Episode 66: Is Bigger Always Better? Muscular Strength vs. Hypertrophy with Elias Figueroa
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Episode Description
In this episode of The Up-Beet Dietitians podcast, Emily and Hannah are joined by fitness coach and professional Elias Figueroa to discuss muscular strength and muscular hypertrophy. Elias shares the big differences between muscle size and strength and how they coexist (or don’t coexist). If you have ever wondered if you should focus on building muscle or getting strong (or if you need to focus on either), be sure to give this episode a listen!
Elias is from Los Angeles, CA! With the help of his wrestling coach and physical therapists, Elias opened his fitness/coaching business when he was 15 years old. Now almost 10 years later, he continues to share his passion of self improvement through the vehicle of fitness and mindset with clients all over the United States and internationally.
Elias graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. of Health & Kinesiology and was the Lead Personal Trainer overseeing over 50 trainers at the university's recreation center. He now is able to dedicate more time to his online coaching clients and is getting his M.S. of Exercise Science with a concentration in Strength & Conditioning at the University of South Florida. Elias aims to open his own warehouse gym and continue to develop his brand training more athletes and providing evidence based/scientifically supported training methods. Aside from fitness, Elias loves going to music festivals and cooking/going out for wild cuisine and cocktails.
Follow Elias on social media @coachelias_cpt!
This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical advice. If you have questions or concerns about any areas of your health, please seek advice from a medical professional.
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Participant #1:
Hello everybody. Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Upbeat Dietitian podcast. In today's episode, we are joined by Elias. Elias is from La. And with the help of his wrestling coach and physical therapist, elias opened up his fitness and coaching business when he was 15 years old. Now, almost ten years later, he continues to share his passion of self improvement through the vehicle of fitness and mindset with clients all over the US and internationally. Elias graduated from Purdue University, boiler up with the BS of Health and Kinesiology, and was the lead personal trainer, overseeing over 50 trainers at the University's recreation center. He now is able to dedicate more time to his online coaching clients and is getting his master's assignment degree of Exercise Science. With the concentration in strength and conditioning at the University of South Florida, elias aims to own his own warehouse gym and continue to develop his brand, training more athletes in providing evidencebased scientifically supported training methods. Aside from fitness, Elias loves going to music festivals and cooking, going out for wild cuisine and cocktails.
Participant #1:
Elias, welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for having me. We are so happy to have you here. So today we are going to well, I guess first things first, we've got a fitness pro on board. Once again. We're of course going to go into the fitness side of things. We love, love talking with our trainer friends because Emily and I dabble in it, but we don't often get too much into it. So we're very excited to go into that. We're actually going to go into today the big differences between muscle hypertrophy versus muscular strength and kind of how those two work together but also work separately. But first things first. We always have our guests kind of take us through like a day in the life. What you do for work, education, boiler up, hobbies, education, all that good stuff. So take it away. Absolutely. Gosh. I'll give you the Elias fitness journey from the beginning. I was never an athletic kid. Growing up. I was the Goopy theater kid. I was in the La children's choir. I was in theater all my life in high school. It wasn't until I tried sports when I was younger, but I was never really into it. And finally I joined a wrestling team when I was in 6th grade. I was like about eleven years old and finally found something I clicked with very quickly, became very competitive, and then by my freshman year of high school, I was on the varsity team. And then by my sophomore year, so that's like 1516 years old, I had a friend, John who was like, I know you're really into fitness. I want to be on the baseball team, but I have a lot of weight to lose. It seems like I'm not feeling like, in my body and working with doctors and I don't know really what to do. Can you help me? And I said, I guess I'd never really thought about working with someone before, but I had no certifications. I didn't know what to do formally, but I was doing a lot of things for myself and working with physical therapist and had my wrestling coach and a track coach at the time. So I said, hey, I'll kind of design something like an outline. Let's meet once a week. And I'll just basically be like, your fitness advisor. And it slowly became that I was like, his unofficial trainer. We would just meet like once a week. And so much more than the physical part, I started to really, really love the emotional and psychological aspect of training and also helping people. I know Hannah and Emily, you can relate to that. Just working with a patient, working with a client, and feeling that you are giving them value and giving them tools for themselves to improve, to take on even after you're long gone and we're not working with them, you have tools that they can use for themselves. So that really kind of flipped a switch in my head. And he ended up being on the baseball team and having this huge fitness transformation. Now that was almost ten years ago. That was 15. Then I'm turning 25 in about two months. So, yeah, now he's a power lifter and way stronger than I am, and it's really incredible to see that transformation. So, yeah, that's kind of where the seed was planted. So then kept doing sports through high school, and then I actually suffered a stress fracture in my lower my l four vertebrae from wrestling. And that kind of turned me on more to the rehab and what I like to call is prehab, which is like training side of things and actually studying the body in kinesiology and nutrition and things like that. So formally created, like my little business lies the trainer as a high school student, kind of with the supervision of my wrestling coach and some physical therapists. So I did have some guidance and I would train other students in high school and that sort of blossomed into going originally. So, Hannah, you and I met at Purdue, but I originally started college at San Francisco State because I'm from Southern California. So I went to San Francisco State as a film major, not even kinesiology, because I still was like the actor and writer and I wanted to do things. And I worked at a private gym there. The Village Fitness Center. And I was surrounded by nutritional science majors and exercise science kinesiology and master students. And I realized that this is something I really wanted to do. So I changed majors and I eventually ended up transferring to Purdue and that's where I started the whole kinesiology and then was a trainer there and then quickly became lead trainer and then one thing led to another and it just flew up. So basically I almost feel like I didn't find fitness. Fitness kind of found me, and that's kind of yeah, it's amazing how one thing can lead to another and it just felt right. And I'm sure you guys can relate to this. I love what I do, so it doesn't feel like work a lot of the time. Sometimes, obviously, okay, I need to take a break, I need a cocktail, I need to relax a little bit. But yeah, that's kind of the origin story of how I got into things. I think I answered your question. You did. I guess my only leading or leading question, but question after that is what are you currently doing for work? Yes. So in one way or another, this brand or this training business that I created ten years ago has evolved and changed, but it still exists. And what it is now is asynchronous fitness coaching, where I design, I have a couple of different packages. Some are more hands on than others, but it's basically I have clients all over the country and I actually had a few in a couple of other countries like India and different parts of Europe for a little while, but basically design workout plan. It's very communication based, so it's very personable and I'm a very talkative person, engaging person, so I love that. And basically I design a program. They go and do it on their own time, but they're sending me videos. I send back the videos with like lines drawn and things. And we talk about form, we talk about adherence. Obviously, I'm not a dietitian. I understand my separation with food and exercise, but I still provide basic scientific physiological processes. I'm currently I finished my bachelor's in Health and Kinesiology at Purdue, and then now I'm currently in getting my Masters of Exercise science and Strength and Conditioning at University of South Florida in Tampa. Funny thing about USF is it's called USF University of South Florida, but it's not in South Florida, it's in Tampa, which is like medium Florida, mid Florida, and it's just called that because at the time when the university was created, that was just the most Southern Florida university. So I just think that's hilarious and it's really weird because I was like, oh, you're in South Florida. Miami, have a good time. Yeah, I could drive three, 4 hours. It's not quite, but Tampa is super awesome. The bucks are there lots of fun things going on. But yeah. So currently for work, doing this asynchronous training, networking with some other professionals such as yourselves, things like that, and then doing school, which takes up a lot of money, it's a lot less physical time in person than, like, undergrad. But I basically create a work week for myself with writing papers and things. My program is very research driven, so now it was a little more traditional, like, lectures in the beginning of my first year. But at this point, a lot of my professors are like, okay, we're going to throw up a bunch of meta analyses and systematic reviews and just go through this research so you can have these conversations with people and just be like, this is not just like because then there's the whole camp. You probably have people. Are you like, I'm not a textbook. I'm not at this. Like I'm my own person. Like, yes, absolutely. So there's the textbook academia, and then there's all the people that want to do things a certain way. But then in the happy medium, you have research studies, and not just one, several on top of each other that can reveal these different things about people. So, yeah, that's kind of what I'm doing right now. Heavily invested in research that is exercise based, heavily. And then I do get a bit of sports nutrition specifically for by Dr. Bill Campbell, if you've heard of him. He's huge in exercise science and sports nutrition. He's a really funny guy, and he has a really awesome Instagram presence. He really does a great job of kind of breaking things down and delivering them in a really digestible way, no pun intended. So that's kind of what I'm doing now. We love some good Digestive Track humor. That's great. It's really great. I love to hear how you and your clients, even though you're, like, virtual, you, like, send videos back and forth. That's so cool. I have never heard of that before. I've heard of, like, videos back and forth, not like drawing lines, like mechanics and all that. That's super neat. Yeah. So that idea I got from it was a class. I don't know what the software was called, but it was at Purdue in the Biomechanics class, there was a software you could go through a video frame by frame and track the joints and see how they were moving. And so that just gave me a very basic idea of literally on your iPhone or for non iPhone users. Non iPhone users, I call green people because when you text them, they have green messages. And one of my best friends, Jordan, hates it when I call him, but he is a green person, so I'm going to call him a green person. Yeah, when you take photos and videos, you can also create lines. And so usually what I'll do is I'll have like and this even comes down to the basics of psychology. And generally I won't use the color red because red is like, oh, bad. Like, incorrect. I'll just use green and blue, both kind of positive colors. Be like, Here, this is where we are. This is green. Or this is blue. I'll kind of even switch them around. So there's like, oh, I'm receiving green, kind of psychology, programming them to see green, but saying, yeah, this is where we are right now. And I'll draw some lines. Maybe their risks are like this. People are kind of like squatting like this. This is where the green is. This is where we want with the blue. So kind of nothing beats in person training or like, you guys have like an in person even like, when you're doing it, I imagine with a patient, just speaking to them in person, it comes off differently. So being able to provide something a little more specific because I can't palpate and be like, pointing or showing them like that. So, yeah, just like things like that and constant communication. So I have like a basic service that's like, okay, here's a program. We'll meet once a week. This is kind of your own thing that you're doing. Then I have an all service program that I basically tell them, like, please bother me if it's two in the morning and I'm programming and I'm awake. I have boundaries for myself, obviously. You guys know you can't let your patients and clients take over your life because you're not a robot. You need to have life. But I said, if it is within the strength of my being to answer you, I will answer you. And so, yeah, it's really fun. It's really dynamic. It allows me to still be in school and travel. Right now I'm going to music festival next weekend in Washington, and it's a camping festival, so I will not have access to my phone or the internet for several days. So I'm sending in my newsletter. I send every week. I said, hey, guys, I'll be gone. I'm sending everyone's programs for next week ahead of time, and it allows me to do that. So it's very flexible and fun. It's just engaging. It's fun to talk to people and, hey, how's it going? How can I help you today? It's awesome. It's also so cool that you could see people from different countries and around the US. That you're not limited by location. So that's awesome. Absolutely. And the thing with my program, it's not like, oh, you better have this kind of equipment, you better have this kind of stuff. Actually, when I really started this formally, how I do things about three years ago was in three, two and a half was in like the height of coven. So all we had, or most people had, was textbooks and backpacks and things like this. So how it works for me is like, whatever you have access to will make it work. Some people even now, some people now are still locked away in covet. Some people are freeballing. It. Especially in Florida, where I'm at. So there's a very big spectrum of availability, comfortability, and what someone's just comfortable doing. So being able to be like, oh yeah, you are not limited by what you are physically limited to be like, yeah, we can make anything work. It's been, again, just really dynamic and organic. It's been cool. Yeah, that's a sign of a good trainer practitioner, whatever is meeting the client wherever they're at, whatever they've got access to, not pushing them beyond their means if that's not going to be helpful for them. Exactly. Well, it's actually really great. I go into our first question on the topic today. So we've touched on this before, like a little bit, Emily and I have, but before we kind of get into the nitty gritty about hypertrophy, strength, all that fun stuff, tell us about some of the benefits of strength, or I guess more broadly resistance training in general. Yeah, definitely. Where do I start? My nerdy gears are starting to turn. Let's see, we can start with just on a basic protection level, having more skeletal muscle. As you guys know, there's more than one kinds of muscle of cardiac and smooth, which is cardiac, your heart smooth all around your organs and your venous system. But specifically, if we're talking in general, probably most people, when they hear muscle, they think of skeletal muscle that can act to protect your body. Generally, when you have more skeletal muscle on your frame, when you are physically hit by something or run into something, usually that will protect your body. Increasing things like bone density, sensitivity to calcium, it's so interesting. Yes, of course, protein is really important and most people would benefit by adding more protein in their diet, as you guys know, way more than I do at this point. But things also like calcium is essential for muscle twitch. And if you don't have calcium in your muscle cells, you don't have muscle contraction. So making sure to have the consuming sufficient calcium from whatever sources are digestible and comfortable for your body. Let's think then there's that as we start to partition, which is the word I use when I talk about strength and hypertrophy, especially with my professor, Dr. Samuel Buckner, who seems to be one of the leading researchers on this partition, because for years and years and years everyone talked about it as like one married thing. And I won't digress until we get to that question in a second. But yeah, so when you have strength, like, what is strength? The physical capability of lifting a heavier load and then hypertrophy, that's simply the increase of muscle cell size. Some people think like, oh, I'm getting more muscle cells. That would be hyperplasia. And it's seen for the most part, and I want to use this language throughout our whole conversation. And this is basically the language that I've adopted, especially in my master's program, is not ever speaking for the most part unless there's a physiological process that we just seem to understand. And this is how it works to have basically assessments on things like this seems to be what we understand about this topic now. But there is room for me to be wrong. I'm not saying that muscle size and strength do not exist together at all. It just seems to be with the research that we have, that there is a difference and they're not interacting as synergistically as we thought. I digress, though, to circulate back benefits of resistive training more than kind of how we think about athletics and being strong and bench pressing £1000 and all that fun, crazy stuff, just bringing it back to its root. That makes Grandma and Grandpa being able to walk around the block with you guys and go to little Sammy's softball game longer and being just functionality. I don't have to ask someone to reach something off the top shelf, just general functionality. And I was actually on a walk with my mum the other day and I thought I was like, isn't it funny? Or honestly, in a weird way, because we've basically structured, I think, all three of us, our lives around health, fitness and wellness. Isn't it funny that we now have to create something, a time in our day to do these things that didn't have to happen before? We have to go out of our way to eat a certain way or think about that a certain way, or like, I'm going to go exercise now because it's good for me. We didn't have to do that less than a thousand years ago. That was way more part of our lifestyle and we just got those nutrients and got that exercise just by living. And now as our brains have evolved and our lifestyles have changed, we have to go out of our way to do that. It's a weird paradox because we are evolving in some ways, but then we've got to do simple things like, I'm going to go into a room with air conditioning and pick up this weight or walk on this treadmill or do this stretch. It's bizarre, but it's funny. I have never thought of that before. That is so funny and scarily true how funny it is, but it applies so much like nutrition, too. Our job did not exist a thousand years ago because people weren't struggling to get their own nutrients or meet whatever goals they have. But now we are always going to have a job because there's always people like wanting to improve certain things. And it's really difficult because we live lives where it's not just like happening, where we're meeting our fitness and nutrition goals. Right. And probably something you guys deal with as much or even if not more than I do is you didn't have the Internet, even you didn't have the Internet probably 100 years ago. Less than that. You didn't have people spreading information on this diet or this diet or this diet. I'm saying the D word. I'm sorry. That's okay. We're going to bleep it out I did that on purpose. Kind of what I've talked about becoming with fitness. You guys are doing the exact same with nutrition is I like to call myself like a health and fitness BS demon slayer. Like cutting through the weeds and fighting the good fight. You're not advocating for a certain it has to be this way. It's just making educated decisions for yourself based on science, based on seemingly true things. I want to use the word prove, usually the word prove. You're probably more aware of this as well. Most things aren't necessarily proven, more just unproven proven. Because not saying proven leaves room for improvement. So I just lost my train of thought. The hamster wheels are turning. I love talking about this. I was so excited. It's okay. Honestly, it's the best when I really love their stuff. This is like I love this. Yeah, well, let's get into the nitty gritty then, since we are on such a role. Which also, by the way, I also love the demons layer thing. That's really great. Feeling that please. Okay, we touched it a little bit, but what is hypertrophy training? What is strength training? How do they differ and how are they similar? Because you kind of mentioned how they might have some things in common. So I guess one of the big ways that they different are similar. Yeah, perfect. So I guess on a very basic level, you have the traditional, like one to five reps for strength and six to twelve to maybe 15 for hypertrophy and then like twelve to 15 plus for endurance. If not a lot of truth to those rep ranges. If intensity, which is a huge thing, it's not like I can just pick up my phone and I'm going to do five reps and now my arm is stronger and if I had done one more, I would have gotten bigger. But no, I did five, not six. So I'm going to be strong, not bigger. And same thing with endurance. So those spectrums match kind of if you're the same, how the three energy systems work, you have oxidative phosphorylation, you have glycolysis, which kind of branches into fast and slow, and then you have creatine phosphate or ATP, I've heard 10 million ways to call that one. But basically Creatine, using Creatine for quick energy, you're never using those energy systems independently. They're all working at the same time. Excuse me? Working at the same time. It's just one is always in predominance. One is always taking the brunt of the energy your body is producing. Same thing with these rep ranges, or same thing with these adaptations. You're never just getting stronger, just getting bigger, or just increasing your endurance one at a time. Usually for the most part, if you're training, all three are happening. You're just funneling more focus into one at a time. So if intensity is high enough, and that's a big thing for people, as often they're not training as intensely as they should be. Now, that's not to say take every set of failure, no days off, 10,000 grams of protein. I'm a robot, but usually if you have a basic RPE scale of zero to ten or one to ten, training somewhere in the range of six to ten, and generally not even going to ten all the time. Now, I'm speaking very generally, and that slightly differs the more advanced you get. Sometimes you do need a higher stimulus to adapt, because I like to think of fitness or health or wellness in general, like a funnel. In the beginning, you can sneeze and you'll get stronger just doing anything.
Participant #1:
What's the word I'm looking for? Adaption will occur and then over time, you have to get more and more specific. Intensity will go up, volume will go up. Maybe exercise selection will differ, but not too much, because honestly, doing the basics is what's going to get you doing. It's not like professional bodybuilders and power lifters aren't doing one handed clean snatches with negative gravity and all that kind of stuff. That kind of stuff. Are people on the Internet just trying to make money from you, that are trying to trick you? Because they're like, oh, look at my circus trick. They're just selling something. Bring me back if I've rented. I haven't had that. So I guess it's a good segue, too. You're like making your own segue, which I just love. That said, who are the type of people who should be training for hypertrophy and who should be training more for strength? How can our listeners know what one they should be focusing on, if they even should be focusing on one specifically? Right? Actually, I love this question when I saw in the notes before, because I wrote two final papers for my strength and conditioning class that just ended last month, and one of the papers was on my professor, Dr. Samuel Buckner is awesome because in all of his papers he creates real world prompts. Tell me the difference of size and strength. It was you are the head strength and conditioning coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team. What does your plan look like and justify where size and strength and the partition of those two things exists? So, very real world application. So I'll just reiterate, what is muscle hypertrophy? Muscle gets bigger. That's all that happens. What is muscle strength? I can move more weight. Now we come to athletics and we have this classic idea that bigger and better and stronger is better. But what about sitting on your back, lifting a stick across your chest is going to help you sprint across a field carrying an egg shaped item and run and pivot and move in such a dynamic 3D plane? It's different. So, yeah, I played a little bit of football in high school and I had an amazing coach, but it was a little more old school it's like you have to bench press £200 to be on varsity. Where does that really come from? Yes, overall strength is important, but I think it's way more prioritized than it should be in athletics. Now to kind of segue from that a strength sport like strongman or powerlifting, where the literal object of the sport is to be as strong as possible. That is its own camp. I'm speaking for I don't want to say traditional sports, but when we say football, basketball, baseball, softball, wrestling, any of the more classic gymnastics, even my professor, Dr. Bucket, was a gymnast and he talked about the difference. Where does strength training and hypertrophy, where does that sit in an athlete's program? Maybe we create some baseline strength so that musculature is starting to get strong, but then we have the idea of three dimensional movement. Something like another paper I wrote was on gymnastics. Again, what does your bench press or your squat, your deadlift, have to do with you doing an iron horse or sprinting down a trampoline and flipping around or being on the double bars? We can use maybe strength to create baseline, create other exercises that are 3D. Maybe we do like, I have a client who's on the UCSB golf team, and we do weight lifting, but in a very power focused way, dynamically. So we do a lot of landmine stuff. So he's changing. He'll do like a row and then twist and into a press, and that's his golf swing right there. So we're choosing things. It's kind of the law of specificity. Basically,
Participant #1:
you're not going to take a random power lifter, put them in a basketball game. You're like, oh, this is an amazing athlete. He's going to be amazing at basketball too. There's an incredible priority for specificity. Basically, everyone listening, kind of rewiring how you're thinking about athletics. Being as specific as possible is essential. It's not even me suggesting it's very essential to your success in what you're doing. So where does hypertrophy meet that does being big help you in your sport? Let's take wrestling, for example. I was a wrestler all my life. Every ounce on your body matters because weight classes matter. And so just getting big for the sake of getting big does not really increase your performance. And this can segue later when we talk about the difference in size and strength. But do I want to increase my flexibility, increase my strength, increase my endurance for my performance of my sport? Or do I want to look like Mr. Olympia? What would that serve me? What are your priorities? So for an athlete, for the most part, I don't think hyperge really is important. I made a case, just to play devil's advocate to my own argument, I made a case, like, maybe for lineman in a football team, it could help because the bigger and heavier they are, the more they're not running, moving as much. There could be an. Argument there. But then again, maybe we still focus on strength. So their performance is still high. Even though they're maybe not as physically large, they still have the strength to overpower their opponent. Just like in wrestling. Same thing. And then on the flip side, where does hypertrophy matter more than anything? That would be the sport of bodybuilding, which we actually work with a lot of bodybuilders. There's actually some professional bodybuilders in my class. I have a few IFBB pros that are in my class, which are really fun. And then the gym I go to, I train at FAM in Tampa is run by Anastasia Writer, who's not a professional, but she's very high. Competing bodybuilder. And then her husband, Derek Oslon, who's an IFPB pro, he placed 8th in the Olympia and the 212 Division last year. Awesome people. If you're ever in Tampa, please go train there. They're super emotionally intelligent and just awesome to be around. But yeah, I digress. So just thinking how specific? What do you want? You have to make a decision. You don't have to choose let me back up. You don't have to choose one or the other outright. If you just want to be a lifestyle person. You know, I want to be healthy, I want to be strong, I want to be big. Like, I have a lot of clients on a power building program. They increase their main list, but they also get bigger. But if you want to go a little bit more in the competitive route or start to because like I said, training and nutrition to some extent is a funnel, we have to get more specific the more we want to go towards our goal. So kind of just understanding what your goal is and prioritizing that. But then there's also the argument of like, you know, I just want to be healthy. Metabolically, I want to look good, I want to be strong. You can't have a program that has both, but it's just if you want to take either one in a certain direction, you then start to get more specific. Totally. We actually have another trainer on a few episodes ago, Steve Wishura, and he said very similar stuff. It was like the topic of the episode was like, should we train for vanity or train for health? And we kind of sums it up as like, training for health is likely. It's going to keep you going till you're 60, 70, 80 years old. But if you have daily goals, oftentimes it starts that way for a lot of people. And even if you do have those goals over a period of time, that's totally fine. But I think training for health is going to be, again speaking very generally here a really great thing, as it does have all the benefits of listed off in the beginning. So anyway, it sounds like you and Steve are kind of saying some of the things, which is just really great. Yeah, absolutely. I had a thought. Yes. I was thinking the same thing as you can. I was like, oh, my gosh, this sounds exactly like exactly like what Steve was talking about. And you also already answered our next question already, so I was going to segue into that. But for people who are indecisive and they're like, I don't want to compete, or I don't want to get really big, I just want to work out. But also, do I need to make different goals? Do I need to choose one or the other? Can they do both? Yeah, that's a beautiful question, because then I say, guess what? What's the best kind of exercise? The exercise that you enjoy. Yeah. Yeah. So for my lifestyle clients that they're like, yeah, I have no desire to compete or in a powerlifting meet or in a bodybuilding show or anything like that. I just want to feel good, look good. Yeah, totally. You can have a program, like, generally, like a basic set up is having, like, a top set of strength, having some background work of hypertrophy. Will you adapt? Will you get stronger? Will you get bigger? Yeah, absolutely. And even like we said, kind of with the conversation of predominance, it's not like power lifters are some tiny people. They still have hypertrophy adaptations. And this is kind of where the world I come from. A little bit more leaning to performance enhancement and competing and things. Is that's just further down the line? A lot of people, your average Joe or Jane, just kind of going about their life. They don't have to overcomplicate things. They have to start small. What's a thing that you can adhere to? What's a program that works for you? You're going to get endurance, strength and hypertrophy, to some degree from most anything that you do as long as you're not playing. I'm going to change my workouts every single week for entertainment, because that's a huge thing. I even had a client who was a personal training colleague of mine who I coached for a little while, and I was surprised because they kept wanting I wanted their input, like I wanted everyone's input. I don't like to make it a thing where I'm in control. The analogy that I use for all my clients is, you're the captain of your pirate ship. I'm just a parrot on your shoulder. You can ignore me like you're turning the wheels. And they said they were like, I love this. It was a strength program, which is very specific, arguably more than hypertrophy is very specific to fatigue management. So gauging strength, how much strength can we provide with the least amount of volume, basically? How can we recover from it? And they wanted to do, like, super sets in their top sets and all these things. I just get bored. I just get bored. And that's where I invite everyone to have the conversation. Being like, your training. I mean, hopefully you love your training, but if you're starting to get bored from your training, one, have a conversation with yourself, what your goals are. And I like to think of it like be passionate about the pursuit, about the end goal, about the whole idea, and don't get so wrapped up in just having to do some random new thing. And I want to speak very carefully there because enjoying what you're doing and psychological fulfillment is super important. I don't want to come off as some robot being like, you just got to work hard and show up and do the shit that no one likes to do and eat asparagus every day. I'm not saying that, but it's a balance. There is some amount of discipline, there is some amount of accountability and unfortunately, amount of repetitiveness to incite adaption or adaptation because that's what it is. Your body wants things to be easy and that's why we adapt. But if you run 10 miles on Monday, do a spin class on Tuesday, do a crazy weightlifting thing on Wednesday, binge eat for three days, and then expect and then literally change everything you're doing the next week, and then change everything you're doing the next week, and then change everything that you're doing the next week. And then you ask yourself, man, why don't I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Serena Williams? Well, that's because you didn't do a system. You just hurt your body. Basically. You just basically took a two by four and smacked your body over the several times and was like, this hurts, we're doing this now, we got to do something about it. That applies so much to like, even what we do. Emily and I specifically talk about intuitive eating a lot, as our listeners know, but oftentimes intuitive eating is viewed as just eat when you're hungry and stop on your full diet. And there's, of course, truth to that. But there needs to be a strategy. There's principles in place. There's like accountability is often needed, which is what we do as dietitians, that accountability piece. So it's not just like eating whatever you want whenever you want it and then just like stopping when you're full. There is so much needs to go into it and oftentimes it's like a full out strategy. And it sounds like that's just so similar to training as well. And I think any kind of health goal, there's going to be some variation of that. It can't just be a simple black and white piece of instruction that you have to follow. It's depending on the person and even day to day, it's going to be different. So anyway, I totally resonate with what you said about that in terms of the strategy and how that applies to the world nutrition as well. Right. And that's why I probably and I've seen some of the posts you guys make and where I'm sure you guys get frustrated with some people coming in the comments and being like, there's no structure. What is happening? They're missing the point. Like, what you guys are advocating for is something that it's not like you guys are saying, just go ahead and eat whatever you want. Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. That's not what you guys are saying. You guys are revealing to people that it doesn't have to be so crazy and restrictive and just, like, black and white and that you can with the education that you both had, because it's not like you two or some two random people. You took the time to get education exactly like you took the time to make those steps, to be able to have the research and the education, to find those paths where you can find for weight loss if a person that is their goal. Both of you, we all understand you need a calorie deficit to lose weight. It's not like you're saying not to do that, but, like, you guys are saying, how can we get there? That feels the less restrictive you are opening a can of worms. I don't have anything to do we can talk about this if we ask. And that's why I think people get just specifically speaking, too, because when I follow you guys and I read these comments, and I'm just like, no, just take a second to just listen to what they're saying is not like they're saying, which, I actually have a date with my sister today, and we're driving a Krispy Kreme here I am, a fitness professional. It's like, oh, no, you can do that. It exists and it's okay now. Are we doing that every day? No. Are there some days where I want to? Sure. But it's not like I have to have
Participant #1:
yeah. I'm getting all worked up because I feel the fire that you guys I resonate when I see you guys post, and I'm just like, it's the impatience of most human beings to not take the time to actually maybe finish the whole video or read the whole article or listen to the whole podcast, and they're like, oh, you said cake. They said cake. Exactly. You should educate yourself. Like, oh, okay. Sorry I didn't. Sorry. I did. I don't know. They want you to book education. Okay. Yeah. Emily always says and I love this critical thought. Just have some critical thought. Yeah, or maybe instead of what they do, like, say these rude things, which blows my mind, because then people just go to, like, things that have nothing to do with nutrition or fitness, and they say really rude things, but instead of saying something mean, aren't you ask a question or, like, clarify. I don't know, just like, instead of creating a battle, create an environment, which you guys do, but they decided to decline the invitation of a conversation.
Participant #1:
Yeah. I feel like that's how it is. It's like, I want to fight. I want to fight because you hurt my feelings. And my feelings are things that I don't understand. And because the chiropractor told me to eat this way and not to discredit any chiropractors. I have a lot of friends who are chiropractors. Amazing profession, but there's lanes that exist. Life is a highway and I want to ride it in my lane with my expertise. I'm not here saying that I'm a dietician telling you guys to eat X Y. And every time I have a client who's like, I have a dietitian now, I'm like, yes,
Participant #1:
I share the fashion. Yeah, they just like, come in, guns ablazing. It's insane. I'm just trying to talk about how you don't have to worry if you eat a donut and you come in here telling me that I'm causing diabetes in the world. Please stop. That's not how it works. Terrible, man. Yeah, it's a scary world out there. We're doomed. That's okay. That's another podcast. That's part two. That's about for today. Okay, well, you have any final thoughts on, like, our trainers listening, our listeners listening, who maybe are just like, OK, like, I get all this. I can purchase free strings. I get the differences. If they're still like, I don't really know what I should do. Do you have any final last minute thoughts about any of that? So I guess to speak about some physiology really quick, because often people are like, and I deal with this a lot with my power lifters, they're like, oh, I got to get really big so I can also get really strong. And in the papers that I've written and in the research, like we say, doctor Samuel Buckner, dr. Seoenfeld writes a lot of research on the difference between size and strength. And it's been revealed that increasing your muscle size does not guarantee your increase in muscle strength. And it's specifically, and I use that word specific on purpose because it's specific, it's the exposure to heavier loads, however heavier weight that will increase that strength. Like, Dr. Schoenfeld did a study in 2015 and 2016 and both basically had each group, one trained with light to moderate loads, close to failure to be in an anabolic adaptation zone, basically, and the other one with heavy loads. Both had comparable, nonstatistically significantly different levels of hypertrophy. Both got big, but it was only the heavy load group that had significant strength increases.
Participant #1:
I've disproven this on my own. The way I used to teach my trainers, I would do workshops with the new hires is I used to think it was that increasing muscle size was like, increasing your potential for strength. It was now basically creating the opening the door for new strength to happen. But really, that doesn't seem mechanistically to be the case from the research that we have. I want to speak very plainly and say I could be totally wrong and I'm spouting BS right now, but with the research that we have, and there's a lot of it. It doesn't seem that there is a mechanistic synergy of the two and A does not equal B and B are not equal C. So A equal C kind of thing.
Participant #1:
It allows for power lifters bodybuilders, any person there's four to choose their training a little more specifically, what do their goals want to be? And if you're getting super frustrated listening right now, but I'm like, I don't want to have these goals. I just want to train. I just want to have some fun. I want to do what I want to do. Perfect. Do it. It's going to make you metabolically healthy. It's going to increase your oh, here's something. Wait, from the very first question. Sensitivity to insulin resistance training helps with that. And if you don't know what insulin does, basically, very briefly, everyone insulin is like, oh my God. You say insulin and everyone freaks out, just brings carbs to your working muscle. That's it. Now we can go down the rabbit hole with diabetes and glucose, but basically at its core, that's what it does. It just increases the sensitivity. So people that are pre diabetic or diabetic doing something like that might help because it makes your body more efficient more than having just, you know, I can lift a certain amount or I'm just my arms or X inches, whatever. So yeah, basically take away sign of strength. There is a direction, there is a path of each and specificity for both. But don't feel like you have to focus on one or the other if you just want to be healthy, if you want to have hybrid goals, that does exist now that does take a turn when you get into competing because you just want to maximize your energy output for a recovery. Yes, maybe I can get away with being super big and being super strong for this powerlifting competition, but is that impeding on my recovery and will increase fatigue, which is something I want to also be very careful about because there's different arguments for different what is fatigue? Dr. Buckle, my professor, always talks about, he's like, what is it when people say they're fatigued? What is that? You just have your fatigue meter has reached 100. What does that mean? So people have a conversation about that. And for me, in my papers, I've created like a blanket definition of what that is that's kind of depleted. glucogen. That's not a word that would be exceptional. Maybe it is and we don't know about it. Oh my gosh. Glycogen, intramuscular triglycerides, psychological fatigue. I'm huge on psychology, if you guys haven't realized. I love talking about how things work, not just why they work, but again, I digress. So if you're hearing all of this and you're overwhelmed, just think about it at its basics. Choose something that you want to do. If you want to get more serious, talk to a professional. How can they help you be a little bit more specific? If you just want to be healthy, you want to move around, you want to lift a little bit of weight, but you want to get a little bit of shape on you, it can dabble in both. It's not a big deal. Yeah, exactly. That's what we always say. Because we don't work much with those who do have specific goals to like, bench press X amount of pounds or build as much as possible. It's mostly just yeah, I just want to, like, generally be healthy, improve diabetes, whatever. So I think it's a good way to sum it up, like those of you listening who are just wondering or feeling overwhelmed, maybe, by all the different rules and programs and all of that. You don't have to do all that unless you have a need or want to do that. But most of us can just lift weights and be healthy. That's great. Exactly. Amazing life. Thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom and knowledge. I know a lot of people are going to enjoy this episode. I love this episode. I love talking about all things fitness because I love when Hannah brings on all her trainer friends, literally, just like a bank of Hannah. But we always, like, ending our episode on a not so serious note. Take a step away from the science. Sometimes we bring science into it, but we get to kind of construe it, how we want to interpret it type of science. Our bonus question for today, and we always let our guests start. So today the question is, what is the best breakfast cereal? Oh, gosh. This is probably like the hardest scientific question I've pondered in my grad program. Actually, I had a lot of time to think about this, and I have three answers. Because
Participant #1:
children's breakfast cereal, which you know what, I'm going to rephrase that just fun. Breakfast cereal. Because I'm not a child. I'd like to eat this. I do love cement. Toast crunch. Cementos Crunch is really, really, really good. If we want to get a little fancier, though, I love Trader Joe's. Just the clusters. Maple clusters. Amazing. I've had that since I was a little kid because I grew up with a trailer just around the corner from me. So we always had that. I had that a couple of days ago. Chop up a banana in there. So good. And then also special case strawberry was something that I started to eat a lot in undergrad my friend Zack, who graduated from UCSB. I would visit him. He always had that in his house. So I just started eating it. So, yeah, really kind of have a little bit of spectrum. We have, like, a mapley, we have a sugary, and then we have, like, a fruity. Oh, my gosh. You just pull the Hannah. I do that every episode. I could never pick a firm answer, and so I always, like, dabbled in a stubborn case. I always think of, like, not to make fun of your choice. Things are good choice. I always think of 1990s, like, diet culture. My first thought with Special K, it's really good, but I think of the commercials and, like, lose weight. Yeah, I'm not eating this to lose weight. It does taste pretty good. Yeah. Okay, Emily, I want you to go first so I could take out my answer. My answer is going to be Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Because I grew up I actually didn't grow up. My parents, I don't think they listened to the podcast, so I can talk about that. But they were kind of like if it says sugar as one of the first two ingredients, I wasn't allowed to get it. Oh, no. So I would like to go to my friend's house and get really excited about their cereals. And Cinnamon Dove Crunches one of the best ones because my argument is the milk is not gross after it's, then, like, a nice cinnamony, almost like Porchata type deal going on. So that way, not only is the cereal component good, but also the milk component is good as well. Not gross or anything like soggy. I just got an idea now. I mean, this is if you're 21 plus, but after you have a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, you just add a little bit of rum and you gotta from China. Okay, I have eight different thoughts and directions. You guys are talking ADHD brain cannot handle this. Okay, I first want to say that it's going to sound like I'm lying, like I was just basing it off your guys'dancer, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch was my original answer. It's so good. Top tier cereal. It's so good. It's so good. My second thought was I watch good. Mythical morning. Do you guys know what that is? The YouTube channel? They just like to find food challenges and stuff. But a week or two ago did a challenge where they tested which cereal lasts the longest of milk without getting soggy toasting. Cinnamon Toast Crunch was, like, one of the first to go. It was like, it got soggy, so fast. Really? You have to get it pretty quickly. Do you not experience that? I feel like it gets soggy, so fast. I guess not. Maybe I just don't think about it. I feel like you, being the slow eater that you are, would, like, be the epitome of soggy cereal. Maybe I don't eat it. I also don't put a lot of milk in my cereal, so that probably affects it a lot. That's true. I guess you don't do a lot of milk in general with anything because your body doesn't like that. I had a third thought, but it's gone. So anyway, I have a very weird contribution to the conversation when I was a little kid up through maybe I don't really do this late anymore. I would purposely let my cereal get soggy. And then I actually had anxiety about saying that on this podcast even before we started, because I was like, they're going to be like, who the hell is this guy? Oh, we're judging you for sure. I know. It was weird. Maybe it'll resonate with someone. It definitely will. I'll lose all my clients, but I'll get one more. I'll get one back. So just something weird just trying to be a person and be vulnerable on this podcast. That's what we appreciate. We like that. We appreciate your honesty in showing your true self. Do you still do that? Yeah. No. Yes, you do. Or at least I haven't recently. What's nice about the trader? What's nice about the clusters is the milk gets soup. Like with the cementos crunch. The clusters are clusters, so they don't really get soggy very much. But he was just thinking, but the milk gets super mapley and delicious, so yeah, I see what you're talking about. The milk. Yeah, I'm thinking of those TikToks. Have you guys seen those where I don't know who the creator is, but they make cereal into ice cream flavors. And the first step is they like, let the cereal get soggy in the milk. I can't watch them because it grosses. Me have to think about the cereal getting soggy, the milk. So you saying that I'm, like, interesting. Like, the first thing they do is let it get soggy, and they strain it and put in the ice cream machine and all that. But the first step is it's like, let it get soggy and milk, but it turns, like the milky flavor. And I can't even watch past that point because it crosses me out so much. I feel like there has to be a way to create the same flavor in the milk without doing that. Well, they, like, eventually strain it and all that, but, like, the first step is they like, make the milk taste like the cereal by letting it soak. I guess that makes sense. It's almost like all in nut beverages, the same concept as with cereal, which I guess is a good bonus question. What is the best milk to put in cereal? Is it just like, cow's milk, or you guys have another strong opinion? Oh, wow. Okay. Emily, what is that? Wow, we're going to go into now for another one? No, let's do it right now. I think that this is going to get me, like, hot. These people are going to unfollow me for this. I think anything that is not skim milk is disgusting. Milk that is not skim milk. I grew up on skim milk. All these childhood things are just programs, wash in my screen. Who knows if any of it's actually true. It's just what I grew up on. But I think it's like 2% whole milk grosses me out so much. I don't know what it is. It's probably thicker. Yeah, I guess the comparison, especially if that's just what you're used to, having that much more fat to your palate is like, this is wrong. Like, I'm drinking half and half. I imagine that's probably what more would it kind of taste? I mean, it's not far off. Yeah. That's so interesting. I actually was raised on Skim, too, so for a long while there, I could not do anything but Scam. Now. I can do 2%. It's fine. But I always buy scam that's like my milk that I go to the store and purchase
Participant #1:
usually buy at least in my household. We always bought Skim and one or percent two, I feel like, to me, I don't know if I can taste. We could do a milk tape. That's what episode two will be. We'll do a milk. Yeah. Riveting content. Yeah. Whole milk definitely tastes different. Way different. One or 2%? I don't know if I can taste that much of a difference. Me, myself, I always buy 1% just because I eat. Usually, like, a lot of my meals are very like my lunch and my dinners. I say dinners because there's multiple are pretty low in fats. So I get my fats from other times of the day. It just helps my digestion while I train and stuff. But that opened my eyes to Skim milk. I have a newfound respect. And it's cool how you mentioned that you're bringing back, like, the childhood programming and we're getting this kind of therapy question going on. This is awesome. I love stuff like this. It's so true with my patients that I see it's never about the actual food itself. It's like the why behind the food choice every time. That's why we have therapists on staff where I work. Yeah. I was trying to think of how to make it fun if we did a blind milk test. Like those TikToks the soda. Yeah. And they haven't labeled, but you don't know emily, when you come visit. We're so doing that. I'm going to be in so much. You'll be bring your lactate.
Participant #1:
We'll get the fair life. The lactose free because they have like all the different levels. Okay. So you'll be safe. Okay. Do they taste similar to I think so. They have more proteins, so I buy them. I think they taste the exact same. Well, to do a taste of those, too, we'll get our Answer Life. $80 on milk at the grocery store. Okay, great. Turn into a Fair Life commercial. I mean, they need to be paying me. I talk with them constantly. Okay, cool. So, Elias, we like to at the end of end of our episode, we like to give you the floor to promote whatever you want, like social media, links, websites, programs, personal links, whatever it is you want to share with our listeners. This is your time to shine. Absolutely. If they want to hear kind of more from you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Guys, this is actually an exciting time. I'm currently working with one of my old dear friends, Liam, back in San Francisco. He does marketing and business consulting. We're working together and I have a lot of projects include like a website and all these other things in the works right now, so they're not live. I do have my fitness instagram, which I'm now finally able to my program right now is two years. Year one is very like physiology intensive and hands on. Year two is a lot more independent projects, so I'm actually able to incorporate my business into my credits. So you can find me at Coachelliascpt, soon to be MSCs. Yes, very excited for that. But you can find me there and we can just have a conversation. I do free consultations and a lot of people, they get really worked up about starting a program and I like to just have conversations, even if I almost know or don't think that they're going to sign up. I still like to do free consultations with people just to see if I can provide a little bit of perspective and help them on their way. And who knows, maybe I need to eat. Obviously that's why I have a business. But I like to just help people in general and that makes me feel very fulfilled. I'm very emotional guy and so it just makes me happy in general. So, yeah, if you ever want to have a conversation, you can find me on there. I have a Google forms that you can fill out in my bio. I'm now actually currently accepting new clients because my time contribution
Participant #1:
school timing is not as high and so I now have the time and energy to take on more clients. So that will be going on for the next couple of months at least, and then going forward just being able to maintain those clients. So if you're listening and this is around the time that we're posting, definitely send me a message. Okay, we'll link all that below so you guys can find it. Do you know when you plan to have your website up and running and everything? Yes. I'm thinking right now we're working to have most of these items live by August. So right now it's June 13, so we're looking around, honestly around my 25th birthday. Kind of quarter life crisis pivot right there, but it's good. So, yeah, probably by around the end of August, if not sooner though. I know first we're going live and then adding a bunch of things to it, but yeah, I don't want to overstep and put my foot in my mouth, but this is about the good estimates right there. Well, that is amazing and also hilarious because you're like our third guest in the past like three weeks that has launched something and your episode comes out exactly like when it launches. So that is just awesome. So whether it's like right after before or whatever, no pressure do at a certain time, but hopefully you guys can check it out shortly after this episode comes out. Yeah, awesome. Thank you guys. Thank you so much for coming on to this, like a brand new topic for us and our listeners, so it would be such a good one to share. I'm so happy. We appreciate it so much. Thank you again and those of you listening, thank you guys for tuning in and we will see you next week. All right, bye, guys. Bye bye.
