HIGH LEVEL COACHING w/Tom Schuster (PEDs, Peptides, Mitochondrial Enhancement, SLU-PP-332)

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In this episode, Nathan hosts Coach Tom Schuster to explore the deep mechanics behind high-level physique transformation, drug stacking, mitochondrial health, and the psychology of relentless effort. Discover how Tom integrates biology, pharmacology, and personal experimentation to push boundaries safely and effectively in bodybuilding and performance.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This podcast right here is just range of gaming purposes. I am not medical doctor, not a nutritionist, or a personal trainer. I am barely unqualified to operate a toaster. As Ruth Lane was so wisely said, I don't know shit about fuck. So don't trust me, don't listen to me. We're here just for shits and giggles. And if you trust me with health advice, and that's just natural selection at work. Don't do drugs, always listen to your GP. And with that disclaimer out of the way, let's get started. Welcome to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan, where we reverse engineer high output humans and the system that keeps us from breaking. Today's guest is one of the few people in this space who's both terrifyingly jacked and also legitimately dangerous behind a keyboard. Coach Tom Schuster on Instagram at Tom SchusterFit. Um at 15 years old, he was a skinny kid that just got sidelined by a blood clot that just no one saw it coming. A decade later, this guy has added over a hundred pounds of tissue, stepping on NPC open bodybuilding stages and running a coaching business that has completely replaced his old life and now supports his family. I think what makes Tom interesting isn't just the physique, it's the operating system behind it. He's built the camp metamorph into a home for obsessed lifters, like competitors, creators, and high output professionals. And he runs them through a blend of lab work, pharmacology, and just a lot of like training logic that really holds up in the real world. And he co-designed a blood panel for athletes. He hosts a more than more than muscle podcast where the sharpest coach in the game come to talk shop. And he's one of the only guys who's openly experimenting with like mitochondrial peptides, GLP1s, thyroid modulation, and a lot of like heavy off-season stacks without pretending that there is no downside or cost to it. So in this episode, we're gonna unpack how he built all of that health, like basically like how he went out of that health scare that he had and the school cafeteria little swipe car that he had, and how he thinks about his off-season versus prep as a control problem, and uh what's really happening inside his mitochondria stack and how he runs his high-level coaching content while also being on a high drug load that would bury the majority of people. So if you want to hear a real practitioner thinking like nobody's watching, this is the one to listen to. Tom, thank you for being here, brother. Dude, you killed that intro. Thank you very much for having me. Awesome, bro. I'm super excited to have you here. So you talked a lot about, you know, on your updates, um, just about like having to door dash food and just being a, you know, because you you have to just add more calories and add more calories and add more calories, and also you've also dealed with a bunch of anxiety for years, and now you're by the water, like with supporting your family with coaching. So, like what what were the key moments that basically made you like realize that well, effort is not really just the thing. I actually had to like change the structure and how I actually think about what I'm running for myself.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

That is a great, great question. Um, thank you for having me, by the way. This is an awesome podcast. I have watched a couple of your episodes. I think you're a great host. But to kind of answer that question, I would say one of the main key moments I can think about was that that blood clot that you mentioned about years ago. And looking back on that, that was a moment that certainly changed my life and changed the trajectory of my life in terms of the way that I view everything from business to bodybuilding. It's funny, I got asked this question the other day by somebody in our school community that I host with Joseph Percher. And somebody asked me, they're like, what is your mental trigger for kind of, you know, getting to the gym, getting yourself motivated for the day? And really it's gratitude because of the way from where I necessarily came from. Growing up, I was, you know, kind of experienced the spectrums of both being very, very obese, being very underweight. I had a dad who was both a successful businessman and a person who wasn't necessarily too successful towards the end of his career. So I experienced both the luxuries of having a good life and also the luxuries of having a bad life. And the reason I say the luxuries of having not necessarily a good life is because of what it gives you in terms of gratitude for what it's like when you make it out of it, what you can sort of appreciate in your day-to-day moments. So I would have to say that to kind of answer that question and not necessarily just dodge it completely, I would say that the biggest, uh the biggest moment for me was having that blood clot because that moment, it changed my life forever. Every single day that I wake up now, it is gratitude because I was probably one of the most painful experiences I ever had in my life. Going through that, I feel like the moments that I have now, any struggle that I really have now really does feel very, very easy uh in comparison to what it was like going through back then. So I would say that for kind of a high-level operating structure of what I've kind of built right now was all based off pain and struggle that I kind of went through during that period of time in my life. Did that kind of answer that question?

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Yeah, no, it answers the question very well. I actually got me curious on another question here, which is do you have to have continuous support for clotting for the rest of your life, like IP6, natokinase, or do you have to go like a step above that as well?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

So I was actually prescribed uh Zurelto, which was like a very kind of mild blood thinner, which was actually lucky. The year that that blood thinner actually did come out for pediatrics was actually the year that I got my blood clot. Otherwise, I would have been prescribed something like warfarin, which if you're familiar is pretty harsh in terms of its side effects and in terms of what you have to do to kind of manage your diet with like vitamin K. You have to avoid a lot of things with vitamin K. And as we know, bodybuilding specifically, you are gonna be eating it's kind of unavoidable to have like a high vitamin K diet. So, you know, that really wouldn't have necessarily coincided. So it really does feel like fate that that medication came out at that specific time. But right now, one of the reasons I actually got into coaching and uh one of the main drivers was actually learning how to kind of overcome that blood clot and kind of get me out of that position in the first place because I was told by doctors and it was one of the biggest blood clots that I ever saw in pediatric history. It was from my ankle all the way to my groin. So basically I factor five. Yeah, it was it was a big one. Like they told me if I had to wait two more weeks before uh getting it checked out, I would have had that leg completely amputated, completely gone. So very, very fortunate, but also it's kind of what drove me towards coaching because it really drove me towards researching. I was told I would never be able to necessarily squat or be able to lift heavy again or be able to do much physical activity beyond doing like 30 minutes on a bike after I had surgery for that blood clot. So going out of it, it was just not a situation I was really willing to accept. It was something that I really kind of put motivation towards overcoming and really did a lot of research into just what you mentioned, supplements like natokinase, pygnogenol, uh horse chestnut, all different things to kind of support the venous flow and venous structure of those actual veins that and arterial tissue that got damaged during that whole blood clot process. So uh really, you know, kind of going and diving deep into that, diving deep into different therapies such as compression, red light, and different things to promote blood flow towards that specific area. I was able to come off the blood thinner medication, even though they told me that I would probably have to stay on it for the rest of my life. So that's really what kind of dove me deeper into research and physiology and understanding how things, you know, kind of looked under the hood. And then I kind of applied that logic towards all things physiology, whether it was lifting weights or PEDs and peptides and all of these other things. Uh, that's really where that kind of fascination behind biology and chemistry kind of originated from.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Okay, dude, that's uh that's super interesting. Isn't it funny how a lot of us just start because we're trying to figure out something for ourselves because we don't want to depend on it for the rest of our lives and then we just end up with functional health? Exactly. That's how it goes. Now you you've also gone from 105 to 250, but then you drop back from 50 pounds all the way down to 100, and you're you're someone that talks a lot. I mean, I interviewed Scientific Snitch, and you're talking a lot about like bulking is not dead, right? So, like looking back, what what do you what do you think went wrong in those early like long off seasons that you had, and what are some like hard rules that you have now so that your growth phases are actually just leveraged, not just creating a bunch of fat and systemic noise for you?

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Absolutely. So early on, you know, the first year I started lifting, when I started off at 105 pounds, I went all the way up until 180 pounds completely naturally. It was just from eating, and a lot of you know, me being at that 105 pound point was a lot of things around food restriction. And I don't like to use the term eating disorder too much because I think a lot of people have sort of a preconceived notion of like, oh, this is like an extremely emotional, like turmoil period of your life and a very, very touchy subject. It's not necessarily like that for me, but it certainly was patterns of disordered eating. I played basketball in high school and I saw a lot of the other guys around me. They're super, you know, skinny and lanky. And I thought that's what you needed to be to be a good basketball player. So I simply just didn't eat. So I kind of put myself into a position to be sort of in a perfect metabolic position to just kind of have like a really big rebound is what we would call it in like the bodybuilding space off of that. So essentially I went straight from that 1085 pounds to 180 pounds. Honestly, during that period of time, I added a lot of tissue, but like you mentioned, I did add a certain amount of body fat. And I would say that the number one driver and really the detriment for me during any sort of period where I have added body fat has been body image issues. And that's mainly uh, you know, something that's very, very common in the bodybuilding space. You know, it's funny. Whenever I started bodybuilding, one of the first people I met who was a bodybuilder at the time, they're like, Welcome to bodybuilding. You will never feel like you're good enough. And I was like, man, I get that's the story of my life at this point, honestly. So I would say that bodybuilding definitely kind of exacerbated certain body image issues, especially during off seasons when I had pushed beyond that certain point of yo, uh feeling good about myself in in the mirror. So I would say a hard rule for me personally. And that's because I've never necessarily incurred any sort of health issues from kind of pushing up that weight. So I would say that for me, mainly the hard boundary I set is that body image part where I no longer feel like I'm looking like a bodybuilder. And I would say that's kind of like a boundary I sort of set for myself in terms of actual bulking as a whole. Now, I won't necessarily say that everybody has that experience, or I would put any one of my clients through a same sort of experience. You know, personally, if you look at a lot of my clients, especially now, a lot of them stay a lot leaner during during the offseason. I try to keep people uh, you know, kind of progressing at a certain rate that's not necessarily getting them to a point of accumulating any sort of body fat past, maybe sort of 15% on the male side of things. So I really do try to stay within a certain boundary, especially for my clientele. But for me personally, I love to be a little bit more experimentative just so I can understand what the boundaries really truly are. So I could tell somebody, hey, I've been there, done that. You don't necessarily have to do this because of X, Y, and Z of what I experienced.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, dude, I I love that. I love that. I I'm a person who tests things out for myself as well. I want to know before I apply it to other people. So this offseason I decided to, for one of my growth phases, I was like, okay, let's see what happens if I let my body fat get higher. So I allow myself to get up to 18% as opposed to the typical like 14-15. And um man, uh, I gain nothing. Like it didn't fuck up my insulin sensitivity or anything like that because I was on a microdosing Red U, like just one milligram a week. But but still, like I did not see any benefit whatsoever. It would the only thing that I gained was a longer diet phase before I'm able to do the next push. So exactly. Yeah. But a l a little bit is unavoidable. It's uh it's just impossible. If you if you try to control a little bit too much, I feel like you're gonna end up just missing out on just leaving some gains on the table inadvertently, you know?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not to say that I won't have anybody main gain, especially if they are, you know, maybe a person who's not necessarily looking to compete and they're just a lifestyle client who just wants to look good, you know, over the period of time. And that's sort of a way of managing that that body image issue and uh making sure that they're in a position of where they could be proud of at any point in time. I like to tell them, hey, I want you to be the person who never feels uncomfortable to take their shirt off whenever they go to the pool. Well, you know, at any period of any phase of our life, because what we're doing this for isn't a necessarily an end goal. We want you to feel good on a day-to-day basis. So that's really where I like to kind of keep a lot of my individuals who aren't necessarily looking to step on stage. But like you mentioned, some of that body fat gain is a little bit unavoidable, especially if you're a person who has to add, you know, maybe 20, 30 pounds to get you to your ideal physique. You are going to be pushing the boundaries in terms of redlining food a little bit. And, you know, it's not to say that that main gaining approach may not necessarily work for that individual. I just think it would take a lot longer for that person to get to the position of gaining about 20 uh to 30 pounds of stage tissue at the end of the day. So I definitely am a fan of uh, you know, just kind of understanding what the case is of the individual who's in front of you. I'm not necessarily a bulking advocate or a main gaining advocate. I'm an advocate of uh working with the actual case-by-case client of what's in front of you at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

100%. That's dude, I I love that. That that's exactly what I do. It's which why some people are like, oh, so you interviewed her, so you now you do the same thing she does. That's fucking I'm like, no, bro. Like, first of all, you should be able to talk to anyone and learn from absolutely everyone. You know, like regardless of who they are. But second, you should have as many tools in your box as possible so that when a new case study comes in, you don't have to then just start asking around, like, oh, what do I do? Like, no, you already know what to do, you know? It's it's pretty straightforward. I want to dive a little bit into these specifics here because you used to be into the low, low test, safer use, right? Yes, and I I was not in the safer use, but from GH 15 times, I don't know if you remember GH 15, but he was very much like low test and just a fuck ton of everything else. So that's what I did. Right now I'm running like well, I'm on TRT right now, but like when I'm doing my push, I'm around like one 1.3 grams of test. And uh for me, I feel like that was a very good switch. But you also had a lot of experience, like you had the the the high DHT with the UK coaches, and then you had EQ to DECA and GH, which is what you're running right now, right? Um, and um then now you're also running a little bit of a higher dose of DECA. Like, walk me through some of those chains because I would be I am terrified of DECA. Like, there's nothing when there's nothing that kills my mood, my drive for work, uh anything. It's it would be like I take DECA and it's like you didn't close that call, I was be like, whatever. Fuck it, you know, like it doesn't matter, you know? Like it seems that you also had some anhedonia from it, and then swapping your approach, you're able to tolerate it. So I'm very interested in that because of the shortage that we have and you know, people having to run Nandro loans right now.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, very much like you mentioned before, starting off in my uh own anabolic journey. I signed off with some UK coaches and they were a little bit more on the safer use side of things. And safer use is a term that I'm I'm a big fan of using things safely and but using compounds safely, obviously. But I think the the whole safer use thing kind of puts into a category of people who kind of a little bit of a more of an exclusionary sort of mindset around using certain compounds and only using certain compounds and having sort of like a dogmatic approach about low test, high DHT, and just kind of leveraging more more of the minds in terms of yeah, what we would count as side effects. I don't really like the term side effects either because they're all just effects at the end of the day. It's just Roderick Chavez.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

There we go. Come on.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Exactly, exactly. And he's one he's a person I can say honestly, uh, I can call him a mentor because of the amount of uh yeah, personal calls I've had with him. Uh but yo, I'm a big fan of using things uh safely, but I'm not a fan of using a lower testosterone approach and a higher uh DHT approach. Just personally, I would say about 90% of the clientele that come to uh come to me have sort of had that approach in the past, whether uh they're a coach by somebody in the US who was a little bit more on the safer use side or somebody in the UK who was coach who was coached on the safer use side. And for for them, whenever we have switched them over to a little bit of the higher test, what is a very common thing that I have noticed a lot of individuals and what they report is that they feel a lot better, that they're not as anxious, they don't have as much dysphoria. And that's that's a big thing that I don't think gets talked about too often in the bodybuilding space is dysphoria. And a lot of times we can count this out to stress, we could count this out to uh, you know, just high cortisol, and we can look into GI maps, Dutch tests, and all these different things, but what we don't understand is how the how do these compounds affect the kappa opioid receptor and how that affects dysphoria. And I had somebody on my podcast, uh Jake Benson, who I think is a genius when it comes to pharmacology, but he basically talked about how mastron can affect dysphoria through different things like its effect on norepinephrine and epinephrine and how it can kind of suppress those and also elevate those and certain things around cortisol to cortisone conversion and how we could be a little bit more on the cortisone dominant side of things whenever we are taking higher DHT compounds, especially coupled with growth hormone itself and maybe even tremblone, which is known to do something very, very similar. So, in all of those cases, I think that a big thing that a lot of people experience whenever they do the quote unquote safer use approach is dysphoria. And you can see that very often where people are very uncomfortable with sitting with themselves. They're very much so needing constant stimulation around specifically bodybuilding related content. Funny enough, if they are bodybuilders, they would feel like they need to listen to bodybuilding podcasts all day. And they'll kind of couple this as like, or kind of, you know, sort of cope with this as like, oh, I'm learning about bodybuilding. I'm immersing myself in bodybuilding. But you take that away from them for a day, they'll feel very, very uncomfortable with themselves. And that's dysphoria at the end of the day. Whenever you're leaning into something to make you feel a little bit more comfortable because you're uncomfortable with your baseline, that's dysphoria. And I think a lot of bodybuilders do experience that without necessarily even being able to put a label on it. So that's a big thing that I try to really advocate for my on my podcast is I really want people to understand what their mental baseline is before they ever started anabolics and also kind of comparing that to being on anabolics and being mindful about those changes as well. Because I think the number one thing that doesn't really get talked about too often, as well, is like how taking anabolics can impact the people around you, not necessarily just yourself, but your family, your friends, your uh significant other, all of these different things. It's like, man, you know, it's something that everybody it loves to say. Like, yo, trend doesn't affect me. I'm immune to like trend side effects, but you talk to their significant other, you talk to their friends, you're like, that's not true at all. This guy's a psychopath on on trend. And it's like, you know, I just don't think too many people are too too mindful about about those changes as well. So that's that's the main reason why I've kind of switched my approach. Now, you talked a little bit about you know my experience with DECA, and uh, I have noticed that, you know, I I do believe this is something to do with with DHN. I'm not necessarily 100% uh or uh able to 100% confirm this whatsoever, but I do feel like whenever you are going a little bit lower on like the MPP dose or DECA dose, at least for myself uh personally, I have noticed that that is where I've sort of experienced the most unwanted effects from from Nandrolone itself, is whenever I have stuck to the the 140, about like 200, 250 milligrams of MPP, that's where I've really noticed crazy anxiety, crazy libido issues in terms of sexual dysfunction and all of those things. But you know, using 900 DECA, which I have used this previous push-up before I started just testosterone and equippus, whenever I started with Justin Compton, I was using 900 DECA right before I went to him. And honestly, I felt the best I've ever felt in a very, very long time. And that's a a common thing that you know I have heard with a lot of people. I also heard uh Dave Crossland on uh uh forget what that podcast is called, drugs and stuff with Scott McNally. He basically talked about, you know, uh that's that sort of being something uh around DHN to where if you are having too low, uh too quote unquote too low of a angelone dose, that could be something to where you're converting to DHN in a way that's not necessarily occupying the receptor as much as it would if you are in a little bit more of a DHN dominant state, to where that's gonna be something where it's gonna be a little bit more potent. You're not necessarily gonna have as much DHT occupying the receptor, and therefore you're gonna have less sort of mental side effects. Now, that's just quoting him. I'm not necessarily sure how much that actually plays out on paper, but I can say personally, from my experience, that has been true, and I've heard uh other people say that as well. So it is a funny one where, you know, a lot of times you think uh taking more of a drug that does cause you anxiety would have the opposite effect of causing you even more anxiety. But uh in this case, this is something where I have noticed having uh a higher dose of of DECA and higher dose of uh Nandrolone in general has led to a little bit less of those ahedonia uh sort of effects and and anxiety sort of effects as well.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Dude, that's uh that's fascinating. I'm I'm gonna have to uh give that a try. I've decided to do a different experiment for this growth phase. I am running the Kurt slash Dean special of uh trinbolone with anadrol. I know it's a terrible idea, awful for plaque, it's just horrendous. I know it's shit. But uh I want to try it. The whole theory of pairing a genomic with a non-genomic compound, a little bit of EQ just to control my estrogen, but high testosterone because I respond well to it. Um and and and and Kurt has his own, I mean, Dean has his own theories of how to mitigate the um appetite suppressant effects of Anodrol. So I'll be trying those out as well, see if that actually has an improvement. But it's like I I sometimes people can hear it and just be like, oh my god, this sodium irresponsible is so fucking crazy. But this is what makes bodybuilding great is the fact that we are Thinking about these things and we're extrapolating and we're literally putting ourselves on the line to figure this out for ourselves. Obviously, it's selfish, but it's also something that a lot of other people can benefit from. Just imagine all the people that right now they're like, Well, I don't have my rice and you know base of Masteron anymore. So what could I use? You know, if you have never considered DECA because you responded poorly at a low dose, maybe the high dose might be the answer, you know, who knows? But speaking of high doses, you also ran like close to a gram of trend um using DNP, and then you stack like trend and dmt together, right? And you have like this crazy trip. Like, how how does that how does that like play out with your like deciding to like where you put your limits on like where you're willing to go with regards to yourself and with your clients? Because I understand very clearly those are two different things. A lot of people they seem to think that because we do something with ourselves, that we are just experimenting with clients as well. That's obviously not how it works. So I just wanted to get your your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

Absolutely. So, in terms of myself, I always say that my personal limit is whenever I will see a negative effect on my blood work. Lucky I'm one of the individuals who's a little bit more, uh, a little bit more resistant to negative effects in terms of blood work. I have gotten a CT scan as well, and that's been perfectly fine. Calcium score is zero. Everything seems to be all good. So that that's where I would start to kind of pull back is whenever I do notice any sort of negative effect. I do get, you know, ultrasounds on the leg where I did have a DVT blood clot. And so far it's honestly been all good progression. I've used things like Vesigen, which is like a bioregulator for your actual blood vessels as a whole. And that honestly, I got ultrasound before that and then ultrasound after that. And the actual it's super fascinating seeing how just a small dose of that for about 10 days, just a basic course of that, actually did cause some massive healing around the blood vessel at the back of my knee, which is where they actually stuck a tube in to suck out that blood clot whenever I did have surgery for that in the past. So, seeing, you know, some of the effects that these have actually done in terms of some of these mitochondrial peptides as well on my blood work and how that's actually impacted that positively, especially EGFR and creatinin and cystatin C markers as a whole, and how those have been impacted has honestly been super positive. So, honestly, for me, it's funny I say that my blood work after all of these years of using stuff has actually gotten better and my state of health has actually gotten better. So it's kind of hard for me to like justify hey, you know, at this point in time I need to pull back or do anything different. Now I will say that because I have done some of those experiments in the past, it's not now that I'm gonna ever run like, oh, you know, I did 900 trend in the past, I'm gonna do like 1.2 grams now. It's that's not the case because you know, doing that, I did see that 900 milligrams. Okay, there's a point of diminishing returns. What was that point? 300 milligrams. I really didn't get much more positive benefits above 300 milligrams of tremblone. So for me personally, just pushing that limit, now I can come back to it and just say, hey, you know, that's a point where you know I may not push again because I really didn't see it being worth it whatsoever. And it's really just not worth the night sweats to be honest, because those are the only things that got worse after a certain period of time was just the the night sweats, uh, honestly. So at that point in time, I would love to say that, you know, if I ever do see a negative in terms of my blood work, and I always say that, you know, past the age of 30 as well. I just turned 27 uh this month. But once I turn 30, that's definitely when I'm gonna start dialing things down in terms of my own self-experimentation, doing things a little bit differently in terms of my whole dosing. And maybe self-experimentation at that point would look something completely different in terms of what I'm trying to do, in terms of not necessarily focusing on kind of balancing this optimization between health and my own physique, but maybe just being more so health-centric going forward. So I would say that, you know, that the way that things are looking now, if there's ever a point where I start to see things moving backwards, or once I reach the age of 30, that's where I'm gonna start pulling back my own self-experimentation, just doing things a little bit more basic and just focusing on, you know, just kind of the coaching business as a whole.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Yeah, I I love that, man. That's a good strategy. And I love how you're also leveraging compounds that are just outside of the usual like five that we pull from, like vesigin. I have vesigen in my growth phase because I want to see if I can delay when I need to input an ACE inhibitor or an ARV. So I I'm added it like I know that this starts happening, like my blood pressure starts going up around week 12. So I added at week eight uh a run of vesigen, just like 10 days of vesigene. Just want to see what it does. I just did stomach court for my protocol. Um, and I I really believe in bioregulators. I'm I'm working on a course right now for bioregulators for my community, and I think the evidence is actually pretty strong, especially when we compare to regular peptides, like the ones that everyone talks about, because we have actual data in humans and we some of them are prescribed, like legitimately used, you know. So I I I I'm really a fan. But speaking of unusual doses, you know, there's um every now and then I have to remake a post talking about all of the studies that we have on muscle loss and thyroid medication, which I'm sure my audience is tired of hearing me say, but up to this point, all of the data we have, it's about yeah, it's one study. It's one it's one study um that lasted two weeks. And uh that's the only study that measured body like body and uh and thyroid, and they found no change with uh I think it was 75 micrograms in two weeks. I honestly feel like, and I I talked to Dom about this as well, it's very overblown. It's just it doesn't make sense mechanistically how it would work. Superficially, it does, and that's the problem. Is that just on a first glance it looks like it, just like MOTC or SLU seems like a bad idea because of AMPK or because the exercise memetic effects, but in reality, like, no, like AMPK actually having an acute peak of AMPK is actually very good for MTOR for MTOR signal, you know? Yeah, so like how is it that you find these things of like, man, I need like a high dose for this, or I need a low dose for this? Because with a safe for use model, you're basically taught, like, hey, you dip your toes in the water, and then like how you felt is going to dictate whether you continue or not, or whether you just go back. And there's three compounds that you can choose from. But you know, there's a like I respond very well to test in EQ. Yes. You're not supposed to use EQ because we have a study that says that it's bad for your kidneys. But we never did that study on Mastron. We never ran that study with Primo, we never ran that study with Annabre. We we just don't fucking know. Exactly. So, like, how do you navigate these unknowns and deciding, like, okay, I want to like test this theory out?

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Yeah, honestly, I would say that when it comes to my own coaching practice, I am very, very, very basic in terms of what I actually put on the table in terms of what I'm gonna be using with most individuals, because most individuals who come to me are kind of struggling with very, very similar issues, whether it's a gut-related issue, hormonal-related issue, or uh just sort of overall physiology in terms of not necessarily being in a great position for them to make any sort of physical progress towards their own physical aesthetic goals, whether that be uh, you know, some sort of past injury or whether that be something in regards to their adrenal health and them just being in an overdrive state in terms of just having massive cortisol dominance or just being in a state to where they may have even driven themselves to pure adrenal fatigue, which is a term that they don't like, they like to use too much in the clinical space, even though we can kind of also assume that they didn't really like using the term leaky gut in the past, but now it's called intestinal permeability. So it's pretty much the exact same thing. Um, yeah, I think that's kind of the spot that we're in with adrenal fatigue, but that's a whole uh different story. But I would say when it comes to you know self-experimentation and uh just kind of figuring out where of these things have application, really it comes down to starting at a lowest effective dose with each individual and also understanding what that specific person needs. Okay, if this person has a gut issue, what can we potentially put into place? Okay, is it something that needs further testing? Okay, if they if it needs further testing, we're gonna pull a GI map. Okay, this GI map pulls up and it shows that they have SIBO and they have H. pylori, okay, then we understand which supplements and which herbs we're gonna be using for that specific case. If it's a massive case, they may need more of those antimicrobials. They may need more of that mastic gum to kind of deal with that H. pylori. We may need to have a whole protocol where we pull off certain foods and certain things and may even plug in something like an LL37. If it's an individual who came to me with like a past injury, or if they're a person who has some sort of very uh extreme sort of acne, we may put in like a glow or a clow blend for for that specific individual while also figuring out what is the thing that's causing the acne in the first place. So really I think it's a comprehensive understanding of how these all how all of these different systems fit together and how we can create synergy between different compounds as well. So I think it's also understanding a balance between practical application of you know relying on some of the people who I know who have done research and have done the work with their clients, such as Dom Kuzen and his school group, and understanding, okay, I can learn from this person and and their mistakes because they're putting it out there for everybody uh to kind of understand and learn from them, but also understanding, okay, how do I read research and how do I understand all of these different things when it comes to the research side of things? Okay, how do I understand client psychology as well? How do how does that fit into the picture? How do I understand finances of what this client can actually afford as well? If they're a person who uh isn't necessarily in the best spot and they can only afford coaching and a few different peptides and just a couple supplements, okay, then we need to understand what we could do that kind of fits in this person's budget versus a person who's completely retired, who doesn't have any sort of thing to really worry about besides actually developing a good physique. So maybe they could go into the dating pool. Okay, maybe that person's budget's uh very different. So, you know, it is kind of like a loaded question, but it's also going to be like a loaded answer in terms of how do we find, you know, very, very how we find the use case for these specific tools and also how we find specific doses for these different individuals and what the optimal dose is. I would always love to say that starting low and going slow is the best way approach for everything because that's the number one way we could kind of decide what is going to be optimal for a specific individual in terms of their dosing, in terms of mitigating unwanted effects while also getting the maximum effects of what we also want. But I also understand that there's a certain timeline of what people really expect to accomplish with their goals as well. So if somebody is a little bit more ambitious, we may push things a little bit quicker than what we may do with the person who's a little bit more timid about some of these things as well. So that's where you know client psychology fits into the decision making matrix as a whole. So I, you know, that's kind of really the thing I love to run through is like all these these different facets. And I think decision making is something that isn't necessarily a cookie cookie cutter process of where I have, okay, well, this is what I do for this and this is what I do for this, and just have like a decision tree for everything. But at the end of the day, it's always asking client questions and also coming to compromise with clients and in their certain positions as well.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

Dude, that's fantastic. Now, when you when you're thinking about specific compounds, right? Like um, there's some compounds that are very, very versatile. And uh, I feel like once you start thinking about them in terms of their mechanisms, you stop thinking about them in terms of how they're marketed or labeled. So for instance, we've moved away now, thank God, from the like, okay, anadrol is for the off-season, Winstraw is for the pre-contest. Like, it's just we don't have that mentality anymore. But we still have a little bit of that attached to like, well, SLU is still just a cutting drug, right? Like SS31, that's for like your prep, right? Like GC1, that's uh, you know, if you need it. Mod C, it's a versatile, but it's mainly for prep, right? Like, but if you also had you know episodes that you talked about um on like the you know different people having different approaches, like Mike White's talked about this as well on like SLU for different phases and things like that. We know Brian ran that experiment. Um, well, he reported that experiment of uh you know running, I think it was like 400 milligrams of SLU, which it's something that I'm gonna be trying out in this entire phase now. It's gonna be 24 weeks of 200 milligrams of SLU. Nice. Just want to see what it does. Honestly, I've taken up to 500 milligrams and I did not notice a difference from 100. It was kind of the same thing as like what you mentioned, like going from like 20 milligrams to 100, it was kind of like the same thing. So I wonder if I could even do less. But like, how do you decide when are you gonna use this for this phase versus the other phase? Like I like a clear example. Reta is a very good micro dose for the off-season. At the same time, like if you're gonna run it in the off-season and in your prep, you're kind of running it year-round. Like, what are you gonna do? Just not just bridge it, like just go to a low dose for four weeks while you're TRTing. Like, what's your approach here?

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Yo, so I I love to say that there's always phase-specific needs for different compounds, and I don't love to say that this is a cutting drug or this is an off-season drug because, like you mentioned, SLU, a lot of people say that this is uh uh you know a cutting drug. And I've even had somebody come on my podcast and basically demonize SLU as being something that you know blocks glycolysis completely, which if you understand anything, it's ridiculous. No, it does not literally die if that happened. So it's like people definitely don't necessarily have a good background understanding of how these things work under the hood. They don't understand, you know, uh cellular respiration and you know how things leak into the actual electron transport chain as a whole, which I think is a very underrated topic of how understanding how these mitochondrial peptides work. But if I was to give a basic example, I don't love to run things year-round. I love to cycle things, I love to have things in for a certain space uh certain phases and then pull them out. Let's say two ones that you may have mentioned in the past. Um I know that you mentioned Mod C. I don't know if you mentioned NAD plus, but those are things I like to bring in towards the the back end of the offseason. It's not something that I really run the entire offseason because I notice that whenever people hit around that 12 to 16 week mark, that's where things just start to feel a little bit shitty as a whole. So I'll pull in pull in some NED plus, I'll pull in some Mod C for that individual towards the back end of the off-season. If we're talking about a cruise, which I like to use over the term uh health phase as a whole, because I think that's a ridiculous term uh to use in bodybuilding. But um if we're gonna be talking about cruise, okay, that's a perfect time to plug in something like a glutathione, something like an SS31, just so that we could pull down reactive oxygen species a little bit quicker in that individual and set them up for their next phase in an even better state of mitochondrial health, which a lot of people like to say that mitochondrial health isn't even a thing, which I also think is a little bit ridiculous as a whole. And that's very noticeable, especially if somebody's gone through uh something like the long bug or something like that. You could definitely notice a change in a person's overall state of well-being whenever they plug in some of these mitochondrial peptides. You know, in a deficit as well, that's that's a place where I may use something like a clambuterol at a very, very low dose and something like lean into the mitochondrial peptides a little bit harder in terms of creating synergy between them. In the off-season, I'm not too big of a fan of using, you know, Matsy plus SLU plus NAD plus plus SS31 all at the same time. But you know, uh towards the back end of prep, I'd rather do that than lean into like a high dose of clambuterol because we know that a high dose of clambuterol is gonna cause uh things such as cardiac remodel and remodeling in a negative sort of uh sort of reaction in terms of that drug. So what I want to do is lean into the other compounds that aren't necessarily gonna have the same negative effect. And even if we do start to notice that person feeling a little bit shitty, it's not like, okay, I'm throwing all of these different compounds in at once. We're gonna layer them in slowly towards to uh you know throughout the prep. So we may start off the prep with just using Mozilla, then you know, may start using SLU when they hit a stall, maybe start using RETA once they hit another stall, and then we sort of, you know, kind of layer these compounds in one by one so we understand what's doing what. And I think that's the number one thing that a lot of people don't really do whenever they they get these peptides is they start using everything in combination all at once. But really, I think, you know, like I mentioned before, starting lows, going slow with each one of these things, layering them in uh is gonna be the best sort of use case as a whole. Did that that sort of answer the question?

SPEAKER_01 38:45

No, that very much answers the question. It was it was interesting how you mentioned it because the way that I have my phase structured, I actually run a health phase. It's um and the the reason I call it a health phase is because I also refuse to call a growth phase a push phase. Yeah because it's just I mean, we're pushing in every phase because this is bodybuilding.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

But the reason I say health phase is because I'm actually focused on health. So the way that I explain is whenever you're in a growth phase or a prep, you are accumulating physiological debt that needs to be repaid. So during the health phase, that's when we repay that debt. So, like for me, this was a phase that was focused on, you know, SS31. I ran a mitochondrial senescence cleanup phase, a synolytic phase, uh, with you know ubiquinol and um um not ubiquinol, I actually ran CoQ10 and Mito Q. Uh Mido Q is very interesting compound. I don't know if you ever like looked into it, but it's uh it's an antioxidant specifically inside of the mitochondria. So it's not systemic, it's just inside of it, which is really cool. Um, and then now I'm in the end of it running a uh a mitochondrial biogenesis phase with high dose PQQ, NAD plus, MOT C, and all of this stuff, right? Now I'm gonna spend about 18 weeks of not running any of these other peptides, which is a really long time. But we know that we only need a few weeks to this to resensitize from them, like maybe some of them eight weeks or so, but for a lot of these, like two to three weeks is even enough. But once I get to that point that I tagged, they're like, hey, this is the point that you start hating training, you start hating food, you start hating absolutely everything. This is when we add like mod C and NAD plus. You know, well, I actually add mod C first and then a few weeks later I add NAD plus just because I don't I don't feel like I like to pull all of my cards on the table just at once. Yes, you know, because then I get to the end and what's my what's my only option? Ephedrin pre-workout, like you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it really gets to that point where you're like fuck, I'm exhausted, I'm on on one gram of caffeine and I don't know what to do, you know, because I'm taking fucking I'm gonna be pushing growth hormone quite a lot this time. I I wanna just see what it does because I've tolerated 18 units in the past. I want to know if I can do more just to know because if that's I can't tolerate a high dose of a lot of drugs, but if I can do test and GH at a high dose, I feel like I don't need a lot of other stuff, you know. But like you you also talk about ratios, right? So you talk about like HRV and blood glucose tracking, and then some ratios like one milligram of SS31 per every like 20 gram milligrams of SLU and stuff like that before. Like I was trying to understand a little bit of like what what what was it that shifted you from basically moving from like let's keep it conservative to the camp of like no, let's methodologically and methodically push this in a very particular way. Let's actually make this push and go towards a you know just understanding it's not a safe sport. It's if I want it to be a safe sport, I would just do e-games on my computer. But I it's not really what I want, right? I I want to try this out, I want to see it to the to the fullest extent, which includes two two two considerations. One of them is I want to get as big as possible. For me to get as big as possible, number two, I need to grow for as long as possible. So we're not just saying, hey, I'm gonna shorten my life and live like a god for three years in bodybuilding. You're literally saying, like, hey, for me to get the best development, I'm gonna need to push the this the disenvelope a little bit more. What was the transition here like for you?

SPEAKER_00 42:10

Yeah, honestly, I would have to say it's results-based 100% because I was with the the UK coach for a considerable amount of time. And during the the back end of that, I really did start to feel like I was being held back in regards to what I was being able to do. So for myself personally, making that own transition from uh sticking to a little bit more of the safer use side of things, a little bit lower dose, to starting to push the boundaries a little bit more was uh one curiosity, which I think it really is uh the massive driver for a lot of us to do some of these things, is curiosity at the end of the day. But two, is going to be results. And I really didn't necessarily feel like I was getting uh the results for for the work that I was putting in. I know uh knew in that period of time that I could have really capitalized on the work that I was putting in uh for you know getting a little bit more out of what I was necessarily using. So I would have to say those were the two main factors for me making that transition. Now, the number one thing that I love to say with that as well is like whenever we are pushing the boundaries, there's always going to be a period of recovery at the back end of it. And like you what you're doing is uh is a health phase, and that's completely different from a bodybuilder going from taking for two grams of of tests and like 600 trend to like one gram of tr uh test and like 300 trend. That's a completely different story than than than what you're doing as a whole. So whenever there's gonna be a period of pushing the system, there's always gonna be a point where a system is gonna start to break or a system is gonna start to to start to to rust a little bit, is what I like to say. Is there's gonna be a little bit of rust towards the back end of off season or towards the back end of prep. So as long as we know we can recover whatever that system is doing, I'm I'm perfectly fine with it. So in bodybuilding, they like you mentioned, it's gonna be a sport where we're gonna be pushing the boundaries a little bit and there's always gonna be coaches out. There who are gonna lean into being a little bit more on the conservative conservative side of things because they want to have that image. And a lot of times whatever gets associated with coaches that push the boundary a little bit more isn't necessarily what a lot of people want to be associated with. But you know, at the end of the day, I love to say that I'm honest. I I I'm transparent about what I'm doing because I don't think a lot of people out there truly are uh super hundred percent honest with what they're doing and putting that out there for the world to see as well. So it is going to be a uh a position to where we're gonna be pushing the boundaries for sure. But if there is ever a point in time where we have to question if we're gonna be able to recover from what we're doing, you know, that that's not necessarily uh a position to where I want to push anybody or or push myself as well. So, you know, it kind of stays within the confines of, okay, yes, we're gonna be pushing the limits, but we're also gonna be pushing the limits within the confines of what we're able to recover from. And the same thing goes with, you know, training as well. And I think that's a thing that's getting lost in this whole debate between, you know, science-based training and bro science-based training as well as like, you know, I want people to push the boundaries for sure, but also within what what they're necessarily able to recover from as well. I'm not one of these coaches who's super, you know, 100% on the fatigue management side of things because I think a lot of people who do come to me could push their limits a little bit harder on the training side of things. But in that same breath, I'm not gonna have somebody do 27 squats, uh, sets of squats failure because that's just stupid as well, and that's just unnecessary. So it's always, you know, gonna be within the confines of what's reasonable, but also what's gonna get somebody results as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Dude, that's a fantastic answer. Um, it's just it's just so individual. Yeah, you gotta you gotta treat every every person like an individual, which is why I'm not a fan of just using templates and just laying out protocols for people to just try it themselves and things like that. Because it's just I honestly I couldn't like if someone asked me, hey, can I run your mitochondrial phase? I'll say sure. But I'm not I'm not honestly convinced that it would work because it's dependent on my context. Like every compound was picked based on something in my experience that led me to believe that okay, this is probably part of what's gonna make that key really fit inside this lock, you know. But the like one thing that I wanted to talk about in the topic of drugs here is the fact that I mean you're still recording these like long podcasts, you're solving hard client problems. I can tell because I work with cognition and I work with people who do a lot of like cognitive enhancement. I can tell like when you're when you're in a conversation, you can hold the topic here, talk about this stuff here, pick it back up, put it back here, and like open like you you're very sharp cognitively speaking, which is not normal when someone is taking a fuck ton of drugs. I I had a conversation in a in a podcast in Brazil last week about this on how just they were just like, Man, you also don't sound like someone who's taken over a gram of gear. And it's like, yeah, like I do some very specific things to make sure that I'm not just becoming as the bodybuilder typical zombie where you have no light in your eyes and you just look fucking run out all the whole fucking time, you know. So, like, what are what are some things that you do? Like, how did you engineer your phases so that your cognition doesn't get sacrificed?

SPEAKER_00 47:15

You know, the number one thing I think that that really gets lost is a lot of bodybuilders don't do things outside of bodybuilding too too much. I think the number one thing that comes down to neurogenesis as a whole, which is basically your ability to kind of grow new neurons or create new neural neural systems. To use your brain. Exactly. To use your brain is to exactly what you said, use your brain. Yeah, read books, do things that are difficult. You know, for me personally, I I love to challenge myself every single year with something that I know is gonna mentally frustrate me, but I know that mental frustration is gonna create new growth. Something like playing the guitar. I'm not musically inclined whatsoever. As a kid, never grew up, you know, being super interested in playing music or anything like that. So picking up, you know, the guitar at 27 years old is fucking frustrating. Every single time I try to practice the guitar, it's like, what the fuck am I doing right now? But I know towards the end of the year, just getting better at that alone is gonna be something that's gonna create, you know, uh just compounding effects as a whole, towards being able to be cognitive, be able to cognitively function as an adult within society and not just be a brain-dead bodybuilder who becomes a zombie at the end of the day. So I think the number one thing that gets missed out, and we talk about all these different compounds, we talk about cerebral lysin or dihexa and all these different things to upregulate growth factors in your neurology as a whole. I think the number one thing that that gets lost is you need to also do things to push neurogenesis towards pushing neuroplastic plasticity as a whole. So I think that is the number one thing that I could say I do differently than a lot of other people is having some of those tasks that really do frustrate you and push you to create new growth towards actually using your brain towards activities that it may not necessarily be used to. We all love going to the gym, we all love listening to podcasts, we all love you know doing all of these different things that we're interested in. How does our brain function when we're doing tasks that we aren't necessarily super interested in doing? How does our brain function whenever we're doing things that are outside of our comfort zone within? I think that that's something that really does get lost.

SPEAKER_01 49:26

Absolutely. Yeah, it's uh it's also I feel like we just don't we just don't think so much about thinking. Yeah, right. Like I'm I have a philosophy degree, so I thought a lot about how humans think and how the brain works. That's how I got into functional health, was just I was very interested in psychiatry and neuroscience. So like the bodybuilding sort of came afterwards because of coach almost killed me, so I just had to learn this shit on my own because I just didn't trust anyone anymore. But it's uh it's a very not it's a not super well-known field, and then when you try to dive a little bit deeper, you get into the biohacking space, which is respectfully a fucking mess. It's just everybody is just all of these conjectures just pulling out of our asses, just like how things work is just it's kind of complex, even like figuring out, but there are certain compounds like you hinted at dihexa. I like cerebral icin a lot. Me too, yeah. In terms of its effects, I don't like the the volume of injection, but you know, in terms of its effects, it's pretty good. 10cc is not for just the the faint of heart here, but it's once you see the the syringe for the first time, you're like, what the fuck? Yeah, like for that am I doing this constructive possession for something I shouldn't have, man? Like what the fuck?

SPEAKER_00 50:36

Dude, yeah, it's that is one that is definitely taunt. It it taunts you whenever you pull that that 10ccs and that's it doesn't hurt at all though, which is nice.

SPEAKER_01 50:46

It doesn't feel like anything.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

Yeah, uh it's water-based, so it's very smooth, and you can use a uh a pretty high gauge needle and not necessarily you know have to use a whole harpoon like you would if you're yeah put 10 cc's of of test in your in your booty cheek. Yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

If you try to do 10 cc's with something like a 27 gauge, it's just not gonna go through. The amount of force you're gonna need on that thing, a three cc is already pretty hard. You know, I like I like to do one cc uh syringes, even if I have to do two shots, because three cc sometimes is just fuck my fingers, my hands start shaking when I'm trying to jab that shit in, man. Um, but in any case, talk talking about jabbing here. You had this uh GH for a women breakdown. You you argued that like for female competitors, low dose GH actually comes before androgens. I agree. That's something that we got like as a good thing that came from the safer use model. Yes, from all the way from time from like Victor Black's thing, but but only after we restored their testosterone, their estrogen, their progesterone, and their just overall resilience. So if you could walk me through like a real case of like, okay, we get the labs, here are the first moves, here's where we get the green light for like Anavar or Primo, and what makes you go like, okay, we're still not there yet. So it's still not time to touch these things. Like these hormones or these signs are telling us this is off limits still.

SPEAKER_00 52:06

Yeah, absolutely. So whenever women come through my door, I would say the number one thing that kind of is a big red flag is hormonal birth control at the start. And that's a you know a conversation that I do have to have with a lot of women whenever they are talking about going into the enhanced side of things, is that if we understand that this thing is gonna be in the picture and it's just gonna complicate the system as a whole, okay, how can we kind of transition off of this in a smart, smart way with also educating them on, you know, what is kind of going to come alongside of coming off hormonal birth control. There is gonna be some sort of rebound there that we're gonna have to kind of account for uh as well in terms of certain hormonal factors. You could even induce something like post-HBC, you know, uh PCOS in some individuals whenever they do come off birth control as well. So it's just kind of having that period of monitoring things at the start whenever we pull them off of that. Okay, once we pull you off of that, once we understand that things have kind of stabilized as a whole, we've got your period in a good position. We we aren't necessarily worried about things such as, you know, uh having some sort of hypothalamic amenorrhea that you could have incurred from being on birth control for for a long period of time. Okay, now we're gonna start looking at optimizing testosterone. And that's always where I like to start with a lot of women is making sure that testosterone is in a good position. I think if you are a person who is looking at compete long term, I would say that TRT may be something that we really like to look at implementing at the start. Obviously, I I do believe that growth hormone can come into the picture after that. I don't necessarily think if a person's in a position to where they have very low testosterone levels, they have very high levels of estrogen dominance, and they have literally no progesterone production at all, that that's gonna be a great state to put a person in a position to where we are using something like an anivar. Okay. Usually 90% of the cases, I'm not gonna say everybody, but I'm gonna speak in generalities here because if we're gonna be talking about PEDs, if we're talking about how, you know, male physiology is very different in terms of how we implement these things. Female physiology is a hundred times more fragile, and it's very, very different in terms of our overall way of applying some of these certain compounds. So I if we're gonna speak in generalities here, I would say 90% of the time that women come through my door, okay, we're gonna pull you off hormonal birth control if you are looking to compete. We are gonna put you on some sort of testosterone replacement therapy. And no, that does not mean we're gonna be starting at 10 milligrams of testosterone a week. Like a lot of clinics put women on these days, but I would say three milligrams a week is like a good starting point for a lot of women when it comes to testosterone. And we'll leave you there. We'll we'll pull blood work in a couple weeks, we'll see where those numbers kind of land you. We'll see if we need some sort of progesterone support, some sort of estrogen support, and just kind of get those three hormones in harmony so that we can understand, okay, you're in a position to where we're making long-term progress. The number one thing that I do see if we don't necessarily do that, okay, we could put in Anivar and it can override the systems, right? We could put in 2.5 milligrams to five milligrams of anivar on training days and we can override the system, but you're gonna be battling this kind of okay, we're gonna feel like Wonder Woman for this four to six weeks that we're on Anivar. And then once we pull you off it, you're just gonna lose everything that you just kind of built because that that baseline hormonal foundation isn't in place to where we need it to be. So for a vast majority of people, I would say that we need to be hormonally optimized in the first place, and that's kind of like the gold standard of where we're like, okay, boxes are checked, your gut health's in check, your thyroid's functioning, your adrenals are good. Okay, now we can put in anivar because we know we have the systems in place for you to not only, you know, make progress while you're on the antivar, which is pretty obvious. Anyone could put anybody on anovar and make great progress with that. But I want to make sure that you're in a position to where when we come off the antivar, we're gonna still be able to make progress or at least hold what we made before we go into the next cycle as well. And we aren't just battling this, okay, feeling like Wonder Woman and coming off, feeling like Wonder Woman and coming off because that's how we create mental dependency on some of these drugs as well, which isn't often talked about in the the women's side of things, which is it happens. Women get very, very hooked to the feeling of being being on anabolics just as we do as guys. But for them, you know, some of the effects are irreversible. So I really want to make sure that they understand and are educated on what is going to be happening whenever we go through this process as well. I think a lot of times coaches like to market PDs and be like, yeah, you know, we could start at the lower safer dose and you're gonna be 100% fine. But I know women who can't take one milligram of Vanavar, who can't take one milligram of testosterone at all. So it's always understanding, okay, if we're gonna be having this conversation in the first place, I want you to understand that there's always gonna be a risk. Even if we do things the safest way possible, I cannot promise you that you're not gonna have any virilization whatsoever, because that's gonna come down to your genetics. So if we're gonna go down this route, I could promise you that we're gonna do things the safest way possible for you to not incur any sort of virilization. But what I cannot promise you is that that's not gonna happen. If we're gonna go down this route, you're gonna have to accept the fact that there's always gonna be a risk for that, even if we do things the safest way possible.

SPEAKER_01 57:25

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I I've talked about my wife's experience here before, but she couldn't do one unit of growth remote. Like it's just it's too much for her, you know. Like it's just the carpal tunnel was insane. She we didn't have like side effects, but she did get s sensitivity from two milligrams of Annavar. So from that feedback, it was like babe, if you want to do this thing, just letting you know you will have side effects, like it will it will come. If you gather with two, we're gonna need to push you close to 20-50 milligrams a week to be able to really make progress. It's just gonna come. You wanna do it, you don't want to do it, because I I feel like you need to have this informed decision. But uh with the testosterone piece, I feel like it's major because even if you keep them at around three milligrams a week, right? Like for my wife, 3.5 milligrams, so three uh three point half a milligram a day, that puts her in the 60s. And uh if we go above that, she starts virilizing. The same way if we start cutting her SHBG, she starts viralizing. If we add DAGA, she starts virilizing. So it's just we found the limit, right? It's just there's nowhere else to go. But that also tells me that, like, hey, whenever we're done with the cycle of Primor or whatever it is, that phase is gone, and now at least physiologically, you're resilient enough that your system can do way more to be able to hold on to those gains because it's not like me. I could run a health phase on a gram of test and I'm gonna maintain my gains, right? And uh, worst case scenario, I just need to take Lacinopro for my blood pressure. But you can't really do that because you're just gonna continue getting side effects forever. The what I tell people, girls, after they're done with their with their push is basically like, hey, now it's the time that you're gonna have to fight like hell to maintain everything you gain because you could lose all of it in just a couple of weeks. 100% of it, you know? Yes. It's uh it's rough being a woman. Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_00 59:23

It definitely is, especially with the the state of information out there these days. It's you know, we're we're in a much better spot than what we were 10 years ago. But I still love to say that you know uh if the male side of things, there's a little bit more transparency coming out. I would say female side of things is like still 10 years behind in terms of transparency and you know, having athletes being honest about what they're using, and not only that, but having coaches being honest about what they're using with their athletes as well. I think because there's so much risk for virilization, I think a lot of coaches out there are very, very timid in terms of coming out with their specific protocols. But I could say personally, I've talked to multiple different coaches out there who have put women on the pro stage for bikinis specifically. And, you know, all of them are saying around 10 to 15 milligrams of Anivar per day is pretty standard for what they're using with some of their athletes who are getting to that level. But I also talked to other women who have come to my door who were put on 100 milligrams of testosterone for their first cycle as a bikini competitor. So even then it's like, okay, well, you know, you would love to think that the state of information out there and how much we have available is getting us to the point where we're not seeing any of those protocols still, but it's still happening, unfortunately. So the more that we can talk about this, the more that we're transparent about what we're using with our athletes, and the more we can understand what's normal, what's pushing the limits, and what's just, you know, downright just complete fallacy and just complete bullshit that goes out there is uh the more we can kind of delineate those lines uh and be able to have better education for for uh the young females who are coming through our sport.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Dude, I love that. What are some specific upgrades that you got from Dom or the Blueprint that basically changed your process on how you coach these high effort guys who in general tend to wide knuckle through problems and just push through everything? Like how did the the thinking towards physiology and client psychology and things like that from the blueprint helped you manage those things a little bit better?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

You know, I would say the number one thing is communication at the end of the day. I think that's a number one thing where it kind of gets lost in the whole process of working with some of these high effort guys is you also need to be able to communicate to them. And I would say that, you know, I learned that from Don, but I also think I garner that respect from my own ability to put myself through the process as well. I love to say us as coaches are our own body of work. You are a person who does that self-experimentation. So you have the ability to tell these guys, hey, you know, I've done the two hours of cardio, I've done the two grams of testosterone, I've done the gram of trend. You don't need to do that because it's not gonna get you more results. I could go back, I could pull you, pull up my check-ins. Okay, this is when I started 900 milligrams a trend. This is where it ended. Did it look like I made you know a crazy mutation of a process? No, it didn't. So you're probably not gonna get the same sort of level of mutation that you expect from doing some of that as well. Okay, I've been the guy who's done the the two hours of cardio, who's done the egg, whites, and fish diet. Okay, way to game me. Okay, didn't game me as much as you know, the period of time where I worked with Mike Nassif and he learned how to pull me back, learn how to do things in a more uh phasic approach in terms of dieting for a contest prep as a whole. Okay, well, I could pull up those two different periods of my time and I could show my athletes, okay, this is what I did, this is what it got me, uh, these are the results it got me. Okay, this is a very period different period of time. This is where I got pulled back, and this is the results it got me. And I could show them, you know, hey, with my own body of work, this is a different sort of uh mental approach as a whole. And I know that that that wasn't necessarily relevant to Dom, but Dom also taught me how to do that as well. He taught me, okay, well, you know, you could pull up your own body of work and you can show that to your athletes in your own communication of how you could actually approach some of these individuals as well. Uh a big thing from the physiology side of things is also understanding that, hey, systems could get broken if you push them too, too hard. So you also need to understand that, you know, there's always gonna be a limit to systems, and you also need to understand where those limits are with those specific individuals. There's gonna be times where we're gonna have to push things, and hey, you're gonna be the perfect guy for that, though those specific times where we need to white knuckle through everything, but not every situation is gonna require that. And I would say to kind of also yeah, move away from the question a little bit, but it also applies. I also think my time in martial arts taught me that very much so, is like, you know, if you talk about jujitsu, the guy who's muscling everybody isn't the guy who's winning. If you look at Mikey, Mikey Musumeshi, who's like one of the best jujitsu uh gui jujitsu guys out there, he's skinny, he's very, very tiny, but he's going up against guys who are roided out, but he's just fucking yo using their own force against them. And that's the number one thing I like to communicate to guys as well is like you can use the force of your process against itself. That that's the number one thing that I don't think a lot of people really truly understand until they get into martial arts is you can use the momentum of your situation to push yourself forward and not necessarily just fight through everything like it's a grind and uh grindstone sort of process of just kind of pushing through everything. So I would say communication is number one, but I will also say that's something I could also do because I put myself through the process and also because of my background in martial arts as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:56

Yeah, that's uh that's really cool. I uh I hear you talking about like your your uh influences all the time, so I I always get curious about like the the specifics of it, which is just cool to hear. Now you you also talk a lot about psychedelics, especially DMT, right, to uh regulate around like trauma and anxiety and how that actually changed your relationship to stress and uncertainty. What do you think those experiences actually change on your day-to-day regulation when it comes to like decision making, volatility, risk taking when you're in the middle of a prep or in a growth phase or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:27

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that, you know, psychedelics as a whole has been something that's been more so I've done in different phases of my life. So starting off, you know, very, very young. Obviously, I think a lot of us have gone through experiences of using those as like party drugs in like high school and college and and stuff like that, but moving more so into spiritual development, personal development, and doing these things outside of the context of just having a good time and really using some of these things to really develop yourself as an individual has been a really, really big part of my life. And I would be kind of really dumb to say that. Wasn't a big part of my own personal development as a whole, going through some processes such as like a heroic dose, mushroom trips and stuff like that has really, really changed the outlook and perspective I have as a whole on life from quantity to quality has been the biggest shift as a whole. Is like, okay, well, you know, my life could be very, very much centered around having more clients, having more money, having more of this, having more of that, having more of this. But really, it's kind of shifted my life sort of approach of okay, well, I really do want to necessarily enjoy everything that I'm doing, whether it's the process of building the business, whether it's the process of learning how to be a better coach, learning the physiology behind certain things, learning how my clients work. It's really been a process of slowing down, of really, really focusing on my day-to-day processes and really enjoying those. So ever since I had that, that some of those experiences specifically with DMT, I would say the number one thing that's really changing my whole coaching process as a whole is learn really being slow. And I think that a lot of people would view that as being, you know, kind of a negative. Oh, you're doing things slow, you're doing your check-in slow. Aren't you supposed to be super fast and responding to everybody? No, I think it's better to take your time to really treat clients like people, not treat people like a number who's coming through your door, not treat this individual just as another paycheck. Treat this person like a person. Slow down, do your check-ins on your own time. Do them when you feel like them. Do them when you know you're gonna give that person their fullest attention and you're gonna be able to treat that person like an individual, not treat them just like an entity who you don't even necessarily know, who you know is just paying you this certain amount of money every single month, but you don't know what's going on under the hood, that you don't know what's going on in their own personal life. So I would say the number one thing that those experiences have really, really taught me is how to slow down and really treat people like people, whether it's in bodybuilding, whether it's in coaching, whether it's in my own personal life, is to we all get caught up in the rat race of everything that we're doing, but to just kind of slow down and be really intentional with everything that you do. I think that's a big part of the experience that I don't think a lot of people understand of how it carries over and bleeds into your personal life and your your decisions through that as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:21

Yeah, man. That's uh that's very similar to the way that I think about it. I actually had my life changed entirely because of psychedelics. I did Ibogaine treatment and nice, yeah. But it was actual treatment, it wasn't like uh a recreative dose or anything like that. It was at a hospital with, you know, doctors and everything. It changed my life in one in one dose. Like I legitimately became an entirely different human being. When I say that it's like a conversion story, that's literally what it feels like. It's just your whole life changes like this. I mean the the experience of Ibogaine, it's a full day pretty much. It's it's like 10 hours long. Plus, you have several days after that that just because of how it acts, it kills certain connections in your brain. You need to relearn a lot of things, so it's very, very like intense. I hope that these can be like I hope these things can start being leveraged more often as tools, not as recreational drugs. I actually am I'm not a huge fan of a lot of these being talked about as recreational drugs because of how powerful they are. I just feel like they work I feel like I do know that they work, uh they depend on you being very susceptible. So because of that, you know, set-in setting is very important, who you're doing with, where you're doing with, and what time you're doing with. That's uh that's something that I always want people to consider. But you know, if if you're listening to this and you've been on the fence about this stuff, give it a try. I know people that don't have depression anymore because of ketamine. I know there's me who was literally in rehab by age of 14, and I just I have a perfect gray life. Drugs are not part of my life anymore, at least not in that way. Um, you know, or not in that in that form, but yeah, to to to end here on the note of the podcast, you said that your podcast brought you a lot of sense of purpose that you didn't have before, and that the real like return on the investment is actually the relationships, and I completely agree, it's not the affiliate checks. Um, and how how is that like having the audience here in a community that's actually watching you changes or or interacts with the way that you push drugs, training, business compared to that like version of you that was running like DMP and a grand of trend in the dark while no one was watching?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:38

Yeah, dude, you know, it's funny that you put it that way because I was literally just having this conversation with somebody in the gym just like an hour before we started this podcast. But I was saying to them that basically it kind of forces you to live up to the version of what you're putting out there. Sometimes we all put out there a version of ourselves that is very much so put up as like a perfect individual who uh, you know, is social media is you know notorious for this of we always put out our successes, we always put out our triumphs, but we don't necessarily put out the bad stuff, our failures, and all of this. So it's kind of been a balance of understanding, okay, what is this version of myself then putting out? Is it realistic? Is it something that people are idolizing? Because I don't ever want to be idle of any of a certain I don't want to idolize anybody and I don't want anybody to idolize me, but I want to put out a version of myself that's honest, but I also want to live up to what I'm putting out there at the end of the day as well. I want to, I want that the those two things to very much so mesh. I want a person who meets me in real life to feel like, hey, I've talked to Tom on the podcast, I've heard Tom on the podcast. This is who he is in real life. But I also want people who meet me who knew me before the podcast to also be like, this is Tom. This is who I'm listening to. This is who he is at the end of the day. So I would say that's kind of like a weird way of answering the question, but that's really what I feel like at the end of the day. Is like I want to put out a version of myself on the podcast that's very much so who I would be if you're just in the living room listening to me talk to you about a peptide that I'm using or something like that. I want that to be a very authentic version of myself. But then also having that podcast forces me to live up to that version of myself in every single moment. And it just kind of is a compounding sort of thing of pushing me towards being my higher self. And I think uh a big part of that is the connections I get to have, not only like speaking with individuals like you who are very, very intelligent and get to push me and motivate me to, you know, upgrade my own intelligence, but also getting to speak to audience members who put me on that pedestal and getting to tell them that, hey, you know, I've gone through all of these failures, I've gone through all of these things, I've I've I've been that individual in your shoes who may have been dead broke, who may have been living off food stamps, and I've made it out of those situations as well. Understanding that, hey, you know, I'm in a position to where I have influence, whether I like it or not. I don't ever like to call myself an influencer, but I understand that whenever I do say things now, and I've had the experiences of people being like, hey, I saw you do this, so I started doing it. That's influence. And I think with influence also comes responsibility as well of understanding what you're putting out there, has to be honest, but it also has to be within the confines of being safe as well, because I don't ever want to put out information out there to where somebody is like, okay, well, Tom said I should do this. No, if I'm gonna tell you I did something that was a mistake, I want to make it very clear that it was a mistake. I don't want you to say Tom did DMT and Trend. I should do DMT and Trend. Before I say that, I'm always gonna put out a disclaimer of like, don't do this because it wasn't good. It wasn't something that you should do at the end of the day. So it's kind of like a multifaceted way of answering that question, but I would say all of those different things come to mind whenever whenever you did ask that question originally.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:08

Dude, that's amazing. We'll we'll we'll wrap it up there. If you're still listening, you're literally the type of person that this show is built for. This is not a person who just wants tips, they want to understand the operating system behind the results. And Tom just handed you years of hard-won thinking on off-season design, drug logic, mitochondrial stacking, and how to build a business and a brain that can actually carry that load. So don't treat this just as entertainment. Go back, re-listen, pull like one or two moves that you can actually implement into your own system and then just go execute. And if you this episode hit, share with the person who you know that's uh already training hard, but it's kind of stuck under the same ceiling. Tag me, tag Tom, let us know what landed and what you want us to go deeper on the next time. And uh, if you're new here, the Opticast drops every single Friday. Every week you're getting one conversation like this with someone who's actually in the arena, coaches, athletes, and founders, and we're pulling apart the real mechanics behind their output. Hit subscribe, line us up in your Friday rotation, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.