Meant to Move Episode #22
Summary:
In this episode of the Meant to Move podcast, host Vanessa Leone engages with Luke and Zoe from Muscle Nerds to explore the multifaceted world of strength training and fitness education. They discuss the definition of strength training, the importance of context in training, and the common misconceptions surrounding health and fitness. The conversation delves into the significance of specificity in training, the impact of personal experiences on training perspectives, and the balance between aesthetic goals and functional strength. They also touch on the importance of movement therapy and the need for a balanced training program that caters to individual needs.
Transcript:
Vanessa Leone (00:00)
Hello, Luke and Zoe, Muscle Nerds, welcome to Meant to Move.
Luke & Zoe (00:07)
Thank you. He’s sitting there and smile. He says thank you as well. I like she doesn’t get on many podcasts, especially with me. this is probably the second or third one we’ve ever done together.
Vanessa Leone (00:13)
Well, I think that together is an interesting dynamic because I love perspective. Like I love different perspectives, and I think that fitness industry people, and if you’re a consumer of fitness industry products like trainers and classes and things like that, what happens is that we live in bubbles. Correct. And I don’t want to be that.
Zoe (00:45)
Veto chambers.
Vanessa Leone (00:51)
I don’t want to be that person at all. And I know that you guys are on the same…
Luke & Zoe (00:56)
Yeah, and Luke and I are also polar opposite in almost everything. Opposites attract. Yeah, quite true.
Vanessa Leone (01:02)
This is perfect. This is, this is perfect. So I’m going to start really broad, really open and you can take it wherever you want to go. But my first question for you guys is what is strength training?
Luke & Zoe (01:16)
Leman, that’s a you question. No, you go for it. No, you do it. You go for it. Don’t do that. Go. You’re the one with the history in it. That’s such a weird question. Yeah, I mean, we doing like just in a general sense or are we getting like…
Vanessa Leone (01:21)
It is, it is a weird question, right?
So here’s what I hear, right? So you’re listening to Diary of a CEO, you’re listening to Huberman, you’re listening to Joe Rogan, and now all of these health people are coming up. And you know what they tell everybody to do? Strength training. What the fuck is, like, what are we talking about, guys? Like, what are yeah.
Luke(01:51)
Okay. Yeah. Okay. now
let’s, yeah, a little bit of clarification and that we’re good. this is, it’s, it tends to be a problem too, because, like even taking out the podcast, you, you having some health issues, you go to a doctor, they go, need to exercise. What does that mean? Like, what do I do? You need to eat better. What does that mean? There’s no, there’s no real clarification on what that means. So if we want to look at the, like just the modality of strength training, we’re applying tension to a muscle. So that could be.
And if you want to like a big broad term, you can apply attention to a muscle just by squeezing a muscle. Like that’s nothing wrong with that. Just if you are someone who can’t train and you just sit here and just do little like most muscular pose at your desk, that essentially is strength training, but it’s limited because there’s no way to scale that up. So this is why we go to the gym because we go to the gym. We’ve got the barbells and the dumbbells, the cables and the fancy machines. And we have a clear path of creating.
Attention, getting an adaptation, creating more tension. But at the end of the day, strength training is using some type of implement to load a muscle with tension that creates a response in the body, a stimulus that creates an adaptation for the muscle to get stronger or bigger or more functional, depending on what you’re doing.
Vanessa Leone (03:12)
That’s a great answer. That was just so clear.
Luke & Zoe (03:15)
I’ll reach out for that myself. Why is the question like, what is health? Everyone bangs on about like, you gotta be healthy. That’s not healthy. Okay, but define what health is and people have a really hard time in consensus on what that is. But that was very clear cut on what strength is in that context of what you asked. Because it can get really muddy. And because the industry, when I got into the industry, it wasn’t cool. It was a…
And we’re talking a few decades ago. So it’s you, want to be a personal trainer or a strength coach and your parents would disown you for that. They’re like, this is not a, this is not a valid career choice. Now it’s the cool thing to do. So it’s gotten super saturated with people who don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t do continuing education. get a basic cert three, cert four, and then they know just enough to be dangerous. And then they go out and they’re trying to teach people how to do movements and then how to apply a load and how to do it safely and then how to progress. So.
It can’t get muddy. reminds me of when Zoe and I met and Zoe was doing boot camps. was teaching boot camps and doing personal training and working like 400 hours a week, which doesn’t mathematically add up, but she somehow made it work out. Still do. Yeah. Nothing’s changed. But I was talking to her about it. I said, well, tell me about your boot camp. She goes, we have a Tabata class and it’s 45 minutes. And I went, what’s a Tabata class? Cause a Tabata
If you do it correctly, you got one maybe two if you put enough rest in between them and you’re done no. No, we just do 20 on 10 off and we just do like push-ups and sit-ups and do it. That’s not that’s not Tabata. So in a lot of cases People will throw around terms and throw around strength training us, but they may not actually be talking about strength training Is yeah, there’s two things
Vanessa Leone (04:58)
Yep. Yep. For sure.
Luke & Zoe (05:06)
that kind of come to mind with that off the back end of that is the first is you’ve got people who do what they believe to be resistance training, but it’s just what you say is that it’s cardio with weights. Like you’re just doing, you’re not doing enough to elicit the adaptations you think you want from strength training. And then the second thing is this, the seed principle. when it comes to strength training within that seed principle, which is specific adaptation to impose demand, where does strength training sit? Like what is
that specific adaptation or the imposed demand to elicit this specific strength. in order to elicit an adaptation, you have to do a specific, highly specific stimulus to do that. if we look at the realm of strength training and now we also have to have the conversation of exercise versus training, because that’s another one. People go, I go to the gym. What do you do? I exercise. Okay.
But when I’m talking to a client, I’m like, we don’t exercise. We train because you came to me, we asked for three goals. You gave me three highly specific goals. It’s my job to create a program and structure to make a blueprint to get you there via like standardized protocols or whatever’s going to work in the situation. So a lot of, think a lot of people get it wrong from the client perspective, but it’s also the trainer perspective too. Cause I know I’ve been at gyms and I’ve seen six.
people in a row with a coach doing the exact same workout and they’re all completely different. I remember being in Perth and I saw, I was training, and I was just watching the trainers as you do and the little old lady doing box jumps. She had to be like 800 years old. like, she does not need to, what specific thing is she going to get out of a box jump that she needs when she leaves this gym? Nothing.
Then there was a little old man who came and same thing. Then there was like probably 120 kilo girl that walked in doing box jumps. I’m okay, I’m seeing a pattern here. You have no idea what you’re doing and everybody’s does the same shit, whether it’s good or bad or productive or not. you know, so he gets the industry’s a really muddy place right now. And it has been for a while. We were looking, we were actually, and it was a Goodlife and we were waiting for one of our, the girl we were steadily.
the lady we were staying with in Perth, we were waiting for her to finish. So we were there for long enough to see enough clients go through this one trainer, just doing the same thing over and over, which is why, but then you had the same argument, sorry, you this, that you have the argument that you can make that especially with beginners, something is better than nothing. Is it at what point does it need to become specific? But something’s better than nothing unless it’s dangerous. Risk versus reward. know, the girl’s gonna blow a knee out.
I a degree. Yeah. Because it’s, think when you have that conversation around specificity, um, it removes, uh, some people might think, okay, well I can’t do this because it’s not specific enough, but it’s like, well, hold on. No. Like you probably should just get out and do something. Don’t, you know what I mean? They don’t want to get lost in the weeds. It’s like the start off, but that more advanced you get the most specific. Something’s better than nothing until it’s not. Yeah.
Vanessa Leone (08:18)
I think you hit some really interesting and excellent paradoxes, which is what muddies the water here for so many people, which I think is super important to kind of cover. a couple of episodes back, so I’ve had a little bit of theme over these last few episodes talking about programming and trying to understand how we get to where we are, how to progress, and…
I think for a lot of people, there’s a lot of programs, like you said, you had three different types of people doing maybe the same program, and we can argue whether that program is good, bad, or indifferent for that person. And there’s arguments to, for and against both, know what I mean? Doing something is better than nothing. yeah. When is doing something?
better than nothing, like what’s your opinion on that?
Luke & Zoe (09:18)
That actually hits a good point I just noted down that I wanted to mention. We mentioned like muddied water and I think the thing that makes that water clear is context, right? Like I’ve said this a few times, we held a seminar in Ireland, I think it was in 2016, and we held it the weekend after Luke presented at a symposium in Ireland. And John Meadows also spoke at that symposium. Actually, no, we held it before, Oh, anyway, it doesn’t matter, we had one.
And so John Meadows spoke, Luke spoke, bunch of people spoke. And then when we held our seminar, someone came up to me and said, what did you guys think about what John Meadows was saying? Cause it’s completely the opposite of what you guys were saying. And we were like, well, hold on a second. We’re coming from different contexts. Like Luke is teaching this from the context of longevity, how generalization.
Meadows was speaking specifically on how to put on as much muscle mass as humanly possible. And so neither was right or wrong, were contradictory at surface level, contradictory statements and, you know, stuff that they were teaching. But when you look at the context in which they were teaching it within, the waters become clear. I think that that might be something that we forget.
we may broad, not we, but like a lot of people make broad sweeping statements, thinking that that applies to everyone, but you, you’ve got to pull it back into the context in which you’re speaking it about. It’s, very, it’s very similar to like, if you watch American news media, which is, which is the most manipulative media on the face of the planet, no matter what they’re talking about, it’s like, they’ll take a 10 second snippet that makes someone look.
So horrible. But if you actually watch the full five minute video, you’re like, wait a minute, they took that out of context. So it’s like, if I said something and John said something and you didn’t hear the rest of the talk, they would go, well, you guys are saying two different things. I’m like, no, no, no, I’m talking about performance, health, longevity. He’s talking about bodybuilding. Those are two completely different, even though exercise and training and strength training is all in that same area.
We’re having two different, you’ve come in at two different points of the conversation. So of course they’re going to sound contradictory. It’s like, it’s like all the, the hypertrophy, everybody’s obsessed about hypertrophy right now. It’s all they want to talk about. It’s like, don’t do back squats because they don’t develop your legs for hypertrophy. They’re not specific enough. You need to do leg extension and you need to do special exercise for your quads. Okay. I’ve never seen anybody that could squat 300 kilos and ate a lot.
that didn’t grow massive fucking legs and huge glutes without having to do any hip thrusts or anything else. Okay, so the squat is not highly specific to any muscle type or any body part, but it is a good overall leg. To say you’re not gonna hyperach from that is ludicrous. Now, if we’re gonna have a conversation about just the quads or just the hamstrings or just the glutes,
Now we have, okay, now I’m going to agree with you, we have a completely different, the squats probably not the best thing for each of those independently. It’s probably better to isolate those things. I actually think you touched on something there. You said, know, like you and Meadows were saying completely different things, but if you heard the rest of the talk, you would understand. I think a prob, sorry. I think a problem is that people can still hear the entire talk.
And take what they want. what they want. And it’s like that critical thinking is kind of going. I was listening to a podcast a couple of days ago on like the future of AI and someone at the end of the podcast, it was like a round table. Someone asked, you know, what is your fear with it? And one of the guys answered and he said, it’s getting hard enough for people to distinguish fact from fiction, especially in the, within their own industry or their own set of expertise. He said, you know, he made a really good comment about
the difference between knowing a fact and understanding what that fact means. And I think that the understanding, because knowing and understanding are two different things. We’re seeing that now we can throw around facts that we’ve heard a million times, but not really truly understand what they actually mean. So yeah, I really liked that people can know a lot, but doesn’t necessarily mean they understand a lot.
So yeah, so there could be people that heard both talks and still listen to it through the bias or through the straw and just, yeah, it’s getting messy.
Vanessa Leone (13:52)
No, I think it’s great because this is what we started with when we first came in. It’s about perspective. It is about perspective and it’s about context. And we all come from, you know, our health and fitness and wellness journey, we all come with our own set of biases and experiences that give you this set of beliefs when it comes to movement. And I think the beautiful thing about
health and longevity and fitness and all of this kind of stuff. The beauty is the fact that there isn’t one answer. Like that to me is the really cool thing. So for someone who doesn’t want to do calisthenics and you know, I say in quotation marks, weird movements like I like to do. Oh my goodness, like go see you guys, you know what I mean? Like this, like I’m not the person for you. I’m not the right coach for you.
And vice versa as well. And it’s not to say that I would never learn anything from you, which is where I think the challenge and the problem lies, is that when we’re talking about something as general, because it really is as general as strength training, I just wish that we could go into a conversation with you guys and be like…
What did I really like about what they said about strength training? Not like, my God, they said this thing about strength training and that’s wrong and that’s blah.
Luke & Zoe (15:23)
Love that emotion though, right? There’s a lot of people that have got, they just thrive off conflict. People just want something to be mad about. you know, in our industry is no different. You know, here’s the thing, like, in the early start of my career, I had,
coaches that were just into the strength training, performance training, and they used to make fun of me because I got into, you know, portal, gymnastic bodies, gold medal bodies. I was doing the calisthenics stuff. did a little bit of Cross Fit for a time. did my weight lifting. did power lifting. I did bodybuilding. They’re like, you’re never going to get good at anything. I’m like, look, I’ve been good enough at all the competitions I’ve done. I’ve won a lot of things. Then I got bored. I got ADHD. I got bored and I went to something else.
But you know, it’s gonna pay off at some point because if somebody comes to me and wants handstand progressions and wants to solidify that, I know how to integrate strength training and I know handstand progressions. If somebody wants to do the splits, I can give them that while also giving them a triple bodyweight back squat. So it’s like, the problem is these biases that people have, they think that their way of training is the only way and it’s the best way. If you’re a powerlifter, you think everybody needs to powerlift. If you’re a bodybuilder, everybody needs to body build. I’m like, hmm, but.
You don’t have to, it doesn’t have to be this or that. Why can’t you do a lot of different stuff together? And that that’s okay. And for general population, that’s probably the best way to train them is use powerlifting when it’s appropriate, use gymnastics when it’s appropriate, when it’s going to solve a problem, use what’s going to solve the problem and stop trying to solve the problem with a sledgehammer, which is what people try to do. There’s also a couple of instances over the years where I’ve really learned that
people’s experience that seems to trump everything. So the first time it happened was throughout like the COVID era. And I remember having like a ton of conversations with a ton of different people on my DMs. And I kind of drew to the consensus that people who were like for the vaccine had had someone that had been, you know, had lost someone to COVID or had seen vaccines work or whatever reason.
And there’s just nothing in the world that could convince them that it was a bad, a potential bad idea. And then the inverse was also true. People that were so against it, like we had a member at our gym, his dad and his sister both had issues immediately upon getting the vaccine. There’s nothing in the world that could convince him that they were safe, like nothing. And we’re seeing that now that our social media is starting to grow a little bit and we’re reaching outside of our network.
we’re seeing the same thing come through with tons of comments. It’s like, no one believes anything if it wasn’t true to their experience. Like a common one is the fact that Luke started training when he was eight. The amount of people who are like, there’s no way I don’t believe that for a second. And it’s like, okay, well, that might be your truth for you. Like you can’t fathom having started training at eight, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no one in the world that did that. I mean, it’s perfectly okay for gymnasts to start when they’re five or, you know,
But exactly, ballet dances like they select kids in China for national team at five or six years of age. That’s when they go and they start looking at things like the distance between the middle of their palm to their end of their pinky. Are they going to be able to hold a hook grip? What’s the distance between their ankle and their foot? They look at all this crazy stuff, their limb links and all that. And then they go, OK, they start selection there and they start training at like six to eight. So how is it so weird to think that somebody didn’t start?
training when they were young. don’t know. I that’s also just one example, but we see it time and time again is that they are drawing from their own experiences and struggle to believe that anything outside of that could be true. and it’s, it’s a lot of people and especially a lot of coaches, mean, people in the world, not just specific to the coaching industry, but I just unable to like intellect outside of their experience or intellect outside of emotion. EQ is.
I don’t know if it’s getting low or up up. Zoe has developed, we found that she has this neat little gift that we didn’t know she had. She can watch a video of me lecturing and find the perfect start and end time to cut a segment, which has no context if you weren’t in the conversation and it gets everybody just absolutely vapid. angry. And what’s funny is, like, if I were to watch a video, like a 15 second clip and somebody said something and I was like,
That doesn’t sound right. I would go in the comments and go, Hey, can you clarify this? And I would ask more questions, but that’s not what they do. They go, you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about this and that and the other. then they put their own anecdotes in there. What you would do is you would go away and you would research. that’s kind of how I see, that’s how I see social media as it stands. It’s kind of like, we’re just making some awareness. It’s not a place to go.
to do deep fucking learning, which people are like, well, what do you explain this in and explain that and, you know, teach me this. And it’s like, no, no, no, no. Like we’ve made you aware of it. Go and be, go and have autonomy, like go and go and have a little bit of self fucking drive. This is what I know about your person. This is what I miss that nobody uses Facebook anymore. And I know it’s for us old people, the young people don’t use Facebook.
but it’s so much easier to explain things on Facebook than to try to explain things on TikTok or Instagram. So it’s like, if we’re going to have a conversation, let’s move it over to Facebook where we can actually talk because you can’t have these discussions on something with a 60 second clip and a limited word count on the copy.
Vanessa Leone (20:54)
Yeah. No, I appreciate all of that. And I think it’s important for people, you know, to understand that people will go to your social media posts, this podcast, and hopefully they’ve listened to the whole thing and they understand the nuance of like, okay, yeah, I, it’s, I want to have an open mind and I’m going to go into some of those and ask my own questions off the back of that. What are you seeing?
that are really big misconceptions or confusion points that people have when it comes to, let’s keep it general, training for health and longevity, or just, you know, kind of, I just want to be fit for life kind of people. What are some of those misconceptions?
Luke & Zoe (21:58)
first thing that comes to mind, and I would have to really sit and gather my thoughts to make sure I don’t say anything stupid, but the first thing that comes to mind is probably because of social media, I don’t know. I mean, it’s probably a lizard part of our brain as well, but the choices that people choose in their training and nutrition stem from physical appearances instead of health metrics.
So I don’t know if enough people are measuring things like blood pressure, resting heart rate, blood sugar levels or blood sugar management. I know there’s a lot of poo-pooing about there about blood sugar stuff. I don’t know if people are running regular lab works. Okay. And then I also don’t know, even those that are, I’m unsure whether enough people know what the SID principle, what things to do to choose to change things that are trending in the wrong direction. Okay. My blood pressure is going up. What training do I now need to do? How many people know how to do that?
I mean, we’ve got an online course about what to do. But do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t know whether you could say that that’s a misconception, but I do think people choose training methods for physique. Fair enough. Great. But I do wonder if there’s a point of like those diminishing returns for longevity. think you bring up a good point about the misconception that looking good externally means that you look good internally.
Vanessa Leone (22:50)
Excellent.
That’s a great point.
Luke & Zoe (23:18)
So, especially with younger guys and younger women, they go online, they see somebody who has this great body, they can lift a whole lot of weight, and they think, I wanna look like that, but they don’t know all the gear that they’re using. They don’t understand, like this person really doesn’t have a normal job, and they can sleep and eat and poop and train as much as they want. They probably have a bunch of coaches that probably take a shit ton of steroids, peptides, whatever. C-Pet machine. Yeah, yeah. So it’s like they don’t realize that
there’s a cost of doing business to look like that. And I work with a lot of them. I work with a lot of these guys that are there at the pro level that they’re all jacked up and I have to look at their labs and I’m going, holy fuck the audio and the video don’t match here because you look great, but holy crap, your bloods are absolutely atrocious. And they, I think people need to be more transparent about that of, Hey, yeah.
I’ve chosen to do this even though it could kill me even though I might die younger. Hey, look at me I’m gonna have it I’m gonna be big in my casket and People need to be way more transparent about how fucked up they are from what they’ve been doing and even like a lot of power lifters I’ve worked with in the past You see them, you know, you see them dead lifting 400 kilos and benching 240
and they act like they feel great. And then I’m with them doing manual therapy and they try to stand up and they can’t stand up without warming their back up. And they’re like, my back is in constant pain. I’ve got to use a CPAP machine because I can’t sleep. I’m borderline diabetic. I’m like, holy shit, but there’s no transparency to any of that stuff. And that comes back to the conversation about what is health then.
Vanessa Leone (25:00)
That’s a great segue. Honestly.
Luke & Zoe (25:03)
Like what does longevity and health mean? Quality of life for as long as you can. is that ease of movement? Quality of life, trying to age gracefully. They’ll say, is health? it the absence of disease? But I would say, yeah, well, you got to look at the absence of disease and the prevention of progressing towards disease as much as humanly possible and trying to, it’s hard to say anti-aging.
because there’s no real, we’re all gonna age. You can’t anti-age, it’s just kind of slowing it down as much as possible. And I think keeping your joints healthy, like all of that stuff, do you wanna be, like I remember, you you look at your grandparents, like they were in a generation that didn’t really do anything. They worked hard and they didn’t, they worked hard and they rested hard. They didn’t really do anything. They didn’t go to the gym. They weren’t very active. And they were all crippled by the time they were in their 60s. It’s like, okay,
Is health not being crippled in your 60s? Is health not being on 15 different medications when you’re in your 50s and 60s? So to me, that’s what health is. If I’m planning to try to live to my 80s, 90s, I wanna still be living, not just waiting to die. And I guess knowing that comes off the back end of knowing what contributing factors are to reducing risk of stuff like that and then doing the opposite.
like reducing risk as much as possible. And there’s a ton of literature out there that shows reduce risk, reduce risk. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s such a deep topic to talk about.
Vanessa Leone (26:37)
I know I love it. love the direction that this has gone. It’s just very cool. I had a very visceral memory pop up for me when you’re talking about longevity and you know, I think we can all have like a picture or a memory of our grandparents and what, what they were like at certain stages. And I, and I vividly, I have two very, very separate memories of my grandparents. My grandfather was, you know, ex farmer.
He was a mechanic. He had this huge garden. He was always out in the garden. He was always active, absolutely completely active. And he was like unbreakable. The man would like get things out of the oven with no gloves. You know what I mean? Like he was mad. was, yeah. But he smoked a packet of cigarettes every two days and he died of emphysema. And he was very sick and you know,
you look at one to the other and he was active until he was like, not active, like he couldn’t do anything. Do you know what I mean? And then his wife and my grandmother, same thing, active garden, like walking every day. She would do all of the housework. She would do gardening. She would lift things. She was constantly cooking. I have memories of me just taking trays of food to the neighbours all the time. And
She fell. She fell. And as soon as she fell, she stopped walking. And as soon as she stopped walking, her onset of dementia, sorry, Alzheimer’s was so incredibly fast. Like it was night and day. And then she lived for 10 years and she didn’t know who anybody was. And that’s like, that’s what we’re facing when you guys are talking about
health and longevity. And I look at my grandfather when it came to strength, if you think about just general strength, he had like engines of cars that he was working on and heavy tools that he was picking up in his seventies. And he didn’t blink an eyelid. Like he was just wiry strong, right? It’d be super interesting to see like what he could bench, right? But yeah, for sure. But like we don’t.
Luke & Zoe (28:58)
Yeah. Great outing to everybody.
Vanessa Leone (29:04)
People don’t, it’s almost like we don’t measure strength with those metrics anymore because we don’t, like that’s not what we do. So do we have to look at health and longevity differently now? Because what was happening for our grandparents is completely different than what’s happening for us.
Luke & Zoe (29:25)
Sorry, just didn’t know if you were going dive into something. Well, I’ve got a similar story with the fall of my grandmother. Same thing happened to her. older, not active at all, for some reason decided to go try to play tennis with my cousin, fell down, broke her hip. And same thing, Alzheimer’s boom, like almost immediately. And I can remember before we finally had to put her in a home because no one could take care of her. I remember she, it was so bad.
that I walked in and she thought I was my uncle and she was petting a dog that wasn’t there. Like it was freaky. It was freaky. And she lived, yeah, she lived another five or six years like that. But it’s crazy. Like an injury like that. that’s when I talked to our students about older populations, it’s not a nut. You can’t just think strength training. Like strength training is the easy part. You can’t just work out on machines. You can’t just do the normal stuff.
because the thing that’s gonna affect people that are older is the ability to stop, to decelerate and stop and not fall down. So if they stumble and they put their leg out and they don’t have the centric breaking force for that, they’re gonna go down. And if they break their hip, they’re likely to either die in the hospital. What was it, like a 50 or 60 %? I think if you fall and break, if you’re over 60,
70. If you fall and break your hip, it’s 50 % chance you’ll be dead within the next 12 months. you break your hip and your arm, it’s like 70%. 75%. Yeah. So it’s like, now when we look at that, what is health and what is strength training? Well, it’s a lot of things. It’s not just how much can I lift on a bench press? It’s how much can I essentially stop? Can I change direction? Can I prevent a fall? Because that is the most dangerous thing. Disease withstanding for the elderly population is
falling and breaking your hip. And it’s quite common, people, people don’t think trainers don’t think about that when they’re training their clients. Like I’m adamant that middle age, we should be doing some low level ply metrics and learning how to decelerate those reactive forces. but you never see people doing that though. They’ll have people doing high level plyos. What’s there going to injure themselves on or there’s no, there’s no path. There’s no path to victory for this. Right. And people just think that strength training is all that you need to do, but no.
doing calisthenics and staying limber and staying mobile and having strength in those positions and having the ability to have reactive, like reaction to things, that’s really important. those are things that aren’t normally talked about because they’re not traditional weight training. And people are too obsessed about traditional weight training and just building muscle and just building strength. And we should be thinking about that and building function as well.
I actually had just written down to mention that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Luke teach in regards to plyometrics is like you first have to teach them how to Yeah, the problem with plyos isn’t the jumping is the landing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The problem is gravity. That’s the problem. I actually had a really similar conversation or brief conversation with my dad when I was home last week and about
Vanessa Leone (32:24)
A box jump isn’t ply metrics,
Yeah.
Luke & Zoe (32:37)
He’s like, it’s so funny. You look at people who they do everything right, they’re fit, they’re healthy, and then they have this health issue pop up. And then you see people who smoke and drink and they live forever or whatever it is. no, was one of his friends had had a stroke and then the doctor was just harping on to his friend about how bad alcohol is. It’s the worst thing you can do. You’ve got to cut it out, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, I have two, my dad’s really fit and healthy. And he said, I have two whiskeys a night before dinner and I’m fine.
And I just said to dad, was like, can’t look at things through a straw. Like you can’t look at one factor and think that that’s gonna determine an overall outcome. You have to look at everything in its entirety. And it’s just like, yeah, you have two whiskeys, but you also still hiking like four or five days a week. You still eat really well. He’s got great mental health. There’s so many pillars, I think, that you kind of have to try to optimize or get as high as you can.
to then feel like you can safely say, I’ve done what I can to reduce my risk. Um, as opposed to just being like, well, I strength train, but then you eat like shit, you sleep like shit, you have bad mental health or, know, the opposite to be true, but yeah, genetics are looking, genetics are a bitch. Genetics is a fickle bitch. You either won the genetic lottery and you can get away with shit or you didn’t. And even, even the focus, the, the pursuit of health and fitness.
doesn’t necessarily reduce all your risk, but it gives you better potential to reduce that risk. So it’s like, I was talking to somebody about a mentorship student the other day about the arguments of should we use really good form or should we let them slack off to good form? And I’m like, well,
The research says that good form isn’t necessarily going to reduce or eliminate your chances of getting injured. But if I were to bet a thousand dollars of which one would injure me faster lifting like shit or lifting really well, I’d probably bank on lifting like shit would injure you a lot faster. So you just have to choose your path and just hope that it’s helpful. also think like kind of coming back to that question you asked earlier about
misconceptions or something, or that conversation we had around that. I do feel like people put a lot of emphasis on what they look like and aren’t able to pay attention to how they feel. And I just think as humans, we’ve likely lost a ton of intuitive nature. Like, I mean, you look at animals and their intuition is phenomenal, right? I reckon we probably had something similar back in the day. And I just think people are so out of touch with their bodies that they do not know that they don’t feel great.
Vanessa Leone (35:21)
Yup.
Luke & Zoe (35:22)
You know, whatever that be, whatever that is, whether it’s constant bloating and gas that they’ve just pushed to the side, whether it’s constant fatigue, whatever. I just don’t know if people know how to tune in and kind of auto correct what they’re doing in their life to make them feel better, because they’ve never felt so great. They’ve never felt good enough to know that how they’re feeling is actually quite shit.
Vanessa Leone (35:42)
I think that that’s a highly excellent point because, and you’ve probably seen it too, nine times out of ten the people who come see you who have been, you know, untrained for a little while or have never trained really very much before, the first thing that they say to you is, I feel better. Like not, not, I look, I, I lift heavier, right? I this and that is,
I feel better. And it’s not even necessarily something that they can pinpoint. It’s, just that, that general feeling, which it circles back really, really nicely to this kind of strength training. Because what I would love for you guys to, to maybe talk about this last few minutes is that if you had, you know, the perfect kind of rainbow scenario.
for a female and for a male because it’ll look different, probably.
What do you think in Rainbow Land are the pillars, the cardio strength, are the other components that give you that I’m feeling better? I feel good. What is that?
Luke & Zoe (37:00)
Yeah. And you know, that’s another big argument in the industry. You know, I come from a polycom background where cardio was a no-no. just did lactate sprints and then lifted really heavy. So luckily I learned better later. So that’s not what we teach. Um, a lot of it, a lot of it goes to, again, back to just specificity of what people need. So that’s why having a coach is a really good idea because they can do assessments. They can look at metrics and go, okay, you need this more than you need this other thing. So.
For example, if you wanted this stock standard generalized approach, if you could live, we know lifting, people say it’s the most important thing. It is very important, but sometimes it’s not. But if everything was balanced and you just, you, everything was perfect and it was a unicorn, shitting rainbow coloured skittles or whatever, three to four days of lifting and three to three, three to four sessions of lifting, three to four sessions of cardio, nice and balanced, you would be pretty good.
Now, if it was in the unicorn and you were shifted one direction, you had high blood pressure, you had metabolic syndrome with high blood pressure, some of things, you might want to lean a little bit more on the cardio and a little bit less on the weight training. If you had great cardiovascular health, maybe you were someone who did a lot of cycling, you used triathlons and all you done is cardio. You do the metrics, you’re probably pretty fit. High VO2 max, low blood pressure, low resting heart rate, HRV’s great.
What you probably need is a lot more strength training and you’ll see this between men and women as well, because women, at least until they hit menopause are more often than not going to have lower blood pressure and most men are going to have a higher blood pressure. So the things we would do if you have those options of the spectrum is women should probably do more sprint work, more hip style intervals and a lot more strength training and like actual strength training, not body pump or, you know, dancing around with weights, actually doing traditional
weight training and more the men probably should do a lot more cardiovascular activity until they reduce the blood pressure. So it, for me, it’s really hard to give generals just because I work with specificity so much. But if people had an, like an equal kind of conditioning and weightlifting throughout the week, they could do that for a long time and be really, really good.
Vanessa Leone (39:22)
That’s the answer there, you know.
Like you said it again, it’s still about context. It’s hard to give generalisations, but I think that that’s cool. It’s a great answer. Sorry, Zoe, did you want to add to that?
Luke & Zoe (39:33)
Only really briefly because I haven’t, mean, I’ve had one client in the last 10 years. Like I very much kind of manage the back end of stuff. So Luke’s more equipped to answer that especially from dealing with a variety of people. I know from myself, like the last, I just, I graduated at the start of, I finished my degree at the start of this year. So I’ve been part-time studying the last eight years. I’ve been running muscle nerves. I’ve been managing the gym. It’s been a lot, right? And the thing that I had to,
focus on for myself were things that gave me energy and like not took it away. And I really, towards the end of last year, I had to get really strict with my sleep. I had to get really strict with my stress management and I had to really tidy up my diet because I truly do notice a difference when I, when I’m stressed, I just reach for shit because it’s what my body is just like, give me quick energy. And I really had to dial those two things and the biggest things that give me energy are sleep, stress, sorry, sleep when I eat.
really well. And then different types of training methods, like I can’t do any, couldn’t train like Luke, it would tank me. He’s very nervous system driven, right? Like you love power stuff, strength stuff. It’s be violent and aggressive and with some level of risk. If I tried to do anything similar, especially when I was like so deep in the hole that I’ve gotten myself in, it would drain me. Whereas I needed to do things that slowly
gave me energy throughout the day. And I think that’s something a lot of people battle with is that fatigue, lethargy? Lethargic, lethargy, right, okay, got it. And I think they deal with that and tiredness. And I think if you started to try and do things that counteracted that and whatever training style that is for you, I think that would make a huge difference in people’s outlook and people’s mental health. And then also people’s ability to do harder things that they need to do to get continue to get better.
That’s a good fucking answer.
Vanessa Leone (41:30)
I’m so glad that you said that, hey, because that’s your experience, Zoe, is so many people’s experience, you know, that maybe not studying, but put kids in that or put whatever, you know, all of that. Exactly. And I totally echo you on that. In 2019, I got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and I just, suffer with fatigue.
Luke & Zoe (41:32)
Thanks!
Yeah, I’m all good. Full-time job.
Vanessa Leone (41:58)
And I’ve always been on that like high performer. I’ll say yes to everything. Go, go, go. Like, and I probably trained like, yeah, like, Luke, like just nervous system. I want to do all the things that make it really risky and really hard and lots of power and all of that kind of stuff. And I just couldn’t do it. Like I couldn’t do it anymore. And when I allowed myself to slow down, it’s, it’s taken me five years, but now I can come back.
to do a little bit more of that other stuff. Now I can bring back some of that power training and not feel like I’m dying for three days. Like it’s so important to, yes, you have great answers from professionals like yourselves, but you know the answer in your body deep down. Like you, you know it consciously, subconsciously it’s there.
Luke & Zoe (42:50)
That’s the hard thing too, because like when you feel when you’re that much in the hole and you want to do all the things and then you get a coach and the coach is like, hold on, like we need to do these other things for a very long time because you’re you’ve dug the hole so deep. I have to give you a ladder and I’ve got to go find a ladder long enough so you can climb out of the hole. But people want results in 12 weeks. It’s like, no.
Like you need to focus on the stuff that’s gonna get you better over the next 12 months. We can’t even start the journey yet. Like we’re not even to the white belt level yet. We’ve got to get you prepared to even do this. And a lot of people want like instant results and they want to feel instantly better. I’m like, bro, you should have thought about that eight years ago when you started pummelling yourself. And it’s hard because people, you don’t have energy.
And you and somebody goes, Hey, you actually you need to you need to actually you need to train and you’re like, don’t have any energy. And it sounds so ridiculous to say if you would start exercising or doing training, it would give you more energy. And then you go, that doesn’t make sense. You want me to go and throttle myself or to do some output to feel better. I’m like, that’s how it works. doesn’t it doesn’t make sense. But that’s how it works. And I think the other thing is, when you kind of do get in the hole, which so many people are and like, I just want to point out like, I know,
all this stuff and I still did it to myself. Imagine people who don’t know how bad they’ve got it. But the thing that is, if you focus on you need to do things that give you energy with it and that is oftentimes eating more and doing less. And that’s so counterintuitive to what people want. They want fat loss, they want hypertrophy, you know, and it’s like, but you got to eat some more and you got to do some little bit less because we can’t just hit you with the hammer right now. And to get people on board with it is
very difficult, but sometimes it’s needed. Again, counterintuitive to what they want, but it’s what they need and it’s a hard sell for lot of people. When people are in that state, they’re also in a state of denial, which isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s they don’t, they tell you, well, I’m dieting, I’m eating 1200 calories. And I’m like, yeah, you’re doing that for a couple of days and then you’re eating 4,000 calories. So if we look at this globally, you’re actually eating too much.
So what we need to do is get you eating enough every day to stop the binging and the snacking and the final level. But it’s hard to have that conversation because they are convinced, like they would sell their soul on the fact that they’re eating 1200 calories and they’re doing exercise. But you’re not really, like you can’t look at this from an hour to hour perspective. You have to look at it from weeks and months thing of what you’ve done. And so we need to…
maybe do a little more chill out stuff and instead of just working out, try to work in and eat enough to prevent all the binging and all the, and all the perpetual cycle that you’ve put yourself in. It’s really hard to get people to, to buy into that. It’s really interesting what you just said there. It’s like, no, no, no, we need to zoom out and look at this pattern as a whole. And earlier in the talk, we were saying, you know, no, you need to kind of zoom into context and specificity. I think
I think that might be you’ve obviously got the science of coaching and then you’ve got the art of coaching. And think the art of coaching is getting lost a little bit. We’re too focused on this. A lot of people are too focused on the science, but I think the key is knowing when to zoom out and when to zoom in. When, when do we need to get lost in the weeds a little bit? And then when do we need to kind of zoom out and have a look at the bigger picture or the ability to do both kind of at the same time? problem is like when they get, when people get too much into the sciencey stuff, they lose.
It’s almost like they lose a little bit of their humanity and they go, well, this is what these papers say. I’m like, yeah, but that was in it. That was 30 subjects over six weeks. And that’s not realistic of what you’re going to see in the gym and how people’s psyches actually operate. So we’re not training studies, we’re training humans. So we need to put the humanity back in what we’re doing. So we make better decisions and we can have some empathy of what our clients going through.
Vanessa Leone (46:54)
Yeah, no, I’m so glad that you guys have said all of that. One of the things that you said there, like yeah, definitely that’s a high five moment, I do it, but I can’t get there, was maybe you don’t need to work out, maybe you need to work in. And that was great. And also just the whole ladder piece is like, I don’t think people realize the hole that they’re in, right? And
Luke & Zoe (47:20)
Yeah.
it takes to get out that one. Like how hard you’ve got to work for how like for how long is…
Vanessa Leone (47:25)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think the work hard is interesting because like you said, like a lot of the clients who I see other people who come to see me when they’ve seen everybody else and they don’t know what to do. And the most of the time, nine times out of 10, we do like four exercises. It’s all like, and they’re like, if they didn’t really feel like a workout, like, you don’t need a workout. You don’t need a workout. Like you don’t, uh, because.
you’re working 70 hours and you have three children. that’s, need to.
Luke & Zoe (48:02)
Yeah.
And you just need some motion lotion. That’s all you need.
Vanessa Leone (48:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We just, we got to like lubricate things, but I’m just going to go for one last question and we’ll keep it nice quick fire because I call myself a movement therapist because I think that movement therapy is really broad. It can be anything. And what I’d love to know is that what I, either of you, both of you currently doing that you feel that is movement therapy for you right now.
Luke & Zoe (48:35)
I mean, the gym is always movement therapy for me, you know, but the style of training that I do is often very different than what other people in the industry talk about, other strength coaches talk about, because I don’t have any problem throwing a stretch or mobility movement in the middle of the workout if that’s what makes the exercise move well. And I use a lot of, I use a lot of lengthened movements just because that’s
something that not a lot of people do in the gym. They do now because the research showing that it’s possibly better for hypertrophy. But we never taught it like that. When we started Muscle Nerds and I started teaching program design, I would tell our students, have people do long range of motion stuff because they’re not doing that in their daily life, right? So.
And if they go to the gym, they’re probably doing a lot of things that are short position, mid position and not getting any stretching done. Right. So it’s like you do a squat, no, we’re stretching a bench press, deadlift, nothing like that. You do a big long range split squat. Now we’re talking. So that and, and hinging and RDLs and good morning. So a lot of the stuff I do is based around getting into lengthened positions to keep everything supple and also to add strength to it.
But I also do, I haven’t done it in a while, but I mean, I’ve done animal flow level two, a Goski clinic, I’ve done all kinds of shit. I’m down, I’m cool to throw down some animal flow at some points. I do a lot of gymnastics stuff, cause I’m good friends with coach Christopher Somers, so I’d use a lot of his stuff in our training. And it’s hard, I train mainly coaches and trying to get them to do what you and I think is normal, but they think it’s the weird shit.
It’s really hard to get them to buy in until they do it and they go, holy fuck, I feel amazing. I’m like, yeah, now it’s easy. Or even to get them to do some cardio.
Now cardio, cardio is getting cool again. But when I, when I, when we started Muscle Nerves, cardio was still a no-no. We don’t do that. It makes you weak and it makes you a pussy. And I’m like, no, it doesn’t. It makes you not have a heart attack, which is really good for your strength training. I snorted and laughed at the end of the Saturday question because Luke’s, his exercise is just ingrained.
Truly ingrained in the core of who he is. He’s done it his entire life me on the other hand I can I have a really bad habit of prioritizing everything else in my life and I will kind of get to the gym and exercise if I Feel like I’m on top of work and I don’t have anything hanging over my head It’s a real battle that I’ve always kind of had but I then think in times like that I think there may be a distinction between like exercise and training and then just movement and in times like that, it’s just like
that constant movement throughout the day. Walks are massive for me. I had some blood sugar stuff going on that was probably caused by stress and wicked family history last year. And I cannot believe the difference in my blood sugar management on the days that I did some big walks. And that’s it, like that’s all it took. So I think.
for me, movement is just, it’s not uncommon for me to just sit at the desk all day and not move. And so I think just any type of movement for me is probably important. Today, we did a mini high rock style workout. And yeah, so that was our movement today. took Luke like 22 minutes. It took me 37. Everybody’s at a different stage of their journey. That’s all that matters. The only thing that matters, you did it.
Vanessa Leone (51:49)
I love that.
That’s so good. That’s awesome. No, Luke, Zoe, thank you so much. Like honestly, it’s been great to have you on. I wholeheartedly appreciate you and your time. I would love to maybe pick your brains again one day. Awesome.
Luke & Zoe (52:22)
This is fun! Looks like,
gosh, I have to stream it one last time with Zoe again.
Vanessa Leone (52:30)
No, that’s perfect. Anyone can contact you, your information’s in the show notes. Any last words?
Luke & Zoe (52:37)
No. ya.
Vanessa Leone (52:39)
Love that. Love it. You said it. Have a beautiful day.
Vanessa Leone Movement Therapist 