Mac: This is hilarious shit. so Starlink for the win. That's Elon Musk. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. It might pin lot of people who don't like him, but he's South African, so we will 100 % just go with him. Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: I was gonna say that's representing your blood for what that's worth. I think that goes well with the OTC shirt though. I think if we were to summarize James Mack into one action, it's the fact that you've bought a roaming Starlink to do your business with you wherever you are in the world.
Mac: This is commit. Literally, so I was coming back from South Africa and I knew that it was coming up for this road trip. So I'd be home for like, whatever, six days and then go on this fucking four five week road trip thing down south to Sydney. And Sydney has got the worst internet in the world. And I was like, fuck it, I'm buying a Starlink, bought a Starlink, bought an in-car dashboard mount. So it mounts to the windscreen inside the car and while we're driving, full satellite signal, full download, ready to go, just carry on fucking working and grafting while I drive. It's great. Smartest thing I've ever done.
Nick Ridpath: while everyone else is out here trying to bio hack, you're just hacking your work efficiency.
Mac: Work, yeah, mobile office just improved way more.
Nick Ridpath: That's that's so sweet. Speaking of biohacking, I'm sure you hate that phrase. ⁓ What were you popping before the podcast? What's your current neuro supplement stack?
Mac: Yeah. I mean, shameless plug. So this is my own one. So I made this. So this is three foot world. So it's, I'm trying to find every podcast that I get on in the U S I'm now going to say that I'm trying to find a U S distributor. So if anyone knows of or wants to start selling my product for me, hit me up. All right. Hit me up and we can start, we can organize this, but basically it's It's called Three Foot World. It's a nootropic. I don't like that word because truly when we look at it, there's only certain compounds that are starting to play on neurotransmitters that actually are effective. Now in saying that, this is, we've got a good stack that kind of comes into the mix from a science-based but at the same time experienced. This took 18 months of messing around with different concoctions and playing, just giving myself headaches and stupid, stupid. stupid things just really not smart at the end of the day, but ⁓ Yeah, comes down to it's got p5p in it. So like a converted version of b6 like most people would probably be familiar with b6 and understand that it can have like a neurotoxicity to it, but The toxicity side of it comes in the conversion process from p6 to p5p so what we can do is we can literally just take the p5p version and then we don't have the same kind of ⁓ downsides or possible downsides that could come through with just taking high doses of B6, because too much B6 causes problems. Most people probably don't know that or have an idea of that. ⁓ So we've got P5P, we've got cytokoline in that, pine bark. So pine bark extract was like an interesting one that we brought into the mix with this. So pine bark can be used very, very effectively for blood pressure. Okay, so it helps manage blood pressure. It's one of those that's, it basically helps with like vasodilation and obviously increasing that which then can be effective in the blood pressure sense. Now for what we're doing, it helps in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain, essentially kind of delivering the product in a better standpoint as well as. my demographic or the thought process behind the product, now to be 100 % honest, the thought behind the product was, I'm tired of taking six capsules every morning and having to walk around and travel with six different bottles, I'm gonna make my own product. And then people kinda started buying it off the back end and I strategically just. marketed it slash just put my product in any and every picture that I could of what I've been doing for the last 18 months and it has done well and taken all from that. But the users that are gonna be primarily using this are either gonna be highly stemmed up through the roof, which Pine Bark is gonna make an effect with, blood pressure changes in terms of that, and or possibly those of the enhanced standpoint. So it's like you're gonna get a health benefit at the end of the day by taking this product. just from the blood pressure management and then the key one and like the last ingredient, ⁓ which I'm quite confident in saying this, that as I currently know it, I'm probably the only individual to use this form. of neurotropic or nootropic in a supplement as of it currently stands. So there's something called triuridine. So we'll try acetyluridine. It is essentially a slightly better bioavailability of uredine monophosphate. So there's only two other products that I know of that run uredine monophosphate. that is... ⁓ What's it ⁓ Jack, Gorilla Mind? So Derek, Derek from More Play It Small Dates, like his energy drink has your monofosfate in it.
Nick Ridpath: Is this the one you were telling me just to buy a bottle of like maybe last summer? Because we're talking about like caffeine alternatives. Okay, okay. Just double check.
Mac: Yes, yes, this is it. This is it. Yes, this is it. So this is exactly it. So that Urethane Monophosphate that I told you to buy, that's essentially, that is the, how do I say the main ingredient? Because we've gone with a slightly better available standpoint. So it crosses the blood vein barrier in a better way for different ways of delivery mechanisms in the long run. And I have a more sports performance. Directed stack of this which we could probably talk about at some stage. So I've I've got the product in works ⁓ in a Sublingual variation so sublingual being obviously kind of piggybacking off of the craze of nicotine pouches Anything along those lines but essentially being able to deliver the same product in this way Why what does sublingual do it crosses the blood band barrier to foster eight it ends the bloodstream at a much faster rate as well instead of having to go through the digestive tract and actually slow it down from a capsule. Think about that in like an NFL sense. If you can have hyper-focus within five minutes, you put that little bad boy in and you just kick in, is, from a sports performance standpoint, it is huge in terms of what can happen. So yeah, that's in the works.
Nick Ridpath: Also just seems like from a marketing standpoint, like, you're already doing your fucking Zen pouches. Might as well do something that's a little bit more beneficial for you. Like this was replacing a similar habit with something more beneficial. I actually trained, one of the NFO guys I worked with was like telling me some story about how he used to love nicotine and how much he would feel like his joints were beat up when he would do nicotine and he stopped doing nicotine and all of a sudden his joints felt amazing.
Mac: Add to set. Yeah, well, that was it. ⁓ I remember, we had that conversation with, you had one of your clients that was a smoker, I remember correctly, couldn't lunge for shit, took God away, naked, yeah, you remember that? Yeah, different story.
Nick Ridpath: No, no, no, okay. Yeah, yeah, well, there's some other things going against him there. But I just asked you, I was like nicotine ⁓ from a general nervous system standpoint, yeah, performance standpoint, because you were telling me in some context, you had clients that would do nicotine ⁓ from a performance enhancing standpoint. And I was going the other direction, which is like when this guy comes in, stemmed out of his mind, he can't even do a lunge without falling over.
Mac: performed. Yep. which let's think about it from a neurological standpoint and even from a parasympathetic sympathetic nerve state, that's no surprise to us. You've got someone in a more sympathetic drive, well what's gonna happen? They're not gonna be able to concentrate. It's like when we've taken fucking a gram of caffeine, dude all I get is anxious.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: That's it, I get anxious and heart palpitations. Which is, it's gonna do fuck off for me from a performance standpoint. So, maybe a little bit more into it and obviously nicotine in itself is going to be working on the sympathetic system. Like there's gonna be a little bit more of an adrenaline or noradrenaline or epinephrine that is going to be released from like a neurotransmitter standpoint. However, I guess as per everything in life, we have to kind of, we have to weigh up the risks.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, yeah.
Mac: along with, and I think this phrase, I heard this phrase and I do apologize to whoever who I heard it from first because I think giving credit where credit is due to phrases and or learnings is an extremely important thing within this industry at the level that we are at. But I heard the concept of like the devil is in the dosage and the duration. And that's in anything in life. Now that was specifically in relation to performance enhancements, but I think it's. very applicable to anything and everything that we do. Let's think about it from a training simulator standpoint. If we give too much volume for too much time, we fuck up. And vice versa to that. If we give too little volume for too long a time, we just stay stagnant. So the concept of the phrase of the devil is in the dosage and the duration, I think is such a cool phrase or phraseology that we can apply to so many things, caffeine content, stimulants.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: pre-workouts, drugs, whatever it is, it comes down to dosage, duration, and then at the end time, like intent on what you're attempting to do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that was beautiful. ⁓ I forgot what even started this conversation. Nicotine and messed up joints or moving around like a baby giraffe. Yeah, melted brains.
Mac: I have no idea what's the other thing called, nicotine. yeah, sorry, sorry. Brain drugs. And like, I mean, I'm still a big fan of nicotine. I just popped some fucking nicotine just before this, along with the brain drugs at the same time, because why not? But, you know, it is definitely something that... you know, since we had that conversation, I think we had that conversation on the lab, I remember correctly, ⁓ maybe, or stemmed in a lab outside of it, whatever it was, ⁓ there definitely has been like a more cognizant approach to it. Like I've been... strategic in deployment of nicotine of myself, not necessarily anyone else, because it is an extremely addictive drug. At the end of the day, is. It's a drug, it's addictive, it's highly, highly addictive. I've had withdrawals from nicotine. That is not fun, dude. I was cranking nicotine in the time period when I was in South Africa, being in a different state, being in a different kind of delivery mechanism as well. And I was taking in... We did the mass because I left South Africa, went to Dubai for about three weeks when I was sorting out some business shit there. And I obviously didn't take the nicotine in the concentration of what I was doing in South Africa. Dude, in the first week, like I had this like fishbowl, like look, couldn't quite figure out what's going on. I felt, dude, I felt like I was like had like a sinus infection and or I had altitude sickness at the same time. And I was like, dude, I can't figure out what the fuck's going on here. And then I sat there one day and I was like, what if I'm going through withdrawals? Like just that came to me. So I luckily had like these lozenges sitting in my training bag and I popped one in at the gym and I was literally like, I'd be training and trying to train for like a week, 10 days. Dude, I had like this glaziness over my, you know, like when you're sick and you have like that fogginess, glaziness over your eyes. I couldn't get a pump, couldn't do fucking anything, dude. I was just irritable. I hated life. I was like, this sucks.
Nick Ridpath: You Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mac: I even was like, is my gear fucked? Like I literally was like, what is going on here? I was like, everything's there. Yeah, I was like, do you know what the worst is? I even asked, then I say this and fuck whatever. I'm open about my use in any shape or form. Like I prescribed my TRT, genuinely prescribed my TRT, not fucking prescribed, like actually. And I've had bad batches before where I had like a batch of ⁓ Bayer, like pro depot test that just was off.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, did I get some bad shit?
Mac: like had actually gone off in terms of like expiring. So I was like, fuck, that must be it. So I'm standing in the gym, dude, and I've got this, this like laziness and I'm standing in front of the Lance's 45 degree shoulder press or chest press. And I popped this nicotine in and as I popped this nicotine, dude, vision goes clear, everything goes clear. was like, fuck you idiot. You've been going through withdrawal for the last two weeks, you son of a bitch. that. It's like, you're such a retard. You're so good at so many other things. This is the one thing you couldn't figure out until you pop a nicotine in and suddenly it was like clear again. I can see everything. got a pump for the first time. was like, yo, fucking idiot.
Nick Ridpath: That's so insane. That's why I don't do it. I just know how much I would love it. Like I know I'd have a problem with it. So I just don't do it.
Mac: You gotta do it. Oh yeah. You know what the problem is? Again, it comes down to devilish nutrition and dosage. I worked this out, so I go back to my delivery mechanism and how I was getting nicotine in, and it was in a liquid base. Anyways, so I then worked out, because I was going through four of these fucking canisters a day, and it's like a 1.8 % per canister, or per canister. not per canister, per fucking certain amount of like, so eventually I work it up. I was having like 80 grams or 80 milligrams of nicotine a day. And I was like, yeah, that's why you just went through withdrawals. was chain smoking. Chain smoking is what I was going through comfortably, comfortably going through just that. And I was like, ⁓ well, this explains why you're going through fucking withdrawals. I went from 80 to cold turkey.
Nick Ridpath: Holy shit. What's in a pack of cigarettes? Like 20? So you're doing four packs of cigarettes a day.
Mac: That's it. Just dead in the water. I was like, okay, you're a fucking idiot now. So, stupid things, win stupid prizes. Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that's... That's hilarious. The white monster is nothing after you've done that. That's just like getting up and having some water in the morning.
Mac: Buh-bye. Yeah, pretty much. Shut up, James Thayer. Just walk getting the fridge beer all the time. Dude, I don't know how he does it. I must be honest. I mean, it is 9 a.m. in the morning and I'm chugging down a fucking white monster, but I'm least slightly better than him, I think.
Nick Ridpath: Hahaha I don't think I've had one since college. It's probably been fucked in six years or longer since I've had a white monster.
Mac: You just gotta spend some time with me. I gotta come over to you and just spend some time with you. I will have you on everything. Just taking all the nicotine, white monsters. It'll just be happening. No, I'm joking. I'm not that much of a, I'm not a degenerate. Hilarious, hilarious. ⁓ fuck. All right, well, we're here.
Nick Ridpath: Hahaha Yeah, mean, you're going to gain like 20 kilos in a month. What was I going to say about nicotine? We're here. No, this is like I'd never intended to talk to you about this. Now I'm thinking about like other nootropics. I know like the big thing was like the humans of the world were pushing like alpha GPC and what were the other common ones? L-thienine, you know.
Mac: old school. Althionine and stuff like that. so nothing against them in any shape or form. So alpha GBC, like gonna work in like a choline receptor. And essentially when we look at that, what are we talking about? We're talking about neurotransmitters, we're talking about like acetylcholine. All so like when our four-ish bigger, there's epinephrine and adrenaline that fall into the mixer, but we have acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine, serotonin. That's like our main neurotransmitters when we look in and acetylcholine the way that I always remember it for some stupid reason but I think of acetylcholine I think of accountants. That's it. That's like that data driven focus analyst like that's what that's it and It got taught to me and the reason why I remember that, got taught to me and I don't want to discredit him in any shape or form because fucking one of the greats in my opinion and I think you would probably think of the same. But this comes up with, oh shit, why have I just gone blank? But essentially around kind of the Charles Poliquin area, the Thibodeau. So Thibodeau came out with like, you're a Christian Thibodeau, so shout out. I mean, he's still alive, definitely still alive. He's not dead.
Nick Ridpath: Okay, yeah. Dude, yeah, he's like one of the only one of the only people that I would like actually go. I could actually go watch on Instagram. Yeah, I couldn't watch Paul Quinn on IG like to do with.
Mac: Poor Trinart. I've got only one my lines up round. Yeah. Well, he's here. So I mean, some interesting things again. So Christian Thibodeau came out and had kind of like a neurotransmitter neurotransmitter type training. All right. So you would train individuals according to the neurotransmitters, which like a super nuanced, if you think about it, like super, super nuanced in terms of that. But at the same time, like I would give some merit to it. However, I think when we have a deeper understanding and deeper look into that conversation, it's learning people. At the end of the day, you have someone who's more derived to one neurotransmitter than the other, for example, like GABA versus dopamine-driven, right? So GABA, the way that I was taught this is, someone who's GABA dominant would never be in a gym. They'd be like a yogi, they'd be doing their pilates and like, cause they're super down to earth and chilled and like they're not gonna do strength training. And very unlikely and at the same time if they do, they're not gonna last long, they're not gonna like the burn, they're not gonna like kind of pushing hard. Like that's the gabba dominant type. Versus like the dopamine driven, that one you're gonna have to fucking challenge them. It's gonna be the conversations and I guess at the end of the day what I really took from his course back to the day. Now don't go and buy his course in any shape and like, sorry, Thibodeaux, like I'm not. Don't go and buy his course. More so because you partnered with an absolute idiot based company, to people who know will know why I'm saying that, to do all of the anyways, long, yeah, good, great. That's fun. Now fuck them anyway. So that's a long story, but.
Nick Ridpath: have no idea. So I don't feel any criminal aspect here on my end.
Mac: What I gained from the entire course at the end of the day is understand the person that you're working with. And Shaloh's got the saying of like it's the people business. I know we've all used that and I think we've now like. really come to understand that that is it at the end of the day, it is the people business. Now what that means is understand the person you're working with. Like what drives you? What's gonna get the best out of you? If for me, or you know, I had clients that were like A type individuals, right? Like very dopamine driven, high execs, like that type of thing. I couldn't treat them the same way that I would treat like Susan. Right, Susan's like I'd have to kind of like, you know, pad her around the gym a little bit and be like, it's okay, we can do a few more. The dopamine driven exec is like, yo, I bet you couldn't do 10 reps on the leg press. Like, I just don't think you can do it. Like, I've put enough weight on there. Like, if you get eight, like, I'll be cool. But I just don't think you can do 10. Yo, that motherfucker's doing 12, right? Because I've like lit that fire. Correct, and that's people. That's learning how to interpret people and talk to people. And like, it's a side of coaching.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, absolutely.
Mac: that let's think about it in our days, we probably don't see a lot of that happen. Like, cause everyone's doing the, you know, the fucking Instagram bullshit adverts, all of this stupid shit, and they've forgotten how to talk to people. Like they've forgotten the in-person side. They've forgotten how to like motivate them. Yeah, they skip it completely.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, they skip it.
Mac: So it's such a, the concept that's coming to me is at the end of the day, all of these things come down to base principles, which is what we teach and what we live. At the end of day, everything is a principle-based thing. The neurotransmitter training type is the principle of people business, understanding a person. That's all it is. It's not specific of. I don't give you your fucking your, I can't even remember what the personality test is now, but dude, you could work out like, was a, not that Myers-Briggs was an old school one, I can't remember what it's called.
Nick Ridpath: Was this, hold on, was this the extension of the polyquin thing where I remember reading some polyquin shit about how I shouldn't have carbs in the morning before I train? So I was like, okay, I used to do, this was again, back when was in college, I used to do two bagels and some egg whites before I'd go train. Or I would do cream of rice with whey protein mixed in. And I'd get the sickest pumps, I felt awesome. And I was reading this, I was like, ⁓ shit. Like I shouldn't have carbohydrates when my cortisol is high in the morning, whatever. I'm going to do what they're saying, which is like six whole eggs and like fat tree cheese. I'm going to try that. I remember doing it for a week and I had the worst training sessions of my life and I was like, fuck this. I'm going back to the bagels.
Mac: Yeah, Yeah, I hate it. Yeah, so I mean, same era, same kind of like training schools, camps, polyquin, similar, you know, strengthy, S &C based work if we kind of want to look at it. But I mean, fucking polyquin at the end of the day had some gems, gold, right? Nutrition knowledge, I wouldn't do a lot of this stuff in saying that though. Give him credit where credit is due. The statement that he made and what you are referring to is if you are not like,
Nick Ridpath: Dude.
Mac: ⁓ sub 12 % body fat, you don't deserve carbs. Like that was his statement. like, I mean, wrong, but at the same time in the current like caloric epidemic that we have, if some people applied that knowledge, they'd have better health markers, they'd have better training performance because their blood glucose levels would probably be more stable across the day than the mass amounts of spikes that we see happening. with the hypercaloric intakes that they're going through. Let's look at it through kind of like a rose-colored lens. He's not wrong. The statement is profound. it's one that's going to an athlete-based like yourself, who's someone who's training hard, you need carbohydrates. You need the facilitation of that. He was in a slightly different realm of like, that fell into what he did in the bootcamp diet. Well, the bootcamp diet was like... know, veg, it was less than 120 grams of carbs or 100 grams of carbs, 50 to 80 of those coming from fruits and veg. And the rest coming from trace amounts in terms of what it is, higher protein, which essentially if we think about it as like a spin-off of like Lyle McDonald's modified protein fast, which also extremely, extremely beneficial diet if you're trying to do like a body recomp or you're trying to make some like really big change and shout out Lyle for being an interesting human.
Nick Ridpath: Hmm.
Mac: very interesting, but dude, one of my, like just the way he just shits on everyone at the same time is amazing, but yeah, fuck it. you know, some of his, I would say his diet strategies are a lot more, ⁓ I don't wanna say intellectual, cause that sounds so terrible saying Charles wasn't intellectual.
Nick Ridpath: Very interesting. My favorite Instagram follow.
Mac: Better applicable to most individuals. Let's go with that one. All better applicable to most individuals kind of across the board. But anyways, yeah, end of the day, like all of these things were, know, what's this 20, 30 years ago type scenario. And, you know, I would argue that a lot of what we've seen emerge now, and the guys were doing back then, like, you know, way ahead of their time in terms of experience and understanding of athletes, but I would go to this and like. There was and there wasn't. There was an understanding of human beings. Charles was difficult, man. Like if you went to a seminar of his and you didn't have big biceps, he would not fucking give you the light of day.
Nick Ridpath: He would have hated me. My arms are way too small.
Mac: But and like whatever, I'm never gonna shit on him in any shape or form. Anyone who listens to this who's ex-Charles in any shape or form, fuck, don't come at me for anything. But we know what I'm saying is true. But I would 100 % say that he was one of the founding greats. No matter what people come and say, I still, I remember reading his shit from years ago. T nation dude I used to scroll t nation as much as I could get the dial up to fucking work at home all the time with tibet like all of these things kind of you know, I think allowed to better my knowledge stack things together Make me the coach they am today like I would really if if I could if I could like deploy some fucking AI thing into my brain that could like track the history, I could guarantee that when we go really, really back to it, that a lot of the foundational knowledge of where it at comes from that generation, that school of thought, that thinking, like for sure, for sure.
Nick Ridpath: I there was so much more original thought then. Same with like people will shit on some of like the West Side methods in Louis. And it's like, we could pick all sorts of dumb stuff they did, but a lot of what they did was pretty spot on and they were doing it without the resources we have today. Today it's so easy to go online with one research is more widely available, but also courses are better. It's so much easier to find mentors. I'd also say it's much harder in the sense there's a lot of dipshits that are preaching weird stuff out there, but.
Mac: Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: access to information for what it's worth, they're so much more readily available versus then it's like, they're kind of just like playing science with themselves and they figure out a lot of cool stuff.
Mac: Yeah, but that's, you know what's so sad about that? Not sad from this, it's sad on the outside. We have so much more access to information, but no one does anything with it. So the only thing that happens is like, there's a parroting of it. And it's one of my like current gripes within the industry is everyone will just sit there and read the script. Or like regurgitate what they've just learned. Like you haven't learned it, you've done fuck all with it. You've just read a study in abstract, a training concept or something like this.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: Go and apply it, see where it is, or at least be able to think and look at the information that you've just kind of, not being provided, but the information that you've just kind of stumbled upon, and look at it go, all right, like my first question out of everything and anything that I read or go in our research is, what is the principle that's being discussed here? Principally, what does this break down to? Is this ⁓ caloric energy in energy out? Is this a training principle? Is this a biomechanic model? What lower level principle can I bring this down to? And then I try and look for the actual principle behind it. Is this an exposure to internal external rotation? Is this a way for me to bias something? Is this a better methylation standpoint of a drug? What is the principle? And then the next question of the back end is, and this is the way I kind of bring it into an experience is, I look at and go, okay, of my current clientele, who could I use this with? And like I learned this from Luke Lehman. Luke Lehman is is one of great, I've mentioned him quite a lot lately for some fucking reasons, whatever. Great Texas guy, old Charles Poliquin guy. He used to present for the Poliquin group, really good educator. ⁓ And I remember him coming to one of our courses in Gold Coast and he just sat there in his iPad. Dude, he didn't even look up. He just sat on his iPad and he just took notes. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. And then he would take his notes, take his notes, that. And then he would ask a question, but he would ask a question specifically to a client that he had in mind. All right, so this was his way of applying what he had just learned to an individual that he has all of his accesses, his knowledge of, his background of, right there and then, because then he can go, okay, well, if it applied to this, the principle is X, Y, and Z. This is how just applied. and now I can cross pollinate it into everyone else. So ⁓ I took that from him from that literal 30 second, 60 second conversation we had afterwards. And I was like, fuck, that's such a genius way to learn something. Because once I can physically apply it with someone in front of me, I've learned it. I've taught it. It's the do one, see one, teach one. That's an old school Chris Baraguano's hospital thing that I learned when I was a paramedic. I worked emergency department, dude, stupidly. I emergency department in the world's trauma capital of the, like the trauma capital of the world hospital. All right, so Barrack Gwinnanth Hospital, if you guys have never heard of it, it's trauma capital. 100, yeah. But so the Barrack Gwinnanth Hospital is like, it's one of the best teaching trauma teaching hospitals in the world. countries send their surgeons there because the amount of access to what you see on a daily basis, will.
Nick Ridpath: I feel like anywhere in South Africa, anywhere down there has to be bad enough.
Mac: probably never seen in your career. Like gunshots, stabbings, trauma, MVAs, like whatever it is happens, right? And the theory and the principle there is you see a procedure done, you do the procedure, you teach it to the next intern. So like I did a surgical crick, right? So surgical crick, when you crack, you open up someone's lungs so they can breathe. I watched one, I did one, I taught one in the same 12 hour shift. Like that, like just think about that kind of, and that's, that, was the hands on teaching. Now this is the same kind of concept, but not a lot of individuals are going to have the access to teach. Right. That's just not really going to necessarily happen. However, if you learn something, you can do it immediately onto your clients. And then what you can do from there is you can teach your other clients in terms of this. Like, so you always have a pool that you can add into from a coaching standpoint. If you can get that principle moving, it's like, then you have a better understanding for it. And then kind of going back to the original rant that I was going on, like you're actually going to be able to, I don't know, not get on Instagram and fucking, so this peptide is an amino acid chain and fuck off, I don't really care. Come sit down in front of me and have a conversation with me about how the use applicability is going to be. What are you gonna do with it? How are you going to bring it in? What are you gonna mitigate? What is the issues that's gonna come up? And like. By doing all of this, and the longer version behind this, or the long story, short version behind this is, by going through this entire process, whether it's drugs, whether it's training, whether it's a rehab modality, whatever it is, the question that I'm always going to ask myself is, where is this going to fail? So I'm risk averse. Everything I do is like a risk analysis in terms of, and that's like an up-running thing. But I look at an exercise, or I look at a prescription of something, and I go, Where is this going to fail? Where are the wheels going to fall off by implementing this? Because if I know the direction in which it's not going to work, I can reverse engineer it to make it work or at least have things in play for when it doesn't work. Right, so this is how I look at exercise. look at know, bring in barbell bench press. Okay, bring in barbell bench press. At the end of the day, don't care who fucking wants to shout it from the moons, great way for you to load the pecs under maximum under load. It is. Yes, there's a skill component that's the downside. There's a wheel that can fall off. So is it gonna be a skill factor that's going to fail? What's the requirement that needs to be had from an individual who can bar-bar-bar-bar-entress? Well, skill, cool, I mentioned that. We've got an internal rotation capacity. Do they have adequate internal rotation while they're in a position of internal rotation of the shoulder that isn't going to allow for progression or expression of strength there? Yes or no? All right, well, is it something that we're gonna have to constantly work on? Yes. All right, so what other exercises in the rest of my program can I bring in to make sure that this movement keeps moving forward? Like that's how I look at it. Like that's the, you know, we talk about the primary, secondary, tertiary benefits of exercises, which are great, but they're only applicable if you understand the risk of an exercise that you bring in. Where is the body going to fail when you bring an exercise in? Where is the body going to fail if I give you fucking bootcamp diet of eggs and you know, at stake in the morning. They wouldn't have carbs, so you don't have an ATP production. Okay, so how do I mitigate that? Okay, well, I don't give him high glycolytic work. Simple, so we go strength based with your programs and like you might actually be more effective, because fats are still gonna be pretty good in terms of that. If we're running a one to three rep range, you don't need like a mass amount of glycogen in the tank for this. It's easy to express. So that's the like. That's me putting it into principle or putting it into context of where does it fail? Because if you understand where it fails, you're going to know what to put in place to keep it being successful.
Nick Ridpath: I mean, I like how you overlap those things too. It's not just the exercise we're selecting. It's also the human. It's also the environment we're putting them in from a nutritional standpoint. Obviously there's lifestyle factors. And then going back to what you said originally, it's quite literally their psyche or their personality. So all those things are gonna affect one another. it's just understanding, I guess looking at research.
Mac: No.
Nick Ridpath: It's okay, this calf raise study showed that a standing calf raise was better than a seated calf raise and n equals eight, therefore, hey, you fucking nerd watching my video, you're an idiot if you do seated calf raises anymore. It's like, well, there's more to it than that.
Mac: Yeah, yeah, okay, cool. But you know what the hilarious thing is? Yeah, fantastic. My gym doesn't ever see the calf raise, so what the fuck am I doing now? Like there's my answer, like to bring it back down to it's like the risk is, well yeah, seated calf raise is better than a standing calf raise. If I have one, if I don't, not doing anything, well doing the standing calf raise is still better than the not doing the calf raise. Like context matters.
Nick Ridpath: Wait, did you see this? This was like a year ago. So it was the other way around. Basically there was a camp of people that were referencing a study. think it was like literally N equals 12. So 12 people seated versus standing and like the standing group, both Solius and Gastroc had like 50 % more hypertrophy or something. And then they were grandstanding it as like, oh, seated calf raises or dog shit. This that and the other. And I'm like, there's plenty of reason why I would agree with that.
Mac: Just straw man arguing.
Nick Ridpath: But like, yeah, I'm not gonna go and say this as if it's, I'm I'm am stating a fact into the universe based off this immaculate research. ⁓
Mac: In fact, now you're not gonna just be dogmatic about it. So now I'm completely throwing out the seated calf raise with any plan that I do. It's like, no, that would be so stupid. I have no idea. Sorry, bros. 35 minutes later.
Nick Ridpath: I don't even know how we got here. I asked you a question about nicotine and we ended up at see the calf raises. That's that's quite the trail. ⁓ I had another I had another sidebar on that. Speaking of popular drugs. I've seen more people talking about like micro dosing, g lp ones and their diet as part of their diet. I don't even know what the dose is, but just using small amounts. I don't know if you have any any thoughts in general on that and the of the industry really adopting the use like the one I see the most now is I think read a true tide. Is that right?
Mac: Yeah. Yeah, so Reta-Trutide being like a GLP-1 agonist, it runs through the three compartments of it, so it's it's in stage two, three clinical trials right now. It will get approved, it will kind of go through at some stage, I'm sure of that. ⁓ It's obviously found in a more underground setting as of right now, so like not medical advice is the disclaimer behind all this, but I think. The conversation that seems to be a play is there's a lot of the data that we've seen behind it is in single dose studies. And we saw this kind of with like Mengera and fucking Zempek and all this shit as well. And cool, right? Where people are going with the micro dose analogy is essentially it is to help mitigate the effects that the drug has. Now, key thing in terms of what I said there, is effects, not side effects. Because at the end of the day, everything that a drug does is an effect. Whether it's a positive or a negative, it's an effect. So we see the GLP-1s generally are used in terms of appetite suppression. And it works from a little more from a Gremlin and Lipton standpoint, and the psychological component of that and the way it's excreted. But essentially, the drug is doing what it's meant to do. Is it completely blasts through your appetite. So like you have none. Okay. But that's effective when you're trying to calorically restrict. Cool. Makes sense. Right. But with that, see some other effects, which are like headache, nausea, a little bit of vomiting. Like it's pretty rough if you fuck up the dose. It slows down GI mortality to like, I don't want to say zero, but it slows it down completely. So your digestibility is a lot less. Cool. All right.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: Now, individuals are utilizing these drugs in non-caloric restricted environments because there seems to be what we would deem, and I guess, you know, we need more research behind these things. And I hate kind of being the, you know, throwing the research study, but I'd love to see more research if it ever happens, is that we see secondary and tertiary benefits of the drug coming through. So we see an improvement in insulin sensitivity. We see an improvement in CRP markers. We see an improvement in global inflammatory-based responses. All of these things come in. And I love the thinking. I really do like the thinking of, all right, cool, well, let's see if we can utilize this drug for things that are not appetite suppression, which are going to improve general and overall health markers. Someone being in a less inflamed state. is going to take them out of a higher risk category. Whether it's cardiovascular, whether it's even like building hypertrophy or trying to increase hypertrophy, someone who's in a less inflamed state is going to accrue more muscle mass. Now the body doesn't like being in mass amounts of inflammatory based responses. Now remember we need inflammation as part of the repair process, blah, blah, blah, blah, on a slightly different mechanism of this. This is why like BPC and all these other things can be taken more frequently than not just. thrown in for injury standpoints, but that's, I guess, separate conversation with this. So we've kind of looked at the drug in a, what I would deem a semi-critical lens. Or we've looked at the benefits that we're starting to see come through and go, how can I apply this to individuals who are not necessarily looking for the caloric restrictive environment, but are looking for the decrease in inflammatory-based response? the improving in insulin resistance improvement to insulin sensitivity. Like how can we make those things effective? And that's where they've now gone, well, if I take, I don't know, fucking a five milligram dose, which is a, I guess, semi-standard to a little bit higher dose of retetruteide, I get the mass kind of appetite suppression and I can't eat my food. Now that doesn't work for a 100 kilogram, 200 pound, 220 pound individual. consuming three to five thousand calories a day. Like if I lose a whole day of food, I'm fucked. Not gonna do great for me. So they've gone, well, instead of doing five milligrams, maybe I do one milligram five days a week. And it becomes a little bit more ⁓ acceptable in terms of the body's response or that effect that comes off the back end. That's the principle in terms of these, these. ⁓ like micro-dosing, and I would probably say it comes from that of like the improvement and the research that we've seen with regards to the hormone replacement therapy of what we have like peaks and lows or troughs, highs and lows in terms of those troughs, and keeping it more blood stable, which kind of makes sense if we think about the concept from like blood glucose levels. We don't really want to have these mass spikes and lows, we kind of want to have like a little spike come back to baseline, little spike come back to baseline. That becomes a healthier individual. And I think that's where this whole concept has come in. Now, the only problem is we don't know if that works in that mechanism. Like I've seen it. I'm not going to lie to you and say like I've had individuals use it in that way and it seems to be effective, but it's like we don't know. So the answer is if we can do that, I'm probably going to err on that side of doing it purely because the effects are pretty shit.
Nick Ridpath: Right.
Mac: And again, the devil is in the dosage and the duration. So if I'm looking at these things and I go, well, I need this response and I've done all of the other lifestyle interventions, I brought over these things in, could this work from a cardiovascular kind of prophylactic use? It's like possibly, but I need the food to be there, I need the appetite to be there, I need that element of it. So well, I know I could microdose it across the week and possibly get the positive outcomes from that. But as per everything we do, there is a risk, right? There is weighing up these risk scenarios of, okay, well, I'm still using a GLP-1 that technically slows down digestibility. While I'm on large amounts of food and trying to grow or hypertrophize or get to that standpoint, like, do I want a slowing down of digestion? Maybe, maybe not. That's for the individual to work out, the coach to try and work out in terms of these and make those decisions in terms of that. I mean, sorry, very long-winded answer to your question, but I think, again, context matters because the answer could be sick, it works, but it's like, do we know if it works? And like, why does it work? What are we trying to achieve? What is the goal? Where is it going to fail? Where is the failure going to occur by doing it in this way? Where is the positive gonna be from doing it in this way?
Nick Ridpath: Right. So sounds like your take is it theoretically could be a positive thing, but we need more time.
Mac: Yes. We need more time in terms of these things and theoretically I think it could be an effective way to dose it. Yes, I think it could be and from what I've seen and what I've kind of like, you know, experimented on myself and played around with is it does seem to be an effective manner. Is it something that I do in the long term with individuals? I don't have an answer. I must be honest.
Nick Ridpath: . Have I told you my theory for American obesity?
Mac: Hit me. ⁓
Nick Ridpath: Do you have a theory?
Mac: ⁓ Look, I feel like these drugs that are coming out are going to be the corn seed oils. What? Really?
Nick Ridpath: seed oils. Do you haven't seen this dude? There's a whole like there's a whole group of people that will tell you the reason that we're all fat in America is because of seed oils or people like I went to Europe and they don't have any GMOs in their food and I lost five pounds. He also walked everywhere and ate two meals a day. But you my here's my take my my take on.
Mac: ⁓ yeah. It's the sea dolls. Yeah, yep.
Nick Ridpath: American obesity because people to used to if I go on like Twitter for example and find this conversation somewhere People are gonna be posting pictures of Americans on the beach like the 1940s like everyone's skinny Like America used to be skinny. We used to eat whole foods and cook at home like, know, we used to do Everyone smoke cigarettes. We were blasting nicotine. You know, it's a really good appetite suppressant Nicotine I swear I once I asked AI at one point to graph me the like prevalence of ⁓ smoking
Mac: You Thanks for seeing.
Nick Ridpath: with the incident of obesity or however you want to say that. Right. So around like 1980, there's like a very steep cross. like smoking Hicks and Nose Dive and obesity goes straight up. It's like, yeah, we just traded cigarettes for McDonald's hamburgers. So like, of course, we're going to get fat if we're no longer stemming ourselves to the gills.
Mac: Yeah, yeah, the end. Yeah, that appetite suppression and like dude, definitely ⁓ a factor and I think there's gonna be a co, there's gonna be multiple factors that come into play to add this into the mix. Like let's go further back as well around that time period. You had mandated PT in every school. Every school, every school did some form of physical education. or PEPT, physical training, whatever it is, like we had the pull-ups, we had the fucking monkey bars, we had the push-ups, we had all of the things that kind of had to come into mix. Now, what do we know, when we think about generation, what do we know about fat cells? Like fat cells, especially, and this is why I'm really gung-ho on adolescent fat gain, is once we develop fat cells, we never get rid of them. We shrink them or we grow them. Shrink grow multiply in terms of fat cells. You never get rid of them unless you have like liposuction, right? So if you're a fat kid you have For and this is not the numbers But I'm just going to give us an example if you were at like 10 years old you have a hundred fat cells You will have a hundred fat cells as a minimum for the rest of your life That's it All that will happen is we'll fill the fat cells up and it gets to a point where like it's not maximal but it's almost at the max and it goes well we need more space so it makes another fat cell. So like by the age of 20 you could have 150 fat cells. But if you go through a diet and you get skinny or you get jacked or toned you still have 150 fat cells. They're just smaller. So you will always have that there for the rest of your life. Now let's go back to what I just said. Back in school, we had physical education where we had more output. We had more calorie expenditure coming through. So we had less opportunity for cephalo cells to be developed. Now speed it up further, that generation is a little bit skinnier, wouldn't put on much. Now yes, there's the cardio aspect in this, the cardio bunnies and fucking blah, blah, blah and all that shit. And again, as I said, multiple factors into this, but if we looked at the base foundation, they're starting from a place with less fat cells. So they have less opportunity to get fat because of that, or even be in a body composition that is that of a representation of a fat individual. Look at our current trajectory. You walk into a school now, like they have a thousand fat cells versus what we had 20, 30, 40 years ago. and longer than that. there is, I don't disagree with you, and I think it would be an interesting thing to throw all of these inputs into the play. I'd be like, yeah, what happened? I don't think the answer would ever be there, but I think the true answer at the end of the day is America in itself has an over-consumption issue and an under-exercise issue, an under-expenditure issue. And that is always going to lead to that of fat gain and or some form of obesity epidemic.
Nick Ridpath: Absolutely. It's definitely multifactorial. That's a super interesting place to look. ⁓ That makes a lot of sense. just if I'm just saying if I were to double down since since like everyone, everyone wants to pick one thing. ⁓ it's it's seed oils. It's ultra processed food kind of the same thing. It's the GMOs. It's whatever. It's like I'm picking one. It's it's nicotine. It's the fact that we nicotine into it into a villain. Yeah, start smoking again. That's my health advice.
Mac: Yeah, you're not wrong. I don't think you're wrong. It's nicotine. Sick. ⁓ Yeah, just start smoking again. ⁓
Nick Ridpath: We just traded lung cancer for colon cancer, you know, like it's.
Mac: Literally, we just changed, know, we have an increase in autoimmune disease. Why? Because we're fucking banging ourselves down with more inflammatory based foods. It's like there's so many, again, multifactorial. But, you know, if you are gonna double down on one, like I'm not gonna disagree with you. think smoking works. as an appetite suppression, smoking works. Nicotine consumption works very effectively.
Nick Ridpath: All my clients that are previous smokers like, yeah, when I quit smoking, I gained so much weight. Yeah.
Mac: or just gaining weight. like, I mean, we could look at it into the psychological component. Did they just trade one addiction for the next addiction? Possibly. Like that could be the case in terms of where it is. Like there's an interesting fact. mean, funny enough, I've had a few like old clients and ex-clients and even some current clients who have addiction-based issues. whether it was drugs, whether it was food, whether it was something along those lines, and the food-based individuals were put on medically prescribed, not red or true diet, Zempak and shit like that. Yes, they lost body weight, but their cravings and their addictive behaviors, not food-related, have improved. which has been a super interesting thing from a psychological component of that. my ex-addicts, if you were drug-related addicts, onto a GLP-1, landed up having less of a ⁓ craving response to the next thing that they changed as their alternative because of that, which was super, super interesting in terms of the research behind it.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that is super interesting. ⁓ Dude, we've almost made it an hour. ⁓ Training things? We haven't talked about any training really. I'm supposed to debate you. One of your, who was it, Cody? And Cody sent me something, was like, you're, he's like, you're not gonna, or Mac's not gonna like this post that you made. And I was like, I was like a kid I had doing alternate pressing.
Mac: Whatever you want, I'm here. caught you. I you.
Nick Ridpath: And I was like, what's what's Max Scrype with alternate pressing? And I feel like I feel like I'm gonna let you say whatever you want to say first, but I feel like our conclusions are gonna be the same. It's just a matter of the context in which they heard us talking about it. Anyway, bodybuilding, it's probably like objectively awful. I think for bodybuilders, especially, they just need like a little bit of variability. You could probably dose in some stuff like that and a warm up if your goal was just movement variability. I look at it more from the perspective of like
Mac: the conclusion is going to be the same. It's going to be... context. Exactly, it's the context. So.
Nick Ridpath: I have an athlete who rotates like shit or human who rotates like shit from trying to focus on some sort of like reciprocal motion, you know, protraction, retraction, change shape of the rib cage. I'll implement it there as more of a temporary means of restoring movement quality or what I even do is I'll mix it into like I was saying warm up sets and then like our high output sets are going to be bilateral, right? But it's it's not like I'm doing it to maximize hypertrophy by any means.
Mac: So I think the context behind this is the modality. So two factors, modality would be the first thing. Cable, fine. Why? Because a cable's an under loaded press anyways. At the end of the day, like if I'm introducing some form of cable variation of a press, it's to move the scaps around the rib cage, it's to probably challenge that of the shortened position, it could be at the beginning of a program, it could be at the end of a program, it could be a volume or like a load management strategy, something like that. On a dumbbell,
Nick Ridpath: Right.
Mac: Really stupid, why? Because the dumbbell in the standpoint of like a force progression or exertion standpoint, we want to be loading that maximally to sub maximally. All right, like that's it. So like why would I do a, why would I do a dumbbell press in a way that is going to be not of chasing the most amount of output out of that means? That doesn't, like it doesn't logically mix the two together. Cables, different scenario. My only question to you, because I think myself and Thea actually discussed this the one day when we were talking about like rotational planes of the thoracic. Do you find that it's, and the concept came to me from kind of the whole like, are we missing internal rotation or are we in a position that is too internally rotated that we now can't move out of it to move back into it? So think about that concept of what we're referring to, terms of thoracic rotation. Do we have a thoracic rotation issue or do we have an inability to decelerate in terms of that thoracic rotation issue? So you hear what I'm saying. So what I bring in from my go-to for thoracic rotation will always be a dumbbell row, contralateral row, all day long. Because we're to have the component of thoracic rotation but we're gonna have more importantly that deceleration component. And I think that's the key issue. And like when we look at rotation, is it inability to rotate or is it inability to decelerate into that position?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think too, their deceleration is relative to like the force vector, right? Because we could look at deceleration in either concept. I think the biggest place where I use it, especially in like a lot of overhead athletes or even like a lot of my combat sports guys, everything they do is it's so torso driven. The shoulders are kind of along for the ride. So getting them to get the rib cage into a better position and have to isolate the shoulders moving without the rib cage moving, that to me is like one of the biggest wins to get out of the exercise.
Mac: athletes all day long.
Nick Ridpath: It's interesting you say that because I haven't necessarily looked at it in the same way you just phrased it, but typically like those are things I'm going to do both of in a program regardless if somebody really needs to double down on it. Like I'm probably going to do an alternating press. I'm probably going to do a single arm dumbbell row almost all the time. Like a single arm row variation, something that I keep in, especially for a lot of my athletes almost year round. Yeah.
Mac: So I... It's in every program of mine as well. Yeah, it's year round, every program, every athlete. Because it just, I mean from a physique standpoint, dude, one of the things I noticed last year with like all my females, obviously getting lean helps, but like I got them all lean, dude. Their serratus, every single one of them, like hypertrophied to the extent, I was like, what the fuck is going on here? ⁓ Like exceptionally more than what I've ever seen before. I went back and I ordered to everyone's program and I was like, what did I do? I kept heavy dumbbell rows. My 60 and 50 kilogram females were dumbbell rowing 30 to 40 kilograms, which is from a body weight, it's fucking wild when you think about it. And every single one of them had no shoulder issues, zero shoulder issues through any prep, any overhead, anything's kind of coming. they all had these most insanely jacked and like cut out washboard like intercostals into serratus and I was like okay, why? Well think about it, oblique intercostal serratus, we're gonna create that lateral compression, it's like we're gonna make them, instead of a sport that is very flexion extension, we now have compression laterally. So we have a more cylindrical tube, a rib cage that's gonna be more malleable, a scab that's gonna move around it more effectively. It was injury preventative, got them fucking strong, but injury preventative in the long run. And that's the same concept of what we're referring to.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think it to even make sense from like a structural standpoint, like I've always had really well developed serenity and external like oblique, but like my, my rib cage is so narrow. And I'm so like compressed that it's I think it's just like probably more of a natural byproduct to have one I did a lot of hard rotational training and sport growing up. And to my structure is going to make me better at doing those things. Therefore, it probably developed these features.
Mac: Features, So like I don't have anything against it in the context of athlete specific. Like I'll use a cable and to be fair, if I do use a cable alternative press, it's gonna be something that is like a standing cable press, more of a decline, where I get them to hinge over more, where they can keep their pelvis in a more neutral position. And now the scaps actually gonna be able to move in a true congruency of what we're looking for.
Nick Ridpath: Yes.
Mac: I'd prefer not to use that of a stationary where it's a bench or something along those lines, because I'm not gonna get the best out of it. I'm not gonna be able to really get those scabs back depending on the arc of the pull. For me, it's self-management. That, cool. Holding that cable there and pressing through, getting the protraction all day long, no issues. But again, context matters behind these things, I think application. from modality, as I mentioned in very beginning, modality is going to be the set point of am I using this or not. Cables, fine. Dumbbells, no. It doesn't compute.
Nick Ridpath: Typically the setup I'll go for a similar, I don't do like the bilateral cable like you per se, but I'll go like split stance and I'll use the free hand to block on the opposite side of the cable stack. And then I'll do like a forceful protraction with the working arm. And then like the big emphasis is on rib cage pelvis position. I find some people though are so. So movement challenge, they have a hard time doing that setup. So if I were to regress that, I would go to a bench on a cable setup, but I would do that more to maximize external stability, just to give them, again, this is somebody who's really poor at organizing the rib cage. So almost cueing like a flat spine to the bench, just making sure they get as many of those touch points as possible to start to build some awareness of organizing rib cage and pelvis. Before we move into.
Mac: poor.
Nick Ridpath: what I'd want them to do, which is a standing variation. I find if I do do dumbbell, it's more of a resources, like if I'm just in a gym with no cables, or if I have somebody that's like so regressed, I need to lay them on their back. So like they're on their back and like the vector for maintaining that position at the shoulder for the non-working arm, there's gonna be very little torque on the shoulder at all. So it should be relatively easy to maintain that kind of block side as we go into extension on the opposite side. That would be.
Mac: Anything. Yeah. I
Nick Ridpath: if I had to give an explanation, but no, think what you're saying makes perfect sense. There's not really any challenge to that. So with a dumbbell, especially into a dumbbell, we're trying to load the shit out of it. So it's more medium to maximum loading. there's a lot of reasons why we shouldn't do that.
Mac: Yeah, 100%. Fuck Cory.
Nick Ridpath: Fuck yeah, I like that. What's the worst thing you've seen in bodybuilding training right now? I don't even know what's popular. I know what I see in my gym and I know which coaches are giving that out.
Mac: Yeah, you know what I don't I can't stand right now is the Everything is in the toes hip extension toes lip leaning to everything's on the toes, bro Yeah heels Yeah, literally only toe pressure. Yeah, literally just like hey guys, you're both wrong. Let's just do full foot pressure Yeah, that seems to be like
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ and the toes. So we got behind the other way around. We've gone from from heel pressure only to toe pressure only instead of getting it like we should in the middle.
Mac: The thing lately is hip extension, you press through your toes, leg press, press through your toes. It's like, just fuck off. Like honestly, you're just, yeah, that's it. It's the everything's into the toes and then like hip extension, split squats, anything that we're referring to, we drive an internally rotated position for deceleration.
Nick Ridpath: Really?
Mac: Yeah, just think about what I just said. Yeah, why? It just, external, say if I'm gonna punch you, and like the way that I tried to explain this to someone who was fighting with me about this is, if I'm bench pressing, okay, so the top of the bench press would and should be, like in my start position at the top here, like to a certain degree or like as I finish the rep, like that's, for lack of a better word, the most internally rotated position that I'm gonna be in as I produce the force. That's a good concept, right?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. Yeah. No.
Mac: But as I come down, I don't want to be driving my hands in. I want to be driving my hands out because that's an expression of external rotation at the shoulder. Now imagine if I was rotating in on the way down, I'd just be fucking destroying everything. But that's exactly what everyone is doing by internally rotating to load into the lateral glute, load into the lateral hip. I'm just like, why? What are we? What are we doing? You're missing the point. Yes, at the end of the day, the foot pressure is what matters. As long as we keep a flat foot, as we sit into that lateral hip, you're gonna get an external rotation component, depending on where you look at it from the structure. You're not trying to internally rotate into the position. Internal rotation is force expression. That's it, that's I punch you, I hit you as hard as I can with an internal rotation, not external rotation. Very irritating.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, think people just overcomplicate that too. And it gets into, it's almost like if you get into an argument with like a PRI person about like, nutation, counter-nutation, inhalation, exhalation, bias. And it's like largely a lot of these arguments we're talking about the same thing. So it's like, how can I, how can I cue this movement to be better? That's what I really care about.
Mac: It is the same thing.
Nick Ridpath: is I'm not gonna come here and argue with you about IR, ER. It's like, well, yeah, if we're going through the frontal plane of the hip and we're moving through relative hip flexion, right, foot's more towards midline, we are accessing hip internal rotation. If I'm going through a bench press, I'm accessing shoulder internal rotation, relatively speaking, but I shouldn't be cuing shoulder internal rotation. So then the first thing that happens is I'm gonna lose suppression of my scapula, I'm not gonna use my lats to create good core stability, good scapular stability, and I'm gonna go to shit. So it's like.
Mac: That's the difference, yes. Yes.
Nick Ridpath: Although I might be entering a position of relative IR, I'm probably queuing ER here, because it's going to help me decelerate into that position better and maintain tension where I want to. And again, it's like that's, but that's like context people don't want to listen to. And two, like if you're the average person listening to this, it doesn't matter. Like what we're saying doesn't matter as long as you're executing effectively. It matters in the grand scheme of things. But like what's the Da Vinci quote? It's like, ⁓
Mac: in. No.
Nick Ridpath: Simplicity is the purest form of sophistication. It's like it matters, but like in practice, it doesn't really matter if we're executing well within those parameters.
Mac: Just for observation, yes. It's the like they've taken the the 2d model of yes We have relative IR, but queuing IR is not the fucking point Queuing IR just takes away from your ability to get into IR to actually then produce the force that's required and it's the queuing of the IR fuck ⁓
Nick Ridpath: especially for your population, like a lot of smaller females, like dude, you're already jammed into IR, like maybe you need to actually access a little bit of hip external rotation so you can now get into hip IR.
Mac: That's exactly what fucking the issue is. And off the back end of this, of this, for lack of a better word, because of this change from, again, the incorrect energy into the heels and now into the toes, we're so under loaded. And now when we're so under loaded, it's just a decrease of hyperactivity stimulus. You're feeling a burn. Great, that doesn't mean sweet fuck all for building muscle. Doesn't, it means nothing. So yeah, that's the problem that I am, I've had to ignore it. I should unfollow and muted so many people. It's the greatest tool. Fucks sakes, button is great. Are you joking?
Nick Ridpath: Good for you. The mute button's awesome. I haven't seen the toe stuff yet though. I need to look for that. ⁓ The big thing, I see a lot of heavy heel stuff still. The worst thing I see in the gym, I try to disassociate what I see online from what I see in the gym because what I see in the gym is typically far worse. Yeah, so I know like heel pressure stuff. I see a knee-banded RDL like almost every day. I guess one of the worst exercises that exists for the lower body.
Mac: It's a true representation. Yeah, true. So knee band and RDL referring to knee band around the knees, cueing ear or pulling to the one side. Okay, so.
Nick Ridpath: Sorry. Yeah, many band around the knees. No, like a super heavy many band around the knees.
Mac: Yeah, that still happens. That happens in squats, in RDLs. You'll see it in the V-squat all the time. All the time, like a V-squat, good morning. Like that's what it is. That's where that one's coming through. It's like, it's doing nothing. Just flatten your feet. Just keep your foot pressure for me you'll be fine. Yeah, that's a thing.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is funny too, it's a bit contradictory what we were just saying, but it's like if I'm entering a position of IR, I don't really want to be queuing like excessively active ER, because that's going to defeat the purpose. So even like though we were just saying maybe we need more ER, that's not how we're trying to achieve it either.
Mac: No, no, The requirement for ER is, again, it's the ability to go into ER, come out of ER, go into IR. Not stay in one position and think that that's the place that we need to be in all the time to express force. It's if I, it's kind of like, it's the whole thing of like you've opened the door, but you don't walk through the door to the other side to close the door. You just open the door and you stand on the outside and be like, yeah, I opened the door. It's like, well, do something with it motherfucker. Like go in. That's the point. And then when you need to go outside, go outside. It's like that's the simplest way that I can somehow come up with this. But it's like, don't just stand there, open the door and be like, yep, job done. It's like, well, you have to go inside the house at some stage to then also come out the house at some stage. Same concept.
Nick Ridpath: You're also, put a note over here. I've not gone over like anything I wrote down for us to talk about and we're not going to, because I have, well, I have a couple of things, but you also love trap RRDLs. You're one of my few other friends who implement those, sounds like. I was going through some of your recent posts. Like I think that's an awesome exercise and I never see it being used.
Mac: Cool. Bye. always. It's a low barrier of entry. It's, for lack of a better word, again, risk analysis when we run through all of these things. It has less opportunity for the wheels to fall off. It's a better center of mass orientation. Most people are so far forward anyways, just bringing that center mass back into their dead center allows them to find their body more effectively, exactly as we're referring to. I tend to see less heel pressure moving because the bar smacks them in the fucking shins. Like it's a self-cue corrective tool. It's such an underused tool. think unless you are a barbell athlete, in my opinion, and this is a bold statement, but unless you're a barbell athlete, you should probably just live on a trap bar. Like doing a barbell RDL.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. I don't know why you would argue otherwise. Like what would the benefit be of choosing bar ball versus trap bar that both has loadable.
Mac: There isn't. Literally, you put 25 plates on, you're gonna max that thing out. You're gonna have better neutral plane in terms of the hand expressions. The lats are going to stabilize the pelvis more effectively. More tension through the glutes, more effective in terms of what we're doing. It it ticks the box. The only downside to it, as I have always mentioned, is when you get manufacturers make those stupid long ass fucking ones and like you have individuals whose frame doesn't fit the trap bar. That's the only time period that maybe the barbell's gonna be more effective.
Nick Ridpath: Wait.
Mac: That's it.
Nick Ridpath: They're almost doing like a snatch grip. Like it's like way out to the sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, that's a fair point.
Mac: Yeah. That's the only time period that I think it's effective. It's when the implement doesn't match the morphology of the individual in front of you.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, it's great. But now all the things you just said, that's why is a better center of mass control, the weights closer to your middle, your center of mass, you can engage your lats easier. It's just, it's just slow to bowl. So like, all those things are going to give us a more effective stimulus. Not saying the barbell is bad. But like it just if we're talking about in terms of ease of teaching and ease of maintaining proper execution under high stimulus or under high intensity, like it's just going to be a probably a better option.
Mac: at ⁓ And again, the top thing on top, like the bigger point or a secondary point on top of this is you can use it for a gen pop to an elite athlete. That's it. Like athletes probably do better on a trap bar than they do a barbell. Simple. Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I use almost actually. Yeah, all my pro guys for RDLs. We do trap bar, trap bar, dumbbell, typically trap bar, because barbed or dumbbell is not not quite as loadable. ⁓ Let's do the Q and A's actually. No, we're going to screen share. I'm not trying to screen share on the podcast yet to my people that are listening. I apologize, but we're going to do this. I'm going have Mac narrate what he's saying for us so we can. Can we see this okay?
Mac: trouble. Yeah, agreed. ⁓ hilarious ⁓ Yeah, I'm stoked. I just eat human. Rhythm. I have seen this.
Nick Ridpath: Have you seen these? I get an ad, no, no. I get an ad on this top left right here. what are your thoughts on this? I get an ad for this literally every 30 minutes on Instagram right now. It's basically, looks like the, if you guys are familiar with the ⁓ continuous blood glucose monitors, it seems like it's like that. It sticks on you, but it draws your blood out and then you get a blood test done or you get your blood work done. Yeah.
Mac: blood. So at the end of the day, think it's a great, a great tool. I think it's gonna be a good tool in terms of individuals who want to assess bio like deeper blood work markers and biofeedback markers on a continuous basis without always having to go to a pathology lab and get your blood drawn. I think that's it. Remember at the end of the day, the two downsides to it though, you still have to mail it off and get it shipped to whatever company or whatever place to get it tested. So that's a time period. Secondly, Drawing blood is an art, right? If you are too violent with the vial or if you tilt it in a way that is ineffective, you break down the cells or you break down the blood necessarily and you can get some false positive false reading. So there is always going to be something that you have to read that with a pinch of salt, but I think it could be a very effective tool in the long run. Athlete screening, like that. You can literally just walk in. stick it to their fucking shoulder and get some form of blood work done pretty simple and pretty easy in terms of that. Could be a very effective tool. I don't know the markers though. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, they've like paired with, I saw they paired with like a high rocks event at some stage or some shit like that. But yeah, it could be effective. Could be effective.
Nick Ridpath: Cool, yeah, I was just curious what your thoughts would be on that. I have no idea any details on it, I just keep seeing it. So I pulled up, we actually got some decent questions. I put this up for Shallows I did last week and we got some of the funniest questions like you'll see, I'll send you the screenshot on that. Anyways, there's a couple of bad ones or weird ones in here. What we got? ⁓ Here's a super interesting one. Do flyos carry over to bodybuilding? No, I know you're gonna say, contextually, can we paint a picture where there might be some benefits to it? I look at like,
Mac: sick. Yeah. ⁓ my god.
Nick Ridpath: I have even like my gem pop clients doing a little bit of plyos. I think one of the more recent ways I've been using it from a movement perspective is I'll do like like Matt Watson deep tier stuff as part of a warmup. So if I'm trying to get some like oscillatory almost inhibition in a position, like I will do ⁓ like a stationary lunge position, like a deep tier kind of plyo just to kind of get that inhibitory response to being in that position. Or I'll pair that with like an isometric in the position. Things that I typically do just to get better.
Mac: Yes. Okay.
Nick Ridpath: Awareness get rid of positioning better mobility in the position before I actually go and load it I don't I can't really imagine a bunch of like 130 kilo meatheads doing deep-tier plyos in the gym
Mac: So that. There we had it. There's no, so the, I would, I'm going to answer this in a way that is a straw man, but not really at the same time. My answer to this is it could be, but the plyometric tool that I'm going to use is going to be one that we used to use back in the day in bodybuilding. We saw some of the old school guys used to do it skipping. Simple skipping is if we think about it is a plyometric based exercise. It's a low barrier of entry, very, very, very, very low barrier. You're probably not what you would deem like a traditional plyometric, but I don't think the ability to skip is a bad thing in the sense purely because we have an understanding where we are in space. We create some form of joint stiffness and tendon stiffness in terms of that. And it could be added in as a very simple basic way to do it now. The only downside to that is one, it's difficult to skip, two, 130 kilo individual skipping on calves is probably, depending on what drugs are in play, ⁓ you're probably at a higher risk for some form of ⁓ ACL, well possibly an ACL, but some form of Achilles rupture at some stage. That's the only plyometric I would bring into the mix.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, feel like, no, no, no, it's great. Honestly, that's what I use with people that are pretty detrained or like I have a fair bit of clients over the age of 60 and they want to get back into doing athletic things or they're like, when I play pickleball, my Achilles bugs me, my knee bugs me, cool. We're gonna do like some real basic pogo hops and play slow intensity and we're gonna do some skips actually moving through space. Like those are two things that I use pretty consistently. So I think I would apply the same thing for a bodybuilder who maybe...
Mac: Skipping. Skipping.
Nick Ridpath: Our only real goal here is to create some sort of stimulus that has a component of velocity to it. And then also maybe give them a little bit of movement variability with that velocity. That would be like all we're trying to get around trying to make bodybuilders into athletes by any means, because then objectively, they're probably putting resources into a thing. doesn't matter for their actual sport, which is just being jacked as fuck.
Mac: That's it. That's Just done. 100 % 100 % agreed. Dead right.
Nick Ridpath: Decent questions. You want some bad ones? We just have John Boy in here, but just John Mayer. John. What is that a question? John Mayer. Yes or no? John Mayer. Yes or no Mac. What you got?
Mac: Mm-hmm. That's that's John Bond, isn't it? What's his name? It's fucking it's ⁓ Yes, yeah, John point PT. Shut up. Yeah, he used to stop drinking monsters while he trains idiot or energy drinks This is wrong time and place Yeah, it sounds like it wrong time and place caffeine half-life is is incorrect You've got a carbonated drink going into the GI system while you're training
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, John Boy PT, baby. That sounds like John Boy.
Mac: You're just not doing the effective things to the GI in any shape or form while you're trying to be in a sympathetic drive state to produce force to maximize hyperactivity or strength.
Nick Ridpath: Sounds like a bad time. I'll make sure to add that to the list of things to give him shit on. we're saying we're not going to answer John Mayer. We're going to answer that. we go. Training, training redundancy in a physique sort of a Zeke sport setting. That's not really a question. Every, every, every program. Yeah. Well, like to some point, like you almost want there to be some redundancy in a sense if our goal is to get jacked. But I think it's not in the sense that typically we would see it, which is like
Mac: Yep. Yeah, it's probably, it's not, it's a statement that is true. True.
Nick Ridpath: Like I said, YouTube video on this couple weeks ago, like I pulled up a couple of programs I had been sent from clients that are doing bodybuilding programs. And it's like dumbbell, lateral raise, cable, lateral raise, Smith machine, upright row, dumbbell, shoulder press machine, shoulder press. And it's like, did we just did the same thing or like lower body days? It's like B stance, RDL followed by bilateral RDL followed by a V squat. Good morning, followed by a three hip thrust variations. It's like, guys, we're just doing, yeah, we're doing the same thing like six times here.
Mac: Yeah, Yeah, Same thing. Yeah, yeah. Smith machine going on, yeah. So the way that I would like, not answer that, but the question would be there is like ⁓ muscle centric redundancies. Like that's the problem. When it's a muscle centric based movement, so it's an origin to insertion based movement, that is constant in terms of redundancy. Like you mentioned, know, shoulder press or machine shoulder press to dumbbell shoulder press. Like guys. just do more of the machine shoulder press. Like that's it, that's all that needs to be required in terms of these things. So yeah, probably my biggest fight or gripe within the framework of individuals that come to me.
Nick Ridpath: What's the biggest one you see with men? obviously like the ones I see with females is chest, so like five chest presses.
Mac: Chest, chest, chest. It'll be just different variations of chest press. It'll be like Smith machine, 15 degree chest press, then like ⁓ seated flat chest press machine, then a dumbbell press. like guys, it's the same fucking thing. You're just overloading the mid to short and then a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Horizontal, yeah, yeah.
Nick Ridpath: then a pack fly and then this the same exact horizontal horizontal horizontal 80 % of its mid mid range to shorten you get one length and then there there's your there's your variability
Mac: Yeah, 100 % if you're lucky and the variability is like a cable fly. It's like guys, that's not a LinkedIn pic. Like calm down, calm down, let's do this.
Nick Ridpath: Let's see. ⁓ Actually, we kind of answered this one inadvertently a little bit, maybe a topic on acceleration slash deceleration, change of direction. It will actually then it says adductors plus core minimizing injuries. ⁓ No, you answered that. Do a single arm dumbbell row. That's the answer to that question. ⁓ Top five exercises and progressions within physique sports. Give me your five best physique exercises. How about that?
Mac: Thank ⁓ Dumbbell row is gonna be in there. Not, again, not because of anything from a load, like a loadable, yes, it is gonna be ⁓ some form of stimulus, like a really good stimulus to the dip, but like we spoke about, keeping that lateral compression. think bodybuilders or physique development sports have too much flexion extension. The ability to have lateral compression into the mixer actually makes a better physique, better rotation, better pressing ability, better upper body mobility, they'll be able to get more back, focused movements. So that's the first one. ⁓ Back wise, probably some form of chest supported row, like I'm a T bar, something along those lines that I can, if it's T bar, I wanna be able to either add D handles to it or create some form of neutral-ish or rotating-based hand grip so that I can get true shoulder extension. that's ⁓ five exercise, some form of shoulder extension, something that takes the shoulder behind, that will takes me on behind the body.
Nick Ridpath: Awesome.
Mac: that then stops us from loading the AC joint instead of anything else. So T-bar row could be really nice for mid-back, mid-lats, even lats to certain degree, but it has to have that ability to row. ⁓ What else would I do? I'm gonna do some form of like fly. I'm probably gonna run like a pec fly, I think that for four pecs from a length and range, great. Most individuals are either gonna be in that very extended position. So learning how to bring this back down and hold the rib cage over pelvis is gonna be very important for them. Also actually getting a true lengthened pec. Like that whole like, you're sitting in internal rotation. It's like, no, you just have a pec that is more contracted or in a more contracted position. We can't actually lengthen or find that external rotation to then find internal rotation. So I'd probably go with that. ⁓ Landmine press. not a hypertrophy based thing, but shoulder rehab, which, ⁓ dude, fuck, it's in dumbbell row and landmine press is in everyone's program, whether it's a warmup and or loadable based exercise, because it's cool having access to the scat moving around the rib cage, but if you don't do anything with it, there's no point. And like a landmine press is not so much overhead that you're going to cause an issue, but enough of a degree of flexion that it can be loadable.
Nick Ridpath: I love that you said that. Yeah.
Mac: but more importantly, it's actually starting to get protraction and it's a super easy awareness tool. Like you can get them to get to the end, they're like, okay, when you get to the end, punch forward for me. And they're like, ⁓ I felt that like crap. It's like, yeah, welcome to using your serratus. Cool. It's like, that's a cool thing.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, exactly. I've got I've got a meathead right now. I got a meathead client who I have doing these to fix some of his issues. He's a super stiff. He's like, he's the most jacked like narrow ISA guy I've ever seen. In terms of like narrow structure. He has put on the most muscle mass I've ever seen in a human that's that narrow. But like, super stiff, doesn't move well through his torso at all. Yeah, the shoulders don't move well. So I've had him doing this and his feedback is like, this is so frustrating. Like I just like yelling at myself in my head while I'm doing this. I'm like, you're doing it right. Like it should be frustrating because I'm giving you everything you're bad at right now. And that's what we're trying to fix with this. We're not trying to do this to give you jacked outs. That's what the lateral raise machine or the cable lateral raise is in there for later in the session. This is movement quality based right now with some load.
Mac: can't rotate. Crisis foot, yep. Yeah, the last one, fifth, and this is not an exercise for hypertrophy in any shape or form, and like I've just mentioned, almost very little hypertrophy based movements, funny that. ⁓ Side lying decompression on a med ball. Big fan, big, big fan of that because once again, most individuals, even when they're jacked, like you're big jacked dude, get him just to lie on a fucking med ball on the side and just open.
Nick Ridpath: Okay, yeah. already already doing it because I love them too. Dude we're like
Mac: Yep. this is, and that's it. yeah, that's, but that's the whole point at the end of the day is, you know, again, let's look at these things. I can give someone any pro like they can keep running their normal program. Let's just sprinkle in these few things that create natural compression. And you're immediately going to get 25 % increase in performance because when you have these obliques and this lateral sling, that is not just Neurally jacked up all the time the body moves more effectively. It's it's it's not fucking rocket science in my opinion
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things has to be keeping the wheels on the bus. Obviously, I don't train a bunch of physique athletes, but even like with my, I was saying this on a podcast with Joey. It's like, you know, one of the biggest things I work on with my, my pro athletes is like just keeping the wheels on the bus, like giving them enough. ⁓
Mac: same thing.
Nick Ridpath: enough new access to movement, enough variability, enough capacity and positions that they don't access well on their own to keep functioning so that we're missing playing time. But you're missing playing time for a bodybuilder is like you shouldn't be training every three months and then you have to take three weeks off because you're hurt. Like I get a bunch of clients come to me and they're like, I haven't been able to train for a month. I'm like, what is wrong with you? Like did you tear a labrum? Like tear a pec? And like, no, I just like, I don't feel very good. Yeah, it was like, but there's no like structural injury necessarily. It's just like,
Mac: training. That's for now. You're broken.
Nick Ridpath: They feel like shit because they have no variability in their ability to move through space.
Mac: And that's it, that's why like a lot of those exercises I picked are not hypertrophy specific, however they are dramatically going to increase your physique in the exercise that you're really doing from like a, they'll fix anything. It's a, for lack of better word, it's a shotgun approach at fixing your physique.
Nick Ridpath: Thank Yeah, that's great. Because yeah, again, like the hypertrophy stuff, a lot of people can figure out the right combination of machines, exercises, hard work, know, whatever. ⁓ Awesome. What are some behaviors or things that coaches consistently get wrong in your opinion?
Mac: Sample. Just load it. ⁓ not pairing nutritional interventions with training stimulus.
Nick Ridpath: Okay.
Mac: Training periodization and nutrition periodization need to match. They have to be congruent. At the end of the day, like we were talking about with you, you were having a keto-based eggs and fucking fat bomb and then trying to do glycolytic work. It's just not the right tool. ⁓ But could be the right tool at the time of if we went into less glycolytic work, went maybe more ATP, we went into something that was strength-based that doesn't require the amount of carbohydrates that you would in terms of more, higher rep ranges, higher burn rate in terms of that. Periodization of both models needs, whether it's caloric deficits, whether it's caloric maintenance, the surplus, that dictates recoverability. Recoverability at the end of the day allows for better performance. matching the two is what coaches fuck up all the time.
Nick Ridpath: What are the two or what are the most common places you see discontinuity with that? Obviously, I very often will see like very high volume training programs with very low calorie diets. That's kind of that would be an example, right?
Mac: Exactly, that's the telltale sign of where it all kinda goes wrong in terms of that. Remember at the end of the day, not keeping the goal the goal. So if the goal is body composition in relation to in a dieting phase, you require way less volume to maintain the muscle mass you have. And the problem is ego is attached to this, where most individuals think they have more muscle mass than they actually do. So they do more because they think they're losing. more muscle and they're not, they just don't have the requirement of muscle they think they have. So you're getting lean by doing less and essentially you have less recovery or less energy available and you do the cardio, you do the steps, you do fucking all that. Training is just there to preserve the muscle mass. The problem is most people think they have more muscle mass than they actually do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think we have one of the kids that works front desk is doing his first show and he walked in yesterday and he was like, he's like looks dead. I can see prep face. I'm like, dude, when are you getting on stage? It's gotta be this week. Like he's like, dude, guess how much I weigh right now. And like he's a pretty jack dude. He weighs like, I think like 190 200 pounds with 90 kilos usually.
Mac: Yeah, that's
Nick Ridpath: And I looked at him, was like, don't know 150. He's like, yeah, he's like, I was like 149 this morning. He's down like 50 pounds and he's maybe 19, 20 years old. So you can only have so much muscle mass at that point, but it's just like crazy. how much weight he's had to lose to get lean, not to digress there. Tips for clients with scoliosis. Not medical advice. I think this doesn't need any medical advice. We can talk about both.
Mac: Yep. Yeah, to get actual lean. Is it functional or structural? Yeah, always. I think at the end of the day, they're not broken. That's the first thing. Don't treat them like glass. Treat them in the same way that most individuals would be treated in the way that like find positions that they can load and load them. If it's more like structural scoliosis, like axle load is probably not a great idea. Really, it's not. You're just compressing an issue at play or you're compounding on an issue at play that is there. However,
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: There are still ways that we can load the lower body and load that aspect of things without directly impacting that of the spine. I think it's complex, but it's not. It's so simple at the end of the day. Just know the difference between the two. where your scope of practice ends. And just keep doing the things that we've just said. Rotation work, probably a really good idea. in both elements.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I've never had anybody that's had like crazy scoliosis. Like I've had a fair bit of scoliosis clients. There's only one where it's like super noticeable, but they're like super high functioning. And like the biggest thing for me is like just looking at it. If I wanted to look at this from an anatomical standpoint, okay, like, well like one scapula is gonna be further from the T-spine. One's gonna be closer. Rib cage might be shifted a little bit. What are the implications? And it's like somebody who might functionally have...
Mac: Yeah, bad.
Nick Ridpath: shoulders that are kind of set that way or rib cage is turned one way. It's like we'd be doing the same things. And a lot of it is just giving again, same thing we've been talking about giving them more movement variability, giving them more awareness of okay, like, here's kind of your bias, here's how we get out of it. Now you can express that with a little bit of load. Cool. That's that's making progress.
Mac: That's it. Literally. Like it's not, it doesn't deserve the over complication. Again, I think a lot of people will use it as a scare tactic. It's like, you, you have structural scoliosis. It's like, have to be so careful. And it's like, all right, cool. Now they've bought into needing this PT for the rest of their life because they're scared they're going to shatter. It's like, no, you're fine. You're sweet.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. You got time for two more?
Mac: Yeah, I'm here. Go wild.
Nick Ridpath: Sweet ⁓ fellow Australian here managing X. Well, you're not Australian, but you're you are quite literally. You're not Australian, but you are Australian, right?
Mac: Yeah. Yeah, I've got a passport, so that counts. Look, we'll take it. Yeah, citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll take it.
Nick Ridpath: You're a citizen, right? As of like the last year, you're an Australian citizen. There we go. Managing expectations with clients around exercise preferences versus what they need. I love this conversation. I have this all the time with the coaches that work with me. I want to hear your thoughts, though.
Mac: What's this? So there's optimum for what we know the body needs and at the end of the day if the person doesn't fucking want to do it you can write the best program in the world it's not gonna work. So it's your job as the coach to figure out like and I used to train a very good lawyer back in the day and he made the statement to me which I've it works in the snow but doesn't he made the statement to me it's like I never make a compromise because it means we both lose. And like he's right. In that sense, it's hilarious in that he's right. It's like when we compromise, we both lose because I don't get what I want and you don't get what you want. But in this scenario, what you got to do is you have to manipulate for positive aspects. You need to manipulate the individual to move them in the direction that you need to get them to. But being able to actually get them to buy in for it. And that's it at the end of the day. So if you know that their goal is you need more Exercise variability find ways or find exercises that they're willing to do with you that they're okay with But you're gonna have to maybe structure one or two extra exercises. We use this like hip thrusts, for example, all my girls fucking use hip thrusts Because it became so popular and it's like cool So I give them a hip thrust but I just manipulated to wear in the program that I want the hip thrust to be So is it gonna be at the very beginning of the program? Yes, because the shorten range my last more blood flow I'm gonna load the shit out of it in terms of reps. So it's gonna be like a 20 to 25 reps and they get their exercise. They get their fix of doing the exercise, but I get out of it what I need out of the exercise. And I think that's it. It's the people. Remember we spoke about it at the very, very beginning to make this full circle. It's ultimately looking at it and going, well, what does this individual need? They need to tick the box of that. Let's do that one. And I'll just work out what I actually need in the program to make it work.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I look at it in the exact same way. It's like, how can I fit in what they want while still accomplishing what we want to get done to get whatever results, especially, know, athletes, it's always like shiny red ball. Like there's all this online, you know, the foot doctor speed work stuff. They want to do like cool exercises all the time. So it's like, if you know how to get done what you want to get done, you probably have some other ways to do that as well. And just making sure we're getting enough of the main things done to make progress. That's what really matters.
Mac: 100 % Yep, 100%.
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ Pivotal last one pivotal education moments in your coaching career things you've learned slash read etc
Mac: The epiphany that you can always do more. That's got nothing to do with the book, not anything to do that. At the end of the day, if you think you're working hard, you're probably not. And why I say that is the biggest needle that moved my entire career was doing more things. I stayed up later, I worked through the night more, I sleep, like I don't function on, I function extremely well on a little amount of sleep. But I started doing things with that time period. So I sat there and I was like, oh fuck, I'm so tired. I've worked six hours, seven hours. It's like, oh, that's cool. It's like, well, you can do that two more times within the day. And it's not an answer in terms of a direct course I took or anything like that, but it opened my eye up to like, all right, I can work harder. And if I work harder, I can fill that time period with more things that I can learn. So in six hours, if I worked for six hours, I've got another 12 hours. because I've got six hours of work, another six hours, and I can dedicate that two bouts of six hours to studying. And that's what I did. I slept for a very small amount of time. I worked for six to make sure I made some form of money, and then I studied my fucking ass off for the other 12 hours because it was the only way in which I realized that I was so far behind. that I needed to expedite my process and catch up for the last 10 years of what I was doing. So, again, not the answer, but I think a really good answer that most people think they're working hard, you're not. Sorry to break it to you, but you're not working fucking hard.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, no, I like that a lot. Stay busy, but like productive busy, not waking up at 5am and doing your morning meditation, drinking tea and reading how to win friends and influence people, like doing things that are actually gonna be productive for your career.
Mac: State billy, is it? Yeah, I think to hone it down a little bit more is also to do an audit of what you currently know. And what you're 100 % sure of, don't go and learn more about that. Go and learn more about the things that you're 50 to 60 % sure of and then build that model out. That's really what I did. was like, I'm confident in this. I'm not confident in this, this, and this. So was like, well, the next week. is fucking just learning this until I was confident enough I could move into the next part of things. That's what I did.
Nick Ridpath: I've taken a similar note in my career. And then two part of that is I'll make sure I can find someone I must attach myself to that's kind of an expert in that field or somebody who I respect a lot and try to learn from them, whether it's. paying for mentor, whether it's signing up for their course, whether it's just consuming every bit of content they have, like find someone who's doing what you want to do. And they're an expert in that field. And it's like learn from them. It doesn't have to be one person, but I think having people to kind of latch on to, especially like we're going going back to earlier talking about how accessible information is nowadays. You don't only have information. You have people that have utilized and information on on their own clients, right? So they've kind of done that for you. And now you can kind of get their experiences as well. And then you can apply their already kind of synthesized experience to your
Mac: is.
Nick Ridpath: new experiences or to your clients, to yourself, et cetera.
Mac: It's the, like, I like calling it like the nuclear bomb approach. It's like if there's something that I know I don't know, dude, I do, like, I'll look at free information, paid courses, I'll like AI the fuck out of it. I'll go whatever I need, like now that we have that resource, it's like why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I throw everything at it to learn it and learn it faster?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. I've only really just started doing that adding in the AI element to it. Like I'll use it to ask questions, especially if you have like a paid version. Like I find Gemini is very good. Tech GPT is kind of ass, but like the Gemini Pro version, whatever it is, I think it's very good for training topics. I've been throwing some stuff in there with without really any filter and it's been giving me really good feedback. So that's it's super interesting.
Mac: Yeah, it's pretty good. Yep. Yep. It's a great way to test your knowledge. think again, at the end of the day, you know, I actually had this, I had a bit of a conversation with Suluji the other day, Shah Suluji, ⁓ where we were talking about, yes, we were talking about like AI and he's like, ⁓ you know, are you using this in your business? Like, no, I'm using this to expedite the process of things. I will never take myself out of the business. And like the problem with individuals who are using AI to replace them in their business is like, you're making yourself obsolete.
Nick Ridpath: Shout out to the G. Yeah.
Mac: That's the problem. So all that I'm doing is I work out and I'm looking at the business and I look at the systems within the business, I go, okay, how can I speed this up by implementing a tool that is done off AI? And that's how I use AI effectively within the business. So I use it for ⁓ certain note taking software, certain, like all of my shit's done with Fathom, for example, when I do meetings or calls and stuff, know, fucking game changer. It allows me to provide a better service. I can sit there and have conversation with someone I don't have to sit there typing like a fucking neanderthal that I am of taking notes and shit. It's like I just go and read the phantom notes. I'm like, all right, cool. That's it. That's making me more efficient at what I do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I do the same thing with whatever Google, Gemini, built in. So all my coaching calls now, record them, transcript, it goes out to all my clients so they can look back over it. I'll go back over them. If I want to even do content ideas, I'll go look through conversations I have with coaches, because a lot of the questions that they're asking me are things that I could just make into content, right? But it's not replacing us, it's just making more minute tasks.
Mac: Yeah. and make your content,
Nick Ridpath: easier for us to do or helping us expand on ideas, I think is kind of having some feedback. It's also very pretty valuable for that. ⁓ Yeah, fuck yeah, dude. We're almost 100 minutes and I think so I appreciate your time. Anything else you want to close on?
Mac: That's right. That's right. Yeah, 100 % dude. No, that's pretty much it I guess. That's fucking... That's pretty much it. We'll go with that.
Nick Ridpath: That's it. I feel like anybody listening knows who you are, but if you want to tell people where to find you, I'll plug it in the show notes somewhere.
Mac: ⁓ Yeah, so obviously coach James Mack on Instagram. I mean, I'll shame this plug this if you're good with this. I'm witnesses coming out.
Nick Ridpath: This would be ⁓ two weeks from yesterday. So not next Monday, but the Monday after. Yeah.
Mac: So the 16th. Ooh, this is a bold statement. But within the next two to four weeks, I have a new screen recording software launching. So I've developed a new screen recording software to ⁓ compete against the current one within the coaching market that is used for meetings and was designed for meetings only. ⁓ So with that being said, will, I mean, whatever that kit that is. yeah, Trellis, ⁓ I designed it. Dude, I got fed up with all of the issues happening. And I was like, my mom always told me that if,
Nick Ridpath: Loom. Yeah. ⁓
Mac: you're complaining about something, either come up with a solution or shut the fuck up. So I came up with a solution, all right? That was it, that was a good old mob. So I came up with a solution, man, that's been in the works for the last eight plus, nine plus months in terms of that. Been waiting on the last kind of verification from Google, funny enough. And with that, it will be launched, hopefully by the end of March is kind of the plan within the next two weeks. I will double check on that. And if that does work, I'll be able to give you a list of a bit of a discount code or something. So I'll shoot that through to you.
Nick Ridpath: Fuck yeah.
Mac: for the first month. ⁓ So yeah, any support on that would be great, but I'm telling you, it will expedite your process dramatically. Obviously the big one being ⁓ we use a different upload system, so it's basically like a live stream upload, kind of like Riverside does. So there is no way that you will ever lose what happens. So it's constantly uploading. If you have a fail in the system, it stops, but that whole piece that you have kind of recorded up until then will be there and will be accessible for you so you don't have to restart your entire thing. So that's the first thing. ⁓ Second off the bat of that, which was a real cool feature that I started doing as well, is once your trellis has been uploaded and you have kind of, same, can say your link, et cetera from that, you will have obviously the transcript, but off the back end of that you will have a summary and action items and a notes on exactly what you have spoken about with your client. So like you've just said with regards to phantom stuff, you will be able to copy that and literally it will pick out all the action items that you have spoken about, give you a summary on what you have just spoken about. and give you any extra notes as a coach requirement at end of this. So that'll all be launching in the next month. So yeah, fuck yeah, bro. Taking on the big dogs. Let's go with that one.
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ yeah, dude, that's cool as fuck. I know I'll be switching. yeah, send me the information on that and I'll plug it in the show notes.
Mac: Yeah, done. Appreciate it, dude. Thank you.
Nick Ridpath: Awesome man, thanks for coming on.
Nick Ridpath: I was gonna say that's representing your blood for what that's worth. I think that goes well with the OTC shirt though. I think if we were to summarize James Mack into one action, it's the fact that you've bought a roaming Starlink to do your business with you wherever you are in the world.
Mac: This is commit. Literally, so I was coming back from South Africa and I knew that it was coming up for this road trip. So I'd be home for like, whatever, six days and then go on this fucking four five week road trip thing down south to Sydney. And Sydney has got the worst internet in the world. And I was like, fuck it, I'm buying a Starlink, bought a Starlink, bought an in-car dashboard mount. So it mounts to the windscreen inside the car and while we're driving, full satellite signal, full download, ready to go, just carry on fucking working and grafting while I drive. It's great. Smartest thing I've ever done.
Nick Ridpath: while everyone else is out here trying to bio hack, you're just hacking your work efficiency.
Mac: Work, yeah, mobile office just improved way more.
Nick Ridpath: That's that's so sweet. Speaking of biohacking, I'm sure you hate that phrase. ⁓ What were you popping before the podcast? What's your current neuro supplement stack?
Mac: Yeah. I mean, shameless plug. So this is my own one. So I made this. So this is three foot world. So it's, I'm trying to find every podcast that I get on in the U S I'm now going to say that I'm trying to find a U S distributor. So if anyone knows of or wants to start selling my product for me, hit me up. All right. Hit me up and we can start, we can organize this, but basically it's It's called Three Foot World. It's a nootropic. I don't like that word because truly when we look at it, there's only certain compounds that are starting to play on neurotransmitters that actually are effective. Now in saying that, this is, we've got a good stack that kind of comes into the mix from a science-based but at the same time experienced. This took 18 months of messing around with different concoctions and playing, just giving myself headaches and stupid, stupid. stupid things just really not smart at the end of the day, but ⁓ Yeah, comes down to it's got p5p in it. So like a converted version of b6 like most people would probably be familiar with b6 and understand that it can have like a neurotoxicity to it, but The toxicity side of it comes in the conversion process from p6 to p5p so what we can do is we can literally just take the p5p version and then we don't have the same kind of ⁓ downsides or possible downsides that could come through with just taking high doses of B6, because too much B6 causes problems. Most people probably don't know that or have an idea of that. ⁓ So we've got P5P, we've got cytokoline in that, pine bark. So pine bark extract was like an interesting one that we brought into the mix with this. So pine bark can be used very, very effectively for blood pressure. Okay, so it helps manage blood pressure. It's one of those that's, it basically helps with like vasodilation and obviously increasing that which then can be effective in the blood pressure sense. Now for what we're doing, it helps in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain, essentially kind of delivering the product in a better standpoint as well as. my demographic or the thought process behind the product, now to be 100 % honest, the thought behind the product was, I'm tired of taking six capsules every morning and having to walk around and travel with six different bottles, I'm gonna make my own product. And then people kinda started buying it off the back end and I strategically just. marketed it slash just put my product in any and every picture that I could of what I've been doing for the last 18 months and it has done well and taken all from that. But the users that are gonna be primarily using this are either gonna be highly stemmed up through the roof, which Pine Bark is gonna make an effect with, blood pressure changes in terms of that, and or possibly those of the enhanced standpoint. So it's like you're gonna get a health benefit at the end of the day by taking this product. just from the blood pressure management and then the key one and like the last ingredient, ⁓ which I'm quite confident in saying this, that as I currently know it, I'm probably the only individual to use this form. of neurotropic or nootropic in a supplement as of it currently stands. So there's something called triuridine. So we'll try acetyluridine. It is essentially a slightly better bioavailability of uredine monophosphate. So there's only two other products that I know of that run uredine monophosphate. that is... ⁓ What's it ⁓ Jack, Gorilla Mind? So Derek, Derek from More Play It Small Dates, like his energy drink has your monofosfate in it.
Nick Ridpath: Is this the one you were telling me just to buy a bottle of like maybe last summer? Because we're talking about like caffeine alternatives. Okay, okay. Just double check.
Mac: Yes, yes, this is it. This is it. Yes, this is it. So this is exactly it. So that Urethane Monophosphate that I told you to buy, that's essentially, that is the, how do I say the main ingredient? Because we've gone with a slightly better available standpoint. So it crosses the blood vein barrier in a better way for different ways of delivery mechanisms in the long run. And I have a more sports performance. Directed stack of this which we could probably talk about at some stage. So I've I've got the product in works ⁓ in a Sublingual variation so sublingual being obviously kind of piggybacking off of the craze of nicotine pouches Anything along those lines but essentially being able to deliver the same product in this way Why what does sublingual do it crosses the blood band barrier to foster eight it ends the bloodstream at a much faster rate as well instead of having to go through the digestive tract and actually slow it down from a capsule. Think about that in like an NFL sense. If you can have hyper-focus within five minutes, you put that little bad boy in and you just kick in, is, from a sports performance standpoint, it is huge in terms of what can happen. So yeah, that's in the works.
Nick Ridpath: Also just seems like from a marketing standpoint, like, you're already doing your fucking Zen pouches. Might as well do something that's a little bit more beneficial for you. Like this was replacing a similar habit with something more beneficial. I actually trained, one of the NFO guys I worked with was like telling me some story about how he used to love nicotine and how much he would feel like his joints were beat up when he would do nicotine and he stopped doing nicotine and all of a sudden his joints felt amazing.
Mac: Add to set. Yeah, well, that was it. ⁓ I remember, we had that conversation with, you had one of your clients that was a smoker, I remember correctly, couldn't lunge for shit, took God away, naked, yeah, you remember that? Yeah, different story.
Nick Ridpath: No, no, no, okay. Yeah, yeah, well, there's some other things going against him there. But I just asked you, I was like nicotine ⁓ from a general nervous system standpoint, yeah, performance standpoint, because you were telling me in some context, you had clients that would do nicotine ⁓ from a performance enhancing standpoint. And I was going the other direction, which is like when this guy comes in, stemmed out of his mind, he can't even do a lunge without falling over.
Mac: performed. Yep. which let's think about it from a neurological standpoint and even from a parasympathetic sympathetic nerve state, that's no surprise to us. You've got someone in a more sympathetic drive, well what's gonna happen? They're not gonna be able to concentrate. It's like when we've taken fucking a gram of caffeine, dude all I get is anxious.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: That's it, I get anxious and heart palpitations. Which is, it's gonna do fuck off for me from a performance standpoint. So, maybe a little bit more into it and obviously nicotine in itself is going to be working on the sympathetic system. Like there's gonna be a little bit more of an adrenaline or noradrenaline or epinephrine that is going to be released from like a neurotransmitter standpoint. However, I guess as per everything in life, we have to kind of, we have to weigh up the risks.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, yeah.
Mac: along with, and I think this phrase, I heard this phrase and I do apologize to whoever who I heard it from first because I think giving credit where credit is due to phrases and or learnings is an extremely important thing within this industry at the level that we are at. But I heard the concept of like the devil is in the dosage and the duration. And that's in anything in life. Now that was specifically in relation to performance enhancements, but I think it's. very applicable to anything and everything that we do. Let's think about it from a training simulator standpoint. If we give too much volume for too much time, we fuck up. And vice versa to that. If we give too little volume for too long a time, we just stay stagnant. So the concept of the phrase of the devil is in the dosage and the duration, I think is such a cool phrase or phraseology that we can apply to so many things, caffeine content, stimulants.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: pre-workouts, drugs, whatever it is, it comes down to dosage, duration, and then at the end time, like intent on what you're attempting to do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that was beautiful. ⁓ I forgot what even started this conversation. Nicotine and messed up joints or moving around like a baby giraffe. Yeah, melted brains.
Mac: I have no idea what's the other thing called, nicotine. yeah, sorry, sorry. Brain drugs. And like, I mean, I'm still a big fan of nicotine. I just popped some fucking nicotine just before this, along with the brain drugs at the same time, because why not? But, you know, it is definitely something that... you know, since we had that conversation, I think we had that conversation on the lab, I remember correctly, ⁓ maybe, or stemmed in a lab outside of it, whatever it was, ⁓ there definitely has been like a more cognizant approach to it. Like I've been... strategic in deployment of nicotine of myself, not necessarily anyone else, because it is an extremely addictive drug. At the end of the day, is. It's a drug, it's addictive, it's highly, highly addictive. I've had withdrawals from nicotine. That is not fun, dude. I was cranking nicotine in the time period when I was in South Africa, being in a different state, being in a different kind of delivery mechanism as well. And I was taking in... We did the mass because I left South Africa, went to Dubai for about three weeks when I was sorting out some business shit there. And I obviously didn't take the nicotine in the concentration of what I was doing in South Africa. Dude, in the first week, like I had this like fishbowl, like look, couldn't quite figure out what's going on. I felt, dude, I felt like I was like had like a sinus infection and or I had altitude sickness at the same time. And I was like, dude, I can't figure out what the fuck's going on here. And then I sat there one day and I was like, what if I'm going through withdrawals? Like just that came to me. So I luckily had like these lozenges sitting in my training bag and I popped one in at the gym and I was literally like, I'd be training and trying to train for like a week, 10 days. Dude, I had like this glaziness over my, you know, like when you're sick and you have like that fogginess, glaziness over your eyes. I couldn't get a pump, couldn't do fucking anything, dude. I was just irritable. I hated life. I was like, this sucks.
Nick Ridpath: You Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mac: I even was like, is my gear fucked? Like I literally was like, what is going on here? I was like, everything's there. Yeah, I was like, do you know what the worst is? I even asked, then I say this and fuck whatever. I'm open about my use in any shape or form. Like I prescribed my TRT, genuinely prescribed my TRT, not fucking prescribed, like actually. And I've had bad batches before where I had like a batch of ⁓ Bayer, like pro depot test that just was off.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, did I get some bad shit?
Mac: like had actually gone off in terms of like expiring. So I was like, fuck, that must be it. So I'm standing in the gym, dude, and I've got this, this like laziness and I'm standing in front of the Lance's 45 degree shoulder press or chest press. And I popped this nicotine in and as I popped this nicotine, dude, vision goes clear, everything goes clear. was like, fuck you idiot. You've been going through withdrawal for the last two weeks, you son of a bitch. that. It's like, you're such a retard. You're so good at so many other things. This is the one thing you couldn't figure out until you pop a nicotine in and suddenly it was like clear again. I can see everything. got a pump for the first time. was like, yo, fucking idiot.
Nick Ridpath: That's so insane. That's why I don't do it. I just know how much I would love it. Like I know I'd have a problem with it. So I just don't do it.
Mac: You gotta do it. Oh yeah. You know what the problem is? Again, it comes down to devilish nutrition and dosage. I worked this out, so I go back to my delivery mechanism and how I was getting nicotine in, and it was in a liquid base. Anyways, so I then worked out, because I was going through four of these fucking canisters a day, and it's like a 1.8 % per canister, or per canister. not per canister, per fucking certain amount of like, so eventually I work it up. I was having like 80 grams or 80 milligrams of nicotine a day. And I was like, yeah, that's why you just went through withdrawals. was chain smoking. Chain smoking is what I was going through comfortably, comfortably going through just that. And I was like, ⁓ well, this explains why you're going through fucking withdrawals. I went from 80 to cold turkey.
Nick Ridpath: Holy shit. What's in a pack of cigarettes? Like 20? So you're doing four packs of cigarettes a day.
Mac: That's it. Just dead in the water. I was like, okay, you're a fucking idiot now. So, stupid things, win stupid prizes. Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that's... That's hilarious. The white monster is nothing after you've done that. That's just like getting up and having some water in the morning.
Mac: Buh-bye. Yeah, pretty much. Shut up, James Thayer. Just walk getting the fridge beer all the time. Dude, I don't know how he does it. I must be honest. I mean, it is 9 a.m. in the morning and I'm chugging down a fucking white monster, but I'm least slightly better than him, I think.
Nick Ridpath: Hahaha I don't think I've had one since college. It's probably been fucked in six years or longer since I've had a white monster.
Mac: You just gotta spend some time with me. I gotta come over to you and just spend some time with you. I will have you on everything. Just taking all the nicotine, white monsters. It'll just be happening. No, I'm joking. I'm not that much of a, I'm not a degenerate. Hilarious, hilarious. ⁓ fuck. All right, well, we're here.
Nick Ridpath: Hahaha Yeah, mean, you're going to gain like 20 kilos in a month. What was I going to say about nicotine? We're here. No, this is like I'd never intended to talk to you about this. Now I'm thinking about like other nootropics. I know like the big thing was like the humans of the world were pushing like alpha GPC and what were the other common ones? L-thienine, you know.
Mac: old school. Althionine and stuff like that. so nothing against them in any shape or form. So alpha GBC, like gonna work in like a choline receptor. And essentially when we look at that, what are we talking about? We're talking about neurotransmitters, we're talking about like acetylcholine. All so like when our four-ish bigger, there's epinephrine and adrenaline that fall into the mixer, but we have acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine, serotonin. That's like our main neurotransmitters when we look in and acetylcholine the way that I always remember it for some stupid reason but I think of acetylcholine I think of accountants. That's it. That's like that data driven focus analyst like that's what that's it and It got taught to me and the reason why I remember that, got taught to me and I don't want to discredit him in any shape or form because fucking one of the greats in my opinion and I think you would probably think of the same. But this comes up with, oh shit, why have I just gone blank? But essentially around kind of the Charles Poliquin area, the Thibodeau. So Thibodeau came out with like, you're a Christian Thibodeau, so shout out. I mean, he's still alive, definitely still alive. He's not dead.
Nick Ridpath: Okay, yeah. Dude, yeah, he's like one of the only one of the only people that I would like actually go. I could actually go watch on Instagram. Yeah, I couldn't watch Paul Quinn on IG like to do with.
Mac: Poor Trinart. I've got only one my lines up round. Yeah. Well, he's here. So I mean, some interesting things again. So Christian Thibodeau came out and had kind of like a neurotransmitter neurotransmitter type training. All right. So you would train individuals according to the neurotransmitters, which like a super nuanced, if you think about it, like super, super nuanced in terms of that. But at the same time, like I would give some merit to it. However, I think when we have a deeper understanding and deeper look into that conversation, it's learning people. At the end of the day, you have someone who's more derived to one neurotransmitter than the other, for example, like GABA versus dopamine-driven, right? So GABA, the way that I was taught this is, someone who's GABA dominant would never be in a gym. They'd be like a yogi, they'd be doing their pilates and like, cause they're super down to earth and chilled and like they're not gonna do strength training. And very unlikely and at the same time if they do, they're not gonna last long, they're not gonna like the burn, they're not gonna like kind of pushing hard. Like that's the gabba dominant type. Versus like the dopamine driven, that one you're gonna have to fucking challenge them. It's gonna be the conversations and I guess at the end of the day what I really took from his course back to the day. Now don't go and buy his course in any shape and like, sorry, Thibodeaux, like I'm not. Don't go and buy his course. More so because you partnered with an absolute idiot based company, to people who know will know why I'm saying that, to do all of the anyways, long, yeah, good, great. That's fun. Now fuck them anyway. So that's a long story, but.
Nick Ridpath: have no idea. So I don't feel any criminal aspect here on my end.
Mac: What I gained from the entire course at the end of the day is understand the person that you're working with. And Shaloh's got the saying of like it's the people business. I know we've all used that and I think we've now like. really come to understand that that is it at the end of the day, it is the people business. Now what that means is understand the person you're working with. Like what drives you? What's gonna get the best out of you? If for me, or you know, I had clients that were like A type individuals, right? Like very dopamine driven, high execs, like that type of thing. I couldn't treat them the same way that I would treat like Susan. Right, Susan's like I'd have to kind of like, you know, pad her around the gym a little bit and be like, it's okay, we can do a few more. The dopamine driven exec is like, yo, I bet you couldn't do 10 reps on the leg press. Like, I just don't think you can do it. Like, I've put enough weight on there. Like, if you get eight, like, I'll be cool. But I just don't think you can do 10. Yo, that motherfucker's doing 12, right? Because I've like lit that fire. Correct, and that's people. That's learning how to interpret people and talk to people. And like, it's a side of coaching.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, absolutely.
Mac: that let's think about it in our days, we probably don't see a lot of that happen. Like, cause everyone's doing the, you know, the fucking Instagram bullshit adverts, all of this stupid shit, and they've forgotten how to talk to people. Like they've forgotten the in-person side. They've forgotten how to like motivate them. Yeah, they skip it completely.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, they skip it.
Mac: So it's such a, the concept that's coming to me is at the end of the day, all of these things come down to base principles, which is what we teach and what we live. At the end of day, everything is a principle-based thing. The neurotransmitter training type is the principle of people business, understanding a person. That's all it is. It's not specific of. I don't give you your fucking your, I can't even remember what the personality test is now, but dude, you could work out like, was a, not that Myers-Briggs was an old school one, I can't remember what it's called.
Nick Ridpath: Was this, hold on, was this the extension of the polyquin thing where I remember reading some polyquin shit about how I shouldn't have carbs in the morning before I train? So I was like, okay, I used to do, this was again, back when was in college, I used to do two bagels and some egg whites before I'd go train. Or I would do cream of rice with whey protein mixed in. And I'd get the sickest pumps, I felt awesome. And I was reading this, I was like, ⁓ shit. Like I shouldn't have carbohydrates when my cortisol is high in the morning, whatever. I'm going to do what they're saying, which is like six whole eggs and like fat tree cheese. I'm going to try that. I remember doing it for a week and I had the worst training sessions of my life and I was like, fuck this. I'm going back to the bagels.
Mac: Yeah, Yeah, I hate it. Yeah, so I mean, same era, same kind of like training schools, camps, polyquin, similar, you know, strengthy, S &C based work if we kind of want to look at it. But I mean, fucking polyquin at the end of the day had some gems, gold, right? Nutrition knowledge, I wouldn't do a lot of this stuff in saying that though. Give him credit where credit is due. The statement that he made and what you are referring to is if you are not like,
Nick Ridpath: Dude.
Mac: ⁓ sub 12 % body fat, you don't deserve carbs. Like that was his statement. like, I mean, wrong, but at the same time in the current like caloric epidemic that we have, if some people applied that knowledge, they'd have better health markers, they'd have better training performance because their blood glucose levels would probably be more stable across the day than the mass amounts of spikes that we see happening. with the hypercaloric intakes that they're going through. Let's look at it through kind of like a rose-colored lens. He's not wrong. The statement is profound. it's one that's going to an athlete-based like yourself, who's someone who's training hard, you need carbohydrates. You need the facilitation of that. He was in a slightly different realm of like, that fell into what he did in the bootcamp diet. Well, the bootcamp diet was like... know, veg, it was less than 120 grams of carbs or 100 grams of carbs, 50 to 80 of those coming from fruits and veg. And the rest coming from trace amounts in terms of what it is, higher protein, which essentially if we think about it as like a spin-off of like Lyle McDonald's modified protein fast, which also extremely, extremely beneficial diet if you're trying to do like a body recomp or you're trying to make some like really big change and shout out Lyle for being an interesting human.
Nick Ridpath: Hmm.
Mac: very interesting, but dude, one of my, like just the way he just shits on everyone at the same time is amazing, but yeah, fuck it. you know, some of his, I would say his diet strategies are a lot more, ⁓ I don't wanna say intellectual, cause that sounds so terrible saying Charles wasn't intellectual.
Nick Ridpath: Very interesting. My favorite Instagram follow.
Mac: Better applicable to most individuals. Let's go with that one. All better applicable to most individuals kind of across the board. But anyways, yeah, end of the day, like all of these things were, know, what's this 20, 30 years ago type scenario. And, you know, I would argue that a lot of what we've seen emerge now, and the guys were doing back then, like, you know, way ahead of their time in terms of experience and understanding of athletes, but I would go to this and like. There was and there wasn't. There was an understanding of human beings. Charles was difficult, man. Like if you went to a seminar of his and you didn't have big biceps, he would not fucking give you the light of day.
Nick Ridpath: He would have hated me. My arms are way too small.
Mac: But and like whatever, I'm never gonna shit on him in any shape or form. Anyone who listens to this who's ex-Charles in any shape or form, fuck, don't come at me for anything. But we know what I'm saying is true. But I would 100 % say that he was one of the founding greats. No matter what people come and say, I still, I remember reading his shit from years ago. T nation dude I used to scroll t nation as much as I could get the dial up to fucking work at home all the time with tibet like all of these things kind of you know, I think allowed to better my knowledge stack things together Make me the coach they am today like I would really if if I could if I could like deploy some fucking AI thing into my brain that could like track the history, I could guarantee that when we go really, really back to it, that a lot of the foundational knowledge of where it at comes from that generation, that school of thought, that thinking, like for sure, for sure.
Nick Ridpath: I there was so much more original thought then. Same with like people will shit on some of like the West Side methods in Louis. And it's like, we could pick all sorts of dumb stuff they did, but a lot of what they did was pretty spot on and they were doing it without the resources we have today. Today it's so easy to go online with one research is more widely available, but also courses are better. It's so much easier to find mentors. I'd also say it's much harder in the sense there's a lot of dipshits that are preaching weird stuff out there, but.
Mac: Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: access to information for what it's worth, they're so much more readily available versus then it's like, they're kind of just like playing science with themselves and they figure out a lot of cool stuff.
Mac: Yeah, but that's, you know what's so sad about that? Not sad from this, it's sad on the outside. We have so much more access to information, but no one does anything with it. So the only thing that happens is like, there's a parroting of it. And it's one of my like current gripes within the industry is everyone will just sit there and read the script. Or like regurgitate what they've just learned. Like you haven't learned it, you've done fuck all with it. You've just read a study in abstract, a training concept or something like this.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: Go and apply it, see where it is, or at least be able to think and look at the information that you've just kind of, not being provided, but the information that you've just kind of stumbled upon, and look at it go, all right, like my first question out of everything and anything that I read or go in our research is, what is the principle that's being discussed here? Principally, what does this break down to? Is this ⁓ caloric energy in energy out? Is this a training principle? Is this a biomechanic model? What lower level principle can I bring this down to? And then I try and look for the actual principle behind it. Is this an exposure to internal external rotation? Is this a way for me to bias something? Is this a better methylation standpoint of a drug? What is the principle? And then the next question of the back end is, and this is the way I kind of bring it into an experience is, I look at and go, okay, of my current clientele, who could I use this with? And like I learned this from Luke Lehman. Luke Lehman is is one of great, I've mentioned him quite a lot lately for some fucking reasons, whatever. Great Texas guy, old Charles Poliquin guy. He used to present for the Poliquin group, really good educator. ⁓ And I remember him coming to one of our courses in Gold Coast and he just sat there in his iPad. Dude, he didn't even look up. He just sat on his iPad and he just took notes. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. And then he would take his notes, take his notes, that. And then he would ask a question, but he would ask a question specifically to a client that he had in mind. All right, so this was his way of applying what he had just learned to an individual that he has all of his accesses, his knowledge of, his background of, right there and then, because then he can go, okay, well, if it applied to this, the principle is X, Y, and Z. This is how just applied. and now I can cross pollinate it into everyone else. So ⁓ I took that from him from that literal 30 second, 60 second conversation we had afterwards. And I was like, fuck, that's such a genius way to learn something. Because once I can physically apply it with someone in front of me, I've learned it. I've taught it. It's the do one, see one, teach one. That's an old school Chris Baraguano's hospital thing that I learned when I was a paramedic. I worked emergency department, dude, stupidly. I emergency department in the world's trauma capital of the, like the trauma capital of the world hospital. All right, so Barrack Gwinnanth Hospital, if you guys have never heard of it, it's trauma capital. 100, yeah. But so the Barrack Gwinnanth Hospital is like, it's one of the best teaching trauma teaching hospitals in the world. countries send their surgeons there because the amount of access to what you see on a daily basis, will.
Nick Ridpath: I feel like anywhere in South Africa, anywhere down there has to be bad enough.
Mac: probably never seen in your career. Like gunshots, stabbings, trauma, MVAs, like whatever it is happens, right? And the theory and the principle there is you see a procedure done, you do the procedure, you teach it to the next intern. So like I did a surgical crick, right? So surgical crick, when you crack, you open up someone's lungs so they can breathe. I watched one, I did one, I taught one in the same 12 hour shift. Like that, like just think about that kind of, and that's, that, was the hands on teaching. Now this is the same kind of concept, but not a lot of individuals are going to have the access to teach. Right. That's just not really going to necessarily happen. However, if you learn something, you can do it immediately onto your clients. And then what you can do from there is you can teach your other clients in terms of this. Like, so you always have a pool that you can add into from a coaching standpoint. If you can get that principle moving, it's like, then you have a better understanding for it. And then kind of going back to the original rant that I was going on, like you're actually going to be able to, I don't know, not get on Instagram and fucking, so this peptide is an amino acid chain and fuck off, I don't really care. Come sit down in front of me and have a conversation with me about how the use applicability is going to be. What are you gonna do with it? How are you going to bring it in? What are you gonna mitigate? What is the issues that's gonna come up? And like. By doing all of this, and the longer version behind this, or the long story, short version behind this is, by going through this entire process, whether it's drugs, whether it's training, whether it's a rehab modality, whatever it is, the question that I'm always going to ask myself is, where is this going to fail? So I'm risk averse. Everything I do is like a risk analysis in terms of, and that's like an up-running thing. But I look at an exercise, or I look at a prescription of something, and I go, Where is this going to fail? Where are the wheels going to fall off by implementing this? Because if I know the direction in which it's not going to work, I can reverse engineer it to make it work or at least have things in play for when it doesn't work. Right, so this is how I look at exercise. look at know, bring in barbell bench press. Okay, bring in barbell bench press. At the end of the day, don't care who fucking wants to shout it from the moons, great way for you to load the pecs under maximum under load. It is. Yes, there's a skill component that's the downside. There's a wheel that can fall off. So is it gonna be a skill factor that's going to fail? What's the requirement that needs to be had from an individual who can bar-bar-bar-bar-entress? Well, skill, cool, I mentioned that. We've got an internal rotation capacity. Do they have adequate internal rotation while they're in a position of internal rotation of the shoulder that isn't going to allow for progression or expression of strength there? Yes or no? All right, well, is it something that we're gonna have to constantly work on? Yes. All right, so what other exercises in the rest of my program can I bring in to make sure that this movement keeps moving forward? Like that's how I look at it. Like that's the, you know, we talk about the primary, secondary, tertiary benefits of exercises, which are great, but they're only applicable if you understand the risk of an exercise that you bring in. Where is the body going to fail when you bring an exercise in? Where is the body going to fail if I give you fucking bootcamp diet of eggs and you know, at stake in the morning. They wouldn't have carbs, so you don't have an ATP production. Okay, so how do I mitigate that? Okay, well, I don't give him high glycolytic work. Simple, so we go strength based with your programs and like you might actually be more effective, because fats are still gonna be pretty good in terms of that. If we're running a one to three rep range, you don't need like a mass amount of glycogen in the tank for this. It's easy to express. So that's the like. That's me putting it into principle or putting it into context of where does it fail? Because if you understand where it fails, you're going to know what to put in place to keep it being successful.
Nick Ridpath: I mean, I like how you overlap those things too. It's not just the exercise we're selecting. It's also the human. It's also the environment we're putting them in from a nutritional standpoint. Obviously there's lifestyle factors. And then going back to what you said originally, it's quite literally their psyche or their personality. So all those things are gonna affect one another. it's just understanding, I guess looking at research.
Mac: No.
Nick Ridpath: It's okay, this calf raise study showed that a standing calf raise was better than a seated calf raise and n equals eight, therefore, hey, you fucking nerd watching my video, you're an idiot if you do seated calf raises anymore. It's like, well, there's more to it than that.
Mac: Yeah, yeah, okay, cool. But you know what the hilarious thing is? Yeah, fantastic. My gym doesn't ever see the calf raise, so what the fuck am I doing now? Like there's my answer, like to bring it back down to it's like the risk is, well yeah, seated calf raise is better than a standing calf raise. If I have one, if I don't, not doing anything, well doing the standing calf raise is still better than the not doing the calf raise. Like context matters.
Nick Ridpath: Wait, did you see this? This was like a year ago. So it was the other way around. Basically there was a camp of people that were referencing a study. think it was like literally N equals 12. So 12 people seated versus standing and like the standing group, both Solius and Gastroc had like 50 % more hypertrophy or something. And then they were grandstanding it as like, oh, seated calf raises or dog shit. This that and the other. And I'm like, there's plenty of reason why I would agree with that.
Mac: Just straw man arguing.
Nick Ridpath: But like, yeah, I'm not gonna go and say this as if it's, I'm I'm am stating a fact into the universe based off this immaculate research. ⁓
Mac: In fact, now you're not gonna just be dogmatic about it. So now I'm completely throwing out the seated calf raise with any plan that I do. It's like, no, that would be so stupid. I have no idea. Sorry, bros. 35 minutes later.
Nick Ridpath: I don't even know how we got here. I asked you a question about nicotine and we ended up at see the calf raises. That's that's quite the trail. ⁓ I had another I had another sidebar on that. Speaking of popular drugs. I've seen more people talking about like micro dosing, g lp ones and their diet as part of their diet. I don't even know what the dose is, but just using small amounts. I don't know if you have any any thoughts in general on that and the of the industry really adopting the use like the one I see the most now is I think read a true tide. Is that right?
Mac: Yeah. Yeah, so Reta-Trutide being like a GLP-1 agonist, it runs through the three compartments of it, so it's it's in stage two, three clinical trials right now. It will get approved, it will kind of go through at some stage, I'm sure of that. ⁓ It's obviously found in a more underground setting as of right now, so like not medical advice is the disclaimer behind all this, but I think. The conversation that seems to be a play is there's a lot of the data that we've seen behind it is in single dose studies. And we saw this kind of with like Mengera and fucking Zempek and all this shit as well. And cool, right? Where people are going with the micro dose analogy is essentially it is to help mitigate the effects that the drug has. Now, key thing in terms of what I said there, is effects, not side effects. Because at the end of the day, everything that a drug does is an effect. Whether it's a positive or a negative, it's an effect. So we see the GLP-1s generally are used in terms of appetite suppression. And it works from a little more from a Gremlin and Lipton standpoint, and the psychological component of that and the way it's excreted. But essentially, the drug is doing what it's meant to do. Is it completely blasts through your appetite. So like you have none. Okay. But that's effective when you're trying to calorically restrict. Cool. Makes sense. Right. But with that, see some other effects, which are like headache, nausea, a little bit of vomiting. Like it's pretty rough if you fuck up the dose. It slows down GI mortality to like, I don't want to say zero, but it slows it down completely. So your digestibility is a lot less. Cool. All right.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: Now, individuals are utilizing these drugs in non-caloric restricted environments because there seems to be what we would deem, and I guess, you know, we need more research behind these things. And I hate kind of being the, you know, throwing the research study, but I'd love to see more research if it ever happens, is that we see secondary and tertiary benefits of the drug coming through. So we see an improvement in insulin sensitivity. We see an improvement in CRP markers. We see an improvement in global inflammatory-based responses. All of these things come in. And I love the thinking. I really do like the thinking of, all right, cool, well, let's see if we can utilize this drug for things that are not appetite suppression, which are going to improve general and overall health markers. Someone being in a less inflamed state. is going to take them out of a higher risk category. Whether it's cardiovascular, whether it's even like building hypertrophy or trying to increase hypertrophy, someone who's in a less inflamed state is going to accrue more muscle mass. Now the body doesn't like being in mass amounts of inflammatory based responses. Now remember we need inflammation as part of the repair process, blah, blah, blah, blah, on a slightly different mechanism of this. This is why like BPC and all these other things can be taken more frequently than not just. thrown in for injury standpoints, but that's, I guess, separate conversation with this. So we've kind of looked at the drug in a, what I would deem a semi-critical lens. Or we've looked at the benefits that we're starting to see come through and go, how can I apply this to individuals who are not necessarily looking for the caloric restrictive environment, but are looking for the decrease in inflammatory-based response? the improving in insulin resistance improvement to insulin sensitivity. Like how can we make those things effective? And that's where they've now gone, well, if I take, I don't know, fucking a five milligram dose, which is a, I guess, semi-standard to a little bit higher dose of retetruteide, I get the mass kind of appetite suppression and I can't eat my food. Now that doesn't work for a 100 kilogram, 200 pound, 220 pound individual. consuming three to five thousand calories a day. Like if I lose a whole day of food, I'm fucked. Not gonna do great for me. So they've gone, well, instead of doing five milligrams, maybe I do one milligram five days a week. And it becomes a little bit more ⁓ acceptable in terms of the body's response or that effect that comes off the back end. That's the principle in terms of these, these. ⁓ like micro-dosing, and I would probably say it comes from that of like the improvement and the research that we've seen with regards to the hormone replacement therapy of what we have like peaks and lows or troughs, highs and lows in terms of those troughs, and keeping it more blood stable, which kind of makes sense if we think about the concept from like blood glucose levels. We don't really want to have these mass spikes and lows, we kind of want to have like a little spike come back to baseline, little spike come back to baseline. That becomes a healthier individual. And I think that's where this whole concept has come in. Now, the only problem is we don't know if that works in that mechanism. Like I've seen it. I'm not going to lie to you and say like I've had individuals use it in that way and it seems to be effective, but it's like we don't know. So the answer is if we can do that, I'm probably going to err on that side of doing it purely because the effects are pretty shit.
Nick Ridpath: Right.
Mac: And again, the devil is in the dosage and the duration. So if I'm looking at these things and I go, well, I need this response and I've done all of the other lifestyle interventions, I brought over these things in, could this work from a cardiovascular kind of prophylactic use? It's like possibly, but I need the food to be there, I need the appetite to be there, I need that element of it. So well, I know I could microdose it across the week and possibly get the positive outcomes from that. But as per everything we do, there is a risk, right? There is weighing up these risk scenarios of, okay, well, I'm still using a GLP-1 that technically slows down digestibility. While I'm on large amounts of food and trying to grow or hypertrophize or get to that standpoint, like, do I want a slowing down of digestion? Maybe, maybe not. That's for the individual to work out, the coach to try and work out in terms of these and make those decisions in terms of that. I mean, sorry, very long-winded answer to your question, but I think, again, context matters because the answer could be sick, it works, but it's like, do we know if it works? And like, why does it work? What are we trying to achieve? What is the goal? Where is it going to fail? Where is the failure going to occur by doing it in this way? Where is the positive gonna be from doing it in this way?
Nick Ridpath: Right. So sounds like your take is it theoretically could be a positive thing, but we need more time.
Mac: Yes. We need more time in terms of these things and theoretically I think it could be an effective way to dose it. Yes, I think it could be and from what I've seen and what I've kind of like, you know, experimented on myself and played around with is it does seem to be an effective manner. Is it something that I do in the long term with individuals? I don't have an answer. I must be honest.
Nick Ridpath: . Have I told you my theory for American obesity?
Mac: Hit me. ⁓
Nick Ridpath: Do you have a theory?
Mac: ⁓ Look, I feel like these drugs that are coming out are going to be the corn seed oils. What? Really?
Nick Ridpath: seed oils. Do you haven't seen this dude? There's a whole like there's a whole group of people that will tell you the reason that we're all fat in America is because of seed oils or people like I went to Europe and they don't have any GMOs in their food and I lost five pounds. He also walked everywhere and ate two meals a day. But you my here's my take my my take on.
Mac: ⁓ yeah. It's the sea dolls. Yeah, yep.
Nick Ridpath: American obesity because people to used to if I go on like Twitter for example and find this conversation somewhere People are gonna be posting pictures of Americans on the beach like the 1940s like everyone's skinny Like America used to be skinny. We used to eat whole foods and cook at home like, know, we used to do Everyone smoke cigarettes. We were blasting nicotine. You know, it's a really good appetite suppressant Nicotine I swear I once I asked AI at one point to graph me the like prevalence of ⁓ smoking
Mac: You Thanks for seeing.
Nick Ridpath: with the incident of obesity or however you want to say that. Right. So around like 1980, there's like a very steep cross. like smoking Hicks and Nose Dive and obesity goes straight up. It's like, yeah, we just traded cigarettes for McDonald's hamburgers. So like, of course, we're going to get fat if we're no longer stemming ourselves to the gills.
Mac: Yeah, yeah, the end. Yeah, that appetite suppression and like dude, definitely ⁓ a factor and I think there's gonna be a co, there's gonna be multiple factors that come into play to add this into the mix. Like let's go further back as well around that time period. You had mandated PT in every school. Every school, every school did some form of physical education. or PEPT, physical training, whatever it is, like we had the pull-ups, we had the fucking monkey bars, we had the push-ups, we had all of the things that kind of had to come into mix. Now, what do we know, when we think about generation, what do we know about fat cells? Like fat cells, especially, and this is why I'm really gung-ho on adolescent fat gain, is once we develop fat cells, we never get rid of them. We shrink them or we grow them. Shrink grow multiply in terms of fat cells. You never get rid of them unless you have like liposuction, right? So if you're a fat kid you have For and this is not the numbers But I'm just going to give us an example if you were at like 10 years old you have a hundred fat cells You will have a hundred fat cells as a minimum for the rest of your life That's it All that will happen is we'll fill the fat cells up and it gets to a point where like it's not maximal but it's almost at the max and it goes well we need more space so it makes another fat cell. So like by the age of 20 you could have 150 fat cells. But if you go through a diet and you get skinny or you get jacked or toned you still have 150 fat cells. They're just smaller. So you will always have that there for the rest of your life. Now let's go back to what I just said. Back in school, we had physical education where we had more output. We had more calorie expenditure coming through. So we had less opportunity for cephalo cells to be developed. Now speed it up further, that generation is a little bit skinnier, wouldn't put on much. Now yes, there's the cardio aspect in this, the cardio bunnies and fucking blah, blah, blah and all that shit. And again, as I said, multiple factors into this, but if we looked at the base foundation, they're starting from a place with less fat cells. So they have less opportunity to get fat because of that, or even be in a body composition that is that of a representation of a fat individual. Look at our current trajectory. You walk into a school now, like they have a thousand fat cells versus what we had 20, 30, 40 years ago. and longer than that. there is, I don't disagree with you, and I think it would be an interesting thing to throw all of these inputs into the play. I'd be like, yeah, what happened? I don't think the answer would ever be there, but I think the true answer at the end of the day is America in itself has an over-consumption issue and an under-exercise issue, an under-expenditure issue. And that is always going to lead to that of fat gain and or some form of obesity epidemic.
Nick Ridpath: Absolutely. It's definitely multifactorial. That's a super interesting place to look. ⁓ That makes a lot of sense. just if I'm just saying if I were to double down since since like everyone, everyone wants to pick one thing. ⁓ it's it's seed oils. It's ultra processed food kind of the same thing. It's the GMOs. It's whatever. It's like I'm picking one. It's it's nicotine. It's the fact that we nicotine into it into a villain. Yeah, start smoking again. That's my health advice.
Mac: Yeah, you're not wrong. I don't think you're wrong. It's nicotine. Sick. ⁓ Yeah, just start smoking again. ⁓
Nick Ridpath: We just traded lung cancer for colon cancer, you know, like it's.
Mac: Literally, we just changed, know, we have an increase in autoimmune disease. Why? Because we're fucking banging ourselves down with more inflammatory based foods. It's like there's so many, again, multifactorial. But, you know, if you are gonna double down on one, like I'm not gonna disagree with you. think smoking works. as an appetite suppression, smoking works. Nicotine consumption works very effectively.
Nick Ridpath: All my clients that are previous smokers like, yeah, when I quit smoking, I gained so much weight. Yeah.
Mac: or just gaining weight. like, I mean, we could look at it into the psychological component. Did they just trade one addiction for the next addiction? Possibly. Like that could be the case in terms of where it is. Like there's an interesting fact. mean, funny enough, I've had a few like old clients and ex-clients and even some current clients who have addiction-based issues. whether it was drugs, whether it was food, whether it was something along those lines, and the food-based individuals were put on medically prescribed, not red or true diet, Zempak and shit like that. Yes, they lost body weight, but their cravings and their addictive behaviors, not food-related, have improved. which has been a super interesting thing from a psychological component of that. my ex-addicts, if you were drug-related addicts, onto a GLP-1, landed up having less of a ⁓ craving response to the next thing that they changed as their alternative because of that, which was super, super interesting in terms of the research behind it.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, that is super interesting. ⁓ Dude, we've almost made it an hour. ⁓ Training things? We haven't talked about any training really. I'm supposed to debate you. One of your, who was it, Cody? And Cody sent me something, was like, you're, he's like, you're not gonna, or Mac's not gonna like this post that you made. And I was like, I was like a kid I had doing alternate pressing.
Mac: Whatever you want, I'm here. caught you. I you.
Nick Ridpath: And I was like, what's what's Max Scrype with alternate pressing? And I feel like I feel like I'm gonna let you say whatever you want to say first, but I feel like our conclusions are gonna be the same. It's just a matter of the context in which they heard us talking about it. Anyway, bodybuilding, it's probably like objectively awful. I think for bodybuilders, especially, they just need like a little bit of variability. You could probably dose in some stuff like that and a warm up if your goal was just movement variability. I look at it more from the perspective of like
Mac: the conclusion is going to be the same. It's going to be... context. Exactly, it's the context. So.
Nick Ridpath: I have an athlete who rotates like shit or human who rotates like shit from trying to focus on some sort of like reciprocal motion, you know, protraction, retraction, change shape of the rib cage. I'll implement it there as more of a temporary means of restoring movement quality or what I even do is I'll mix it into like I was saying warm up sets and then like our high output sets are going to be bilateral, right? But it's it's not like I'm doing it to maximize hypertrophy by any means.
Mac: So I think the context behind this is the modality. So two factors, modality would be the first thing. Cable, fine. Why? Because a cable's an under loaded press anyways. At the end of the day, like if I'm introducing some form of cable variation of a press, it's to move the scaps around the rib cage, it's to probably challenge that of the shortened position, it could be at the beginning of a program, it could be at the end of a program, it could be a volume or like a load management strategy, something like that. On a dumbbell,
Nick Ridpath: Right.
Mac: Really stupid, why? Because the dumbbell in the standpoint of like a force progression or exertion standpoint, we want to be loading that maximally to sub maximally. All right, like that's it. So like why would I do a, why would I do a dumbbell press in a way that is going to be not of chasing the most amount of output out of that means? That doesn't, like it doesn't logically mix the two together. Cables, different scenario. My only question to you, because I think myself and Thea actually discussed this the one day when we were talking about like rotational planes of the thoracic. Do you find that it's, and the concept came to me from kind of the whole like, are we missing internal rotation or are we in a position that is too internally rotated that we now can't move out of it to move back into it? So think about that concept of what we're referring to, terms of thoracic rotation. Do we have a thoracic rotation issue or do we have an inability to decelerate in terms of that thoracic rotation issue? So you hear what I'm saying. So what I bring in from my go-to for thoracic rotation will always be a dumbbell row, contralateral row, all day long. Because we're to have the component of thoracic rotation but we're gonna have more importantly that deceleration component. And I think that's the key issue. And like when we look at rotation, is it inability to rotate or is it inability to decelerate into that position?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think too, their deceleration is relative to like the force vector, right? Because we could look at deceleration in either concept. I think the biggest place where I use it, especially in like a lot of overhead athletes or even like a lot of my combat sports guys, everything they do is it's so torso driven. The shoulders are kind of along for the ride. So getting them to get the rib cage into a better position and have to isolate the shoulders moving without the rib cage moving, that to me is like one of the biggest wins to get out of the exercise.
Mac: athletes all day long.
Nick Ridpath: It's interesting you say that because I haven't necessarily looked at it in the same way you just phrased it, but typically like those are things I'm going to do both of in a program regardless if somebody really needs to double down on it. Like I'm probably going to do an alternating press. I'm probably going to do a single arm dumbbell row almost all the time. Like a single arm row variation, something that I keep in, especially for a lot of my athletes almost year round. Yeah.
Mac: So I... It's in every program of mine as well. Yeah, it's year round, every program, every athlete. Because it just, I mean from a physique standpoint, dude, one of the things I noticed last year with like all my females, obviously getting lean helps, but like I got them all lean, dude. Their serratus, every single one of them, like hypertrophied to the extent, I was like, what the fuck is going on here? ⁓ Like exceptionally more than what I've ever seen before. I went back and I ordered to everyone's program and I was like, what did I do? I kept heavy dumbbell rows. My 60 and 50 kilogram females were dumbbell rowing 30 to 40 kilograms, which is from a body weight, it's fucking wild when you think about it. And every single one of them had no shoulder issues, zero shoulder issues through any prep, any overhead, anything's kind of coming. they all had these most insanely jacked and like cut out washboard like intercostals into serratus and I was like okay, why? Well think about it, oblique intercostal serratus, we're gonna create that lateral compression, it's like we're gonna make them, instead of a sport that is very flexion extension, we now have compression laterally. So we have a more cylindrical tube, a rib cage that's gonna be more malleable, a scab that's gonna move around it more effectively. It was injury preventative, got them fucking strong, but injury preventative in the long run. And that's the same concept of what we're referring to.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think it to even make sense from like a structural standpoint, like I've always had really well developed serenity and external like oblique, but like my, my rib cage is so narrow. And I'm so like compressed that it's I think it's just like probably more of a natural byproduct to have one I did a lot of hard rotational training and sport growing up. And to my structure is going to make me better at doing those things. Therefore, it probably developed these features.
Mac: Features, So like I don't have anything against it in the context of athlete specific. Like I'll use a cable and to be fair, if I do use a cable alternative press, it's gonna be something that is like a standing cable press, more of a decline, where I get them to hinge over more, where they can keep their pelvis in a more neutral position. And now the scaps actually gonna be able to move in a true congruency of what we're looking for.
Nick Ridpath: Yes.
Mac: I'd prefer not to use that of a stationary where it's a bench or something along those lines, because I'm not gonna get the best out of it. I'm not gonna be able to really get those scabs back depending on the arc of the pull. For me, it's self-management. That, cool. Holding that cable there and pressing through, getting the protraction all day long, no issues. But again, context matters behind these things, I think application. from modality, as I mentioned in very beginning, modality is going to be the set point of am I using this or not. Cables, fine. Dumbbells, no. It doesn't compute.
Nick Ridpath: Typically the setup I'll go for a similar, I don't do like the bilateral cable like you per se, but I'll go like split stance and I'll use the free hand to block on the opposite side of the cable stack. And then I'll do like a forceful protraction with the working arm. And then like the big emphasis is on rib cage pelvis position. I find some people though are so. So movement challenge, they have a hard time doing that setup. So if I were to regress that, I would go to a bench on a cable setup, but I would do that more to maximize external stability, just to give them, again, this is somebody who's really poor at organizing the rib cage. So almost cueing like a flat spine to the bench, just making sure they get as many of those touch points as possible to start to build some awareness of organizing rib cage and pelvis. Before we move into.
Mac: poor.
Nick Ridpath: what I'd want them to do, which is a standing variation. I find if I do do dumbbell, it's more of a resources, like if I'm just in a gym with no cables, or if I have somebody that's like so regressed, I need to lay them on their back. So like they're on their back and like the vector for maintaining that position at the shoulder for the non-working arm, there's gonna be very little torque on the shoulder at all. So it should be relatively easy to maintain that kind of block side as we go into extension on the opposite side. That would be.
Mac: Anything. Yeah. I
Nick Ridpath: if I had to give an explanation, but no, think what you're saying makes perfect sense. There's not really any challenge to that. So with a dumbbell, especially into a dumbbell, we're trying to load the shit out of it. So it's more medium to maximum loading. there's a lot of reasons why we shouldn't do that.
Mac: Yeah, 100%. Fuck Cory.
Nick Ridpath: Fuck yeah, I like that. What's the worst thing you've seen in bodybuilding training right now? I don't even know what's popular. I know what I see in my gym and I know which coaches are giving that out.
Mac: Yeah, you know what I don't I can't stand right now is the Everything is in the toes hip extension toes lip leaning to everything's on the toes, bro Yeah heels Yeah, literally only toe pressure. Yeah, literally just like hey guys, you're both wrong. Let's just do full foot pressure Yeah, that seems to be like
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ and the toes. So we got behind the other way around. We've gone from from heel pressure only to toe pressure only instead of getting it like we should in the middle.
Mac: The thing lately is hip extension, you press through your toes, leg press, press through your toes. It's like, just fuck off. Like honestly, you're just, yeah, that's it. It's the everything's into the toes and then like hip extension, split squats, anything that we're referring to, we drive an internally rotated position for deceleration.
Nick Ridpath: Really?
Mac: Yeah, just think about what I just said. Yeah, why? It just, external, say if I'm gonna punch you, and like the way that I tried to explain this to someone who was fighting with me about this is, if I'm bench pressing, okay, so the top of the bench press would and should be, like in my start position at the top here, like to a certain degree or like as I finish the rep, like that's, for lack of a better word, the most internally rotated position that I'm gonna be in as I produce the force. That's a good concept, right?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. Yeah. No.
Mac: But as I come down, I don't want to be driving my hands in. I want to be driving my hands out because that's an expression of external rotation at the shoulder. Now imagine if I was rotating in on the way down, I'd just be fucking destroying everything. But that's exactly what everyone is doing by internally rotating to load into the lateral glute, load into the lateral hip. I'm just like, why? What are we? What are we doing? You're missing the point. Yes, at the end of the day, the foot pressure is what matters. As long as we keep a flat foot, as we sit into that lateral hip, you're gonna get an external rotation component, depending on where you look at it from the structure. You're not trying to internally rotate into the position. Internal rotation is force expression. That's it, that's I punch you, I hit you as hard as I can with an internal rotation, not external rotation. Very irritating.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, think people just overcomplicate that too. And it gets into, it's almost like if you get into an argument with like a PRI person about like, nutation, counter-nutation, inhalation, exhalation, bias. And it's like largely a lot of these arguments we're talking about the same thing. So it's like, how can I, how can I cue this movement to be better? That's what I really care about.
Mac: It is the same thing.
Nick Ridpath: is I'm not gonna come here and argue with you about IR, ER. It's like, well, yeah, if we're going through the frontal plane of the hip and we're moving through relative hip flexion, right, foot's more towards midline, we are accessing hip internal rotation. If I'm going through a bench press, I'm accessing shoulder internal rotation, relatively speaking, but I shouldn't be cuing shoulder internal rotation. So then the first thing that happens is I'm gonna lose suppression of my scapula, I'm not gonna use my lats to create good core stability, good scapular stability, and I'm gonna go to shit. So it's like.
Mac: That's the difference, yes. Yes.
Nick Ridpath: Although I might be entering a position of relative IR, I'm probably queuing ER here, because it's going to help me decelerate into that position better and maintain tension where I want to. And again, it's like that's, but that's like context people don't want to listen to. And two, like if you're the average person listening to this, it doesn't matter. Like what we're saying doesn't matter as long as you're executing effectively. It matters in the grand scheme of things. But like what's the Da Vinci quote? It's like, ⁓
Mac: in. No.
Nick Ridpath: Simplicity is the purest form of sophistication. It's like it matters, but like in practice, it doesn't really matter if we're executing well within those parameters.
Mac: Just for observation, yes. It's the like they've taken the the 2d model of yes We have relative IR, but queuing IR is not the fucking point Queuing IR just takes away from your ability to get into IR to actually then produce the force that's required and it's the queuing of the IR fuck ⁓
Nick Ridpath: especially for your population, like a lot of smaller females, like dude, you're already jammed into IR, like maybe you need to actually access a little bit of hip external rotation so you can now get into hip IR.
Mac: That's exactly what fucking the issue is. And off the back end of this, of this, for lack of a better word, because of this change from, again, the incorrect energy into the heels and now into the toes, we're so under loaded. And now when we're so under loaded, it's just a decrease of hyperactivity stimulus. You're feeling a burn. Great, that doesn't mean sweet fuck all for building muscle. Doesn't, it means nothing. So yeah, that's the problem that I am, I've had to ignore it. I should unfollow and muted so many people. It's the greatest tool. Fucks sakes, button is great. Are you joking?
Nick Ridpath: Good for you. The mute button's awesome. I haven't seen the toe stuff yet though. I need to look for that. ⁓ The big thing, I see a lot of heavy heel stuff still. The worst thing I see in the gym, I try to disassociate what I see online from what I see in the gym because what I see in the gym is typically far worse. Yeah, so I know like heel pressure stuff. I see a knee-banded RDL like almost every day. I guess one of the worst exercises that exists for the lower body.
Mac: It's a true representation. Yeah, true. So knee band and RDL referring to knee band around the knees, cueing ear or pulling to the one side. Okay, so.
Nick Ridpath: Sorry. Yeah, many band around the knees. No, like a super heavy many band around the knees.
Mac: Yeah, that still happens. That happens in squats, in RDLs. You'll see it in the V-squat all the time. All the time, like a V-squat, good morning. Like that's what it is. That's where that one's coming through. It's like, it's doing nothing. Just flatten your feet. Just keep your foot pressure for me you'll be fine. Yeah, that's a thing.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is funny too, it's a bit contradictory what we were just saying, but it's like if I'm entering a position of IR, I don't really want to be queuing like excessively active ER, because that's going to defeat the purpose. So even like though we were just saying maybe we need more ER, that's not how we're trying to achieve it either.
Mac: No, no, The requirement for ER is, again, it's the ability to go into ER, come out of ER, go into IR. Not stay in one position and think that that's the place that we need to be in all the time to express force. It's if I, it's kind of like, it's the whole thing of like you've opened the door, but you don't walk through the door to the other side to close the door. You just open the door and you stand on the outside and be like, yeah, I opened the door. It's like, well, do something with it motherfucker. Like go in. That's the point. And then when you need to go outside, go outside. It's like that's the simplest way that I can somehow come up with this. But it's like, don't just stand there, open the door and be like, yep, job done. It's like, well, you have to go inside the house at some stage to then also come out the house at some stage. Same concept.
Nick Ridpath: You're also, put a note over here. I've not gone over like anything I wrote down for us to talk about and we're not going to, because I have, well, I have a couple of things, but you also love trap RRDLs. You're one of my few other friends who implement those, sounds like. I was going through some of your recent posts. Like I think that's an awesome exercise and I never see it being used.
Mac: Cool. Bye. always. It's a low barrier of entry. It's, for lack of a better word, again, risk analysis when we run through all of these things. It has less opportunity for the wheels to fall off. It's a better center of mass orientation. Most people are so far forward anyways, just bringing that center mass back into their dead center allows them to find their body more effectively, exactly as we're referring to. I tend to see less heel pressure moving because the bar smacks them in the fucking shins. Like it's a self-cue corrective tool. It's such an underused tool. think unless you are a barbell athlete, in my opinion, and this is a bold statement, but unless you're a barbell athlete, you should probably just live on a trap bar. Like doing a barbell RDL.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. I don't know why you would argue otherwise. Like what would the benefit be of choosing bar ball versus trap bar that both has loadable.
Mac: There isn't. Literally, you put 25 plates on, you're gonna max that thing out. You're gonna have better neutral plane in terms of the hand expressions. The lats are going to stabilize the pelvis more effectively. More tension through the glutes, more effective in terms of what we're doing. It it ticks the box. The only downside to it, as I have always mentioned, is when you get manufacturers make those stupid long ass fucking ones and like you have individuals whose frame doesn't fit the trap bar. That's the only time period that maybe the barbell's gonna be more effective.
Nick Ridpath: Wait.
Mac: That's it.
Nick Ridpath: They're almost doing like a snatch grip. Like it's like way out to the sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, that's a fair point.
Mac: Yeah. That's the only time period that I think it's effective. It's when the implement doesn't match the morphology of the individual in front of you.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, it's great. But now all the things you just said, that's why is a better center of mass control, the weights closer to your middle, your center of mass, you can engage your lats easier. It's just, it's just slow to bowl. So like, all those things are going to give us a more effective stimulus. Not saying the barbell is bad. But like it just if we're talking about in terms of ease of teaching and ease of maintaining proper execution under high stimulus or under high intensity, like it's just going to be a probably a better option.
Mac: at ⁓ And again, the top thing on top, like the bigger point or a secondary point on top of this is you can use it for a gen pop to an elite athlete. That's it. Like athletes probably do better on a trap bar than they do a barbell. Simple. Yeah.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I use almost actually. Yeah, all my pro guys for RDLs. We do trap bar, trap bar, dumbbell, typically trap bar, because barbed or dumbbell is not not quite as loadable. ⁓ Let's do the Q and A's actually. No, we're going to screen share. I'm not trying to screen share on the podcast yet to my people that are listening. I apologize, but we're going to do this. I'm going have Mac narrate what he's saying for us so we can. Can we see this okay?
Mac: trouble. Yeah, agreed. ⁓ hilarious ⁓ Yeah, I'm stoked. I just eat human. Rhythm. I have seen this.
Nick Ridpath: Have you seen these? I get an ad, no, no. I get an ad on this top left right here. what are your thoughts on this? I get an ad for this literally every 30 minutes on Instagram right now. It's basically, looks like the, if you guys are familiar with the ⁓ continuous blood glucose monitors, it seems like it's like that. It sticks on you, but it draws your blood out and then you get a blood test done or you get your blood work done. Yeah.
Mac: blood. So at the end of the day, think it's a great, a great tool. I think it's gonna be a good tool in terms of individuals who want to assess bio like deeper blood work markers and biofeedback markers on a continuous basis without always having to go to a pathology lab and get your blood drawn. I think that's it. Remember at the end of the day, the two downsides to it though, you still have to mail it off and get it shipped to whatever company or whatever place to get it tested. So that's a time period. Secondly, Drawing blood is an art, right? If you are too violent with the vial or if you tilt it in a way that is ineffective, you break down the cells or you break down the blood necessarily and you can get some false positive false reading. So there is always going to be something that you have to read that with a pinch of salt, but I think it could be a very effective tool in the long run. Athlete screening, like that. You can literally just walk in. stick it to their fucking shoulder and get some form of blood work done pretty simple and pretty easy in terms of that. Could be a very effective tool. I don't know the markers though. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, they've like paired with, I saw they paired with like a high rocks event at some stage or some shit like that. But yeah, it could be effective. Could be effective.
Nick Ridpath: Cool, yeah, I was just curious what your thoughts would be on that. I have no idea any details on it, I just keep seeing it. So I pulled up, we actually got some decent questions. I put this up for Shallows I did last week and we got some of the funniest questions like you'll see, I'll send you the screenshot on that. Anyways, there's a couple of bad ones or weird ones in here. What we got? ⁓ Here's a super interesting one. Do flyos carry over to bodybuilding? No, I know you're gonna say, contextually, can we paint a picture where there might be some benefits to it? I look at like,
Mac: sick. Yeah. ⁓ my god.
Nick Ridpath: I have even like my gem pop clients doing a little bit of plyos. I think one of the more recent ways I've been using it from a movement perspective is I'll do like like Matt Watson deep tier stuff as part of a warmup. So if I'm trying to get some like oscillatory almost inhibition in a position, like I will do ⁓ like a stationary lunge position, like a deep tier kind of plyo just to kind of get that inhibitory response to being in that position. Or I'll pair that with like an isometric in the position. Things that I typically do just to get better.
Mac: Yes. Okay.
Nick Ridpath: Awareness get rid of positioning better mobility in the position before I actually go and load it I don't I can't really imagine a bunch of like 130 kilo meatheads doing deep-tier plyos in the gym
Mac: So that. There we had it. There's no, so the, I would, I'm going to answer this in a way that is a straw man, but not really at the same time. My answer to this is it could be, but the plyometric tool that I'm going to use is going to be one that we used to use back in the day in bodybuilding. We saw some of the old school guys used to do it skipping. Simple skipping is if we think about it is a plyometric based exercise. It's a low barrier of entry, very, very, very, very low barrier. You're probably not what you would deem like a traditional plyometric, but I don't think the ability to skip is a bad thing in the sense purely because we have an understanding where we are in space. We create some form of joint stiffness and tendon stiffness in terms of that. And it could be added in as a very simple basic way to do it now. The only downside to that is one, it's difficult to skip, two, 130 kilo individual skipping on calves is probably, depending on what drugs are in play, ⁓ you're probably at a higher risk for some form of ⁓ ACL, well possibly an ACL, but some form of Achilles rupture at some stage. That's the only plyometric I would bring into the mix.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, feel like, no, no, no, it's great. Honestly, that's what I use with people that are pretty detrained or like I have a fair bit of clients over the age of 60 and they want to get back into doing athletic things or they're like, when I play pickleball, my Achilles bugs me, my knee bugs me, cool. We're gonna do like some real basic pogo hops and play slow intensity and we're gonna do some skips actually moving through space. Like those are two things that I use pretty consistently. So I think I would apply the same thing for a bodybuilder who maybe...
Mac: Skipping. Skipping.
Nick Ridpath: Our only real goal here is to create some sort of stimulus that has a component of velocity to it. And then also maybe give them a little bit of movement variability with that velocity. That would be like all we're trying to get around trying to make bodybuilders into athletes by any means, because then objectively, they're probably putting resources into a thing. doesn't matter for their actual sport, which is just being jacked as fuck.
Mac: That's it. That's Just done. 100 % 100 % agreed. Dead right.
Nick Ridpath: Decent questions. You want some bad ones? We just have John Boy in here, but just John Mayer. John. What is that a question? John Mayer. Yes or no? John Mayer. Yes or no Mac. What you got?
Mac: Mm-hmm. That's that's John Bond, isn't it? What's his name? It's fucking it's ⁓ Yes, yeah, John point PT. Shut up. Yeah, he used to stop drinking monsters while he trains idiot or energy drinks This is wrong time and place Yeah, it sounds like it wrong time and place caffeine half-life is is incorrect You've got a carbonated drink going into the GI system while you're training
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, John Boy PT, baby. That sounds like John Boy.
Mac: You're just not doing the effective things to the GI in any shape or form while you're trying to be in a sympathetic drive state to produce force to maximize hyperactivity or strength.
Nick Ridpath: Sounds like a bad time. I'll make sure to add that to the list of things to give him shit on. we're saying we're not going to answer John Mayer. We're going to answer that. we go. Training, training redundancy in a physique sort of a Zeke sport setting. That's not really a question. Every, every, every program. Yeah. Well, like to some point, like you almost want there to be some redundancy in a sense if our goal is to get jacked. But I think it's not in the sense that typically we would see it, which is like
Mac: Yep. Yeah, it's probably, it's not, it's a statement that is true. True.
Nick Ridpath: Like I said, YouTube video on this couple weeks ago, like I pulled up a couple of programs I had been sent from clients that are doing bodybuilding programs. And it's like dumbbell, lateral raise, cable, lateral raise, Smith machine, upright row, dumbbell, shoulder press machine, shoulder press. And it's like, did we just did the same thing or like lower body days? It's like B stance, RDL followed by bilateral RDL followed by a V squat. Good morning, followed by a three hip thrust variations. It's like, guys, we're just doing, yeah, we're doing the same thing like six times here.
Mac: Yeah, Yeah, Same thing. Yeah, yeah. Smith machine going on, yeah. So the way that I would like, not answer that, but the question would be there is like ⁓ muscle centric redundancies. Like that's the problem. When it's a muscle centric based movement, so it's an origin to insertion based movement, that is constant in terms of redundancy. Like you mentioned, know, shoulder press or machine shoulder press to dumbbell shoulder press. Like guys. just do more of the machine shoulder press. Like that's it, that's all that needs to be required in terms of these things. So yeah, probably my biggest fight or gripe within the framework of individuals that come to me.
Nick Ridpath: What's the biggest one you see with men? obviously like the ones I see with females is chest, so like five chest presses.
Mac: Chest, chest, chest. It'll be just different variations of chest press. It'll be like Smith machine, 15 degree chest press, then like ⁓ seated flat chest press machine, then a dumbbell press. like guys, it's the same fucking thing. You're just overloading the mid to short and then a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Horizontal, yeah, yeah.
Nick Ridpath: then a pack fly and then this the same exact horizontal horizontal horizontal 80 % of its mid mid range to shorten you get one length and then there there's your there's your variability
Mac: Yeah, 100 % if you're lucky and the variability is like a cable fly. It's like guys, that's not a LinkedIn pic. Like calm down, calm down, let's do this.
Nick Ridpath: Let's see. ⁓ Actually, we kind of answered this one inadvertently a little bit, maybe a topic on acceleration slash deceleration, change of direction. It will actually then it says adductors plus core minimizing injuries. ⁓ No, you answered that. Do a single arm dumbbell row. That's the answer to that question. ⁓ Top five exercises and progressions within physique sports. Give me your five best physique exercises. How about that?
Mac: Thank ⁓ Dumbbell row is gonna be in there. Not, again, not because of anything from a load, like a loadable, yes, it is gonna be ⁓ some form of stimulus, like a really good stimulus to the dip, but like we spoke about, keeping that lateral compression. think bodybuilders or physique development sports have too much flexion extension. The ability to have lateral compression into the mixer actually makes a better physique, better rotation, better pressing ability, better upper body mobility, they'll be able to get more back, focused movements. So that's the first one. ⁓ Back wise, probably some form of chest supported row, like I'm a T bar, something along those lines that I can, if it's T bar, I wanna be able to either add D handles to it or create some form of neutral-ish or rotating-based hand grip so that I can get true shoulder extension. that's ⁓ five exercise, some form of shoulder extension, something that takes the shoulder behind, that will takes me on behind the body.
Nick Ridpath: Awesome.
Mac: that then stops us from loading the AC joint instead of anything else. So T-bar row could be really nice for mid-back, mid-lats, even lats to certain degree, but it has to have that ability to row. ⁓ What else would I do? I'm gonna do some form of like fly. I'm probably gonna run like a pec fly, I think that for four pecs from a length and range, great. Most individuals are either gonna be in that very extended position. So learning how to bring this back down and hold the rib cage over pelvis is gonna be very important for them. Also actually getting a true lengthened pec. Like that whole like, you're sitting in internal rotation. It's like, no, you just have a pec that is more contracted or in a more contracted position. We can't actually lengthen or find that external rotation to then find internal rotation. So I'd probably go with that. ⁓ Landmine press. not a hypertrophy based thing, but shoulder rehab, which, ⁓ dude, fuck, it's in dumbbell row and landmine press is in everyone's program, whether it's a warmup and or loadable based exercise, because it's cool having access to the scat moving around the rib cage, but if you don't do anything with it, there's no point. And like a landmine press is not so much overhead that you're going to cause an issue, but enough of a degree of flexion that it can be loadable.
Nick Ridpath: I love that you said that. Yeah.
Mac: but more importantly, it's actually starting to get protraction and it's a super easy awareness tool. Like you can get them to get to the end, they're like, okay, when you get to the end, punch forward for me. And they're like, ⁓ I felt that like crap. It's like, yeah, welcome to using your serratus. Cool. It's like, that's a cool thing.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, exactly. I've got I've got a meathead right now. I got a meathead client who I have doing these to fix some of his issues. He's a super stiff. He's like, he's the most jacked like narrow ISA guy I've ever seen. In terms of like narrow structure. He has put on the most muscle mass I've ever seen in a human that's that narrow. But like, super stiff, doesn't move well through his torso at all. Yeah, the shoulders don't move well. So I've had him doing this and his feedback is like, this is so frustrating. Like I just like yelling at myself in my head while I'm doing this. I'm like, you're doing it right. Like it should be frustrating because I'm giving you everything you're bad at right now. And that's what we're trying to fix with this. We're not trying to do this to give you jacked outs. That's what the lateral raise machine or the cable lateral raise is in there for later in the session. This is movement quality based right now with some load.
Mac: can't rotate. Crisis foot, yep. Yeah, the last one, fifth, and this is not an exercise for hypertrophy in any shape or form, and like I've just mentioned, almost very little hypertrophy based movements, funny that. ⁓ Side lying decompression on a med ball. Big fan, big, big fan of that because once again, most individuals, even when they're jacked, like you're big jacked dude, get him just to lie on a fucking med ball on the side and just open.
Nick Ridpath: Okay, yeah. already already doing it because I love them too. Dude we're like
Mac: Yep. this is, and that's it. yeah, that's, but that's the whole point at the end of the day is, you know, again, let's look at these things. I can give someone any pro like they can keep running their normal program. Let's just sprinkle in these few things that create natural compression. And you're immediately going to get 25 % increase in performance because when you have these obliques and this lateral sling, that is not just Neurally jacked up all the time the body moves more effectively. It's it's it's not fucking rocket science in my opinion
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things has to be keeping the wheels on the bus. Obviously, I don't train a bunch of physique athletes, but even like with my, I was saying this on a podcast with Joey. It's like, you know, one of the biggest things I work on with my, my pro athletes is like just keeping the wheels on the bus, like giving them enough. ⁓
Mac: same thing.
Nick Ridpath: enough new access to movement, enough variability, enough capacity and positions that they don't access well on their own to keep functioning so that we're missing playing time. But you're missing playing time for a bodybuilder is like you shouldn't be training every three months and then you have to take three weeks off because you're hurt. Like I get a bunch of clients come to me and they're like, I haven't been able to train for a month. I'm like, what is wrong with you? Like did you tear a labrum? Like tear a pec? And like, no, I just like, I don't feel very good. Yeah, it was like, but there's no like structural injury necessarily. It's just like,
Mac: training. That's for now. You're broken.
Nick Ridpath: They feel like shit because they have no variability in their ability to move through space.
Mac: And that's it, that's why like a lot of those exercises I picked are not hypertrophy specific, however they are dramatically going to increase your physique in the exercise that you're really doing from like a, they'll fix anything. It's a, for lack of better word, it's a shotgun approach at fixing your physique.
Nick Ridpath: Thank Yeah, that's great. Because yeah, again, like the hypertrophy stuff, a lot of people can figure out the right combination of machines, exercises, hard work, know, whatever. ⁓ Awesome. What are some behaviors or things that coaches consistently get wrong in your opinion?
Mac: Sample. Just load it. ⁓ not pairing nutritional interventions with training stimulus.
Nick Ridpath: Okay.
Mac: Training periodization and nutrition periodization need to match. They have to be congruent. At the end of the day, like we were talking about with you, you were having a keto-based eggs and fucking fat bomb and then trying to do glycolytic work. It's just not the right tool. ⁓ But could be the right tool at the time of if we went into less glycolytic work, went maybe more ATP, we went into something that was strength-based that doesn't require the amount of carbohydrates that you would in terms of more, higher rep ranges, higher burn rate in terms of that. Periodization of both models needs, whether it's caloric deficits, whether it's caloric maintenance, the surplus, that dictates recoverability. Recoverability at the end of the day allows for better performance. matching the two is what coaches fuck up all the time.
Nick Ridpath: What are the two or what are the most common places you see discontinuity with that? Obviously, I very often will see like very high volume training programs with very low calorie diets. That's kind of that would be an example, right?
Mac: Exactly, that's the telltale sign of where it all kinda goes wrong in terms of that. Remember at the end of the day, not keeping the goal the goal. So if the goal is body composition in relation to in a dieting phase, you require way less volume to maintain the muscle mass you have. And the problem is ego is attached to this, where most individuals think they have more muscle mass than they actually do. So they do more because they think they're losing. more muscle and they're not, they just don't have the requirement of muscle they think they have. So you're getting lean by doing less and essentially you have less recovery or less energy available and you do the cardio, you do the steps, you do fucking all that. Training is just there to preserve the muscle mass. The problem is most people think they have more muscle mass than they actually do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, absolutely. That makes me think we have one of the kids that works front desk is doing his first show and he walked in yesterday and he was like, he's like looks dead. I can see prep face. I'm like, dude, when are you getting on stage? It's gotta be this week. Like he's like, dude, guess how much I weigh right now. And like he's a pretty jack dude. He weighs like, I think like 190 200 pounds with 90 kilos usually.
Mac: Yeah, that's
Nick Ridpath: And I looked at him, was like, don't know 150. He's like, yeah, he's like, I was like 149 this morning. He's down like 50 pounds and he's maybe 19, 20 years old. So you can only have so much muscle mass at that point, but it's just like crazy. how much weight he's had to lose to get lean, not to digress there. Tips for clients with scoliosis. Not medical advice. I think this doesn't need any medical advice. We can talk about both.
Mac: Yep. Yeah, to get actual lean. Is it functional or structural? Yeah, always. I think at the end of the day, they're not broken. That's the first thing. Don't treat them like glass. Treat them in the same way that most individuals would be treated in the way that like find positions that they can load and load them. If it's more like structural scoliosis, like axle load is probably not a great idea. Really, it's not. You're just compressing an issue at play or you're compounding on an issue at play that is there. However,
Nick Ridpath: Yeah.
Mac: There are still ways that we can load the lower body and load that aspect of things without directly impacting that of the spine. I think it's complex, but it's not. It's so simple at the end of the day. Just know the difference between the two. where your scope of practice ends. And just keep doing the things that we've just said. Rotation work, probably a really good idea. in both elements.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I've never had anybody that's had like crazy scoliosis. Like I've had a fair bit of scoliosis clients. There's only one where it's like super noticeable, but they're like super high functioning. And like the biggest thing for me is like just looking at it. If I wanted to look at this from an anatomical standpoint, okay, like, well like one scapula is gonna be further from the T-spine. One's gonna be closer. Rib cage might be shifted a little bit. What are the implications? And it's like somebody who might functionally have...
Mac: Yeah, bad.
Nick Ridpath: shoulders that are kind of set that way or rib cage is turned one way. It's like we'd be doing the same things. And a lot of it is just giving again, same thing we've been talking about giving them more movement variability, giving them more awareness of okay, like, here's kind of your bias, here's how we get out of it. Now you can express that with a little bit of load. Cool. That's that's making progress.
Mac: That's it. Literally. Like it's not, it doesn't deserve the over complication. Again, I think a lot of people will use it as a scare tactic. It's like, you, you have structural scoliosis. It's like, have to be so careful. And it's like, all right, cool. Now they've bought into needing this PT for the rest of their life because they're scared they're going to shatter. It's like, no, you're fine. You're sweet.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. You got time for two more?
Mac: Yeah, I'm here. Go wild.
Nick Ridpath: Sweet ⁓ fellow Australian here managing X. Well, you're not Australian, but you're you are quite literally. You're not Australian, but you are Australian, right?
Mac: Yeah. Yeah, I've got a passport, so that counts. Look, we'll take it. Yeah, citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll take it.
Nick Ridpath: You're a citizen, right? As of like the last year, you're an Australian citizen. There we go. Managing expectations with clients around exercise preferences versus what they need. I love this conversation. I have this all the time with the coaches that work with me. I want to hear your thoughts, though.
Mac: What's this? So there's optimum for what we know the body needs and at the end of the day if the person doesn't fucking want to do it you can write the best program in the world it's not gonna work. So it's your job as the coach to figure out like and I used to train a very good lawyer back in the day and he made the statement to me which I've it works in the snow but doesn't he made the statement to me it's like I never make a compromise because it means we both lose. And like he's right. In that sense, it's hilarious in that he's right. It's like when we compromise, we both lose because I don't get what I want and you don't get what you want. But in this scenario, what you got to do is you have to manipulate for positive aspects. You need to manipulate the individual to move them in the direction that you need to get them to. But being able to actually get them to buy in for it. And that's it at the end of the day. So if you know that their goal is you need more Exercise variability find ways or find exercises that they're willing to do with you that they're okay with But you're gonna have to maybe structure one or two extra exercises. We use this like hip thrusts, for example, all my girls fucking use hip thrusts Because it became so popular and it's like cool So I give them a hip thrust but I just manipulated to wear in the program that I want the hip thrust to be So is it gonna be at the very beginning of the program? Yes, because the shorten range my last more blood flow I'm gonna load the shit out of it in terms of reps. So it's gonna be like a 20 to 25 reps and they get their exercise. They get their fix of doing the exercise, but I get out of it what I need out of the exercise. And I think that's it. It's the people. Remember we spoke about it at the very, very beginning to make this full circle. It's ultimately looking at it and going, well, what does this individual need? They need to tick the box of that. Let's do that one. And I'll just work out what I actually need in the program to make it work.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I look at it in the exact same way. It's like, how can I fit in what they want while still accomplishing what we want to get done to get whatever results, especially, know, athletes, it's always like shiny red ball. Like there's all this online, you know, the foot doctor speed work stuff. They want to do like cool exercises all the time. So it's like, if you know how to get done what you want to get done, you probably have some other ways to do that as well. And just making sure we're getting enough of the main things done to make progress. That's what really matters.
Mac: 100 % Yep, 100%.
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ Pivotal last one pivotal education moments in your coaching career things you've learned slash read etc
Mac: The epiphany that you can always do more. That's got nothing to do with the book, not anything to do that. At the end of the day, if you think you're working hard, you're probably not. And why I say that is the biggest needle that moved my entire career was doing more things. I stayed up later, I worked through the night more, I sleep, like I don't function on, I function extremely well on a little amount of sleep. But I started doing things with that time period. So I sat there and I was like, oh fuck, I'm so tired. I've worked six hours, seven hours. It's like, oh, that's cool. It's like, well, you can do that two more times within the day. And it's not an answer in terms of a direct course I took or anything like that, but it opened my eye up to like, all right, I can work harder. And if I work harder, I can fill that time period with more things that I can learn. So in six hours, if I worked for six hours, I've got another 12 hours. because I've got six hours of work, another six hours, and I can dedicate that two bouts of six hours to studying. And that's what I did. I slept for a very small amount of time. I worked for six to make sure I made some form of money, and then I studied my fucking ass off for the other 12 hours because it was the only way in which I realized that I was so far behind. that I needed to expedite my process and catch up for the last 10 years of what I was doing. So, again, not the answer, but I think a really good answer that most people think they're working hard, you're not. Sorry to break it to you, but you're not working fucking hard.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, no, I like that a lot. Stay busy, but like productive busy, not waking up at 5am and doing your morning meditation, drinking tea and reading how to win friends and influence people, like doing things that are actually gonna be productive for your career.
Mac: State billy, is it? Yeah, I think to hone it down a little bit more is also to do an audit of what you currently know. And what you're 100 % sure of, don't go and learn more about that. Go and learn more about the things that you're 50 to 60 % sure of and then build that model out. That's really what I did. was like, I'm confident in this. I'm not confident in this, this, and this. So was like, well, the next week. is fucking just learning this until I was confident enough I could move into the next part of things. That's what I did.
Nick Ridpath: I've taken a similar note in my career. And then two part of that is I'll make sure I can find someone I must attach myself to that's kind of an expert in that field or somebody who I respect a lot and try to learn from them, whether it's. paying for mentor, whether it's signing up for their course, whether it's just consuming every bit of content they have, like find someone who's doing what you want to do. And they're an expert in that field. And it's like learn from them. It doesn't have to be one person, but I think having people to kind of latch on to, especially like we're going going back to earlier talking about how accessible information is nowadays. You don't only have information. You have people that have utilized and information on on their own clients, right? So they've kind of done that for you. And now you can kind of get their experiences as well. And then you can apply their already kind of synthesized experience to your
Mac: is.
Nick Ridpath: new experiences or to your clients, to yourself, et cetera.
Mac: It's the, like, I like calling it like the nuclear bomb approach. It's like if there's something that I know I don't know, dude, I do, like, I'll look at free information, paid courses, I'll like AI the fuck out of it. I'll go whatever I need, like now that we have that resource, it's like why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I throw everything at it to learn it and learn it faster?
Nick Ridpath: Yeah. I've only really just started doing that adding in the AI element to it. Like I'll use it to ask questions, especially if you have like a paid version. Like I find Gemini is very good. Tech GPT is kind of ass, but like the Gemini Pro version, whatever it is, I think it's very good for training topics. I've been throwing some stuff in there with without really any filter and it's been giving me really good feedback. So that's it's super interesting.
Mac: Yeah, it's pretty good. Yep. Yep. It's a great way to test your knowledge. think again, at the end of the day, you know, I actually had this, I had a bit of a conversation with Suluji the other day, Shah Suluji, ⁓ where we were talking about, yes, we were talking about like AI and he's like, ⁓ you know, are you using this in your business? Like, no, I'm using this to expedite the process of things. I will never take myself out of the business. And like the problem with individuals who are using AI to replace them in their business is like, you're making yourself obsolete.
Nick Ridpath: Shout out to the G. Yeah.
Mac: That's the problem. So all that I'm doing is I work out and I'm looking at the business and I look at the systems within the business, I go, okay, how can I speed this up by implementing a tool that is done off AI? And that's how I use AI effectively within the business. So I use it for ⁓ certain note taking software, certain, like all of my shit's done with Fathom, for example, when I do meetings or calls and stuff, know, fucking game changer. It allows me to provide a better service. I can sit there and have conversation with someone I don't have to sit there typing like a fucking neanderthal that I am of taking notes and shit. It's like I just go and read the phantom notes. I'm like, all right, cool. That's it. That's making me more efficient at what I do.
Nick Ridpath: Yeah, I do the same thing with whatever Google, Gemini, built in. So all my coaching calls now, record them, transcript, it goes out to all my clients so they can look back over it. I'll go back over them. If I want to even do content ideas, I'll go look through conversations I have with coaches, because a lot of the questions that they're asking me are things that I could just make into content, right? But it's not replacing us, it's just making more minute tasks.
Mac: Yeah. and make your content,
Nick Ridpath: easier for us to do or helping us expand on ideas, I think is kind of having some feedback. It's also very pretty valuable for that. ⁓ Yeah, fuck yeah, dude. We're almost 100 minutes and I think so I appreciate your time. Anything else you want to close on?
Mac: That's right. That's right. Yeah, 100 % dude. No, that's pretty much it I guess. That's fucking... That's pretty much it. We'll go with that.
Nick Ridpath: That's it. I feel like anybody listening knows who you are, but if you want to tell people where to find you, I'll plug it in the show notes somewhere.
Mac: ⁓ Yeah, so obviously coach James Mack on Instagram. I mean, I'll shame this plug this if you're good with this. I'm witnesses coming out.
Nick Ridpath: This would be ⁓ two weeks from yesterday. So not next Monday, but the Monday after. Yeah.
Mac: So the 16th. Ooh, this is a bold statement. But within the next two to four weeks, I have a new screen recording software launching. So I've developed a new screen recording software to ⁓ compete against the current one within the coaching market that is used for meetings and was designed for meetings only. ⁓ So with that being said, will, I mean, whatever that kit that is. yeah, Trellis, ⁓ I designed it. Dude, I got fed up with all of the issues happening. And I was like, my mom always told me that if,
Nick Ridpath: Loom. Yeah. ⁓
Mac: you're complaining about something, either come up with a solution or shut the fuck up. So I came up with a solution, all right? That was it, that was a good old mob. So I came up with a solution, man, that's been in the works for the last eight plus, nine plus months in terms of that. Been waiting on the last kind of verification from Google, funny enough. And with that, it will be launched, hopefully by the end of March is kind of the plan within the next two weeks. I will double check on that. And if that does work, I'll be able to give you a list of a bit of a discount code or something. So I'll shoot that through to you.
Nick Ridpath: Fuck yeah.
Mac: for the first month. ⁓ So yeah, any support on that would be great, but I'm telling you, it will expedite your process dramatically. Obviously the big one being ⁓ we use a different upload system, so it's basically like a live stream upload, kind of like Riverside does. So there is no way that you will ever lose what happens. So it's constantly uploading. If you have a fail in the system, it stops, but that whole piece that you have kind of recorded up until then will be there and will be accessible for you so you don't have to restart your entire thing. So that's the first thing. ⁓ Second off the bat of that, which was a real cool feature that I started doing as well, is once your trellis has been uploaded and you have kind of, same, can say your link, et cetera from that, you will have obviously the transcript, but off the back end of that you will have a summary and action items and a notes on exactly what you have spoken about with your client. So like you've just said with regards to phantom stuff, you will be able to copy that and literally it will pick out all the action items that you have spoken about, give you a summary on what you have just spoken about. and give you any extra notes as a coach requirement at end of this. So that'll all be launching in the next month. So yeah, fuck yeah, bro. Taking on the big dogs. Let's go with that one.
Nick Ridpath: ⁓ yeah, dude, that's cool as fuck. I know I'll be switching. yeah, send me the information on that and I'll plug it in the show notes.
Mac: Yeah, done. Appreciate it, dude. Thank you.
Nick Ridpath: Awesome man, thanks for coming on.
