Show #2689  -  part 1
DIALOGUE edit
The Blueprint Power Hour
with Co-host, Rob Regish

Carl Lanore: [00:03:04]
Before we get to our first question, how has your training been going?

Coach Rob Regish:
It's going well. Thank you for asking. My back is now 100% healed. It feels so good. I'm going to roll tonight, or at least attempt to at jujitsu. It’s so nice to be pain-free, other than this right elbow which I consider minor. A healthy body is a privilege. You don't know it until you lose it.

Carl Lanore:
A lot of people say their body has betrayed them, but they fail to recognize that they've been betraying their body for decades. 

Carl Lanore:
A listener says ‘after about a year of training, my gains have really dried up. I take creatine, eat enough and train hard three days a week. If I add aminos like glutamine, taurine, beta alanine, etc., how much will that help? I'm 25 years old. I'm also looking to get on board with a good test booster, if you could suggest one.’

Coach Rob Regish:
There's going to be some tough love here. I want the listener and everyone else to understand I'm doing it with a purpose. There is a pattern here that I want everyone to take note of because it's an easy trap to fall into, especially in your younger years. The vicious cycle usually starts out like this: your newbie gains are gone and you've hit a huge plateau, so consequently, you have a problem to solve, right? He made statements about how he's training hard enough and he's eating enough. How much is really enough? You never really know until you get details.

Carl Lanore:
In my humble opinion, he's not asking about the right amino acids. He should be asking about essential amino acids.

Coach Rob Regish:
Then he informs us that he's 25 years old, which is all well and good, but then he's right back to you looking for a good test booster. The pattern that I've just described is really no accident. Supplement companies are producing products that give people the impression that they can rectify some of the wrongs and get them gaining again. Consequently, many people get caught up majoring in the minors. I made that mistake too when I was younger. You start wondering what type of creatine is best or how many grams. That’s nothing compared to the fundamentals. I just want to be clear so that people understand. There is no amount of amino acids, test boosters, or any natural supplement I can think of that is strong enough to cause the kind of size and strength increases that we're all looking for. Let’s be honest. The benchmark, our good old anabolic steroids, there’s nothing even close to those for actual muscle growth. Are there certain natural supplements that'll help? Yeah, but I'm going to define help as things that amplify the benefits that proper training, diet, and rest all give you. Do those exist? Yes, absolutely, but they never replace the fundamentals. If I were in this situation and I was in my earlier days, I would have sat down and I would put pen to paper and I would have detailed every last thing that was going into my training, what I was eating and how many hours of sleep I got every night and how good were those hours. Then what I would do is get a second opinion. I don't care if this is just from your training partner; a second and third set of eyes sometimes can make all the difference. As a matter of fact, the more I thought about it there is a great opportunity here, in my opinion, for technology to help people. As an analogy, in the world of investing today there are things called robo-advisors. What this is is artificial intelligence algorithms that look at your portfolio of investments and make recommendations. Why couldn't that same thing be done as applied to your training and ultimately supplement recommendations? I'm betting something like that could spot a lot of things that could be improved where guys are just missing the forest for the trees. Then perhaps it could make certain supplement recommendations that will assist in achieving your short and long term goals. Speaking of those supplement recommendations, he almost certainly doesn't need a test booster assuming that they even work or work to the degree that we want them to. It's a waste of money at 25. Unless there's some underlying pathology that's causing low testosterone, and even then you'd want to get a test first.

Carl Lanore:
That's what he should do if he does suspect that his testosterone levels are low. For $65-$85, you can find out what your total and free testosterone levels are. 

Coach Rob Regish:
Here are the economics around that decision: you pay $65-$100 once to figure out if you have low testosterone or you don't and you make that assumption. Then you’re going to spend hundreds, maybe thousands on test boosters over the next year or five, trying to fix a roadblock which doesn't exist.

Carl Lanore:
Let's be clear, no test booster is going to raise your testosterone levels to super physiological levels. You're never going to have 250, 300, 500 milligrams of testosterone.  You're chasing a cloud. 

Coach Rob Regish: [00:10:26]
To your point earlier, he asks about create or glutamine, taurine, beta alanine, and all these other aminos. If you really want to use aminos, use the essential aminos. I've been saying it for forever. Fortunately it looks like a lot of companies are now listening. I'm seeing more and more essential amino acid products hit the market. But here's the bottom line: if you can't answer the question, ‘how are these supplements working to amplify the effects of my training, diet, and rest?’ then you still have a lot of work to do. You're going to save money. You're going to know for certain, and you're going to get better gains. What's not to like about that situation? So those would be my recommendations. Spend your money a little wiser and proceed from there. 

Carl Lanore:
There's nothing that increasing calories won't do for you. But It's hard to eat more every day for weeks and months on end. 

Coach Rob Regish:
It's hard. If you want to up all of your anabolic hormones, start eating more. Very clear studies reproduced many times show that over-feeding is maybe the single most powerful anabolic.

Carl Lanore: [00:11:58]
Another listener says, ‘if I leave squatting out of my workouts, how much muscle growth am I giving up? My knees really hurt when I squat and the pain just gets worse when I chase higher and higher numbers.’

Coach Rob Regish:
The squat: the king of all exercises. On the surface, removing it from your routine is going to hurt you, at least in terms of stimulating muscle growth. But there's an underlying assumption here: he is very likely talking about barbell squats, which of course are a fantastic movement. They usually figure heavily into any serious trainees program. But there are lots of different squats and squatting motions. It's here where you could use a book like Keys to the Inner Universe. There are more exercises in that book than you can remember. There's no way you can remember all of them. Off the top of my head, there’s dumbbell squats, Bulgarian split squats, sissy squats, one and two legged body weight squats, goblet squats, box squats, belt squats; I could go on forever. The Russians, and to a lesser extent, the Bulgarians, advocated heavy weighted step-ups, which I would argue is in the squat family too. Now, add multiple stances to those squats; shoulder width slightly narrower, the wide box squat stance that you see popularized by West side. You can also try squatting with a band in between your legs, squatting with bands and or chains. It goes on forever. So to say that you can't squat without great pain, that's quite a statement. It's almost certain that the person that is making this statement hasn't tried all of those, because until you do, you can't really rule out squats. Let's say you do, though. Then you're still having issues for whatever reason. I've spoken before about the merits of trap bar deadlifts. Anyone that's done them with regularity can tell you that your legs really get hammered. In particular your quads, but also, because of Lombard's paradox, the hams will always come into play. Trap bar deads alone would recover most, if not all, of the growth stimulation of barbell squats. They arguably involve more muscle groups and are the original “dead stop” training movement. Because it's a concentric only lift. You’re not lowering that barbell right before you come back up, at least on the originating rep. Trap bar deadlifts are very important. I often find people with knee issues can do them, where they can't do a full range squat, simply because although the knee does flex, it's to a much lesser degree. So here's the bottom line: you needn’t give up squatting until you've exhausted all those different types that I cited. It is a lot more likely that you can still squat by using one or several of those variations. Alternatively, the trap bar deadlift still delivers tons of muscle growth. My old saying is ‘there's always a way’, and that is as true here as it is anywhere else in training. Look those squat variations up, and come up with what you can do, not what you can't. 

Carl Lanore: 
If you don't want to squat, listen to the last two shows I did with Doug Brignoli. Doug says you don't have to squat to build massive quads, and he's proven it. He's done it with a lot of athletes including himself. In fact, he says the squat is the most inefficient way to build upper legs. Go back and listen to the show I just did with him: the Ultimate Home Gym and the one before that about his new book The Physics of Resistance Training. Doug says you can build massive legs without squatting. There's a lot of people who don't like to squat.

Carl Lanore: [00:17:03]
Another listener says ‘I grabbed the twin pack of synthagen during the last sale. I usually train two days a week and find that's just about perfect for me. Max muscle growth is my goal. How would I use it for maximum muscle growth?’ 

Coach Rob Regish:
I really wish he included his age, but in lieu of that I'll do the best I can to answer. More recent hypertrophy models have shown the importance of training and muscle frequent. At least twice, if not three times a week. I’ve even seen more in some of the more recent studies. There is an assumption in those models though that needs to be mentioned, which is the ability for those muscle groups to recover from said frequent workouts. In all honesty, training a muscle group three days a week is rarely an issue for athletes in their twenties, maybe into their mid right thirties. And that of course assumes their training split makes sense. Regardless, for people beyond 35, you are likely to benefit from adding synthagen in a manner as follows: instead of two days a week, you're going to train every other day for at least a month. Some people can do two. That assumes regular, progressive jumps in weight and/or reps every workout. Normally going from two to four days a week results in severe over-training for many people. If they'd been training twice a week and only twice a week for a long time and everything isn't a hundred percent and frequently isn’t, then doubling your training frequency catches up with  you; most people quit. If you add synthagen, that equation changes radically. You will be able to train every other day productively for long stretches, and I’ll define long stretches as between four and eight weeks, sometimes more, but let's call six weeks the average.  You will feel fresh as a daisy doing it. That simple move - training hard every other day and recovering from it - will almost double the number of opportunities you have to stimulate muscle growth in a one month period. You're going to be going from eight opportunities to stimulate growth a month to 15 or 16. That's a big difference. It is a very big deal for naturals in particular. As you know, they need as many productive growth stimulating workouts as they can get in every week, month or year, depending upon how you look at it. Some people have a very long-term horizon, some people are only willing to gamble, so to speak, for four weeks. Whichever one it is, you're going to be able to train more frequently and more productively. I would tell you for those four to eight weeks, take 10 tabs prior to training your first workout or two, and five tabs after. Such that you can see for yourself what it does at full dose thereafter. It only makes physical and financial sense to me to dial it back to let's say 10 caps immediately prior to training, or even less to find out your lowest effective dose. Some people do well with 10 right after training. Some do well with 10 before. To me, it doesn't seem to make much difference. I've heard from some people that had been dosing it post-workout and when they switched to pre-workout, they claimed it made a much bigger difference. Personally I dose it pre-workout because that's where some of the prior studies on essential aminos discovered that when you took, as an example, six grams before training versus after, you increase muscle protein synthesis, 600% versus 400%. 200% difference. Is that because the aminos are already in circulation once you start stretching and squeezing that muscle and causing damage? That makes sense to me, although to be fair, I haven't seen evidence either way. But that's what you want to do: dial it back to find your lowest effective dose. For the month or two that you're on it, I think you'll agree that it's a total game changer. If my goal was muscle growth, that's exactly what I would be doing. And in fact, that's exactly what I do do, which is where I got the example. Most of the time I train very productively two days a week; plenty of recovery time for this 51 year old body. But when I want to up my game, I double my frequency and I dose synthagen and hard.

Carl Lanore: [00:22:37]
We have a couple of questions from the live listening audience. One listener says ‘on leg day, do you recommend doing the compound lifts first followed by isolation exercises, such as leg extensions and leg curls or the other way around in order to pre exhaust the muscle?’.  Pre exhaust is a fallacy. Anthony Roberts wrote a very detailed article about 12 years ago about this notion; that if you train your triceps before training chest, pre exhausting the triceps forces the chest to work harder. It's a complete fallacy. In fact, your triceps get bigger without your chest getting bigger because of the added volume that it's doing. Where do you stand on pre exhaust? 

Coach Rob Regish:
I used it and it was advocated very strongly in the very first Heavy Duty book by Mike . My strength increased. I don't know if it was because of or in the face of pre exhausting. I can tell you two things that I think are very telling. In his book Heavy Duty 2, he moved away from that.  My own results of trial and error are I no longer use pre exhaust and I perform pretty much only compound movements in my workout. If I feel I have more gas after my compound movements are done, I'll do more compound movements in lieu of isolation work. I know that's not everybody's cup of tea. I think you said you had a guest on recently who made a case where you should do only isolation movements, at least later on in your years. 

Carl Lanore:
No, he says even young guys should train that way. Doug Brignoli, he’s done some amazing stuff. The guy is 61 years old and he looks so freaking good. And he has the “Brig 20”, which he doesn't usually talk about, but he listed it on the last show that we did. He puts up pictures regularly of guys in their late fifties, early sixties, and even seventies who just use the Brig 20. Holy crap. These guys were massive and thick and ripped. In fact, I'm trying to get them back on the show to talk about diet because you can't talk about training without diet. I'd love to know how Doug diets; what he eats. He looks at everything from the optimal way to hit the muscle, where 100% of the stress is on that muscle and not shared somewhere else. He will be the first one to tell you that without volume, nothing happens. He says, if you're going to train legs, squat, deadlift, leg press, be prepared to train for two hours. This idea that you can build muscle in 10 minutes, that’s not true. You need the volume to get muscle to respond.

Coach Rob Regish:
I would agree. There's a certain amount of mechanical work; a threshold that needs to be crossed. 

Carl Lanore:
Bottom line is, you’re not a fan of pre exhausting anymore.

Coach Rob Regish:
Nope. I haven't used it in 20 or 30 years.

Carl Lanore: [00:25:45]
So Bear says “are you familiar with Dr. Ken and the steep tip? Did you ever try his training method?”

Coach Rob Regish:
Dr. Ken, I am. But not the steep tip. No. I'll tell you an interesting story. I read his book, but I didn't try it. I can't recall if it was because I thought it was sufficiently similar to minster's method, high intensity training. Maybe it was a mistake, not trying it. I don't know. I just thought the methods overlapped a little bit too much. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Mike Mentzer and training Heavy Duty, and it was very productive. But it doesn't last forever. It lasts for as long as your ability does; your body's ability to adapt to it. 

Carl Lanore:
That's why volume is king. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you set out to do 25 sets of one movement for chest, as you start to get exhausted, you go heavier and you just do four or five reps, and then you rest and you do another set of four or five reps. You just keep doing that six, seven, eight, nine, 10 sets because that volume is where the translation to muscle growth is going to come from. Volume is King.  Dr. Brad Schoenfeld talks about it. Doug Brignole talks about it. Those of you who are looking for a quick way to get in and out of the gym to build muscle, it doesn't exist. I'm sorry to tell you. I'm not going to lie to you. If you want a super physique, you're going to have to put the time in. A listener says ‘I think he was trying to say the Steel Tip Newsletter’. I still don't know who he is or what it is. 

Coach Rob Regish:
That goes back several years. Maybe that was it, I can’t recall. 

Carl Lanore: [00:28:04]
Welcome back. We’re going to be talking with Chris Zack from Pure Nootropics about black seed extract. It's apparently a very popular supplement. We're going to get to the bottom of why it's so popular, what it provides to people, and give a super discount for anybody in the audience who wants to try it. Let's get onto the next question at hand. A listener says ‘what's the latest on Kratom? I really like the stuff and don't want to ever be without it’.

Coach Rob Regish:
It's a good question, and it's a timely question, given some of the latest goings on. Kratom is once again under attack, with the FDA and the DEA spreading more lies about it being addictive and dangerous. Let me be clear: Kratom is about as addictive as caffeine. 

Carl Lanore:
I would agree with that.

Coach Rob Regish:
As far as danger goes, danger is relative. The poor guard at the back of the Brink's truck didn't realize how dangerous a hundred thousand dollars was in rolled quarters. He was crushed to death. True story. As far as taking too much Kratom, it's possible. You’ll get something called the wobbles. Your muscles will be very shaky, almost like walking on stilts. The worst that can happen, the worst I've ever seen, the worst I've experienced is if you take too much, you'll just throw it all up as vomit. Which is a lot preferable to your breathing shutting down.  Big Pharma’s prescription opioids are killing people left and right. So the latest is the FDA has commissioned one of their puppet research organizations and published a study showing the alleged dangers and the addictive nature of it. That seems to have manifested itself on some new warning labels on Kratom, advising as to it's posing a risk of death with addictive potential. 

Carl Lanore:
To my knowledge, there’s one person who supposedly died from Kratom and it was questionable because they were mixing it with legit prescription opioids. So you really don't have anybody dying from Kratom. Every month over a hundred people die from acetaminophen. We have those statistics at hospitals. No one is really dying from Kratom. They took their target on beef, even though beef isn't what everybody's eating. We talked about that on the show. Beef consumption and red meat consumption is small in comparison to dairy, fruits, and vegetables. Those three categories outpace individually beef all day long. So why are they going after the beef? Who knows. Why are they going after Kratom? Who knows. There are other issues. It has nothing to do with your safety and your health.

Coach Rob Regish:
I think personally it has everything to do with protecting Big Pharma.

Carl Lanore:
They couldn't get around the legalization of marijuana on the statewide level. They wanted to, but since marijuana became legal in Washington and Colorado, opioid prescriptions plummeted. The opioid companies don't like that idea, but there's nothing they can do about it. So they're like, okay, well we can stop Kratom.

Coach Rob Regish:
One of the most telling things is when was the last time you saw a TV ad pharmaceutical company for an opioid based product? They don't need them. They sell themselves in the form of addictive nature. Be that as it may, the fight today is going on to preserve Kratom for us as a choice of a natural supplement on the state basis. So it's state by state. And why is this?  For the simple reason that years ago, when the FDA literally tried in the middle of the night to ban Kratom without any public comment whatsoever, they were stopped cold. So now they're trying to go back and do that through the states today. Most Kratom vendors won't ship to the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. 

Carl Lanore:
Do we have any statistics on opioid consumption in those states?

Coach Rob Regish:
That'd be real interesting. Let me give you one shining example of the FDA stupidity, as it perfectly illustrates how they have no intention of hearing both sides of the story. Some time ago, the American Kratom Association, which is Americankratom.org, asked to meet with the FDA to show them the scientific evidence of Kratom safety and efficacy, and how addictive it really was, which is to say, it's not. What did the FDA do? They completely ignored them. In fact, have continued to ignore the American Kratom Association’s repeated requests for 958 days and counting. We're over two and a half years. Not one single person in the FDA, which by the way, employs over 18,000 people, not one of them could be bothered to even return a phone call. Your tax dollars pays these people’s salaries. Are you mad yet? Because if you're not, you should be. Whether you use Kratom or not, this is how your government operates. No concern whatsoever for you. Plenty of concern with Big Pharma’s profits. There is an agenda and damn you or anyone else that gets in the way of it. I cannot emphasize this last point enough. You need to go to Americankratom.org today and decide to do something about this because whether they're successful or not with Kratom, it’s just going to continue. They're going to come for whatever it is that you like and use next. So that’s my way of saying, contribute whatever you can, even if it's just $1. Contribute to the cause, because if you or I don't, you can kiss your Kratom goodbye. Probably a lot of other things too. I'll say the American Kratom Association is the best supplement, grassroots, whatever you want to call it, organized effort to fight these people. If we had something like this for pro hormones, we may still have them. But we didn't and they're gone.

Carl Lanore: [00:36:31]
So we have two questions also we'll get to before the break. A listener asks, ‘what do you make of this product called androgen? I guess it has ginseng and some other stuff, and they're saying it acts on the androgen receptor, but also somehow it increases growth hormone’. You know anything about it?

Coach Rob Regish:
Yeah. It’s getting an increased amount of play on one board in particular. The short answer here is I would definitely wait on the stuff, as outside of this small number of people on this one board, I don't see anybody even trying it anywhere else. Maybe that's because it's so new. On the one hand, there are some scientific studies showing that the select subtypes of ginsenosides dock at the androgen receptor and upregulate certain processes that are related to muscle growth. I’m going to take mTOR as an example. I have lost count of the number of things and natural supplements that supposedly increase mTOR.  Besides, training itself increases mTOR probably better than all of those supplements reported to do so combined. People might say I’m biased, but I'm really not. I don't have a ginseng product. I don't have a dog in this fight, so to speak. In fact, I would be the happiest guy in the world if it worked. If we got a legal over the counter anabolic that really works, who wouldn't want that? But at this point in time, I'd have to say it falls into the ‘too good to be true' category. Let me give you one example. It supposedly delivers all of this anabolic goodness while supposedly increasing things such as luteinizing hormone, increasing your endogenous production of testosterone. Do we see that with anabolics? No. Do we see that with SARMs? No. Is it reasonable to think there's a plant or part of out there that does this? I don't think so.

Carl Lanore:
Let's also make something clear. All of these things are selective in the way they stimulate the mosaic of the androgen receptor. The same way SARMs do, the same way SERMs do. We don't know exactly what the effects of just stimulating this part and that part of the androgen receptor and not the entire receptor itself. There's a lot of things that appear to be phyto androgens. Ginger appears to dock nicely in the androgen receptor, but none of that stuff is going to be like 500 milligrams of testosterone. Don't kid yourself. If that's your thinking, don't waste your money, because if it was, bodybuilders would be taking grams and grams of it 10 times a day on top of their stack of steroids to get bigger. But they're not.

Coach Rob Regish:
If all of that wasn't enough, there is supposedly a cross-hormone increasing effect too. That's comparable to GH-releasing peptides, such as CJC 1295 and GHRP 6.

Carl Lanore:
Those two are very different. GHRP 6 is a ghrelin agonist and what it does is it shuts down somatostatin. Somatostatin is the brake. Growth hormone, releasing hormone is the gas pedal. You need the brake to release and the gas pedal to increase in order to have a pulse of growth hormone. That's why you have to take both the ghrelin agonist and a growth hormone, releasing hormone, such as CJC 1225. It's not going to be one compound that does both of these things. It's just not going to happen. This idea that it does the same thing as this and that, that should be a tip to you that it's complete bullshit. 

Coach Rob Regish:
I think it's a real long shot that any of these gene sennosides actually do anything like that. It's an even bigger long shot that the effect that it does have justifies the cost. I'm not totally down on ginseng. I mentioned last week how I literally felt a particularly good Korean red when I took it. Believe me, I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting a stimulant type of effect, which is what I felt with many of the others that came before it. This stuff needs to pass the ultimate test of time.

Carl Lanore:
Here’s the problem here. There are hundreds and even thousands of guys buying this stuff and taking it, but nobody's running out and getting before and after blood work done. Is anybody going into any lab test and ordering a urine analysis for growth hormone metabolites, and a total and free testosterone analysis, and then taking the supplement for a month or two and being retested? Of course not, because they feel like, why would I want to spend $150 twice? Maybe you'll find that you're wasting your money and you'll save a bunch of money instead of buying this crap. You don't know if it's working. Get blood work. If you really believe in this product, tell the people that are selling it to pay for your blood work. Say, I'll buy this product if you pay for my lab work. And if it comes up that I'm producing more testosterone growth hormone, I will post on every single forum on the internet that it works. Try it. They won’t give you any play.

Coach Rob Regish:
Now what they have said is, we did in-house tests and saw some amazing things. Okay. Release your in-home test. I haven't even seen that. Is it going to be around in 10 years, largely unchanged, supported by repeat buys? Or is it going to be pink magic compound 20 prime, a menthol flavor, and the beta. I can go on and on. Where are those products today? They're not being sold.

Carl Lanore: [00:43:26]
Because they suck. Jordan Frans was on my show many years ago. Back in the day, on the boards, he was “the unlikely toad”. I think that was his screen name. He has cerebral palsy, but he trains very hard. He and I were talking about my new approach to training; doing one thing for 40 minutes, doing the volume that Doug Brignole says, as you start getting weaker you up the weight and you do less reps. He said it's worked for him for years. We put the volume with one to two exercises a day and that's all he needs. Another listener says ‘what are your thoughts on sermorelin dosing?’ I don't like sermorelin at all. I'd rather take CJC 1295 without DK and GHRP 6 together, and you will see a growth hormone rise. You'll see fat loss. You'll see all the things you want from growth hormone. Sermorelin is just a ghrelin agonist. It's only half of the equation. Another listener says ‘I have infrared sauna and red light tower. Red light boost testosterone. Is there anything you can stack with the red light to boost testosterone like topical DHA and magnesium?’. I'd be careful about rubbing anything on my skin and then getting in front of a red light unit or any light unit. You don't know what that's doing. If it's burning, if it's creating onco-metabolites that are going to trigger cancer. More importantly, get your blood tested before. Get in front of your red light tower and your infrared sauna and do that consistently for some period of time for a month and then go have your blood tested again and see if your testosterone levels actually came up before you start investing more time and effort into this so-called effective way to raise testosterone. Nobody wants to do that because nobody wants to know the truth. 

Coach Rob Regish:
It's amazing how much money is spent. Taking a total flyer on these brand new unproven products versus taking a blood test, which is going to tell you right where you are, what's working and what isn’t. It's almost as if the typical consumer is an annuity stream for the company, but the key to keeping that annuity stream going is feeding you new stuff every three months, maybe every six months. Give a bunch of free samples away on the board and watch the placebo take off. 

Carl Lanore:
One listener says to grow your own. As it relates to Kratom, that's what he does. 

Coach Rob Regish:
I wish I knew how to. Maybe it can be done. I don't know. 

Carl Lanore: [00:46:39]
A listener on YouTube says "opinions on red yeast rice for lowering LDL cholesterol?”.  It doesn't work. You know why it doesn't work? Because eight years ago, the pharmaceutical industry found out it did work and they made them remove the component of red yeast rice that's called static. So it doesn't work anymore. You can buy pig thyroid. The only difference between pig thyroid that you can buy at the supplement store and armor thyroid is they washed the T3 and T4 out of the supplement that's sold over the counter. A lot of people buy pig thyroid and go, oh, this is just like armor! The government doesn't know! Are you stupid? The government knows. They wouldn't sell thyroid hormone over the counter. The same thing has happened to red yeast rice. There was a component in red yeast rice that was responsible for its coliostatic affects; its ability to stop the production of certain types of cholesterol. When the pharmaceutical industry found out, the FDA went after the company selling it. They said, well, you're going to have to produce red yeast rice without that component in it if you want to keep selling it. And of course they did. But no one talks about it. They still sell it and tell you it's good for your cholesterol. It does nothing anymore. Save your money. 

Coach Rob Regish:
It doesn't surprise me. What do you do when a natural alternative presents itself? You kill it. That's exactly what they did.

Carl Lanore: [00:48:12]
Right now we have the blueprint tip of the day. What is the blueprint tip of the day Rob? 

Coach Rob Regish:
The tip of the day is training info: then versus now, a critical review. Given its importance ,the question that's posed here is definitely worthy of further discussion. As I mentioned earlier, using the right training protocol for your goals is a major part of your success for a natural. It's absolutely vital. There is no safety net, so to speak, as there is in some cases for people using anabolics. With that as a frame of reference, I want to take a look at training now versus then, and what we can learn from it. When I got into this sport in 1985, there weren't a whole lot of resources for quality training information. I quickly learned that the bodybuilding training that was put forth in newsstand mags was virtually useless. That was a real blow to my goals, as I desperately needed to get bigger and stronger. Where there were some real treasures, though, were in the back of said magazines, buried in the classified ads. Little black and white ads in the back of a magazine. It was there that I found Super Squats by Randall J Strawson. Classic 20 rep squats and pullovers from the 1930s works just as well today as it did then. I would say to this day, God bless Iron Man for bringing that book and making it available, because it helped me put more muscle on faster than virtually any other system. Yes, I was 18, 19 years old, but still, it was a great program. The problem is it didn't work forever. Once I had success with that information and those classifieds, I looked for more and I found them. There was a program for football players called Super Big in Six Weeks, something like that. This little book, maybe the size of a deck of cards, was a huge breakthrough and gave me method number two for getting bigger and stronger. Then one day, I'll never forget it, I was flipping through a muscle mag international and I saw Leo Costa's first ads for Bulgarian Burst Training, which was the precursor to his later book Big Beyond Belief. The methods described in his books were literally groundbreaking for the time. To this day, I would tell you that they run circles around most other systems that you see people using. The only other quality information that was out there, frankly, was Powerlifting USA. Now long gone, unfortunately. In every issue, they had something called the workout of the month. That was a percentage-based system that you could scale to your current strength levels. It was dynamite at upping your bench, your squat, and your deadlift. The point I want you to remember about these three or four training methods is this: you had to dig for them. You had to pay for them. You had to order them via snail mail. I can remember getting money orders when I didn't have a checking account or credit cards, but each one was pure gold in many respects. They still run circles, like I said, around anything else, which brings me to today. The single biggest difference between then and now, no surprise, is the internet. Within 0.37 seconds of Googling “how to get bigger and stronger", you'll find you get 6,490,000 hits. And those were just the video tutorials. You don't even want to know how many you get under the all category. While variety isn't a bad thing, unless you get more tips than you could possibly try in a lifetime, sorting out what works and what doesn't would take forever. There are some good training protocols out there. There are a lot of bad ones too. Trying these one at a time, there's no guarantees. You could hit pay dirt or you could waste decades of your life. Unfortunately for many it's the most productive decade there is, between ages 15 to 25. One positive in the Renaissance of bodyweight training or calisthenics recently was that 30 years ago, people would laugh you out of the gym for not lifting weights or for doing any kind of body weight work. Today there's an entire movement away from them, and there are several good bodyweight routines that you can learn and grow with. For the next few months, however, I'm going to challenge you with this. We're going retro. What I want you to do is to issue whatever training method that you're using now and run one of these timeless classics from the eighties and nineties, because they are among the best of the best. So here's your short list: Super Squats by Randall J Strawson, it's going to be the best 15 bucks you ever spent. I got mine for $9.99 in 1988, plus postage. Big Beyond Belief, which is now in paperback, by Leo Costa, $47. If you think that's pricey, think again. It is worth 10 times the asking price and it's still cutting edge in some respects, even today.  Lesser known were Leo's follow-on books: Serious Growth and the Titan Training Manual. $29 and $69 respectively. Heavy Duty 2: Mind and Body by Mike Mentzer is long out of print. It is selling for a hundred bucks. Like Big Beyond Belief, though, it is easily worth that asking price. Ironically, after you get done reading Big Beyond Belief and Leo’s stuff, it's the perfect 180, because in many ways it is the polar opposite. Sometimes switching to that is what works. Number five, Escalating Density Training by Charles Staley. The last time I saw this, the Kindle version was up on Amazon to read for free. Free is a good price, folks. The information in there is well worth your time. Number six, the Westside Barbell Book of Methods, $50, and again, very well worth that cost. It is the collection of methods that were used and refined by Louie Simmons, over 30 painstaking years. You need to get it, even if you're not a powerlifter. Finally, and it was hard to keep it to just these few, but the last one on this list is The Strongest Shall Survive: Strength Training for Football by Bill Star, the classic five sets of five method long out of print, but available used for around $220 is what I found. It is required reading for strength athletes. Save your pennies if you need to. It's that good. Any or all of those is guaranteed to expand your knowledge exponentially. Here's the bottom line: you don't need millions of different training methods. You need to have a dozen or so that are tried and true. And while these were considered cutting edge in the eighties and nineties, do not let that timeframe fool you. They are as good or better than most of what I see in gyms today. Buy them. Read them. Use them. They are yours for life to train with, and they are priceless go-to’s when the going gets tough. Unlike most of what is seen in gyms today, every one of them has stood the ultimate test of time. I guarantee you won't regret it.

Carl Lanore: [00:57:22]
Great show. Thank you, Rob. 

Coach Rob Regish:
 It was fun. 

Carl Lanore:
Don't forget to visit coachrob.com to learn more. And we'll see Rob next Tuesday. Thank you. See you later. Bye. 

Coach Rob Regish:
Thank you. Take care. 

SHR #2689 Part 2
BLACK SEE OIL EXTRACT
with Chris Dziak

Carl Lanore: [01:00:26]
Welcome back. Hey Chris, how are you doing? We are here to talk about something called black seed oil, which apparently is a very popular very sought after supplement. What is it? What does it do? What's a good form? 

Chris Dziak:
One of the reasons why it's considered popular is it's kind of like one of those general health supplements. It does a ton of different things. Basically it is comes from black cumin seed, and this is something that has been utilized for many, many years in ayurvedic medicine and traditional medicines around the world. The active ingredient is something called thymoquinone. Thymoquinone has been studied and shown to do a lot of really neat things, such as regulating glucose levels in the blood. It has anti-inflammatory properties, anti viral properties, anti-cancer properties, just a whole host of stuff. I don't know if you happened to get any in time.

Carl Lanore:
Yes, I have it.

Chris Dziak:
What people have noticed is it anecdotally improves mood and things like that. Sleep. Anxiety. It really depends on the individual. There's a study that, it was in obese men, but it noticed basically a market improvement in quality of life in terms of improving loss of libido, improving forgetfulness, appetite, things like that, that were improved as subjective symptoms of obesity. So anecdotally, a lot of people seem to echo that sentiment in terms of what it does and that it makes them feel better.

Carl Lanore:
So should you take it at night, if you want to help improve your sleep? Would it work better to take it in the evening? 

Chris Dziak:
Some people take it at night. It’s one of those supplements that you can kind of do whenever. Once we started carrying this, a lot of my family and my staff's family got newly interested in it. My mother-in-law takes some in the morning and at night, kind of splits it up in the day to just get that effect throughout the day. It's just one of those real general health supplements. It's good to take because it helps other things work better in terms of thymoquinone itself. Part of the reason that they're studying it for anti-cancer activity is because it will have effects in genetic expression. In some areas it will cause certain genes to upregulate or downregulate. A lot of those are good when looking at it from a cancer perspective.

Carl Lanore:
I can't help but recognize the name thymoquinone. There is a study that was texted to me today in anticipation of the show that shows that it may have some value in COVID 19.

Chris Dziak:
It has been studied because it does have antiviral activity. It's being included as part of a lot of supplements as an immune booster. There was a recent study, I wasn't able to find the results of this study. It was just the abstract of thymoquinone paired with zinc in treating COVID stuff. It's not surprising to me because it has a lot of interaction with breathing type issues. It’s been shown to basically have anti allergic type of effects against rhinitis. It helps with asthma. Things like that. So it's not surprising to me that it might be useful in a COVID regimen.

Carl Lanore:
What is a therapeutic dose? 

Chris Dziak:
It's tricky because when you look at the products on the market, a lot of them are not standardized to thymoquinone, or they have just a really small amount of thymoquinone. Our capsules are 200 mgs of extract standardized to 5%. So you're getting 10 mgs of thymoquinone per capsule. Realistically it's a very safe supplement. My mother-in-law takes one in the morning, one at night. It’s really going to be individual-dependent. Some folks take more, some take less. When you look at other black seed products, a lot of them may not be standardized or if they are, you're getting a much lower amount of thymoquinone. The key is looking at the thymoquinone content. Most of the studies are looking at thymoquinone and its effect on whatever.

Carl Lanore:
So right now, if you go to SHRnetwork.biz/pure and use the code SHR30, you’ll get 30% off black seed extract for a limited time. Then it will shift back to SHR20 for 20% off. 

Chris Dziak:
We genuinely feel this is one of those ones that if you make part of your daily regimen, you’ll generally like it, feel better, and you'll want to keep it there. If that's not the case, we'll give you your money back.

Carl Lanore:
It doesn't get better than that folks. Risk-free. Give it a try, go to SHRnetwork.biz/pure and use the code. When you go to the website, you’ll notice nothing is expensive. I have people go, ‘I couldn't get the code to work, but it's cool’. Like it was so inexpensive. These are some of the best prices you're going to get on these types of products. They have the highest standards for production. It doesn't get any better than this. Give it a try.  Sativa is a very common plant. Isn't tea made from the sativa plant? Even some cannabis is a sativa.

Chris Dziak:
When you're looking at cannabis, it has two main types that are indica and sativa. Realistically, any experts in that area will tell you that those distinctions are pretty much meaningless these days. The idea is that the sativa plant took longer to flower and mature, so it was a little more intense from a growing perspective. Nowadays they've hybridized all of them so that the distinction is basically meaningless. Then in terms of tea, I think you might be right, but there's just so many different types of tea.

Carl Lanore:
Interesting. It must have something to do with the flowering process. 

Chris Dziak:
It’s a good question. You’ve sparked my curiosity and it's worth looking into, because you do encounter it elsewhere. So it may be just a typical naming convention for plants. 

Carl Lanore:
So again, go to SHR network.biz/pure. Use the code SHR30 for 30% off your black seed extract. Until that code stops working, then use SHR20. Show them some love. They are a sponsor of the show. Thank you for being here today. 

Chris Dziak:
We appreciate you. Thanks Carl. Let me know if you like that black seed oil.

Carl Lanore:
I'm gonna start taking it today. I have a little something working on me every year. At springtime, I get this thing, I really think it's a virus. It's not allergies. It just knocks me out. I really think it's a virus and I'm going to try taking a pretty large dose when I get home today and follow that up with a large dose tomorrow and see what happens. 

Chris Dziak:
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised there. I hope you will. Let me know. 

Carl Lanore:
We'll see you soon, Chris. Thanks for being here and thanks for being a sponsor.