Today's podcast covers three lessons I learned from John Meadows who recently passed away. His death came way too soon, and I offer these tips as a tribute to my good friend.
Lesson 1: Exercise sequencing
Lesson 2: Bracket nutrition around training or during your session
Lesson 3: Experiment and try things
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Thank you, John, God Bless and Rest In Peace. You are missed.
Dr. Mike T Nelson 00:00
Hey there, welcome back to the flex diet Podcast, where we are focused on all things to increase your performance, add some muscle, and improve your body comp, all without destroying your health in the process. So today, I'm going to try really hard to get through this one without breaking down. These are three lessons I learned from john meadows. As I'm sure you've probably unfortunately heard, john passed away recently, at the age of 49. freaks me out quite a bit, because and right around the new listen to this, I will be 47 that's only a couple of years older than me. So I think when anyone passes away way too soon makes you stop and pause and do a lot of reflection upon your life, which I think is one of the silver linings to heart events that happen to all of us. Another part I've also realized is that being very fortunate as I am, and very blessed to know, lots of amazing people, to have many of them as close friends. As I get older, they're also getting older. And it's just a fact of life than a sort of morbid note that they're all gonna pass away at some point. And those things are going to become increasingly more common in my life. But this one really hurt it was way too soon. And I wanted to do something to share three lessons that I learned from john Meadows himself. As always, this is brought to you by the flex state certification, go to flex diet calm FL dx dt comm to get on the waitlist, and we will notify you the next time that it is open. The lesson number one that I learned from john meadows, talks about exercise sequencing. If you've seen my readings, or if you've worked with me as a one on one client, or sometimes it talks about exercise programming and the flex diet mentorship program. I'm a big fan in general, not all the time of heavier, more compound exercises first, and then accessory work after that. Again, there's many exceptions to that all depends on your goal and what you're trying to do. But if you were to put how I program in a nutshell, that would probably be as close as you can get, as the john was very big for a hypertrophy. Now again, this is not necessarily for performance of adding a stimulation or activation type exercise first. Now some people may say that this kind of goes into your warmup sets, I guess you could think of it that way. So an example was if he would do hamstring curls before squats, those are familiar with a lot of the sort of bodybuilding bro literature would say this maybe a pre exhaust method. And while the research on that is really hit or miss, I would say for pure performance, probably not the best idea. But when I have tried it with some clients and myself, sometimes it works really well. And especially I've noticed if people are a little bit older, their joints are a little bit more beat up, that this tends to work quite well for them. So by doing the hamstring curls before squats, a lot of people reported that their knees and just performance and everything just felt better. Another example was to do a seated cable press before a more main exercise of a dumbbell bench press. And I've tried that a little bit for my particular goals, which again is not all out hypertrophy. I didn't care for it, I did feel like there was a little bit more activation. But my goals are a little bit more on the strength side. So the weights I was able to move or a little bit less. So again, for my personal goals, this didn't fit. But if you don't really feel much going on with a dumbbell bench press and you start to have some more shoulder and joint pain. I have used this with quite a few clients over the past and five years. And the vast majority of them really like it. And if their main goal is only hypertrophied I can work quite well. And the reason I bring this up is it's probably best to not be overly dogmatic about exercise sequence. Again, it goes back to what feels better for that person person. How is your performance and water Are your goals. So there aren't really any hard fast rules of you must always do this or always do that, as a big thanks to john for pointing that out. The second part is, I like I said, I tend to view everything as a main movement for strength. And then more accessory work after that. So the second part related exercise sequencing that I got from john, was he after the main movement, then he was found of doing more of a pump type focus exercise, and that those sets would then be closer to failure. And the literature on that is just kind of split. But I do think as you get into smaller muscle groups, that you can get away with doing things closer to failure. I'm not a huge fan of taking a lot of sets to failure, I think it reduces the total amount of volume that you are doing. But like Dr. Stu Phillips and others have done some very interesting studies showing that if you're using less volume, and it is on kind of smaller muscle groups getting closer to failure, you can probably get away with it. I think there's a big difference between, you know, getting close to failure on something like a squat, which has a higher risk involved in it. And it has a much larger muscle movement, compared to going towards failure on something like a tricep push down. The latter, I don't really find impairs recovery a lot, especially if it is on the last set or it's more infrequent, I do find that if you are going close to failure or add failure on the bigger exercises, that that will torture your body quite a bit, it'll take you longer to recovery, I see drops and heart rate variability in the next day sometimes lasting for two, three, in a rare cases for days. And there's also a risk involved with the low back and just the mechanics of performing that exercise. And most of the time when you're performing that exercise, to me, it's more of a performance based move. So john was a big fan of adding a more pump focused exercise after the main movement. And I found again, for clients, we're looking for all out hypertrophy, higher rep work in that area has worked really well. And especially if they're very limited on time, we can take some of those exercises closer to failure, get a fair amount of the benefit. And that does reduce the total time of training. So again, goes back to not being dogmatic, playing around a little bit to see what works best for you. The second lesson I got was bracketing nutrition around training and even adding some nutrition during training. Now I know if there's any PubMed ninjas listening, which they're probably not listening to this podcast, but they're gonna lose their mind and give me a tyrant lecture about have I read any of the nutrient timing literature. And yes, I have. Like I've read most of it by this point. But there might be a few new studies that I've missed. And a quick rundown on that says that for carbohydrates, which again, this may be a little bit different for protein, that if you have to repeat another exercise intense session within a few hours of sessions. So let's say you're training for American football, and you've got a pretty heavy skill session during the day. And then three hours later towards early evening, you've got a weight training session. At that point, having caught faster acting carbohydrate, something that is going to replenish glycogen stores fast is going to be of a benefit to you because you only have a few hours. In order to repeat that again. If you're doing some long endurance events over an hour, hour and a half, then consuming carbohydrates during those events, we'll show an advantage in performance. However, if your next session is not until 24 hours later, the next day, more like a template I use a lot is alternating weight training days, some more cardiovascular days, your cardiovascular day, the next day, if it's not high intensity, you may not even really need full glycogen stores to perform that you have the luxury of time. So you will not necessarily have to be super worried about cramming in as much glycogen as you can into the muscles within a few hours because you have 24 in some time cases 48 hours in order to do it. For protein, that's a somewhat more debatable, I think having three to five protein feedings per day 20 to 40 grams of protein at each is going to get you 90 plus percent of the way there based on the literature that we have. Now, I go over all this in great detail and the flex diet cert, including interviews with Dr. Jose Antonio and Dr. Stu Phillips. And john was a big fan of having nutrition before and sometimes during and even after training. Now a caveat with this too, is that a lot of times that may be with competitors whose goal is mostly hypertrophy, and who may be on lower calories. So I have noticed with clients that as your total amount of calories get lower and lower brackney, more of them around training does appear to help training performance. And if we look at volume as one of the main drivers for hypertrophy and performance, whatever we can do to get better volume and training performance day in and day out, especially while trying to improve body composition, that is going to be a benefit of potentially increasing muscle a little bit or holding on to as much muscle as you can. I have noticed that by doing this heart rate variability scores, which is a marker of stress are typically better than next day. So I've done this experiment on myself. And with a few clients, on and off, man probably over a dozen times I've done it on myself, where if I'm doing a longer session, and even if I was replacing the same amount of fluid, if I include some carbohydrates, and sometimes not even a lot, you know, 20 to 40 grams of carbohydrates during the session, especially if my sessions are longer over an hour, or consuming some right before I walk into the session. that heart rate variability is better than next day, right? So I can do that. And especially if my calories are around maintenance or maybe a little bit lower. Sometimes this enables me to do a whole nother session per week, which total volume then is going to be higher. So I know let us run this is pretty split, we can get into all the literature of just pure timing, from the studies from Paul crib, many years ago that showed a benefit to it to other studies that tried to replicate that that didn't necessarily show a benefit. But it's something you can easily test out yourself. Right look at your session performance, you can log your RP rating of perceived exertion, you can look at stress the next day, or even just soreness, other markers how you feel and try it out. I find for most people, especially as their calories tend to cycle lower that this is a net benefit. Now whether that is from the protein or the carbohydrates up for debate, if I'm having normal meals, I will just tend to add carbohydrates only in during my training. That's because I've had protein normally before and protein after they don't really need any protein per se during that training period. There's some data to show that we actually need a drop in the amino acid pools a little bit in order to kind of reset that mechanism. They've done studies with a continuous IV of amino acids. And what they saw was muscle protein synthesis goes up, and it comes back down. Even having a constant IV push of amino acids, muscle protein synthesis does not stay elevated that entire time. So one of the theories is that those incoming amino acids have to drop in order to kind of reset that mechanism so that it can be stimulated again. But I have found bracketing nutrition does tend to help. And if you have longer more than 10 sessions, consuming potentially maybe some protein or carbohydrates right before or even adding some carbohydrates during that session along with plenty of fluid and electrolytes, specially sodium, really important if you're outside in the heat or it's warm in the gym environment that you train can make a big difference. So I would play around with that. Lesson number three was experiment and try stuff. Right I kind of going back where we started. Number one, we should have, hopefully less dogma and at the end of the day, the research is at best a guide kind of points you in the direction. And then research really provides you the answers on an N of one. And that's all most people are cared about is is that particular client and doing better if you're a coach? Or are you as an individual doing better? If your job is to conduct research studies, then yes, you have different questions, you're dealing with statistics and power and all that kind of stuff. But most people are more interested in what is going on with them as an individual. So research is going to guide you with some direction. And then testing things out on your own, making sure you have ways of measuring it, which could just be as simple as X amount of weight for a certain number of reps over time, individual kind of point soreness, just a simple scale of how you feel on a one to 10, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, whatever. All markers have their pros and cons, but at least have something to look at to try to determine are you going in the direction towards your goals? Are you going away from it? No, Don was a big fan of saying that, you know, he may not be the most up to date on the science. But his 30 years of doing this, he's found that fill in the blank x works well. And to me, that's more enough for for me to look and go Hmm, maybe I should try this. Right. So experience does inform where we are at, and there's a lot of things we can learn from it. There's a lot of things we can learn from research also. So again, it's a combination of both. And it depends upon what you're trying to do. So research will guide you in a general direction of things to try. And then your individual research will provide you the particular n equals one answer that you're looking for. And as long as you're honest about that, I don't have any problem with it. The thing that I don't like is people saying, well, I did x, and it was only on me for one experiment. Therefore, all of you people should do this. Probably not so much. Right. But if you tried something time and time again for several decades, granted, you may be biased one way or not. But to someone who's new, that's a pretty darn good place to start your own individual testing. So again, test out what is going to be potentially beneficial for yourself and run your own experiments. So thank you very much to john for those lessons and many, many more. I just wanted to share them today. So hopefully they can help you out. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Take care