself, uh, using an LLM, that that just doesn't. It's a great use of your time. Um, and yeah, again, you can already hear it.
Speaker 1:I should be on this article side because it's essentially making an argument for the existence of my profession and maybe it does hold up. But I guess one thing that I just wanted to point out is that counterpoint. I am a trainer and I have used chat GPT, do design programs for myself and it's really good. So, no, I guess I just wanted to point out or I'm going to literally walk you through how to actually use chat GPT like a trainer instead of how to use chat GPT like a fitness writer. I don't doubt that this writer's experience didn't go well, but I am bold enough to think I'm actually better at using a chatbot than whoever wrote that article, to be totally honest. So, anyway, I actually just think that there might be value in just teaching people how to use it for a fitness problem. So my current program I actually did write using chat GPT, so you guys are free to feel however you want about if I wrote that. But again, I'm going to and I think you'll see in this process.
Speaker 1:Prompting is a different skill and so, yeah, there is a little bit of skill which I think probably goes into why ChatGPT is not necessarily a great trainer. If you're not good at something, I don't know if ChatGPT makes you better instantly, your ceiling, if you will, might be capped actually by your knowledge. But particularly if you have knowledge of a domain, I actually think that you can navigate it. And also, let's be honest, fitness isn't exactly like rocket science or particle physics. So I think there's going to be enough people out there who have a high enough understanding of fitness to be able to use ChatGPT to make some really good programs.
Speaker 1:So anyway, yeah, without teasing anymore, I just wanted to walk you guys through how I actually use chat GPT to create my own program. So, yeah, I had actually gone through. I had been doing a lot of hypertrophy work all through the winter. I don't like to try to lose fat, so I was eating big, lifting big. My joints were starting to reflect that and I wanted to switch gears. So, again, I am completely capable of writing a program on my own.
Speaker 1:I've been doing this for over 20 years. I have a literal library of strength training books. I have a literal library of strength training books highlighted, and actually I started buying books on Kindle specifically so I could highlight them there, because then it sends it to a cloud file that then for me is organized and searchable. So literally every single book that I've read in the health and fitness sphere, I have every note, every highlight that I ever created in it.
Speaker 1:So I mentioned all that because for me to make a program specific with the principles that are known to work, there's a process of either. You know, obviously I remember a lot, I can go through my memory, but again you get into patterns and you start programming certain ways and sometimes you want to be broken out of even your own patterns and a lot of times our intuitions, if you will, are more our passions. I don't even really want to elaborate, but that's actually a good one. But anyway. So even for me, after all of these years of writing programs, even though I have all of these tools, for me is one of the most challenging things is trying to actually just make a choice when I know a million different ways to do what, three or four different things, but no, whatever it is that's the hardest part about actually building a program.
Speaker 1:So when I didn't want to go comb through my library, I didn't and I just wanted to see what GPT could do with a program. So the prompt the literal first prompt that I threw out it was I want to do a strength program. One of my favorites of the past few years was Easy Strength by Dan John and Pavel. What I liked, it worked and it was easy to run, not complicated. Can showed me some other ideas for strength programs that are somewhat similar. So GBT shoots back at me Starting Strength, mark Ripoteau, 5x5, strong Lifts, wendler 531, tactile Barbell, grayskull, lp, gzcl. So I'm familiar with every program there, and there was one in the list you don't need to be, it's not the point, but it was the tactical barbell, because that one includes some running, and so this time of year I like to get out and play sports, hike, do other things besides be in the gym. So then next I just mentioned that. Okay, the one that I feel most interested in right now is tactical barbell.
Speaker 1:I listed what my goals were and I also listed the modalities that I wanted to train. I even threw down a couple preferences of mine, like I only like to deadlift once per week. Should I explain it now or later? All right? Well, the only reason I like to deadlift only once per week? Because my body doesn't recover. Quite frankly, especially on the heavy sets, when I'm pulling a big, heavy weight, I don't recover fast enough for the next session. So I can either have a subpar second session or I could just do something else, and as I've gotten older, I just prefer to do something else. I could just do something else, and as I've gotten older, I just prefer to do something else. I can really get one top end deadlift session and, ironically, when I was weaker, I could get two into the week. So that was actually something that, for me, developed as I got stronger, couldn't recover, but anyway I told chat GPT my deadlift problem and the rest of the goals that I had for the program.
Speaker 1:So then what it spit out was day one squat five by five, bench five by five accessory work, doing dumbbell rows, lateral raises. Day two conditioning light jogging, psyching 30 seconds. I don't care about his conditioning prescriptions deadlift five by five, overhead press five by five accessory works, pull-ups, max reps. This was cool. That's actually a West side technique that it had run in there. Um, yeah, skip, it's recovery work, I don't care about that. Uh, so then we had this, the conditioning which. So this is where I already started to tweak a little bit. You can hear I didn't care at all about its programming for my conditioning or recovery. All I really wanted was the skeleton of the strength work, and so just on that prompt, I didn't love the workout so much that it was like, oh great, copy paste run it. So much that it was like, oh great, copy paste, run it. Immediately made a few changes, but to me basically 80% of the program was there, and then that whole process that I just told you that honestly took so much longer to talk out than it was in reality. That was like 15 seconds.
Speaker 1:And again, I like to think that I am good at writing programs. I have every advantage and tool at my disposal and, that being said, sometimes I still can commit that error myself of just paralysis by analysis or trying to do too many things in one program. I found the experience of writing my own program in ChatGPT actually really enjoyable. But yeah, now I guess, getting back to the article, the article wasn't saying can ChatGPT write a program? Well, this guy tried to use it as a personal trainer and from that standpoint, maybe my profession is safe for now.
Speaker 1:I guess one of the real limitations that I do see and I think this, if I didn't know what I wanted, I couldn't really get it to where it needs to be. But also this is something that I still see people commenting on use of LLMs kind of missing is that, for me, actually using them is what's giving me a very different you know perception on, on, to be honest, even the creative aspect of using an lm. I am, I am quite confident that if you know no offense, if you were to go and you know prompt chat gpt for a program, you might not be able to get as good a program out of it as I can, and the point for me isn't saying that I'm better at it. What I'm getting at is that there's actually creative value to the works that people produce with an LLM. I think right now there's actually a little bit of a pretentious and snooty attitude that if somebody uses this technology, that the work is somehow, on face value, inferior by mere use of an LLM. And yeah, I do think right now me saying that is not going to be popular. This is going to be, at least on the other side, people arguing against it. It's not going to age very well, just like people have used existing technologies to push any art form further. I think this is just the conversation that we have as something is being adopted. So, yeah, back to the question of can Chet GPT replace a trainer? Probably not. I guess I have felt that again.
Speaker 1:I want to point out some of the benefits, because I do think there are a ton there, and particularly if, let's be honest, if you don't have money for a nutritionist or a lawyer or all of these other professional staff around you, I think you're going to find that actually, this is going to be a way for you to democratize access to a lot of information that you haven't had access to. Yeah, I'll just give you some ideas. But you can get legal form letters done. You can use personas to make it sound like a lawyer from a specific university or whatever, but no, there's a number of different ways where it kind of just levels the playing field a little bit for people who haven't had access to personal assistance and various tools. Yeah, what is it?
Speaker 1:There's some famous writer that just dictates his stuff to someone and they write it down, and I've never heard that. It's James Patterson. Yeah, but it's not like people say that that's an inferior way to write. People have different learning styles. People have different dictation styles.
Speaker 1:So, again, my stance on AI, I think, has been consistent and has been use it, get real world experience with it. The reason I keep saying that is particularly I honestly think intelligent, smart and creative people, that these are the people that are going to come up with the coolest things using AI, and it seems like in some of those circles it's just not seen as a cool thing to do or it's seen as beneath them, and I think that's going to be a very short-sighted way of using this tech, but yeah it's, I don't know. Maybe maybe I'm safe for a little while, as as a trainer it definitely has. You know it. It has issues. Um, there was I I saw a study evaluating some gpt generated workouts and it found that recommendations were only what they were using. It was basically versus the American College of Sports Medicine's components of exercise prescription. It was 41% comprehensive. But even there, as I say that I already know how I could fix that problem. So if what they were scoring it on was basically how well it adhered to the ACSM's six components, you could literally add a layer to the prompt and tell it to do that, because, admittedly, I actually do that.
Speaker 1:One of the things you can do is restrict the library, and actually I learned this from an English professor, but one of the critiques is it writes poorly. So you can get it to draft something and then, after it's done drafting, you just say, okay, great, now rewrite that using Kurt Gavonagate's 10 rules for writing, and what you'll see is you can improve the draft very quickly and I guess, in short, and this is the way to think of it, when you're interacting with a chatbot act more like its teacher, grade what it's doing. Iterate, work with it and you'll notice your content gets better and better. Don't expect it's not like the early days of Google, when you would click I'm feeling lucky. It shouldn't necessarily work in just one prompt. You're going to have to tweak and iterate and that's actually where the good things come out. And, of course, hallucinations are real.
Speaker 1:You need to fact check. People say that like that's a new feature. You guys know. Like you need to fact check everything on the internet, right? No, I'm sorry. No, it's just that. That one's just annoying Because it's like I. It just shows that people are not checking facts currently and you should always be doing that, whether you're on an LLM or your most trusted social media platform or wherever you think you're safe to not fact check. Start fact checking that stuff to not fact check. Start fact checking that stuff. It'll blow your mind Anyway. But no, I don't want to get sidetracked on AI forever. Summarize so today, obviously, intermittent fasting was in the news this week. This is one that I continue to think the hype and the dangers are both over exaggerated on a regular basis. Interesting issue, but really how to operate in an environment of abundance. That's the real issue we're all talking about and trying to figure out here.
Speaker 1:Like we've said on this podcast for a long time, resistance training is really good for treating depression, and of course everybody's known it. But it's really good at adding muscle too. Of course everybody's known it, but it's really good at adding muscle too. Has a dose-dependent relationship for positive outcomes in both domains. So highly recommend it. Five stars. Make sure you're doing that.
Speaker 1:Actually using AI, I think, is the best way to acquire opinions on AI, whether or not it replaces trainers. Time will tell. Um, but hey, we'll see how that goes. Um, no, but just in even reacting to the news cycle, obviously every single thing we talked about here came from from a news cycle whose whose real goal is to get me to click on ads. Um, but no that well, that's essentially it.
Speaker 1:I just wanted to kind of break down how, in general, how do we break out signal from the noise in the news cycle? I've mentioned it. I'm actually not a huge fan of consuming a lot of news. There was a time that I was, and I don't think it added any a competitive advantage. I think it added more either conditioning or complacency, or a mix? I'm not sure, but I was actually exposed by one of my clients to a guy a bit of an arrogant writer, but I don't write him off for that. I'm probably a little bit arrogant from time to time, so can't really draw lines in the sand there. But no, nassim Taleb. First book I read of his was the Black Swan. He talked a lot about the narrative fallacy. I read a few of his other books and in Skin in the Game there is a discussion about the noise bottleneck and kind of how to break through. But I do want to read just a little bit about because I do think this is really relevant for the information ecosystem we live in. And then I just kind of want to comment on what we can do about this problem, if you will, um. But so this is to lab.
Speaker 1:In business and economic decision making, data causes severe side effects. Data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity, and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well-discussed property of data. It is toxic in large quantities and even in moderate quantities. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get. The higher the noise to signal ratio, the more confusion.
Speaker 1:So now he gives an example. So say you look at information on a yearly basis for stock prices and assume further that what you're observing at that yearly frequency has a signal to noise ratio of about one to one. So half noise, half signal. That means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations. The other half just came from randomness or degradations. The other half just came from randomness. So the ratio you would get from your yearly observation would be 50% noise, 50% signal. But instead, if you looked at the very same data on a daily basis, that composition would change from 50-50 to actually 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observed it on an hourly basis, like particularly people who observe news or markets in particular like to do, you're getting now closer to like 99.5% noise and 0.5% signal.
Speaker 1:So again, the basic observation for that there is a lot of noise, how can you reduce your exposure is simply, you know, first, consuming less information. So again, even though there's going to be inherent irony in closing out a discussion on reading a bunch of news stories on consuming less, the reason I want to point that out is that, first off, in every single story that I mentioned today, there really was not any groundbreaking or new information. The way this is going to be used by our news cycle is to place ads or push products related to these ideas. There was no breakthroughs that needed to be discussed in intermittent fasting in any of this, but we have these studies and stories and countless others that will come out Just like. Just like it was saying you know, assuming I think a one-to-one relationship between noise and signal is actually pretty charitable.
Speaker 1:Um, I don't think it's actually that often that that things you actually need to know are coming out and unfortunately, people don't have to tell us, um, to tell us that there's no real breakthrough. Yeah, I've already had you here for almost an hour and I could have said that up front. Hey, no real breakthroughs. I'm only going to talk about some ideas that everybody already knows. You can't do that at the beginning of a show. Now I'm going to get feedback that this is where everybody turned the episode off, but no, so I guess what I want to work to just for something a little better than saying consume less. That's not that helpful advice. We got to figure out how to get through there, and I actually think nutrition can kind of inform us how we can keep cleaner information diets.
Speaker 1:We talk about fasting with nutrition all the time. What about fasting with, with your information diet? Um, you don't have to just cut out from you know all caloric consumption. Um, what about macros? People love to talk macros the protein, carbs, the fat. What if we were instead instead talking about the ratio of the sources you read from time-tested, peer-reviewed and periodical, even the relationship with junk food.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of media that is pure crap and sometimes, when you have these types of pseudo-pretentious things, know things to say. You know, it's not like I don't watch stupid. You know pet videos and stuff too. But, um, junk is only a problem when you're not using it sparingly. Um, if you're, you know, just having a little dessert here and there, it's honestly not a problem. Um, so, so no, just make sure junk isn't like the main food group and you're fine, but no, anyway, particularly when we are now looking at health information.
Speaker 1:This is something I have a lot of years experience just trying to sift through and some of the general principles and practices that I think are best you want to look for. Well, big changes are more important than small changes If you're just noticing them, recalibrate like a risk level, but basically stating something that you already knew. Just in slightly different association. That's not a big deal. That's not really something that you're going to have to, uh, spend a lot of time on, um with the health studies. What you're really going to want to pay attention to is if you're noticing big changes in stuff that you um had seen in the past, that that's probably going to be worth your attention. Um, you know, in the same vein where I was saying, like, when we get new information about old exposures, that doesn't, you know, change the risks of those exposures. It just changes your awareness or understanding of them.
Speaker 1:Quite frankly, to be more specific, I've seen a lot of this with you know, say, like processed meat. Processed meat Studies will come out with a heightened understanding of the risk and then you'll have the hyperbolic headlines where they won't mention it's processed or however they want to stretch it. And we already knew that hot dogs and bacon and salami aren't healthy. If you thought they were, I'm not sure where you got that healthy. If you thought they were, I'm not sure where you got that. But yeah, many, many times there's like a new information about some old risk that we already knew. Those, to me, are the ones that you can probably spend the least amount of time looking at.
Speaker 1:And then, just in general, the next time you see a provocative headline that has a statistically impressive result, um, you know, from some impressive sounding diet study, um, just ask yourself, how long was the study? Who was enrolled? Um, what was compared to what? Is there any reason to think that this is anything other than a short-term fix? Or does this even pertain to me? A lot of times I'll come from the sample group, but, um, no one, don't read too many. It takes too damn long. Um, you know, wait, wait for the big peer-reviewed, wait for the meta-analysis. Um, look for big changes. You don't really need to read it. And if, if you follow it closely, it looks like the fields are turning over on their heads all the time. They aren't.
Speaker 1:Most of what we know about, particularly nutrition, very, very stable. Exercise science, very, very stable. We're learning some fun new things here and there, but a lot of times, again, these are codified to specific populations, modalities or, trust me, it's in that methodology section that the headlines never really seem to like to report on. But anyway, with that, you know, I always appreciate you guys spending your time here with me. You know, please make sure to share. Oh, and actually here we go.
Speaker 1:Here's what I want to do. If you want a chat GPT written program, I'll write it for you. No, but throw it down in the comments. It literally takes me just a handful of seconds. So I just thought this would be a fun way to engage with listeners. If you guys want a program, it'll literally take me a few seconds. So shoot me all the relevant details, and what that would mean to me would be age goal, injury history, modalities, you have whatever. If you reach out, I'll let you know what I need. I will get that done for anybody who wants a program. Leave us a little note in the comments and get that done for you. Anyway, guys, remember mind and muscle are inseparably intertwined. There are no gains without brains. Keep lifting and learning. I'll do the same.
