Building Systems for Physiology Optimization w/Mike White - SLU-PP-332, DNP, & Peptides

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🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO 
In this deeply insightful episode of OptiCast, Nathan speaks with Mike White — a researcher, coach, and educator — about the complexities of mitochondrial health, gut functionality, and how a systems-based approach transforms coaching and health outcomes. Whether you're a coach or an enthusiast, the conversation challenges conventional protocols and emphasizes upstream diagnostics.

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🧠 TIMESTAMPS 
00:00:00 - Introduction and episode overview
00:02:06 - Impact and risks of nicotine for gut health & cognition
00:07:21 - Mike White’s journey from debt to coaching success
00:14:25 - Transition from academia to real-world coaching
00:19:30 - Managing health markers and unexpected effects of supplements
00:27:09 - Upstream causes of IBS and gut health diagnostics
00:33:38 - Gut-brain connection and stress influence
00:39:35 - Managing testosterone and estrogen levels via gut health
00:44:49 - The importance of foundational knowledge over protocol obsession
00:55:22 - Building mitochondrial health through phased approaches
01:02:13 - Adjusting protocols based on metabolic and cellular signals
01:06:50 - Cycling mitochondrial agents and combining therapies
01:11:36 - Handling long-term fatigue & systemic health
01:23:02 - Working with shift workers and circadian disruptions
01:27:17 - Ironman-like training volume vs. fatigue management
01:32:24 - Use of propranolol for anxiety and peak week management
01:35:04 - Gut health’s role in androgen receptor sensitivity
01:37:00 - Coaching philosophy: humility, collaboration, continual learning
01:38:42 - Episode summary

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome guys to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan, where today we're gonna dive very deep on mitochondrial enhancement, upstream diagnostics, and the real story behind IBS and also safe for use as an individual health management. And also, I'm interested in looking like what it looks like to build a coaching system that actually produces durable results, not just short-term transformations. My guest today is someone that needs very little introductions in the circles that really matter, right? Like Mike White is a doctoral level coach, a researcher, and an educator who has quietly become one of the most reputable minds in applied physiology and performance coaching. He built his brand called Gray Mind Matter T uh Grader Gray Matter Training. God damn it, I have too much Vivance in my system. From the ground up, he literally went from food stamps and credit card debt while finishing grad school into a full roster coaching practice that attracts some of the most analytically demanding clients in this industry. He's known for thinking in systems, not in terms of protocols, so someone who will trace your gut dysfunction back to your nervous system, your hormone issues back to your gut, and your plateau back to a sequencing error that nobody else caught. He's the recurring guest on Morden Muscle Podcast with Tom. He's the co-founder of TrueCoach and one of the few people in this space who is equally comfortable in the research literature and in the trenches with real clients every single week. If you've ever heard someone in this industry actually explain why someone works rather than just it works, there's a good chance Mike was the first one saying it. So, Mike, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Thank you, man. That was that was a really generous uh introduction. Thank you. That was awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

No, no, no lies were said. Now, I have a question here, right? I just I just woke up and I'm doing cardio, right? And I read this functional health coach uh who told me, like, hey, nicotine, because of the norepinephrine effects, it has the same effect almost as your himbean. So you can pair nicotine for fat loss benefits. And I'm already using nicotine because I know you know everybody has learned with you that nicotine is such a powerful nootropic and one of the best things you can do for your gut health. So just what walk me a little bit into like how, like, where does your passion for nicotine actually come from, bro?

SPEAKER_00 2:06

So for for those, for those of you who are who are unaware, I am not the uh biggest nicotine fan. It's one of those things I actually think like, yes, we can look at some tabletop studies or table when I say tabletops, tabletop studies, I I usually mean like mechanistic data. We can look at some of this uh mechanistic data and see that nicotine does have some really profound effects for fat loss and for cognitive function. And then where people talk about it's being it's good for the GI, it's because it's stimulatory on the migrating motor complex. So it it pushes um a stimulus for a bowel movement. And on its face, it's not always a bad thing. But we can start to become too demanding on it. And it can start to, depending on your intake, start to cause things like reflux or even generalized dysbiosis. There's some really compelling data about uh I granted it's correlation data, but there's some corollary data about nicotine intake and rates of uh gut dysbiosis, and they're pretty tightly correlated. So I've become one of those people who I've come full circle on it. Uh there's actually a point in time when I would diet I think there's actually I'm gonna sound like an old man, before zins were a thing. Uh I would use nicotine patches and stick them on my arm before I would go like do my cardio and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Whatever it takes, bro.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Yeah. Cause I was like, oh yeah, the nicotine is really gonna be moving the needle on my fat loss here.

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So I used to do that, but I I just came to the point where I think it's use case. While yes, I agree there is some benefit that we could see from it, the potential for net negatives long term is is what I worry about. So changes to long-term gut health, um, sympathetic nervous system drive, and then things like HRV, uh, even blood pressure to a certain extent can start to be hurt by too much nicotine. And I think like zins and vapes, this is gonna sound weird, I'm gonna sound like I'm pro-cigarette here, have removed some of the barrier of use of having to go stand outside or making your house stink uh to smoke a cigarette. So there's people I know that we've been uh sharing Airbnbs before and I'll come out and they're sleeping like this with their vape in their hand.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Oh dude, I know. I know.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

It's like that like that level of nicotine starts to feel like it's it's a little crazy what we're we're opening up into.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Not to mention just smoke on the lungs. Like there's no level of smoke in your lungs that's healthy. I am a I guess you could categorize me as a chronic cannabis user because I use regularly, not daily, but regularly. Um, but still, like I have to recognize that this shit is not fucking healthy, guys. Come on. There's no amount of beat of TB500 that can reverse the fibrosis that can actually happen in your lungs here from these habits. So I just wanted to start with the nicotine because I I think nicotine is overrated, but I also, as we're gonna talk a little bit about this, I also think the majority of fat burners are overrated just because like it's not like you can throw clen, five amino, MOTC, SLU, yo him bean, caffeine, nicotine, green tea extract, like all of this shit. And like just don't change your diet and see the rate of loss. The rate of loss went from 1% a week to now 1.5%, 1.05%. Like it's not that meaningful. And I I say this because I used to be the person who was like, hey, if I'm gonna lose fat, I'm gonna hammer it all, bro. And I would just be shaking so much. I I had diarrhea, I had fucking hemorrhoids from just my gut being so fucked from this sympathetic state nonstop that I I couldn't sleep, so I would lose muscle and lose my progress, and just like, guys, there's no there's no fucking reason for that. And with nicotine in particular, I had um just hiccups. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but I've talked, I've talked to other people um and they also experienced hiccup. I had hiccups for over 24 hours nonstop. I was scared. Like because I know that you can actually go to the hospital, you can fuck up your esophagus through these hiccups. So it looks very mild. There is a supplement that can help with that, but that's usually like you don't need the supplement. You actually just need to lower your nicotine dose. So I tried very legitimately. I went from two milligrams from zero, right? Because I wasn't doing nicotine. I went from two milligrams all the way to 40 milligrams of nicotine multiple times a day, nonstop. And let me tell you, the cognitive and fat loss enhancements were not noticeable at all. And the way that I run my my protocols is I will run like a cognitive test, like an IQ test or like a memory test. I always do flashcards, so I have this data to know whether these things are actually working, doing something or not. But in any case, before before we jump too much into the actual stuff, I want to know a little bit about your history, bro. Because you you've launched gray matter training, right? And you were on food fucking stamps. You were, well, back in the day when we had those, you had you were just sharing money like food money with your dog, and you had 33k in credit card debt, which just being honest, I I wish I only had 33k in credit card debt. So, but just you you kept building, right? What I want to understand here is what's the internal logic here for you that kept you going when nothing was paying off yet? And like, do you think that obsessive forward momentum was a feature or a bug in how your brain is wired?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah, dude, you really you did your research on me, man. That's awesome. The the the the food stamp thing was was kind of crazy for for a little while. Why I kept like working on this when when that was the case, I don't know. I think I was really delusional. Actually, I on the mirror phrase, I am really delusional. If I start to do something, I I just don't I don't have exit strategies, I don't have plan B's. Uh obviously, that's not to say everything has always been successful, but I I pivot when I get there. I don't start thinking about it. Um like even um True Coach, like we like what we talked about with education. I had to uh to pivot, its name has changed, kind of the layout that we're doing is changing. It's still education, but we're pivoting. What is it called now? Uh it's gray matter academy. We just brought it into the gray matter umbrella. So now we have Yeah, now we have three arms of gray matter. There's the training, the academy, and the clinic. So come in and get off wherever you please.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

But as far as why I kept going, yeah, again, I'm gonna sound like a real asshole here. I kept seeing on social media things that coaches were doing and the drugs they're giving their clients or the way they would talk about nutrition or the way they would talk about training. And maybe it's a piece of ego and I had a chip on my shoulder. Maybe it's from being in school for so long. I just kept thinking there's a better way to be doing a lot of this stuff. And so I started posting about it. I started posting just real small like mechanism education, like way, way back. I would just post carousels a couple times a week. And I would do a lot of QA's where people would ask me questions. And almost always would there be some sort of PubMed thing for me to follow up with. And this was before uh AI tools were a thing, by the way. I was waiting.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

So you had to actually read the studies and not like you didn't have Claude to summarize the conclusion because you couldn't even read the fucking conclusion, but you wanted to sound smarter than every other coach out there. That's insane, bro. How do you build a business that way?

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Yeah, so I I think that's kind of what I started really like cutting my teeth on was having this understanding of health that maybe some other people didn't. And specifically regarding like female health, I was getting a lot early, really early in my career, I was getting a lot of uh women who I always say were just treated like small men by their previous coaches, where they go, and this is a literal case. Well, I'm 230 pounds and I'm taking 1200 milligrams. You're about 115, which is about half, so you could probably take 600 milligrams a year.

SPEAKER_03 10:14

My God, Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Yeah, yeah. Um, or male coaches who were uncomfortable talking about the menstrual cycle, like they would refer to someone's period as that time of the month, and then they don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

That's nasty. So then when when girls would diet or they'd come off of whatever, maybe like high stress period of their life and and lose their menstrual cycle, their coach would be like, oh, well, maybe we just need more cheat meals. And I I wish I was exaggerating when I said any of this, but these are all literal cases I've worked on.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

I know you're not exaggerating. I talked to I talked to someone that was in a deficit. Like they they they finished a fit model competition, right? And uh they binged just the the fucking entire house, right? They went on a cruise right after that, and obviously it was a bad idea. So they gained more than the weight that they had lost in prep. And then the coach had the brilliant idea of like, hey, we have a show about a year from now, so I'm just gonna put you in a deficit for this entire year. And then put her in the the bitch is natural. So put her in a deficit for the entire fucking year, and obviously she wasn't really feeling great. So when I'm like, hey, I think your coach is kind of failing you. Like, I think this is not the way to do it. You shouldn't be feeling like shit and having no emotions and no sex drive for eight months in a row, right? Like that's not common. So she pulls out of the show and is like, you're right, I think it's it's time to do something different, but still gonna continue working with that coach, which is fine. Let's give people second chances, let's actually try to work with you and stuff like that. I I I'm gonna respect that and try to say that this is not Stockholm syndrome. So let's uh, you know, like then I asked, like, okay, what's exactly your your approach to then fixing your hormones? Because these things are not just going to bounce back magically in sh in a short period of time without you doing anything. And the answer was, we're gonna add some body fat. And I'm like, bitch, what the fuck do you think is inside of cholesterol that's gonna magically fix your like estradiol dominance and like the fact that you have no testosterone in your bloodstream? Like, God fucking damn it. So it uh it I relate to what you're saying so much. And I I've talked to well, this is funny. I talked to Dom about you. So cause because uh when I was making my peptide course, Dom was like, hey, this is the feedback that I gave Mike White. This is the feedback that I'm giving it to you. Do not use technical terminology at all. Like, explain things in the most simple way possible. And I'm like, son of a bitch. He's like, dude, if I see like something like AMPK in your course, I'm gonna lose my shit. And I was like, okay, so I'm gonna talk about tiny energy factories, not about mitochondria, because that's too complicated, right? Like, that's uh let's let's talk about that, right? And I I feel like with what you're doing with education and you moved a lot, like I went back all your feed and I I analyzed how you talked before, how you talk now. I think you're doing a fantastic job at breaking down this high-level knowledge stuff into digestible bits. So while a lot of people, and this is this is, dude, I'm gonna keep hammering on this because uh Tom is hammering on this as well on social media. A lot of people were trying to step into the last step of coaching, which is when you are proficient in all of this shit and you can just spitball like shit from the top of the dome. You can just create protocols in your sleep and stuff like that. People want to show up with that day one before they even have like two before and afters on their page. And I just go from like, oh, you guys heard about Claude and now you're building all these protocols. Great. I've seen some protocols be actually really good, but what are you gonna do when the protocol breaks? Like, what are you gonna do when the client doesn't respond in that way or just gonna resort back to AI? Like, you don't, this is not the way to do it. So having someone who's really focused on education and talking the language that people understand, man, I really, really fuck with that on your on your side of things. Now, I appreciate that. Like you have you have three years into your doctoral program, right? And then coaching just took off and you went off with it. And and most people, they they finished the credential because of the sunk cost. Like I decided that I was not going to pursue academia before my first semesters in master school, and I just finished the whole thing because I was like, might as well, right? What what was the moment that you realized that you were building something in the real world that had already outpaced what the institution could teach you?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Yeah, dude, I love that question. So the kind of distaste that I had for academia started initially actually my first year. I was treated pretty poorly in a lab that I was working in, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing here? And then I told myself, well, how about we move labs and you know, work with a different PI and we'll give it another shot. So I finished my second year, and I it still just like didn't feel like it was for me. Classes weren't like the most stimulating thing for me. I wasn't really compelled by the research that I was doing. The research that I saw getting done in adjacent labs around me felt like it was more of a purpose of saying I published X amount of papers as opposed to I produced something meaningful. And I I really disliked that. In academia, I mean, you you're probably aware, there's this whole concept of publish or perish, where if you don't publish a lot, you know, you stop getting invited to talks, your lab funding changes. You look worse, for lack of a better term, as a professor, as an academic. And that also applies to the labs that you run. So if you have a a lab of like a dozen grad students and you're not cranking out papers, people will look at you and be like, what the fuck are you even doing over there? And that starts to affect how much funding that you can get. Uh when you apply for grants and they see you're not producing a ton of research, they're gonna be like, Well, I don't want to give you all this grant money if you're not gonna do anything with it. Um so I just stopped liking what was getting produced. And then my third year, uh, I really started having a lot of success with coaching. Um, and I was also working in the supplement industry. Like I had a lot of stuff outside of my doctor that was going for me. I was really, really unhappy. If you asked anyone important in my life, probably 30% of the calls that we would have would be me talking about how miserable I was in the in the program as well as like geographically. I was in a really tiny town in rural southwestern Virginia where the only thing to do there was drink. Obviously, I don't drink. So I had a really hard time finding a community. Um, I had probably three really good friends that I established in the time that I had been there, but not it's it just wasn't what I needed. So you kind of had three things all happening at once. I started getting really disillusioned with academia and the research and what I would be producing and what I was sticking my name on. I was really, really unhappy geographically as well. So I was okay with saying, like, hey, I'll move to this small town if it means I get my doctorate, I can really put my head down and work, I'll kind of get in and get out. And then that wasn't happening. So I I was supposed to finish pretty quick because I came in with a master's degree already. And my timeline just kept getting extended and extended, extended with like no end in sight. So I remember, funny enough, it was actually Dom Kuza, who I feel really fortunate for. Not not only has he been like a good mentor for me professionally, but I mean, he's he's one of my best friends. I call him whenever I have issues, like even in my personal life, he's someone I get input from. And he and I had been having this ongoing conversation for a while now. Because he could tell how unhappy I was. Because whenever he'd ask me about school, like in our mentoring calls, or just when we would catch up on the phone, it was never anything good. It was never, I'm excited by this, I'm doing this, isn't this so cool? Here's something cool I learned today. But whenever we'd have conversations about coaching or something else I had learned on my own time, it was a totally different conversation, a totally different tone for me. And at one point, I remember I came back from a lab meeting where I got in some news that again, I was gonna be delayed on how fast I could get through the program because people above me, I'm trying to be nice. People above me forgot to file papers for me and forgot to reach out for me on my behalf after I gave them a timeline of what I needed. Right. Uh and it was as simple as sending like two emails.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

It wasn't a huge I worked for a university, so I know how this should work. It's just it's a people underestimate how much actual like paperwork professors have to do. Absolutely. That's what disillusioned me in academia was realizing like 90% of my time will be spent writing reports and being in business meetings, not in teaching. Fuck that. I could just teach online for free. Right. But yeah, it's um it's it's it's quite frustrating when when when something like that is missed. But sorry for sorry for interrupting. Yeah, no, no, you're good.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Um, so I remember I was coming home from that meeting on the phone with Dom again for the 19th time, probably in the last month, just bitching and complaining about how I'm like, I'm not getting taken very seriously. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. And at one point, he asked me how much I was making. I told him how much I was making. And he goes, Do you think you're gonna ever make more than this as a professor? And I said, I'm already making more than the head of my department. So I don't think so. And he goes, All right. Uh if you were to drop out today, how would it meaningfully impact your life? And I was like, uh, I mean, I'd have a lot of time back and I'd probably be happier. And he's like, All right. Well, and uh some backstory, I was getting paid to go to grad school, so I had an assistant ship. So like my degree was paid for, plus I was getting a living stipend. And he goes, Well, if that money goes away, are you really gonna miss it? The stipend money. I said, No, I could get a couple of things.

SPEAKER_02 20:15

Stipend money is almost insignificant most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Ours was pretty generous. Ours is pretty generous. So for eight for eight months, I think, including like getting paid for breaks, I think I was getting$38,000 or something.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Wow, okay, that's really good. I I got uh I got accepted into the grad school program at Duke University, and uh they offered me the max ride, which was 75% coverage plus a stipend, but the stipend was like 20 grand a year. And when I ran the numbers of everything I would be required to do, I realized like, okay, after finishing the graduate school, I would still have about a hundred K in debt. Oh yeah. Like Trust me, I still had debt.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

I still got debt from from from loans. Yeah. Um he was like, Would you miss that money? I was like, no. And he goes, All right, can you give me one good reason to stay? And I was like, I I don't like quitting things. I said I was gonna do, and he said, well, he said it's not he said it's not quitting, it's stepping into something else. And I was like, All right. So then the next day I went into my advisor's office for another meeting, and I was just like, hey, this is my last meeting. I'm not coming back on Monday. And then I packed my shit up in my house and I moved and decided to go totally all in on myself and the business, and it's grown into something like really, really fulfilling and really, really beautiful. And I feel really fortunate now that like I get to do what I do. I I always joke and tell people I'm unemployed because I don't have a job.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

That's amazing. That's amazing, dude. Yeah, what what what what took me out of academia? It was several things, right? One, the pressure to publish. So I realized that if I wanted to be competitive against people who were doing fucking summer programs at Harvard when they were 14, because that's the people you're competing with, and at least in the humanities. Like, man, I had to be having a great CV, right? So I my goal for finishing my college was to have more publications than my friends who were finishing their doctoral programs. And guess what? I did it. I got presented in international conferences. I started teaching. Like when I was in my master's school, I was teaching for Hebrew University, which is the largest institute in Hebrew education in Israel, which was really, really nice. But at the same time, it's like the pay is not there. So I'm having to teach languages on the side. I'm having to do English. I'm having to do fucking Portuguese and Spanish. So I'm teaching three languages, doing grad school, teaching Hebrew, modern and ancient. So five fucking languages that I'm teaching. And then also he needing to have a job on the side. But my job on the side, I realized this is this was crazy. I was looking into job openings because I made a spreadsheet to compare all of my grad school options and just looking at the financial opportunities. And the head of the philosophy department, the head of the ethics philosophy department in Oxford University, the job listing was 50,000 euros a year. And I said, Are you fucking kidding me that I'm going to spend at least another 10 years studying because it's grad school? But nowadays you also need a postdoc and you also need some experience in the field and the publications and the travel to the conferences and stuff. I'm going to have like 200K in debt 10 fucking years to then get paid 50K a year. I'm making 70 working as a server. What the fuck are we talking about? So it just I was so frustrated with academia and uh the whole publication and stuff like that that I didn't even want to go to my graduation, bro. I was so burned out. I just I just like finished it and I was like, fuck this. My wife's like, why are you so upset? I'm like, shut the fuck up. I don't care about this shit anymore. I'm just done. So I finished my graduation. It was online because of COVID. And I went straight to the range to fucking start shooting and just go deeper into competitive shooting. And I never looked at any of that stuff ever again. Like it's uh academia can be quite disillusioned, especially when you start noticing like fuck, like the majority of the shit that I'm gonna produce has no meaning whatsoever. It's just another line in my CV. And then I need to repurpose that in five different ways to create more lines in my CV. Like, fuck that.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

Yeah, I always tell a story. Uh and again, I wish this was a lie. Part of like what really knocked me off my rocker with the disillusionment was um someone in my program, their dissertation was something like a modest calorie surplus plus high volume resistance training yields augment augmentation in skeletal muscle in untrained individuals. So they they got their doctorate was if we put you in a mild calorie surplus and you lift weights, you grow muscle. And I just remember sitting in the defense being like, this got a PhD. This is what got a doctorate. Oh all right. Like what the fuck? But you gotta spend five years working on it. Dude, I I will never forget that. And like obviously, yes, there's some nuance to it, but like the the main findings of the paper were like that if your calorie surplus came from primarily carbohydrates, it augmented gaining muscle better than if it was primarily fats, which again I could have told you that probably my sophomore year of undergrad after Nutrition 101, and that just in general, there is a good correlation between lifting weights, the calorie surplus, and gaining muscle.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

That's great. I might start that. I might actually like start lifting weights. I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about it. I think that would be having great applicability to my clients. I think it's gonna transform the field here. So I the where I was working, I worked in a really cool project uh that basically created um the texts that are going to be used for scholars to figure out what even is the Greek text of the New Testament so that later scholars can figure out what we are gonna do about the translation process. So I worked directly with manuscripts for an institute in Germany, the Münster Institute, just with 14th century lectionaries. And the the most boring research that I found, because I was big in textual criticism, like textual criticism was my shit. And I realized, like, oh my god, the dissertations that these people were working on, I'm gonna die. Like, I'm a very dynamic person. And the the biggest like dissertation that everyone was super excited about was on the roll of a fucking dot on 14th century manuscripts. Like that's just the dot on the corner of the page. Like, what does that mean? And the conclusion was, oh, they were using it just to like dab the pen and make sure that's working before start writing.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Beautiful. That's very chattering.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

That's gonna change my life. I think it's gonna I has the power to change the political landscape of the United States, even. I guess.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Yeah, agreed.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

But uh, but let's move a little bit away from academia. I can talk about this shit all day long. I just don't want to bog every everyone down to these details, but you said IBS is a lazy diagnosis, right? Like inflammation doesn't just park itself in the gut for no reason. So let's say you you you you're working with someone and they come in with like years-long IBS. What's the actual order of operations for you to find the upstream cause? Because we know there could be several. And how often does it trace back to something that the client was doing to themselves that no one just even connected the dots?

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Yeah. So I mean, really low-hanging fruit, very first off, is uh just lifestyle audits. So what do you eat? How often are you eating it? Um, how often are you eating in general? And that's easier said than done because a lot of people we have this bias where, you know, self-reporting bias, we don't want to tell someone how bad something actually is. So I also have to take it with a grain of salt. So uh, but first I ask for food intake, I ask for what their stimulant load is like, medication load. Um, funny enough, that we start talking about nicotine, I always ask about nicotine now. If they're a woman, I always ask if they are or have taken birth control. I always ask people if they're on any sort of SSRI or SNRI. And I ask people over the last five years, like how many times have you had to use antibiotics? So that's kind of where I start, just as general questions. You can pull a ton of info about someone there. Another thing that that I'll ask about, that's this is more routine in the check-in, not really right off the bat. I ask about stress a lot. I talk to people a lot about stress. So that's something that that we we discuss quite frequently. And then from there is where I'll start to make some inference. Generally, we'll also be doing the baking soda test. Um, for those of you who who are listening and maybe don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

Um if you have a line of baking soda first thing in the morning, just snore that shit up and see if it fixes your mouth.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

You could do that. I don't know what what how much I'll tell you, but uh it's I think it's a quarter teaspoon of baking soda in four ounces of room temp water. Knock it back like a shot first thing in the morning before any other like fluid or supplements, food or anything like that, and then run a timer and see how long it takes for you to burp. Standard adage, people will tell you it's like anything like longer than five minutes is too long. I'm of the opinion once I start seeing it creep up over like a minute 30, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

Wow, really?

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Yeah, it's when I start to say like we need to add some acid support. So if you really get into like if you're telling me your time and it has starts, it's like something minutes, I I kind of know we we have a stomach acid issue. And then we're gonna start using some enzymatic and um uh acid support there. Odds are though, if someone is hiring me directly for GI issues, we're gonna be pulling a GI and zonulin, a GI Map plus zonnulin, and that'll be kind of the first place. I've had some interesting cases where GI Map was not enough, actually. And then so we had some like unexplained symptomology, and I had them buy like an at-home, you can get it on Amazon for like 40 bucks, mold testing kit and go around parts of their house, and their mold exposure was was somewhat high. So we had to work on kind of like detoxing from that, as much as I hate the word detox, and kind of setting up clearance pathways to to better augment clearing some of these like spores and other environmental stressors that were hurting how well we could progress their GI. Because I just remember getting a GI map and being like, yeah, there's some things that could be improved here, but it's not as fucked up as you would expect it to be given the symptoms. And so I kind of came to the conclusion that likely what was happening, this very particular case, the environmental stressors from some of the mold would was likely causing a really intense increase, both in stomach or intestinal rather permeability, um, as well as uh increased stress on some of the enterocytes in in the gut that are responsible for releasing stomach acid. So what we were probably getting is food fermenting. Not bad enough to the point where we're getting like true SIBO because they'll have stomach acid, but then likely we're also getting a lot of lipopolysaccharides that were what is that? LPS there these inflammatory endotoxins. Um so actually it's it's really funny that my first exposure to what LPS were was working in a lab because you would inject rats with LPS directly to increase their inflammatory burden. So shout out to rats. What'd you say?

SPEAKER_02 31:16

Shout out to rats. They be fucking taking it all for us, man.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

Just yeah, so like the way the way lipopolysaccharides works is they they stimulate um it's uh inflammatory pathway called nuclear factor kappa B. And that's think of it as the master regulating complex for inflammation. It's what produces things like IL-6, uh, TNF alpha, C reactive protein, all that stuff. Inflammatory markers. Yeah, it's all produced from that complex. Lipopolysaccharides directly act on that complex to uh stimulate production of inflammatory proteins. So a lot of their symptoms were this like chronic level of inflammation. So we ended up pulling some blood work for the mold just to like confirm that it was actually an issue. And their mold exposure test was lit up like a Christmas tree. So we started working on the gut in tandem of the mold stuff because our initial pass of working on just gut wasn't yielding the results that that we would we would want. And we ended up getting much better success with environments. So, like this all circles back to your question. I always start like really low hanging fruit, a lot of lifestyle, what are you putting in your body? How are you treating your body? And then it's let's pull some low difficulty data. Like it's not hard to do the baking soda test, it's not expensive. And then if we infer from those two that it's a little more serious, we get the GI map. And if we get the GI map and it's not maybe telling the full story, that's when we start to pull maybe some other more like functional tests. So maybe we can pull a Dutch test if there's you know suspected like hormone metabolite issues, or maybe we pull uh an environmental exposure test to look at like leads and plastics and xenoestrogens. So you kind of have this full circle of we look around the gut, we look directly at the gut, and then maybe we look outside the gut to troubleshoot.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Dude, that's a that's a very, very good breakdown. And I um I'm someone that has the label IBS, but I have not ever like dove any deeper into figuring out exactly what it is. But as you were talking, I I started thinking like, shit, I think my IBS started like six, seven years ago, eight years ago actually, right after I had gyneosurgery. So it was probably the antibiotics because I started having like uncontrollable diarrhea on the airplane, driving back, like coming back. And doctors tried all of the stuff, right? They eventually, you know, just like, oh, you just gotta eat low FODMAP for the rest of your life. And uh actually, with better food choices, without any protocol whatsoever, I was able to get back to eating over half of the high FODMAP foods just by that. And then I noticed that, like you touched on this a little bit, stress. Like I can be eating the same exact stuff, but if my stress level is high, whether that's coming from stimulant use or from real life stressors, I will have symptoms of IBS, like just non-stopping, also symptoms of high bile, like super like high bile of just like that uncontrolled like burning sensation and all this stuff, which is which is the gut brain connection, is like people talk about it a lot, but I don't think we underst we really appreciate how deeply it is that like, you know, like I fix my wife's acne with like vitamin E, omega-3, calcium dglucurate, dim, like that's how we fix it. It was through the gut. Like it wasn't through topicals. We're using no topicals whatsoever, just systemic GHK copper. But honestly, we put GHK copper first, five milligrams a day, no difference in skin health. Like it just didn't help whatsoever. But you change the protocol for the gut, and now shit starts flowing. And it's interesting because people don't expect that something like vitamin E is gonna help, right? Like, don't you need something like Racutan or something like that? But how do how do you have the conversation with someone who came to you for a physique goal and then they have a certain nervous system that just literally can't handle the load of their goals?

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Yeah. Oh, dude, I love that question. So I think um client psychology and client communication is as important, if not more important, than the actual ones and twos of the program you give them. Uh so, like a really neurotic client who puts a lot of pressure on themselves and is really high strung, uh, and maybe also has a lot going on in their personal life, whether it's relationships or work or whatever it may be, the conversations that you have with them are gonna be way different than you know, conversations you have with someone who is really go with the flow. They just are gonna do what you tell them to do. You say jump, they say how high. So the way you communicate that's gonna be really, really different. One of the things that I have started doing, really good question that I think for all coaches, I was not just young coaches, to be asking their clients when they get presented with a lot of problems that have more to do with their personal life. Just ask, how can I support you better?

SPEAKER_02 36:17

And every single week I have a question on the check-in that says, What can I do that I'm not currently doing to support your goals and fix your bottlenecks? Every single week. I think that's such an important question.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Yeah. Um, because you're gonna get one of two responses. You're gonna get someone who just says, like, hey, there's really nothing you can do. Like, this is for for me to figure out and manage. Great. And then you can also go, here's exactly what I need from you. And then that can help you with the conversations. Another thing that I've started doing, if it's someone who truly is having this like chronic, recurring high levels of like anxiety or or neuroticism, I just tell them I think they should see a therapist, but I also always go through the lens of like, hey, I see one. So it's not like me saying this is some pejorative thing. Like, I don't see therapy as anything to like be shamed about or it's like to feel weird if you may or may not need it. I see it no different than like maintenance on a car. Like, hey, maybe you don't have to get maintenance every six months, but I need it every other week.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

So same, same. I I go to my I go to my therapist whether I have something to discuss or not. Like, I yeah, you always have something to discuss. Yeah, exactly. It just I wish my therapist had recorded my first sessions because like my demeanor from the first sessions to now, it changed so much. The way that I talk about things, the way that I approach problems in my life. I could not handle the stress load that I currently handle if it was not for therapy. Obviously, the other thing that was a big needle mover here for me was my dog. I am autistic, like actually diagnosed autistic. So the dog had a better effect on me than something like melanatin or medications and stuff like that. Like there is a medication called Eripirazol. I don't know if you ever looked into it. It's pretty new, but it has like the ability to regulate some dopamine and serotonin in a way that makes ADHD medications a little bit better, but it also keeps you from having those like super highs or super lows. So obviously these things can help. But the dog, man, dude, like sinking your breath with your dog, like breathing in their smell, that is literally what grounding is is is, right? Like it's it's it's having an exchange of electrons, not just that, because if that was the case, we could just buy like grounding mats and they would work, but they don't because there is like the human real life component of it. And I I just yeah, I recommend it for my clients to get a dog, really. I have a client with uh treatment resistant anhedonia, and uh, he cannot come off of opiates and and things like that. So I'm like, okay, this is gonna set the ceiling for us. But a couple of things we can do besides you know cerebral lysin and dihexa is obviously going to be get a fucking dog, like for real. Yeah. And it's uh it's underrated. I feel like that's the type of stuff that get it's so valuable for a coach because you just expect your coach to just say, okay, let's tune up this supplement, let's take this out, let's swap this. And in reality, it could just be these simple life changes that you're missing because you're trapped in your own subjectivity. I find that to be the biggest problem with doing things solo, is you're trapped in your own subjective mindset. Now, talking about GI maps, you did touch on beta glucaronidase on the GI maps causing the estrogen recirculation. So you started applying that lens to men on the TRT on TRT who are claiming to be high aromatizers, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

So walk walk me through the thought process when a mail clinic has like estrogenic sides on a reasonable dose, right? Like let's say 20 to 25 milligrams per day. You shouldn't really see negatives at that dose, but it happens. Like, at what point do you think the gut becomes the first suspect before we have to resort to an AI?

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Beautiful question. Generally, I'll look at the gut well before AI. So there's there's three things in my head that I evaluate before we start talking about AIs. And also, I'm not anti-AI. I think AIs are fine. I just I'm fully of the thought, like, hey, if we can manage this maybe medical need through some form of lifestyle intervention, I would just rather do that rather than saying you gotta be married to this medication. Because I think maybe it can be really easy as coaches to just be like, oh yeah, take this other thing, but that snowballs. And then you have clients who are taking 38 supplements and four medications. And you like what you don't even know what's working, it's fighting for absorptive capacity, it it starts to become too much of a burden. Before we'll look at AIs, I always go, are you fat? Do you have digestive issues? And are you insulin resistant? If the answer to any of those is yes, usually it's two or three are yes, then we will work on that before we use an AI. Maybe we'll use an AI to buy us a little bit of time if the estrogenic side effects are really bad. But I have never, never seen someone who is decently lean. I'm not talking bodybuilder lean. Like I'm not bodybuilder lean and I would just refer to myself as like lifestyle lean. So no one who's like lifestyle lean, who doesn't eat like shit, who has fine digestive capacity and isn't insulin resistant, no one falls into all those categories and then has a really hard time with 200 milligrams a week of testosterone.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Yeah, I I only seen one case, and this is also from a hyper responder. This is a client who's on 25 milligrams of test a week. In like four months, he put on 35 pounds. He is ridiculously lean, like there's just no response. But I also know that like he his estrogen went high. He started having the night sweats and all of this stuff. So I just started supporting phase one and phase two of the detox system and just lowered a little bit of his growth hormone dosage because that was also causing some issues. And bro, like shit just started moving again. Like we, but but this is one of the few cases where this person is lean, insulin sensitivity is perfect, and this person has good habits and the gut is fine. So I have to resort to using a sh a small dose of an AI while just using testosterone. And that's something like a quarter of an aroma of an Arimadex every 10 days or so. That's not like, you know, every other day one milligram and type of type of type of thing. But like I think this gives us a good a good point to talk about the foundations before optimization. Because you you said it, you said it, I don't remember exactly the quote, and I'm I'm sorry about it, but you said something like people are slamming white monsters at 5 p.m. and then they're asking me what peptides to take to sleep. So like the target audience that we both work with are intelligent people and they usually think that they've done the foundational work. I assume that you are also not working with a lot of people who are like, I have no fucking clue what to do or anything, because they they come to your videos already having tried a couple of things. So, how how do you diagnose the difference between someone whose foundations are very solid versus someone who's convinced themselves that they are solid just because they've been obsessively tracking random shit for years?

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, so a lot of it kind of comes down to initial inbound info. Uh how you ask probing questions. I I am fortunate enough that um when I was in my academic experience, um we learned because I was gonna be, you know, hopefully PhD and registered dietitian were the things I was going for. So I had taken some classes on what's called like uh motivational interviewing. So it just taught me how to ask really good questions to get information that I needed. Dude, I need that. That's a really fantastic course.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Do you have the do you do you is there a course that's available for people to take or is there a university?

SPEAKER_00 43:45

This was university, but I if if I have my slide. Okay. Yeah, if if I have it, usually I'm a data hoarder, so I probably do have it somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I know. But so it got me really good. At being able to ask people questions without them feeling judged and being able to pick up on different parts of the answer that, you know, if if I asked you a very direct question, you tried to kind of skate around it, I could somewhat suss out what's going on. So between that and then just after I've been doing this for so long, I can, I can clock people really well on where they are. So a lot of the people that you and I probably work with, they they know a lot. Like they're they're I would call them enthusiasts when it comes to like the health and wellness space. They're they're into the things like peptides, they're into talking about health optimization. But I think it's they have so much information at their fingertips. It's hard to sort out through like what's noise versus what is actually going to move the needle. Yes. Yes. And that's where I think we step in. It's because we understand all of this stuff. And yes, we understand that all of these like cognitive peptides are really going to help you with functioning, but if it's so much so that it's interfering with your sleep, you're stepping over a hundred dollar bill to pick up a penny. And you can usually tell who these people are just on the list of supplements that they send you when you ask, like, what supplements are you taking? Because they're doing, you know.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

Well, there's so much competition for those co-factors and transmitters happening there. It's just uh it's a mess, bro. It's just traffic jamming up.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

Yeah. The the biggest one I love when I get uh new clients, and I can tell who they watch based on their supplement stack. Yes. Like if if I ever see B1 in someone's supplement, I'm like, oh you follow Mahaley. Yeah. Um or or like same thing when they're talking about bile, I'm like, oh, you follow Mahaley. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um similarly, like there's certain supplements that that Dom puts in a lot of plans. And I I just know from like I've seen a lot of what he writes. I'm like, well, this guy, he's paid attention to a lot of what Dom puts out there.

SPEAKER_02 46:07

Yeah. Um I'm curious. I want to I want to put you inside of my community, and uh, I'm releasing a course that's on protocols, but it's here's the thing I'm not giving people protocols, I'm explaining the rationale as to why I chose a certain compound, a certain dose, and this combination for the particular goal that we have. So we identify the issue, then we find all the ways to fulfill that. And I'm explaining the rationale. I want to know what your like what your thoughts are on that. So I'm I'm gonna set you up.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

That's that's what so in our group education container. So I I do education through one of two ways. You can either do one-on-ones with me, and that's like totally bespoke. We spend the first like we spend an hour and a half usually on a call talking about where you are, where you want to go with your coaching, kind of blind spots. I send out like a big survey, I have you fill it out, and then from there I make like a bespoke education for you. That's I do that, that I'll get really protocol intensive on the tail end of it to be like, this is exactly how I would do it with the doses. Here's my decision-making, like kind of framework and flow charts. But in the group container that I do, I'm I'm doing a lot more of what you're doing, where like I have a an estrogen dominance slide deck, for example. And in there, I talk about all of the potential options we can use to manage it and the ranges in how we can use these supplements. And then I have like a couple of pint case studies, right? But like, here's exactly who I've worked with, here's exactly what I did, and here's why, and here's the outcome that we saw. So I think it's really good in education when you don't just spoon feed people the end product. Yeah. It's similar to like the AI thing we're talking about earlier. Sure, you can drum up a protocol and copy and paste the protocol. I've seen plenty of copy and paste the protocols, but if something doesn't go perfect, now what?

SPEAKER_02 47:53

What do you do? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's the point. If you don't, if you don't understand the mechanisms that are behind this stuff, this is this is where you start you're just managing things based on symptomology. And I find it to be a a huge problem. I actually have a question for you later on on that, because a lot of these things we can't tell by feeling. So you need to go by mechanism. And if you don't understand the mechanism, uh you're just blind and you just recreate it. I I find a fixation with protocols to be very bad, very, very bad for our lazy. It's very lazy, but it's also it deprives people of what they need. Uh protocol is helpful for someone who has an oversight, like someone looking over this stuff and managing the system for you. But if you're just gonna do this thing completely by yourself, just getting a protocol, I don't think it helps. I I very rarely I have a protocol that I just give you and we just run with it without making any adjustments whatsoever. Usually I'm I'm getting I'm a protocol is an input. And every input that you put in the system, you derive a certain output. You then need to measure whether that output is bringing you closer to the gap that you conducted. You conducted a gap analysis of where you want to be and where you are. And if it is, great. If it isn't, we need to make a couple of changes. And I I find that when you're able to explain the protocol design to someone and help them understand how this works in real, like real life language, that's when people have a lot of buy-in as well, you know, especially with the client who are more cognitively invested in their own process.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 49:19

Um, a thing that you did that was very similar to what I did, I started with uh playing around with SLU, right? So I went ahead and I'm like, okay, we had uh Brian's friend experiment doing 400 milligrams. Let me see on a mini cut what 500 milligrams will do. And I I ran with it, 500 milligrams, right? And you I I documented sort of the same effects as you. That like in in terms of like, okay, we have heat uh that's being uh generated higher, sure, but the the heat that I get from T3 is still significantly higher. We have certain bioavailability problems, and then like the fact that I didn't see gains changing that drastically from 100 to 500. I didn't see any difference whatsoever, apart from the fucking cost, which was quite significant. So you you talked about periodizing mitochondrial compounds. So build it, you build efficiency with SLU, then you introduce DNP, and then you started rebuilding, right? Like, what are the actual like what are you actually watching in the physiology to know that the person's mitochondria is ready for the next phase of that protocol?

SPEAKER_00 50:22

Yeah, dude, I love that question. So generally the way that I'll set things up, let's say you you came to me and we're starting from square one. And I think a lot of people, when you start talking about mitochondria, naturally kind of tense up because it's a very like interesting spot where I think a lot of like grifters operate. I I think a lot of people in the longevity and mitochondrial health space are people that are just trying to sell you something and will kind of make mountains out of molehills. One of the things that I do when it comes to like these mitochondrial issues, I'll take it even like a step back more than just like fat burning. If someone comes to me and they have this kind of unexplained fatigue where like they sleep well, no sleep apnea, they are not really that stressed, um, their labs look fine, like there's no thyroid or sex hormone issue. Uh, usually if they're having really bad energy, I mean, we obviously we can't evaluate mitochondria on someone. So I'll just say, hey, hey, let's try using some SS31 for a few weeks. And we'll do, depending on the limitations of their wallet, between one and five milligrams a day for like six to ten weeks. Um and usually by like week three, I'm getting text of, oh my God, I feel so much better. My energy's back cognitively, I'm feeling a little better. And then in my head, I go, okay, maybe there was a little bit of like a mitochondrial issue and engines and yeah, and like stabilizing the cardiolipens, maybe it helped. And then I go, all right, now that we're done this, and they have this goal of maybe wanting to improve performance or in some cases fat loss, we can use things like SLU. The way that I think about them is SLU is intentionally making your mitochondria more efficient so that they have a higher energy demand. And there's benefits to that, but it kind of directly opposes how like DNP works mechanistically.

SPEAKER_02 52:27

So we should see protocols where people are doing like BAM 15 plus SLU.

SPEAKER_01 52:32

Yeah, that's really silly. That's really, really silly.

SPEAKER_02 52:35

It's especially silly because I feel like BAM 15 does absolutely fuck all, but yeah, BAM 15 is is is is it's stupid.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

Just like if you're gonna take an uncoupler, take an actual uncoupler.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Be a man.

SPEAKER_00 52:47

Yeah. The the combining both of them is is is really dumb. But so like let's say someone's goal is performance. We probably won't ever use DNP, um, aside maybe on just like a rest day. But we'll use SLU and maybe like MOT C as well. MOT C I like. I don't think it needs to be as dosed as high as some people think it does. Like, I think even 500 micrograms three times a week seems to really benefit a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 53:14

Um, I'm doing 10 milligrams three times a week.

SPEAKER_00 53:17

Yeah, I was gonna say, don't get me wrong, I've had some people get up to 10 milligrams a week, but um sometimes with just like 500 mics three times a week, if they're more like endurance athlete, I I actually kind of prefer like a less is more type situation. Um, because one of the things we need to be mindful of is when we are cranking on all these mitochondria all the time and upregulating a lot of the processes, yes, it increases energy demand, which can be good, and energy turnover, which can be good, but it also starts to increase oxidative stress and then energy demand locally within the cell. So if we are someone that is using a lot of SLU as well as like MOTC and is going for like runs and long endurance bouts, they're gonna be getting hypo a lot faster. And they're gonna be tearing through some fuel a lot faster, which when we're talking about the fat loss, fantastic. Let's do that. But when we're talking about performance, that's where it can start to shift a little bit in like how much demand can we really put on the cell spaces for energy before we start to run into like this acute bout of low energy availability, or in some cases, we start to just create oxidative stress because we have all of this burden placed on the mitochondria. So the the way I phase it is like start with establishing some health. And you could actually apply this to literally everything outside of mitochondria. Start your baseline should be establishing a little bit of health and seeing if there's benefit there. Run down that rabbit hole. So in the case of mitochondria, using SS31, if there's perceived benefit and some measurable benefit in our feedback, we'll keep using it. We'll get to the point where we don't really need it anymore. And then now that we have this really solid foundation, you can start to build off of that and drive up efficiency. So using things like Mod C and SLU. Getting into the DMP, so now we've spent time building a really healthy foundation. We've built efficiency. Now we can afford to kind of damage our mitochondria and make them less efficient. But because we're at this new established baseline that's like way up here, even when we spend some time damaging it, we're still above like our previous baseline. And then we can just kind of rinse and recycle through those. I've found that people's like side effects are way lower when we're using DMP after a full kind of a blow through of all these mitochondrial agents beforehand. And then when we use these mitochondrial agents on the back end of DMP use, usually the fatigue and recovery from it happens a lot quicker. So it lets us kind of play with our timelines a little better, which can be important for like weight-class athletes or or or bodybuilders maybe that are getting ready for shows.

SPEAKER_02 56:11

Dude, that's a fascinating response. I love it. What what what's the dose of DMP that you generally start someone at?

SPEAKER_00 56:17

That's this is the one time I don't love talking about dosing. I start really low with people, actually. I think there's some people that hear DMP and immediately assume you're just like cranking it to the max. Right. But like But that's that's precisely why I asked. So like what I'm personally doing right now is so I train four or five days a week, just depends on the week. So if I, let's say train two days in a row and I know the following day I'm gonna rest. Like a couple hours after my last workout before the rest day, I'll take either a 100 or 200 milligram cap uh of DMP. Uh the reason I wait till post-workout is because I just don't want it to affect my training. I do a lot of endurance training right now. DMP makes you feel fucking terrible.

SPEAKER_02 57:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

But so you take it after the training session, and then it has like 36 hours to work and but also clear out. So by the time you show up to the following training session, about 48 hours later, it's likely not in your system anymore. So it's not gonna have any net negative effects on your performance. But for that whole day and a half beforehand, you're burning a measurable amount of more fat. Ideally, on your rest days, you're not a total slug and like you're still going outside, still getting some walks. You know, maybe even on your rest days, you're doing more of that. It's this concept from Alex Kickle that I liked. I worked with him for a number of years. Uh, he calls it like parasympathetic beta oxidation, where it's being relaxed and still doing some sort of m light physical activity. So like for me, it's I I live near the beach. Going to walk on the beach, it's pretty hard to be stressed out when it's you know, like right now it's 78 degrees out. Um and I could be walking on the beach. But there's some perceivable benefit, obviously, from the exercise, also from you know, there's some interesting data about like being outside in states of relaxation and how that can affect uh bodily processes and uh uh aerobic exercise and and maybe some fat burning. So you're getting all those benefits plus like the mild fat burning benefit from the DNP. But because you're taking it so infrequently where it's like one to two times per week, you're never gonna get an accumulation in tissue that starts to cause the negative side effects. So that's where I start myself. That's where I start clients who are using it. Um and then I like a low and slow kind of bit with DNP, where like I I there's two schools of thought. You can either do low and slow and you kind of milk it longer and take a lower dose. I like that for most people. Or there's you know, I mean, I've done it myself. There's there's plenty of coaches that do this, like the get in, hammer it, get out. I don't really want to talk numbers on there because I don't want anyone to hear this and be like, oh, I heard Mike say he's done this before.

SPEAKER_02 59:06

We've talked about this stuff in in here before of like people doing high doses of DNP.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:11

But I like I want to try it because I am retarded. So like I want to do whatever. I would just I want to die knowing that I've tried everything that I wanted to try. But at the same time, it's like I will not use this stuff with people. I don't I don't trust the labs as much to like the difference between you having really good fat burning and dying is so small that like someone can make a mistake. And if they make a mistake, I don't think I don't think people understand. There is nothing that you can do to bring yourself back from DNP. You can try to cool yourself off, do some ice baths and stuff like that, but believe me, you're cooking from the inside out. The stiff the shit in your skin is not gonna do it. You're you're dead. You just don't know it yet. So it's uh something that we do very, very controlled. I already go very controlled with something like clambuterol. I've read this study on like the safety doses of clambuterol and just basically seeing like because it's a mechanistic feature of clambuterol, the the heart remodeling is not dose dependent. So it's dose dependent in the sense of the acuity of the effect that you're getting, but it's not dose-dependent in terms of like, oh, after 40 micrograms, that's when it starts being bad for your heart. So, like, what I do is sort of to induce the same like parasympathetic, sympathetic balance is during rest days, we do no stimulants. So that gives at least your central nervous system a break. You know, like that's uh that's something that I like. Now, when we're talking about all these different compounds and stuff, it's very difficult to phase these because once you understand the mechanism of these compounds, you kind of understand that the label of like the purpose of it, like say fat loss or muscle growth. It doesn't matter at all, right? Like we can talk about SLU to provide you with better recovery capacity doing your growth phase via just increasing your cardiovascular capacity and thus increasing your recovery for training volume. But we can also we can talk about like BPC157 for cognitive enhancement. We can talk about like uh TB500 for lung fibrosis and all of these things. So there is a there is an applicability to pretty much every compound in all phases. And like I just ran a mitochondria, like a synolytic phase. I basically went from taking care of my mitochondria, killing the the synolytic cells, and then starting at biogenesis with SLU, MOTC, and SS31, plus things like Cercertin, things like that, then the synolytic with physicin and and all these things. I did not have the balls to try FOXO4. So it's just like, but at the same time, I know. So this is prepping me for a fantastic growth phase. At the same time, I know that once I get around week 16, I'm getting kind of fatigued and burnt out. So like now I'm thinking, okay, I gave 16 weeks of a break between these peptides. How about running another phase of, say, like eight to 12 weeks now, as we're getting close to the end of this growth phase, let's say for the next 12 weeks, right? So we get to week 22 of a cycle, and we are pushing now mod C and SS31 at the doses that you feel comfortable with. After that, putting something like NAD plus just to support energy while you pull the MOD C out or something like that. Then we get to another health phase. Like, isn't now a good time to also work on mitochondrial like dysfunction and then fixing this other stuff? So, like, what the there is a danger of never coming out, and then you're running your own 197-week experiment on SS31 and just ruining your wallet. So, like, how do you how how do you go about like sorting this out in your protocols?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:27

Mm-hmm. For me or for clients? Because I have two different answers.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:30

I want to know for you first because I am I am personally interested in that because I I do shit differently for me too.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:36

I don't come off things.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:38

Someone asked me on an interview yesterday, I was like talking about Red A True Tite and when is the time to use it? And I'm like, okay, we don't have to use it from the beginning. We we can use it just at a certain time and stuff like that. But just being completely fucking honest, I like the response to Reddit more than I like the response from insulin. Insulin was hard to control in terms of electrolytes and blood pressure and stuff like that. So I ran it, I run uh Red on my off season. I also run it in a fat loss because, you know, like it's been on it, I've been on it for 18 months. Yeah, bro. It's like it's it's uh like are you getting pancreatic insufficiency? No, then kind of we're kind of fine, you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:13

Um now for clients.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:15

Yeah, for clients, it's definitely different. For clients, when I try to pair up like how much we crank on mitochondria, it's kind of inverse, actually, funny enough, to how much we'll use androgens. So during times of high androgen use, our peptides are probably gonna be a little bit lower. Um, we're gonna be doing just enough to maintain things like insulin sensitivity and some in maybe anti-inflammatory adjacent peptides. But like to me, that's not the time to be using a ton of mitochondrial agents that are gonna increase like our fuel demand because it's gonna make you just gotta eat more now, which can maybe cause some digestive burden long term. Yes, it's gonna keep you leaner, but I don't think you're gonna stay any leaner than if you just weren't like a fat retard about how much food you're eating in the off season. Like the the MOT C isn't gonna be what's standing between you and being 30 pounds fatter than you need to be if you're still eating five guys three times a week, like some people tend to do in their off seasons. So I'd like to give that kind of a break because also when we're blasting with the androgens, we're doing a lot of shots. So then now I'm asking you to do even more shots on top of more shots.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:28

It's annoying. It's annoying. Compliance starts falling through with just motivation and to buy in with the process. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:34

One of the things that I learned from Victor Black is like this concept of like the psychological burden of injection. And it's like it's a real thing. You don't want to. I mean, some people are fine with it, some people aren't. They want to do like five, six injections a day. So it can really quickly be like your daily dose of androgens, a growth hormone, one, two, three peptides, insulin, maybe pre and post. Like it really rapidly can escalate. So I tend to use them less when people are taking a bunch of androgens. And also in my mind, I go, well, how about when we're in between big exposure phases? We use some of these mitochondrial um supplements and agents to help kind of restore the function that we likely lost during all the oxidatively stressful uh periods of using androgens. So we can restore some mitochondrial function, and then maybe if we give it enough time before our next exposure, we've now brought our baseline of function up. So the damage we're going to do has a kind of lower relative effect to the last time, and then we can kind of rinse and repeat that. I think it's similar to when we're taking a whole bunch of supplements. It can be well thought out. Like it could, I can be very well intended with wanting to use all of these mitochondrial supplements and mitochondrial agents and peptides and stuff. But when we're blasting, that's likely. Time we're doing the most amount of oxidative damage because we're having such high food. Our training might be a little more assertive in our progressions. We're taking all the drugs. Maybe the time to give all these restorative compounds, and like a lot of them, maybe now is not the time because we're kind of just having some clashing signaling going on. Maybe we wait till we reduce that oxidative stress a bit, and then we can really get some good health under the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:29

Dude, what a what a great response here. I I love that. You know, obviously, if we're gonna be talking about certain peptides that will downregulate, like talking about CIMAX, for instance, obviously we're gonna cycle that in and out. Like uh things like methylene blue, we're gonna cycle this in and out. We're not gonna run it every single day. But on a couple of things like SS-31, you look at how long the trials are, there like really isn't a reason to say you need to cycle off. Plus, there's a new study, I don't know if you saw this one yet, with MOTC, that showed that Mod C also has the capacity to restore mitochondrial function. So do some of the roles that SS-31 does. So, like that made me think like, okay, maybe there is something to running MOTC and SS31 from the get-go, like from the beginning, as opposed to doing SS-31 first and then moving to Mod C after that. So that's um that's something I find very, very interesting. And I appreciate that. The way, the way that I explained to people is like when you're in a growth phase or a rough fat loss phase, you're accumulating physiological debt. You have to pay that bill. So we pay that bill during the health phase. And we I prefer to focus things on a specific time. So we're now running multiple different stacks in a gut protocol during a growth phase and at the same time a mitochondrial enhancement phase and a synolytic phase and a biogenesis phase. Like it doesn't make a lot of sense. It makes it very hard to manage the client. So a lot of the times that I get people, like usually the first thing I need to do is just be like, okay, let's actually ease off the financial burden of everything you're doing. And let's start with just a couple of signals here and there. You know, let's make sure that all of the cofactors and transmitters are in place first, the transporters and all of these things are accounted for before we're going back to all of these peptides. Now, one thing you mentioned that was very interesting was that look, like a lot of these allow you to use lower doses of androgens, right? Or like will demand you having higher food intake. I actually found that I can do significantly less doses of stimulants after running this phase. So like I am diagnosed ADHD. If you look at my prescription, it is Vivance first thing in the morning, Adderall in the afternoon, and Ritalin before bed, like just like in the evening, because of like how short a half-life is. It's a fucking cocktail. It's a lot. Right now, I'm doing nothing. And that's just like wait, I went from a lifetime user to nothing. Also, my sleeping sack with epitallon and DSIP went down to nothing, and I was on three different benzos. Like, come on. That is insane, right? Now, that's those are the positives. The negatives are I have a major appetite. And now that I'm running my fat loss phase for some fucking reason, I was I was maintaining my weight at 4,400 calories, and now I am having a trouble losing fat at 2,000 calories. What what could actually be going on here with like my mitochondria changing energy allocation and all of these things? Like what could actually be happening?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

That's a really good question. I don't know. I'm I'm wondering, have you gotten any like thyroid numbers looked at recently?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:22

Are you taking I am on 36 micrograms of thyroid? That puts me at like 4.8 for free T3, very low reverse T3, no antibodies, the height level based.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

I was gonna say, so a lot of the times what can happen is with all these mitochondrial agents, I've seen people who use like a heavy, heavy dose of them for an extended period of time, their thyroid output starts to get lowered as an adaptive replace. Yeah. Um, I think it's just kind of to protect the body from stripping away too many nutrients.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:48

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:50

As far as why I I don't really know if there's gonna be like a cellular answer to your to your thing. You you might just be one of those people that has a more maybe adaptive, you know, metabolism maybe than some others.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:06

Do you think metabolic flexibility could be part of the key is like why that's happening? Just too much metabolic flexibility. I don't know. I don't know about that. Hard to find someone that is that switches so easily between fat and and and fuel. And if it was the case, you would be burning more fat during fasting. And I fast for 20 hours every day, like all the yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:24

Yeah. So also like if we look at all the data that has to do with like gas exchange, even at rest or during exercise, uh, what what that measures is kind of the substrate that's being burned. So whether it's protein, glucose, or or um fatty acids, we see that people that have an RER that's more favorable towards like carbohydrate or fat, long term, there doesn't seem to be any difference in terms of like actual fat loss, assuming a calorie deficit. So I I actually I don't think metabolic flexibility would really play a role here. And I don't think it's possible to be too metabolically flexible.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:01

Yeah, I I agree. It's just something that I heard on a very big podcast, and I was like, I don't think that's the case. I think that certain people just need a harder yank, so to speak, to bring them down. Like you need a you put them in a 2,000 calorie deficit and their body adapts so fast and you just gotta keep digging it.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:17

Now, at the same time, I also so there is a confounding variable that I left hidden here, but I like obviously I'm running a GI face, so like I know that my nutrient partitioning and delivery is going to be improved. So that being the case, it could be very well that I just need less fucky calories because now I'm absorbing significantly more than what I was before, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:36

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:38

So um, just a quick question before we move on. How are we doing on time here, brother? I'm good, dude. I don't think I have anything else. Okay, so I'm gonna keep hammering because we got some good fucking questions here. So you you you you mentioned that since going to a hundred milligrams of SOU days daily, you have to start redosing your retitrutide every four to five days as opposed to seven to ten days to get the same effect. And your your theory, if I remember correctly, was that the mitochondrial agents are turning over these drugs just faster than the pharmacokinetics would predict. So how confident are you in that mechanism? And are are you also adjusting client protocols based on this?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Uh, how confident am I? I I can't truthfully say I've done like a ton of like research on it. It's one of those things where uh, you know, I always say we sometimes play a game of theoretical physiology. And it's just one of those things where I just try to think logically about, well, like what has changed? And, you know, when I wasn't taking the SLU, I could dose my Red U every seven to ten days sometimes. Uh and then when I started taking it, it seemed like I was burning through my food a lot quicker. I was getting hypo during training, I was really flattening out a lot. Uh so it made sense. I'm like, all right, or maybe we're getting more turnover at a cellular energy level. And then in my head, I was like, is this just being upregulated kind of across the board? Because I started to notice a couple other things, right? So not only was I having to dose my retina, around the same time that I did that podcast with Tom, I remember going to a baseball game with my friends and they're doing Dollar Beer Night. And I think I had like seven beers in four innings, which was that's a lot for me. I don't really drink very much. And at one point I remember sitting down being like, wow, I'm I'm fucked up right now. And then 45 minutes later at most, I was stone cold sober. So like I kind of started putting well yeah, because all the SLU I was taking.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:38

What? I need to try that out, my man.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:41

And so then I just remember thinking, like, well, maybe it's just getting this ubreculation of really all of these metabolic pathways. So I'm like because it felt like, well, I'm metabolizing food a lot quicker and I'm metabolizing my alcohol a hell of a lot quicker. It doesn't seem too far off to say, well, maybe I need more frequent dosing of RETA because I'm metabolizing drugs a lot quicker.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:11

Dude, that's a that's a fascinating takeaway from this. I notice that um when I'm running SLU and RETA at the same time, I feel like I need a higher dose of RETA. So that's similar to what you're saying. Now I never go hypo ever. I eat I'm currently eating around like 150 grams of carbs a day, and I have been eating that for the past like four weeks. Um I don't go hypo, like fucking ever. Like if I can I can go on RETA, SLU, MOTC, everything, and my fasci glucose is still gonna be like 90 something, but post brandio is still pretty good. Now I wanna I want to talk a little bit about this because it gets a lot of either very good rep or bad rep. And since you you were one of the few people who mentioned Victor Black in a positive light, and I also have a lot of positive things to say, especially in how important it was on being the foundation for something as big as J3U in terms of like how we think about this stuff. So you you reframed safer use. I really like this, not as compound selection, but about like whether you can manage what happens in the individual right in front of you. So two people on the same studied in humans cycle, so to speak. One's health is fine, and then the other one, their health tanks. Like, what does your actual health monitor and framework look like in practice? And what's the threshold that makes you change course before the client even feels it?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:27

Yeah. Um, so I ask for blood pressure, uh blood glucose, I ask for subjective feelings about sleep, energy, and fatigue. Uh, and then again, it's kind of like what we talked about earlier. I just start asking really probing questions. So if fatigue is really high and sleep is poor, I start asking questions about what those look like. Uh, ask about libido, because that can give us some insight onto uh estradiol and and where that is is landing. And if we we start to just see some of these numbers skew poorly, obviously we have some interventions that we can use. Like really quick off the bat, if I see blood pressure start creeping, I'll use telmasartin. Um I use really high doses of it in some cases. What's that? Like 160? 320 milligrams.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:16

Holy shit. So, so just quick, quick detour here. When I read the reports on telmasartin, I saw that the effect on blood pressure was not very different going above 80 milligrams. What what made you go for telmasartin as opposed to switching to something like Lysinipro, for example?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:32

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So in general, I actually don't always love uh actually I generally don't recommend uh combining an ACE inhibitor as well as an ARB.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:43

Correct, correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:44

So like the I I don't always love that. Uh I I do like some calcium channel blockers. Um as an addition or like a diuretic in some cases, like uh 12.5 milligrams of hydrochlorothiazide, I think really works very well. But the reason I got up to like the 320 milligrams of telmosartin, you're I mean, you're right about the blood pressure thing. So it's also telmasartin is not a hypotensive drug, it's a normotensive drug, which I think is a really important distinction. So even if you don't have a high blood pressure, you shouldn't be getting low blood pressure from telmosartin.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:18

Yeah, which is which is why we get to leverage the PPAR delta agonism in people who do not have high blood pressure.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:24

Yeah. So that's that's why I like taking a lot of it. Um and we seem to get really good uh PPR uh activity uh at 160, 320 milligrams, and it's so cheap. Like, fuck it, why not?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:37

How do you how do you know that you're getting an increase in PPAR activity?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:41

I mean, you're never gonna be able to directly know, right? It's just what sometimes we're doing things that we can't necessarily perceive in in our training, but we're hoping these like 1 and 2% things accumulate into maybe a 12% difference. Okay. That that can add up. Like you're never gonna feel PPAR creeping up. But it also has some really good benefits for cardiac health, telmasartin, that is, in terms of managing the left ventricular hypertrophy and just cardiac remodeling, which I think is a really obviously important thing when we're talking about bodybuilders or anyone using enhancements. There's some neurological effect, there's some insulin sensitizing effects that I like for both. So it's one of those things where I really like cranking thalmostartin up. But if we get to the point where like blood glucose is becoming a problem and blood pressure is becoming a problem and we're trying to troubleshoot it and it's becoming problematic, also want to pull some labs. So if someone is having these skewed biofeedback numbers, or if it's a drug we have never used before, I will get some labs. So like uh if you've never used uh equipoise before and we're using it for the first time, I'm gonna pull labs 10 weeks into at least 10 weeks into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:53

So that way the full report, everything, full 600.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:57

Minimally like an apolipoprotein panel, GGT, cystatin C, probably a complete metabolic panel, the blood count panels, probably most everything, because I need to know how it's affecting everything. So is it fine on your kidney? Like not picking on equipoise, but just like anything in general. Is it fine on your kidneys? Is it fine in your liver? Is it doing anything meaningful to the apolipoproteins in your cholesterol? Is it really badly skewing your red blood cell numbers? Like all of that matters a lot. And I want to keep an eye on it. And really, there's no way that we can infer any of that data. We just have to get labs. Like one of the things about if you choose to be someone who is pharmaceutically enhanced, don't just factor in the cost of the drugs, but you have to factor in the cost of the monitoring and the health drugs to help manage everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:49

Dude, I I've had uh, you know, people asking me about like what's the best way to like make sure that you can reduce some of the cost with this stuff. And there are several strategies that coaches use to reduce the cost. But like what I would say is stop spending so much time getting affiliate money for your fucking peptides and start getting affiliate pay from like lab work companies. There's so many companies out there that don't have as many people representing them. And that's an easy way that if you're working with other people and stuff like that, or just every say six labs that you get, you're pretty much getting one for free. So that's um that's just something to consider, just a complete like separate note here for the people who are starting this out. Now, you you coach, um, you talked about coaching people who work like uh shift nurses in the ICU. So it's uh it's very heavily like circadian disrupt and uh on top of a lot of like what I would say is extreme physiological stress. So you talked about the light timing with these people, melatonin strategies, and also training sequence. But like when the labs and the biofeedback are consistently dysregulated because we have a night shift client, so it's very hard to make those readings. How do you sequence fixing the circadian biology versus the downstream hormono and gut issues when they're actively feeding off each other?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:01

Yeah, you're not gonna fix it if they're actively on nights, you're you're just trying to offset it. You're never gonna fix, like you can't go, it's your sleep. It's like the central clockmaker of everything on the whole body. There's there's no you can offset things to the best of your ability, but you're never gonna fix it.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:18

Yeah. Which I think is a great thing to say, especially hearing from someone who is very involved in a functional health space because we are so used to talking about, oh, we can fix everything with the upstream, just go upstream and everything. I'm like, motherfucker, like that's not everything upstream. Shut the fuck up.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:33

Yeah, yeah. You can't, you can't, you can attenuate, you can't fix. So, with like how can we offset it? Obviously, trying to filter out some blue lights, trying to support sleep the best we can between habits and maybe some supplementation or medication. On days that we come off nights and can work day shift, we maybe try to catch up on our sleep. We try to get into a good rhythm right away. Uh, we can play around with some nutrient timing in the evenings to help like or evenings before bed to help with sleep quality and maybe time to sleep, but there's there's really only so much you can do. As far as the downstream effects, again, you're kind of fighting an uphill battle. And it actually kind of circles back to a conversation you and I had earlier, where you just have to have the realistic conversation with your client in front of you. Like, hey, these are what your goals are. Here's kind of where this bottleneck is in terms of your career. Just be realistic about what the maybe limited outcomes would be.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's good. I've played a route a lot a lot with certain compounds like SR9009 and DSIP to sort of like try to reset your circadian biology as fast as possible. And I got very good results out of this, like especially SR9. It's very useful for like um, you know, jet lag and things like that. But I it's just it's just managing it. This is not something that we can actually fix, unfortunately. Now, you've you've you've had certain clients, and I'm I'm very interested in your response here, because um, like you mentioned certain clients who are they're gaining weight, they're putting on muscle, their training is moving up progressively, but they're still showing a lot of signs that their recovery is not where it needs to be. So they get systemic fatigue, they get brain fog, and sometimes even worse indigestion. So your answer to this problem was less volume, not not touching the food per se. So for the analytically wired client who is already very convinced that just having more data is gonna solve the problem, like how do you get them to accept that the system is literally telling them to just back the fuck off a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:36

Uh yeah, I I just am kind of harsh about it. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:42

Um you can you can be as honest as possible because this person is literally me. I'm gonna tell you later, but this is uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:48

Yeah. So like if you're a client of mine and you're and like you're asking all these questions, I'm happy to answer questions, but it's not gonna be as in-depth as if like it was like a mentoring call or something like that. Like I'm not gonna send you PubMeds. But the way I always explain things is the way that we we would teach stress. I used to teach a strength and conditioning course or help teach it. And the way we would teach stress was we would talk about it in terms of like those big Gatorade buckets that are on the NFL sideline. So if if that big bucket is your stress tolerance and that little spigot at the bottom is how quick you can recover and dissipate stress, we have everything getting poured in the top. Your body can't differentiate between different kinds of stress, it just no stress. So fight with your girlfriend gets poured in. You know, you're you get fired, that gets poured in. Your training, that's a stressor. The drugs you're using, that's a stressor. Your poor sleep is a stressor. All these things are stressors.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:44

Even like even the recovery tools are also stressors. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:48

Sometimes but even like you stress matters, positive stress. Like I a good example is I work. I work a ton. I enjoy what I do. Like I'm not dreading doing it, but I still work a ton. I'm very grateful for what I do. But that is a cumulative stressor as well. So don't think of stress just as in like, oh, I'm anxious about a meeting. I mean, it's it's everything. So if I start seeing poor recovery, it's usually we're being too greedy about what the stress additions have been. And that can be the food burden, it can be the drug burden, it can be training, it can be a whole number of things. Uh there's only a certain amount of things that we can control. And if your client's not willing to work on any stress management techniques, then maybe we just have to pull back what we can pull back on. And I think training volume in and of itself, for hypertrophy goals at least, you can get away with a lot lower volume than a lot of people think. I think you could do like eight sets per bucket.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:47

Like, are you are you ramping up intensity to account for the lack of volume, or are you still maintaining like say two R AR?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:53

No, so every training plan I write for hypertrophy, unless you specifically ask me for it, is to zero R AR every every single set, every single time.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:01

And that's like that's like, are we going for that like grinder rep at the end where there is some like overcompensation of like other muscles?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:08

No, so I I say zero IRR is to mechanical breakdown. So if you execute a good technically sound rep, the set's over.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:17

Okay, good. I love it. That's that's what I do because I'm retarded, I don't know how to forecast the future of how many reps I have in the tank.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like and on the back end of stress, I don't really think that like a five rep versus an eight rep or one IR versus zero IR, I don't think it's an actually meaningful amount of difference in terms of recovery demands. I think that gets like really, really overblown. But Really?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:44

Yeah, I do. Lifting weights is not that fucking hard, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:47

Like Are you talking like the last, like, the last like grinder rep, you you think that the physiological cost is actually worth it? So is that what you're saying? Like it's it's worth going to that last rep because we are not doing like three-hour marathon zone three cardio sessions. We are just fucking lifting for 20 seconds at a time.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:04

Bodybuilders bitch more about fatigue to me that and they're training four times a week. Then I at one point I was working for a team USA weightlifting. Some of our athletes would train 20 times in a calendar week.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:16

Yeah, it's insane.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:18

No one ever complained about fatigue. I think we have done this like mental masturbation about fatigue management in the hypertrophy space that is so unnecessary. But again, it is part of a stressor and it's one of the ones that we can control. It's really kind of the only meaningful one we control aside drugs and nutrition. So I'll pull back on training and hopefully it helps people with sleeping.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:41

And that's gonna probably move the needle a lot more in terms of recovery than most other things. I will find those specifically with guys that are getting heavy. If their fatigue starts to get really bad and recovery starts to get bad out of nowhere, I start asking a lot about are you snoring? Because if you're a guy and you're over 220 pounds and And you are tired a lot, get checked for sleep apnea.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:04

It just blows my mind that people aren't just by default, hey, I'm going into bodybuilding, buy a sleep app. Like that's that's that's how I approach it because I started having sleep apnea when I went from like 145 to 170 already.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:16

Yeah. Yeah. Um and you can get one on get used one on Facebook. It's pretty cheap. That's what I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:21

Yeah, yeah. No, the people are like, man, you need to go get the study and all this shit. I'm like, just talk to me. We'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:26

Yeah. Yeah. You can get the study and wait eight months for your prescript to come through, or you can just go buy one on Facebook today and yeah, you pay$400 rather than$200, but I don't have to wait eight months of suffering.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:37

Plus, plus, just like there are those services for like getting your disability parking tag, getting your fucking, you know, emotional support animal, there are services for sleep apnea. Just just use Google. But like when I'm when I'm looking at my phase here, the previous growth phase that I did, I doubled my volume. So I went from doing around 10 sets per body part to doing about 20. I did what Tom did, right? So my growth was substantially better, like ridiculously better. I swallowed that other motherfucker up. And I used about 300 milligrams less than the previous push. But I still had sleep disturbances starting around week 14. There's something that is still causing me to have sleep disturbances around week 14 and just moving on. So I'm thinking the only options that we have, which is what you alluded to, are you can increase your recovery capacity or you can reduce the stressors. There's, or you can do a little bit of both, but you can't, there's no compound that you can add. There's no stressor that you can add that reduces stress. So, so like my my approach here was okay, I'm gonna increase my recovery capacity by doing red light therapy twice uh twice a week. I'm gonna be doing uh zone two cardio twice a week. Yeah, dude, I see it. I'm gonna be doing zone two cardio twice a week and I do hit cardio after every training session. So when I when I ran this to a few people, they're like, you're not gonna have any rest days. I'm like, bro, 30 minutes of zone two cardio shouldn't really be that demanding. If it is that demanding, it's a sign that you really fucking needed. So I am I am thinking about running that on my rest day and not having technically any rest days per se. Um and then on my training volume, I just I still have around 25 sets per session, but I'm not doing like the majority of that in the large muscles. I'm doing the majority of that in things like abs and arms and stuff like that, because I want to bring up those two. Do you think that's um that's a reasonable approach to dealing with the problem of like you always crash around week 14, regardless of like the dose?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:25

Yeah, I'd be really curious about like what the actual cause of that is. When you get when you get further into your cycle, do you start using any PDE5 inhibitors?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

So not really. I mean, I I have I have like Cialis in place like from the beginning, but just because I run a year around, but there's I don't ramp up the dose or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:44

Yeah, because um PDE 5 inhibitors can cause uh turbinate hypertrophy, actually, like in the nose. So I'm I'm wondering if you know maybe there's some like turbinate inflammation that you're getting around week five.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:59

My inflammation markers are very, very low.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:02

Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting. I mean I also don't think like if you have an issue with zone two, it's a it's a screaming message that you should be doing more zone two.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:14

And and I'm running SLU. Like there's I I can fucking I can run and type emails at the same time. It's it's boring.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:21

There's there's no way that it's gonna cause any meaningful amount of of fatigue.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:26

Yeah. I just the the only thing that I found is like, hey, you are autistic, you have ADHD, you have an actual disability, and like like my recovery capacity is not as good as other people's. Like I I get overstimulated by light, by sound, by talking, by studying. So like all of those things add a lot of stress. Like I can get to the end of a working day and I am wiped out. Like I am falling asleep at 7 p.m., which is ridiculous. So I know that my regular life, because of business, is already like demanding a lot from me. So it's just like to me, it seems like it's a choice between, hey, how much do you want to pour into bodybuilding? How much do you want to pour into your business? Because if you want to crank up bodybuilding, welcome to brain fog, welcome to not having libido 100% all times, welcome to having sleep problems and just having to troubleshoot shit every single week. You know, it's just cost of doing business, so to speak.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:14

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:15

Now, you've uh you've talked about something that I like a lot, uh beta blockers, and I've I've leveraged them. I brought them to the shooting world because people didn't know that you could leverage these things. So, like you you talked about uh the anxiety heart rate to use an abivolal, and then you also used propanolol, which is one of my favorites during peak week, but you used it for competitors who are holding water due to stress rather than the diet, right? And then it solved the problem without having to resort to a diuretic. What's your clinical reasoning here for when the sympathetic overdrive or specifically with propanolol, the dopaminergic overactivation, becomes the primary variable to manage in PrEP? And how do you think that interacts with the mitochondrial stack that's already in play if that's there?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:54

Yeah. I mean, you can tell certain people, like uh they just start getting really neurotic. They start asking you, do I look okay? Do you think I'm ready? Does this, that the other? And it starts to become like every day where they're asking you to like more or less uh be their confidence, which obviously at some point with coaching, we have to do that. That's not like the the big end of the world thing. Um, but if it starts to become a really constant thing and they're oh, I'm having trouble with sleep, I'm really anxious, usually they'll they'll just tell you that. And the reason I like propanololol is just because it's kind of in and out. Uh it doesn't it's not like it's something that you're gonna take and feel for yeah, it's like four hours. Whereas like, yeah, but if you take like a trazodone or something to go to bed, you might feel sedated the next day. So I like propanolol to help people just like manage their day-to-day anxiety, really end or really in the end of peak week. Um, because there's real there's only so much we can do. If I just keep telling you to calm down, it's gonna make you spaz out more. There's no amount of therapy you can do in one week to help with that. There's like taking an SSRI at that point and be really stupid. So propanolol seems like a really good fit. To just help you get through the day without being so stressed. And when you're less stressed, you're gonna be able to peak a lot better for a bodybuilding show. You're not gonna hold on to fluids as much. You're not gonna get on stage and be like shaky and nervous. So I I really like that. How it interacts with mitochondria. Usually at that point in the end of prep, ideally, you are kind of off all those things that are stimulating. Um, I like to pull anything that could be stimulating, like 10 days out. So that way we are doing our best to shift more into a parasympathetic state to help with sleep, to help with recovery, because it just makes your look a lot better.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:37

Dude, what a great answer. I leverage proprenolol as the only thing that helps me sleep when I'm taking trend. It's uh it's very good. But then I use XR so that I get like the about eight hours or so of uh good restful sleep. One thing that you also mentioned was that dysbiosis can actually create a dysfunction at the androgen receptor itself, not just a hormone clearance. And so this is something that I have applied in my life that I just like went through a different type of reasoning, but I arrive at the same spot as like, hey, it's good to run a gut cleanup phase before starting a growth phase because you've you've talked about people like clearing up cybo and then they suddenly build 10 pounds of muscle just out of fucking nowhere. So for a client that has plateaued, despite having a very solid protocol, how do you identify the absorption and the receptor sensibility of as like the missing variable and like what the and and what the intervention actually does for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:24

Yeah. So I mean, usually the way that we kind of come to that is there's been some other signs that there's some GI distress or GI issue. So there's there's things like skin issues, there's energy problems, maybe we have lower abdominal bloating, maybe we have reflux, maybe we have poor pumps despite being insulin sensitive. There's usually something that will yield me to probe for a GI map. And it's not like I'll go into it with the assumption that, like, oh, it's the GI or the gut androgen receptor axis. That's the one thing. That's a silver bullet. Usually it's not that. Uh again, that's really not something we could br realistically tease out in our clients, but likely what it's a combination of is now that we've fixed gut, thyroid health is better, nutrient absorption is better, androgen function is better. Um, I have a lecture even on the gut muscle axis. There's a bi-directional communication between muscle tissue and the gut. So maybe we're getting better nutrient or rather signaling in the muscle as well. So we're kind of getting uh a host of factors, and I think the androgen receptor part is just a component of it. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:35

Okay, okay, dude, that's very good. And I have one last question here for us before I let you go. You you build true coach at a time, right? Like um, you you you you built it because you saw that coaches were chasing a lot of these advanced peptide protocols while not knowing what like a little protein, a little B was like right, like your model is built on still being on the rent on the trenches with a full roster. So when you're when you're developing a coach, what's the like one conceptual shift, not not a tactic or a protocol itself, but like that's going to separate someone who keeps the clients long term from someone who just keeps on that churning rate nonstop?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:11

Yeah. Uh the biggest thing I can say, the biggest concept is it's okay to not know everything. Love it. So if the I'll tell people exactly how I learned how to do stuff. I would reach a client that would have an issue and I didn't know how to fix it, and then I would pay someone to teach me how to fix the issue. Yeah, I do the same thing, bro. There were many months when I was a young coach that like very much. Yeah, that like I would spend five times the amount that that person paid me that month on one hour of time with someone to help me with their problem. So the the humility of understanding you don't know everything, I think is big, and that it's okay to ask for help, and that all the coaches you admire have asked for help along the way and probably still ask for help. I have a group chat with a couple of my really good friends that are all in the coaching industry, and we just bounce ideas off each other. We'll send progress photos of like clients and say, Hey, here's what I'm thinking. What do you guys think? There's a lot of collaboration at the top. So don't think you need to be isolated in some silo where you work by yourself and you can't reach out for help and you just need to figure it out on.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:19

Dude, what a fantastic answer. I love that so much. This is going to be a wrap for another episode of the Opticast. Guys, if this conversation did what it was supposed to do, you're already walking away thinking differently about at least one thing, whether that's how you look at your gut health, how you're sequencing your mitochondrial stack, or just the realization that most problems you've been trying to solve at the protocol level actually live somewhere upstream that no one looked at yet. So Mike is one of those rare people in this industry who makes you feel like you've been thinking about the wrong like altitude of things, so to speak. And that's exactly the type of conversation I want to keep bringing to you. No fluff, no need for motivation or surface take up, just surface level takes here. Uh, we just want people who have actually done the work, built the systems, and can show you the reasoning behind every decision they make. So if you've got value from this episode, share with one person in your life who's smart enough to appreciate this combo. And also leave a review, subscribe, whatever you're listening, and make sure you're following along on the social so you don't miss what's coming. Because here's what I'll tell you. We're just getting fucking started, guys. Like every single Friday, there's a new episode that's dropping with another conversation at this exact level. The guests we have lined up are going to challenge how you think about optimization, physiology, coaching, and what it actually means to build a system that works for a real human in a real life Friday, every week, no exceptions. I'll see you then.