Jeff Cavaliere
Appearances
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived and high stress states. But there's some new research coming out showing its ability to slow, prevent things like
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When you can do the difficult thing, it's still not an automatic that you're going to be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody, but you know that you have the capacity to do things that you didn't really think you could, and it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out. Interesting thing on that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you start to like the thing that you actually didn't like in the beginning, then it no longer challenges that area of the brain. That area of the brain starts to shrink again. Oh, really? So it has to kind of, which is cool because it means that you need to continue to seek challenge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Oh gosh, yes. Conditioning, running. I try to address those things and do them knowing that I should do more of them, but there's always more to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Insecurity is definitely a factor. I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is part of that. I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable Because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are. If the moment arose that they needed to, let's say, protect their family or do something that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our preparedness that way. So I think that's a driver. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Oh, the conversation. I would start with always with the conversation. I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody. Because if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do, but if you ask the question of like, why do you want to get in shape? You might say, I'm too fat right now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I would say to you, what would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you are? Well, it would be better because I'd have a six pack. what would be important about having a six pack? Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more. Why would it be important for you to like who you're looking at in the mirror?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because I don't feel like I'm enough right now because I'm letting myself down because I know that I'm not doing the things I need to. Why is it important to not let yourself down? So when you start to ask the question, keep digging, you find the why very quickly. And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood. It comes from pain of letting others down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was... drilled into you from your parents or others, or because you just never lacked the self-confidence to actually feel better about yourself.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers, they all have some level of pain in their life that caused them to seek this out because it's the one thing they can control. It's the one area where it's like, I don't have to listen to anybody. I have to do what I have to do for myself, and I'm in control of my body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I think that a lot of times people, or it's an escape, where you benefit from the endorphins that are released through exercise, and it's your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better. But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain. So if I had...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You would come to me in the very beginning, I would have started with that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can't stick with this? You've tried and you stopped. And I think that people need to understand that and finding the why to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I mean, the top is abs, biceps, chest, and low back pain. I mean, people actually come to me for one of two things. Again, I think it's having the two hats of physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach. I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So we have lots and lots and lots of views, obviously, based around fixing issues, low back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain, and how it disrupts their ability to carry on in life or through their fitness pursuits. Then there's the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six pack abs and then they want their arms and they want their chest.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because it's, It's the beach muscles, but it's a fact of life. People want to improve those areas. What I try to do when I bring people in through that track is to also make them aware that, okay, this is cool. You want your abs. That's good. But obviously, this can require a healthier eating plan.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So I know I can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life if I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now. So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interests might be, but my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there's more to it than that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
that someone carries, so how lean they are, the aesthetic development of their muscles, what their bodies are shaped like, because you could lose weight, but as you've described before, skinny fat isn't really an attractive look. So I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
As a trainer of athletes, it's sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the lower body. They're not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have strong, developed glutes. I mean, it's just not really high on the list. So pretty much everything is going to focus on from the waist up in terms of the aesthetic desire. bigger neck for men. For women, it's the opposite.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist. They want to have better legs. They want to have stronger legs. They want to have well-developed backsides. There's probably a cultural importance upon that. Men are being judged aesthetically on their upper bodies more than women are. And women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So we're feeding into those desires, especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you're just reinforcing everything I just talked about. In that category as well of looking good, nutrition? Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
What happened with me and what I always advise people to do is start just by looking at globally from 30,000 foot view, what do you know you're doing not well right now? Are you drinking excessively? Do you end every night with a pint of ice cream? You know that you're doing some things wrong. So you make one pass at the obvious stuff.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And you just do it for a couple weeks, you know, and you see how you progress. And what will normally happen is usually those are the most offending, the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition, that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, I mean, white rice is actually, there's a place for carbohydrates in people's diets, I believe. But you have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be overeaten. Like the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us. But you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
or pasta and then some because they are much more chemically pleasing to the body. So I think people need to be cautious of overconsumption of carbohydrates and they're not aware of portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say, no, I had rice and pasta. And I would say I have rice and pasta too every day. But like, I probably don't eat as much as that person does.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So portion sizes when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness about.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
the kind of hidden offenders i mean there's sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing especially you know like yogurts right people will have you know fruit on the bottom yogurt but it's like loaded with sugar or my first experience was oatmeal i was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in the morning so of course i was buying quaker oats but i was buying those little packets
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And they have brown sugar in the bottom. And it's like they're loaded with sugar. They were not the equivalent of Quaker Oats from a canister. And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right. But I'm not. Because there was more sugar in that than there was in a bowl of Trix cereal. What do you look for on the package? I always look for sugar and fat. That's what I look for. So...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But dietary fat, there are nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. There are much more calorie dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, that dish is going to increase pretty quickly. So you have to be mindful of them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Everybody, for the most part, that's out there trying to put information out they should have a level, there's a level of respect I have for everyone doing that, because they're all trying to help people get better or improve themselves.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you want to lose weight and achieve a hypocaloric state to get there, you're going to have to take in fewer calories in your then you're burning. That's why I would look at fat content. But sugar is just really not necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and tends to be too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating sugar.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So I think that's one of the fastest ways to to get yourself on track is to try to minimize the sugar content in the food. And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied and full faster than if it's just a carbohydrate-based meal. So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around, protein, sugar, and fats. And what does your diet look like? I eat breakfast in the morning, and I have usually, again, I'll give you typical meals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I have oatmeal. I even put some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin just for some additional vitamins and minerals. Protein shake. and some maybe some egg whites so i get good amounts of protein and for lunch i'll have like a grilled chicken wrap again trying to prioritize protein in every single meal And I'll try to have a Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Then I'll have a protein shake usually after work only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at 6 o'clock, I come home. The kids are there. They want to play. I wind up just having something to tide me over, realizing that my dinner is going to occur later at night after my workout. What happens, though, is that workout occurs at around 10.30 to 11 o'clock at night.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So dinner happens at around midnight for me. That's always, again, based around a protein first, so usually chicken or steak or fish, and then fibrous carbohydrates. So it's going to be Something like, I like edamame. It has good protein in it. And I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there, especially in that limited amount. Broccoli.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think where I was really heavily focused was on a more comprehensive, more multifaceted way to do that, because my background wasn't just in, let's say, strength training or and aesthetic appeal of training, but also as a physical therapist and having a physical therapy background, I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying to aesthetically improve the body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And then I have my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is sweet potatoes. So I'll have sweet potatoes or pasta or both. I'm still shocked that you're eating dinner at midnight. So what time do you train? So I train around 10.30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it. If I could change that, I would probably work out at 5 p.m. But I always find that there's still work going on. People still need me at that point in the day.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I have a very difficult time waking up on one of those people that act like a zombie for probably 15 minutes before I'm feeling ready to go.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, how do you feel when you wake up? Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up, or do you feel... No.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think it's a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed. Because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the routine of sleep is what's most important, I believe. Even in cases of lower sleep totals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
There's actually 27% of people report sleeping less than six hours a night and 20% of people sleep four to five hours. I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because I get to bed late and I get up around seven o'clock each morning. Do you sleep track? I don't sleep track. I did for a while. I don't sleep track.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I actually... I've tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now, there is... and I hold onto this as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleeper syndrome.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness and brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is that only one to 3% of the population has that. So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be playing a game that I ultimately can't win.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep totals than others.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
it's the level of strictness of nutrition and what i mean level of strictness is not just in the foods that you choose but the consistency with which you choose them so how long can you sustain this really clean diet i hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean it's actually the first thing it's a red flag but they don't um but i think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don't have one, but I mean, as ridiculous as this is going to sound, when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it's right there. And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort of make this their own journey, The benefits are so far reaching. It's not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve. It's so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves. Mental health is directly related to people's physical health.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The shamefulness of how your body does this and what it does to us is that it kind of works from this top-down approach. Like you'll lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and the last place is here. So it works in this top-down approach. Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you've lost the fat in your face. You've lost the fat in your neck.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So sometimes I look at myself in the mirror. I'm like, man, you're gone. And I hate the way that my face gets sort of caved in. But it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially naturally, because that's how your body starts to lose fat. And especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness. So it looks even more of a challenge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But this top-down approach is sometimes good because... it allows you to start to see like the upper row abs underneath the chest. Or when you start to get into better shape, you might've noticed this yourself, you start to see like, okay, my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually starting to take some shape.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation that like, I want to keep going. I can see the top ab. Right. I can see the top ab. There it is. I can see, I have them, you know, I actually have them. I got a two pack, but I have them. Well, you continue down that path. Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Sometimes you take one extra night of socializing or drinking out of the schedule and you start to see it you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row of abs, then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue and what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And that's the caveat that I always say, I mentioned early on, like, is it that important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat, you're going to look amazing and you're going to look better than 98% of all men. So whether you had that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you're still going to have your abs.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You're still going to have defined shoulders and arms and Some veins popping out in other places. Is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits? You'd be there. Aesthetically, you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you came from. And you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice to get there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And that's the battle people have to fight. and ask themselves, how worth it is it to me?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yes and no. So to lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie deficit. But if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say you ate Twinkies in a deficit, you're not going to get the same outcome because the type of weight loss
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
is going to vary depending upon what you ingest so if you don't ingest enough protein you're just eating twinkies you might lose weight but you're also going to lose muscle in the process so if you want to deter the loss of muscle and maximize the retention of muscle, and maybe again, even slightly build in that deficit, then you're going to want to prioritize protein.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So it's not just the calories in, calories out. That will get you to lose the weight. But when you ultimately, I think people aren't just talking about weight loss. They really want to make sure that they're maximizing lean muscle at the same time that they're losing weight. If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it's going to matter.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
What are the big misconceptions we have about abs? To get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff, that doesn't work. I think that's probably the biggest misconception. I always remember Laszlo. Laszlo was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building it. He would come up to me. He was like the typical male, right? He was in pretty decent shape.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves too. Every element of life is improved, I think, with improved levels of fitness and health. My why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even the smallest investments, it doesn't have to be every bit I do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
He worked every day, active. He's like, I got to get in shape, man. And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train? He said, well, I don't really train. I just, you know, do a couple of pushups and stuff. I said, well, you're gonna have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition? I kind of eat what I want. And I was like, all right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But he wasn't really overweight, you know, but it's the typical. And he goes, just tell me what I could, I just want to know what I can do for this. What's a good exercise I could do for this? For his belly fat. For the belly fat. It's just pointing at his stomach. And it's like, there's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how it is.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Abs are not going to be
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
gotten through just the exercise it's always about nutrition it's always nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else now when you get lean enough if you're not doing any type of uh ab training you'll probably have less defined abs because you won't have the development of that muscle there's nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads there's still muscles that can be developed and because of the anatomy of the abs
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
there's that line down the middle in the tacks, right? That's just caused by a suturing down of something called the linea alba. It's just a tendinous sheath. When you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right? Even weighted ab work is helpful in this case. The muscles are just growing just like a bicep would grow.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And as they grow, you can't change the suturing down of the tendinous sheath. So they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area. So you get more visible abs. But that's the only way to really do that is through... training to hypertrophy the abs, but you're not going to get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's over them. And that's only going to come from nutrition.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
What is that? I mean, that's usually the anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone. That doesn't generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within the abdomen, not just in the inguinal, you know, in the groin area.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you get there. That's really usually a telltale sign of like growth hormone use, something that they've abused that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension pushing out of the belly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, it's actually a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it. But it's certainly not a healthy thing to have. And there's always a lot of repercussions to going down that path. They might look short-term.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
way they want to look and i would argue that even in those cases you know the the the large super large mr olympia look i don't even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people but um it it definitely leaves behind a lot of a lot of damage
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like you don't have to eat the way I do, to get as lean as I am to still benefit from being lean. You could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits in terms of overall health. So you don't have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to yourself
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
yeah i mean i think it look at trt is becoming such a prevalent path for people i don't like that that's the prevalent path i don't want to come across as somebody who is anti-trt because i've been i've been reminded of that and that on some of the videos i've made about it that look jeff there's a lot of cases where people have extremely bottomed out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone that's not being made
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I completely appreciate that. But as you've noted, the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people talking about their use of it and how it's physically changing them. And they're doing it at a rate... It's becoming option one. What about maximizing your natural potential first before...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
declaring yourself as low testosterone even at levels like of 400 and 500 and then going and using testosterone like you're going to be on that for the rest of your life if you pursue that path you know once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with exogenous testosterone you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life now some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body's ability to produce testosterone but that's not a given so be prepared that once you go down that path that's when you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe... I'm aching to say 100% safe because that's what I want, then maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from the loss or the change that my body was going through. Because I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that it feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep going. And I'm going to be 50 this year.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So this is where I think when I say if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an athlete. Because the hallmark of their training is that it's multifaceted. So you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one-dimensional, I'm not saying this to put them down, but one-dimensional as an arm wrestler, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When we poll our followers, I found that for men, they want their six-pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest. And for women, they want to have better legs and well-developed backsides. So we'll get into those exercises. But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
They can have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor recovery, they're likely gonna lose, especially because your neurological output and grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don't have more than one element developed. You're not going to be your best.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So when people are looking, the general population is looking to become healthier and feel better. It's not going to be one thing. First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
the building of muscle, so hypertrophy and strength building is gonna be really important because we are gonna, again, like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose strength every passing decade, up to eight to 10% per decade as you pass the age of 50. So you need to make sure that you are doing something to stave that off.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
That to me is the most rewarding part of it. Because if I can show you how to do it, it's the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right? If I could do that, then I think I've done something right. I say all the time, I could take everything away from you. I could take all your money. I could take houses. I could take everything away. I could take even relationships away.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment, because that's, again, neurologically, your neurons start to fire at a slower pace.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You need to train these things. Reactivity, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He had an obstacle course he built. I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old. And he made this obstacle course.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And he used to add every week or so, he'd add one more obstacle to his course. And he built it in his backyard. And it was like a balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And he said that he would try to find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain guessing as to what's next. And again, whether or not he was finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do, maybe it was also feeding into his increases because he was doing the things he hated to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted and by incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach because it is important. The fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But you need to factor those types of things in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Flexibility and mobility feed into that. I always talk about there's a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom, which is supposed to represent all the things you're supposed to work on. And then it kind of fine tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength, right? You got to maintain your strength.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And then above that, you got to maintain your muscle mass, like the amount of lean muscle you carry. And above that, your ability to perform because of those two attributes. So to be able to actually do things. And if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you're a baseball player, you know, how well do you swing the bat?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You know, how well do you feel the ground ball? It's that top level skill work that comes up here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Cardiovascular is in there as well. Your condition would be right there. you know, depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play is going to fall right above or below strength. Now, I would argue that there's a few things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because we could always find another relationship potentially. If I take away your health, you're done. Health is everything. And what did you study? So a few things. Physio-neurobiology was my initial degree. And I became a physical therapist, which required another three years.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And the pyramid sits on the ground, but what's underneath the pyramid, the roots, your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person that could squat 600 pounds, but now I'm going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility, you lack the flexibility, Then I've also taken away and I've weakened the strength that you have. It's there. Your strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root of longevity in fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility, and stability.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints in their full range of motion. So it's a muscle or joint thing. Still the same concept, but they're working on different elements.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
No, I think people hate it. And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you're into the practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
but for the average gym goer no it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they leave the gym or not at all and i think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel i think that when they talk about the fountain of youth stretching and mobility is probably the thing that makes people feel the best I've heard that. People say that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I agree to almost a full extent. But I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I have this band to sort of show that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Like, if somebody was just completely flexible, right, and you were trying to shoot this band across the table, I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to get any kind of force to do that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
on the contrary if somebody was um strong right maybe even muscle bound i don't have any flexibility here to again really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of force generation but if i were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
flexibility but also the strength in this case the muscles the tension i can shoot that band a lot further with a lot more force and a lot more ease our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this but our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and mobility because that's only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance possible
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It just has to be consistent. So, I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to 10 minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight. And again, this is very individual. Like one thing that I always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program. And it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I would go through the assessment of each player.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that regard. So you'd have to have a college degree, but then you'd also have to have a certification. And in this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And you would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type, you would find certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
People have to be willing to, A, seek out where the deficits are, and B, to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be, an hour a day of doing those things. You prioritize that list and you focus on five to 10 minutes of extra work with it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's funny, I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning. But it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them off. That's not necessary. You find the ones that have the biggest impact.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But I don't think that having, you know, doing stretching requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Sure. As you can see from the space I'm in, you don't need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible. They're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry. So no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So the first exercise up here is pretty simple, but it does demand some balance and it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it's called the single leg RDL. What you want to do is you want to hinge. Pretending that there's a drawer behind you that's open, you're going to close it with your butt.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Then you reach forward, but at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So, your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without losing weight. your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground. Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And what we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position. And we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. And then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate, and follow it with your head as you go up as high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When we get into these chronic positions like this, right, with our devices at our computers, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine. Doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking. So, the next thing is something we call a sumo squat stance.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's a squat stance hold and it's based off of something called the horse stance, which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability. Again, we're going to still work on the hip and all three planes. So, what we do is we get down, feet wide, and squat down into this position here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to work for the Mets.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs for a little bit of support. But what I want to see is as tall of a chest as I can get, the same way that we just did through that rotation, to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine, and getting extended.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it and the posture will get away from this position and more to this open, upright position. If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is cross the hands over, get in that down position, reach up and out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Okay, that is a 30 second hold up to a 60 second hold, depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is we've got to work on that upper body a little bit. So, the upper body, you should still be able to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the pushup. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits, both front and backside.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So, we call this a posterior chain pushup. For a pushup, you want those hands underneath the shoulders. I'll demonstrate one, then we'll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So, you squeeze your butt together, you straighten your knees out by contracting your quads, and then you get a good, firm holding plank position here. Now, when you go down. Normally, people would stop here or they wouldn't come up all the way. You go all the way down to the ground.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team. I worked with some of the best baseball players in the world. I had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world. It's wrestlers. I'm a big wrestling fan growing up. I have a lot of wrestlers that come through.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you, point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed tight, and then lift up into what we call a Superman. Right from here, you're going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain, from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers. Come down. Slide it back. Come up into that good, firm pushup.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Don't lose any of that stability. Come down. Slide up and lift. The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover. We're talking about just a side lying hip abduction. Okay. And what we do is we get in this position here. We position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
From there, you're going to slide your leg back behind you as far as you can take it and then lift up. Right when you do that final lift, you're going to feel a contraction. right here in the glutes. In particular, in the glute medius.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that's needed to propel your body, even on a regular walk, without your hips dropping down side to side. You don't want to let that happen to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Some of the mistakes people make is, in order to feel like they're getting the lift, they'll just rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius to do the lifting, so you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. And that's it. There's the five essentials.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment, no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now, back to the Diary of a CEO studio.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And that's a cool thing because wrestling, though some people may not like the storyboarding of wrestling, athletically, they're some of the most gifted athletes in the world. I mean the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week, the rigors that they put their body through. Whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined, but the bumps and bruises are not fake.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will measure at a high level how much of a deficit you've acquired over the years from not doing them. So you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're gonna reflect the global approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip abductors.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Getting exercises that work the other two planes, and mostly through rotation, but working this frontal plane, this side to side, is really important to producing a complete person, right? With complete levels of strength. And because they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that side-lying hip raise that I show you, is...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Not one of the big exercises are most important that are going to be up on your list. You're going to do your squats first and you're going to maybe never do those. But it doesn't mean that that muscle didn't matter, right? Those muscles are there for a reason and they need to be developed.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball players, the leading home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external rotation strength.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
and it being incredibly weak like incredibly weak and you say to yourself how is that even possible because it was never actually directly trained and does it have a carryover obviously they're doing really really well in terms of their performance on the field i still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field but more importantly one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his his career
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
and there are missed games because of knee pain, what could his career stats have looked like? They're already Hall of Fame worthy, but what could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those games? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So I think that these types of smaller movements are... really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them. Like it doesn't require a gym, doesn't require an elaborate setup. They're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand. Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The bow tie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I have my t-shirt, but this is Raymond. So X-Ray is his full name. And then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
probably in 2011 or 12 and he became a fan favorite pretty quickly but i think people like the visual and for me he's not the most mobile guy he's lost his lower arm he doesn't have another arm on this side and he doesn't really move that well but what it is important is he's also lost his legs he's lost his legs i got a leg over there if we need it but the spine see for me again i focus a lot on
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And they also have to have that aesthetic appeal too. So it's this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit. It's what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because the area of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine. So what that is, is anybody that wants to measure on themselves, it's right at the bottom of the neck.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders, and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the thoracic spine ends. It has so many far-reaching implications because it shares its range of motion between two different directions. So its ability to go front to back, again, he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward. We can go back, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You want to have ideally about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just us sitting here alone, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When you use up motion in this direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are on their phones or at a desk all day, you're gonna start to lose the motion into extension. You're gonna get too flexed. Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a direct degree into rotation. So you're, because you're sharing that motion.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The motion is only available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there's going to be less motion available here. If I have a thing, if you let me grab this, put this over your back.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
over my back yeah just like this right yeah now allow yourself to slump forward pretend you're on that phone right get there now just turn from the shoulders in one direction slumped over okay now take a peek down the barrel of that thing you know behind you and see where you're pointing how about how far rotated you are yeah all right cool now come back Reset yourself.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Now take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine. It's like I'm getting cramp in my back. There's your rotator cuff. So get yourself up right now. Nice posture. Act like I'm watching, right? So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that direction. How much more did you get?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you're falling as you get older, you're likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash down and maybe break a hip.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Functionally, as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You know, you don't usually just move in one plane like this. If you're a football player, American or not, you're rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know, by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it's all about rotation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You need to hold on to rotation, but what we lose is... the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60, people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, I think motivation is extremely overrated, right? Because motivation isn't what produces the results. It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym and initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there. And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have. Now, discipline comes with finding success.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
My grandmother, God bless her soul, she lived to 97 years old. Wow. But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally... She had a walker. She was completely bent over at that walker. Could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her extension. So she could not rotate at all.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And again, functionally, it's the most important movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things. So... I think that people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation, I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah. Well, it's impossible because, you know, you're losing that...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
that fight to gravity right gravity is going to win ultimately but it doesn't have to win completely so the more that you work on maintaining your ability to extend through the thoracic spine then you don't develop those downstream adaptations that happen from always being there so what happens once you get in this position you lose flexibility through other joints again if you get get in that position again actually turn a little bit try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Okay, now just straighten yourself out, go tall, now raise your arm up again. Why? Because you've literally mechanically blocked your shoulder because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now and just held your shoulder blade.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top. Okay. When you realize that this epicenter of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead. And then what happens then?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you can't move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, Stephen, get your arm up over your head. And you're like, I can't. No, get your arm up over your head. You'd go like this. you'd lean your body back, because your arm can't get any higher, so you're gonna lean your body back. Well, what are you leaning from? Your low back.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So now all of a sudden you're asking an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable. The low back, the lumbar spine, is supposed to be a stable area of your body. you're asking it to now become a mobile area of your body. And you're asking for motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn't give it to you, right? The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So now what does that happen? Now you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become spasmed. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now you're causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has all these far-reaching benefits. Another thing that can happen too is when you're down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talk about is actually connected to the ribs.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you're in this compressed position where you're rounded forward, hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open. You can't get the lungs to inflate properly. lack of properly operating lungs are going to cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day, and it causes you to feel less rested at night.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So this area has so many up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it. And it's one of those things, again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on this area, 10% at most.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success early, you do become motivated, again, self-motivated to continue on down that path. So My genetics were never great. My mom was five foot tall. My dad's five foot nine, five foot eight, 160 pounds, not a lot of muscle. I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah. There's a few things. Again, anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, we talk about...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
the mobility flexibility part being the the foundation of that but then there's also a strength component because like you can free up the mobility and flexibility but can you maintain it the strength is just going to help you to maintain it from a mobility flexibility standpoint you can simply go up against a wall right and what you what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall your upper back against the wall and your butt against the wall so you're going as flat as you can
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And you put your arms back up against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is going to have good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles. Because your rotator cuff, as it gets tight, wants to internally rotate your arms. Can you get them back this way?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Can you get your elbows forward with your arms? You're doing a pretty good job. I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position? When I'm there, can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only way I'm gonna be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because what's gonna happen is if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it's just gonna fold you forward from the wall and you're not gonna be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that dowel that we had there, you would lay on the ground face down, dowels over your back like that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You spread your legs so you look kind of like maybe an X with your hands out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling. That dial is going to travel back behind you. And you're pretty much isolating the rotation through that mid-back, through that thoracic spine.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this and lean backwards. There's another exercise I have that's called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach over is you push up through, you're on your back, you do a regular bridge, like a glute bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? You're getting extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can combine those movements. And again, take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions. These are all things that anybody can do. Like anybody can do them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning because you are restricted. But these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don't look for perfection right away.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel what happens when you start to become less restricted here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Very, very. Again, I think people don't realize the minimal time investment that's required. It just needs to be done each day, right? Those little deposits have to be made each day, and they pay off in big dividends if you do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah. So I always say you can train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. Right. And I think that, especially as you get older, I think. you need to minimize the rotations on the tire, right? How many tire rotations are you getting? Because even if I just raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I'm still moving my arm up in that position.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But I didn't come from this genetically gifted pool of cavaliers. There's no way. But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far as I could. But I really found the discipline through... the fact that I liked it. And I found that this was feeding me in other ways. It was making me feel fulfilled. So it was easier for me to stick to it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And every time I move it up, even on here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like you're still getting some of that rotation rubbing and grinding in that joint.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder, and this is rubbing up against that each time, it's like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back over sort of a sharp edge, right? Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I'd rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity because the tension delivered to the muscle with the higher level of weight they're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is going to have bigger, benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Now, that's not to say that you can't actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle. You can. They've actually shown recently that anywhere between 5 and 30 repetitions taken close to or all the way to failure, can stimulate muscle growth. The absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But I believe that as you get older, you've got to kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. Ultimately, you're going to have to change the tires. And we might not be able to change these tires as easily.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I get emotional, but it's sad when people don't ever find that drive and motivation, because the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking. Like, if I take away your health, you're done. So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one, it keeps you safe. Most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you're in command of the weight that you're lifting. And therefore, it's likely going to, do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve muscle growth, I'm a big believer that muscle growth is not given, it is taken. And you need to force yourself, you need to force your body to make a change because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And getting it to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding, or it's creating more tissue that's going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn't want to do that. Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And the only way to take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now. That's why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute failure is 100% necessary, but it's the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language here.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I'm pretty comfortable in saying, well, Steven, you went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop at an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, you know, passable, same, same result potentially. How do I know it was really one or two reps? I don't, I don't.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Cause I think if, if there's a gun to your head, you might say, oh, I could do two more. Well, now it wasn't one to two, it was four and four is completely not as effective if not at all compared to the one to two in reserve. So when you do these exercises and to this degree of effort, there's gonna be a little bending of form. Now I'm not saying that the form should break down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me, as long as it's still controlled. If the exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
then you're not doing it right your form has broken down to a point where i don't think you're getting the benefits of that you might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train right you might have shifted the focus where you started the exercise it was supposed to be for your chest but by the time you're done it's for everything but your chest because you're just trying to move your body through space that's not effective if you're trying to build muscle you want to direct the tension into the muscles you're trying to build and sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit but not to the point where you're actually taking it off of the muscles again
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It is a good connection back to what we talked about because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic spine. Because when you go like this... you're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, that's the external rotation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If I do it the way we were just doing it up against the wall, that's external rotation. More difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction. When you start to round here, your neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because when you're here, what are you going to do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Got to look up, right? Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it's not that your neck is necessarily being pulled in that direction or the fact that you're looking down. It's the fact that your body's following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way and I've lost that mobility into extension of my back.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
What do I do to compensate? I got to look up. So now I'm walking around looking like this. And that's that sort of nerd neck. I think nerd neck is less of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
We live in an age now where You have access to the internet. You have so much access to information. Use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey because the earlier you start, the better. But it is quite sad when people don't ever find that spark in trying to play catch up. There's no lie to it. It's going to be harder as you get older.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, I mean, you're certainly going in the wrong direction, but I think when it comes to injury, preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it. It's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm. But when it comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
built to be mobile that aren't being controlled or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right? It's a ball. And again, we can look at that. It's a ball and socket, right? It's got the ball inside the socket. It's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you look at the leg, right? We don't have the other part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball socket. It's meant to be able to go in all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip, are...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
uncontrolled meaning you're lacking strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint that's when you actually wind up having issues so what are the what are the muscles that control that well we talked about one of those smaller exercises before the glute medius that muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane so not just in this front to back squat lunge deadlift direction but this frontal side to side plane it controls the movements of the hips this way
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you don't train them, they're not going to magically get strong. They have a function. And if you're not challenging that function, then you're not strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. The function is hip abduction. So you could do some of the side-lying hip lifting or leg lifting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You could do something more challenging where you perform a lunge, but... And interestingly, all you have to do is wait on one side. So if I were to say, all right, Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunches? How much weight do you hold in your hands when you do a regular lunch?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You gotta do lunches. So let's say you're doing, or Bulgarian split squat, another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench. I would say, hold the weight in one hand. So now if you're doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side, and then you go and you lunge out,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
That weight, when you're in the split position now with one leg out in front, the weight on this side totally wants to pull you in that direction. you have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I can say, I'm gonna make this even harder, go slow, go really slow.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So now you're stepping out, you're on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down, the dumbbell wants to drop you down, you stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position, because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I've just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these things accomplished at the same time you're training something else. So it's not always an extra thing that you have to do. You can actually do this in a way that
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Starting or initiating a training program in your 40s and 50s, though way better than not starting one, is much more difficult than if you had started in your teens and 20s.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
you know, it's sort of part of what you do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push pull legs, I would, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps there. Because it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work. And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day. So Monday, what do I do Monday?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push-pull legs is that it tends to be a lot, right? Like you're doing... shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don't like that amount of volume, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah. So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So if you look at a bench press, it's pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action that you're doing. If I looked at a lat pull down, I'm pulling the weight towards me. That's the concentric part of it. If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards me. Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I'm pushing away this way, pushing away that way. Push up, I'm pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs, it's in the name itself. I'm pushing down through a tricep push down. I'm doing tricep lying extensions. I'm pushing the weight away. they would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the function of that because it's optimal recovery.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So why that's good if you could tolerate, and I'm asking if that's okay for you to do that because you're not naturally adding shoulders in. If you were okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your push workout. And then what I would do is
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
know to develop that habit to maintain that habit it's very difficult to initiate that the older that you get but i do think that it's possible so my best advice to people who have that struggle to get started is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking right because the longer you think the more likely you are to not be able to do it you know the thing that stops most people
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
know that I'm getting enough recovery in between workouts because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday, come back and do Wednesday legs, right? So Monday, I'm just doing push upper body. Yeah, just push upper body. Okay, Tuesday, you're going to give me the day off. Tuesday, you get the day off. Yeah. I'm going to give you two variations of this. Okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And when I say day off, if you were with me, you'd be doing conditioning. All right. So we'll get into that, but that, but it would be, yeah, it's not a day off. No, you give me seven days. I'll take, I'll take a ball seven, even if I'm just doing ab work on some, but you, you then on Wednesday would come back and do your, your leg workout. And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So it's gonna be anterior, posterior. So I'm gonna train your hamstrings, your glutes, and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you'd have another day off. Again, likely not a day off, some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your pull workout. Now what's nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And this is not everybody, but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those workouts. If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light on the pole because you just did that. Probably did it the day before.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So my whole body on Saturday? You could do it. When I mean like, I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of including as many muscles as possible at one time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I can shy off a little bit, back off a little bit off of the pull that you were doing because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day before. So I would, if I trained you on, and this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday and a pull workout, remember I have different planes of motion I can move in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff, like a pull up or a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises like a seated row or a bent over row, right? So I could shift the focus a little bit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I definitely don't advocate seven days a week of full training.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So in that, in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And if you were gonna, if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned with fat loss and overall conditioning and you feel like you're not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But if your priority was the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage of that Saturday as my flex day to do training.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It could be, but if your priority, again, is to build muscle, then prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio conditioning work at the end of that workout. Something might suffer, and the thing that usually comes second is what suffers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So set count, you know, if you can get in, and again, this is a little bit determined by whether you're going to train on that Saturday. So if you're going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I know I have an opportunity to maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation bench, an incline bench. So I don't have to get all of my chest volume in in that first day.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But typically you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you were going to do, let's say, the one workout for chest and you're doing, say, three sets per exercise, you're in that range of around three exercises. For chest. Now you don't have to have that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because you're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put something, my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension where I lay on my back on the bench and I do the, some people call them
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
There's that saying, the start is what stops most people, right? But at the same token, it's not the obstacle that's in your way. It's the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting. So you wind up saying, well, I don't know. I could just sit on the couch and watch this. I'm not going to go to the gym.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I actually discussed this with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people. From person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between muscles.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every three days but I could never train my back every three days, or I could never train my chest every three days.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's just so intricate because every muscle is gonna be different for every person. And even at a holistic one level, you're just not gonna find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body. So a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training intuition to say, hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I'm probably recovering well. And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And believe me, there's even nights now for me where I'll be with one of my sons and we'll be in his room putting him to bed. I might fall asleep in there and wake up and it's late at night. I don't even think. I let my dogs out. I go right outside. I walk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Pretty important, huh? A lot of that research has been determined to be more correlative than causative, but the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so because they're regularly engaging in physical activity.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy weights, they're having to manipulate their body in space if they're doing calisthenic exercises. So there's a level of activity that remains in their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues as they age.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Right, or lacking, right? You're not doing enough of. That being said, you can actually directly measure your ability to recover from exercise based upon having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over weeks or months of training.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the morning, five mornings in a row and average it out at a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is. What's a good grip strength? So most men would be somewhere between 100, I'll talk in pounds, 100 to 120 pounds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So if you look at that, that's around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. If you want to give it a shot, see where you stack up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Sometimes I'm literally half asleep as I'm walking, but I know if I can get to the gym, get in there, turn on the music, and kind of put the lights on and do one warm-up set, I'll be good. And if I even sat down for a second— I might find that path of least resistance to be a lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
so to do this now there's some rules here yeah don't go like this you know keep it in here don't touch your arm to the table at all keep it yeah 90 degrees like that yep and then you're just gonna squeeze you know one good effort as hard as you can all right don't blow out now all right let's see oh gosh my head nearly exploded
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
130 so you're you're above average so doing well on grip strength so now what you would do is and you would test both sides you could average out the size sometimes you're gonna have one obviously one side stronger than the other you would then have a good baseline if you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not you would test this in the morning not can i try this yeah yeah this is my so this is my weaker all right here we go weaker hand all right you gotta beat it though now oh gosh it's a bit slippery
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
160.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did the other side again. You think I'd beat it? No, no. You're going to beat your old performance, but you're not going to beat the left side. Are you left-handed? I'm right-handed, so that was strange. All right. Let's see what you got. 150 now. See, my prediction was right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the stress of doing that. What's your grip strength? I don't know. I haven't tested in a while. See, now you're going to show me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I'm right-handed. So it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not... Not superhuman for sure.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Not in grip strength.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, I mean, this is, again, underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually. Okay. All right, so now hold it like this. Yep, and then you just get one hand, right? Squeeze as hard as you can for kind of a short burst. Okay. All right. There you go. Let's take a look. Wow, 100. Now, women's average girth strength is 60 to 80 pounds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you're actually much stronger than the average woman.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you probably enjoy it now, right? The process. It becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step. But there's still going to be days, you know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you're going to be like, maybe not today.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old-fashioned little grippers, you know, that you just squeeze. And they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels now for people that have worked on it and actually improved. When I was young, they're pretty easy to conquer with a little bit of training.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resistance high enough, but... Now it's definitely something that you could be challenged by.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that's all it usually takes to get you through the door and you realize what you were set out to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
26% of the time, at any one time in the United States, people are going to be dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there. The other thing I find interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind respiratory infection.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least four or five times to the doctor for respiratory infection, it starts to, it's an eye-opener, like, wow, and this is something that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come from so many different causes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You know, we talked about before how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could and therefore cause strain there. Now, here's the good part about this. Though 80% of people or 85% will have low back pain in their life, only 27 to 35% of the time is it disc-related.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So we're talking about, if you look back on this guy again, it's the discs between the vertebrae, right? The vertebral discs that create that spacing and the cushioning between the vertebrae of our spine. When one of those discs, actually this is one of them, dislodged itself, but when the disc that sits above and below these two levels pushes outward or herniates.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward. Anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure, in this case the disc, you get the radiating symptoms that go down whatever dermatome this is. What that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower body or some sensory area of the lower body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Depending upon where people complain of pain, like, oh, I feel it in my hip or I feel it in my leg around my knee or I feel it down behind my knee down to my foot. You pretty much know what level of disc problem they have because it's representative of the level of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
L5-S1, right, the last lumbar vertebrae and the first sacral vertebrae. It's going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your calf, underneath your foot. If you get something more around the hip, you know, a lot of times people complain of hip pain. They think they have a hip issue. It's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So that's an L2-L3 or L3-L4. You get indicators of where that's coming from. Again, the good news is if you don't have this neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling numbness, weakness, it's mostly muscle in origin. Now, again, even of the disc-related issues, the 27% to 35%, 96% of those are not operated on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So think about the impact you can have if we're saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed through non-operative strengthening or stretching intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what's the cause of the dysfunction? Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well, let's work on it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So let's try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute, right? Having weak glutes? Because again, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other words, kick the leg back behind you. If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body by doing that when I step through and get behind me. Well, how can I do that?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Once again, I could do it from the low back by over-exaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to. Always remember the low back is supposed to be the stability center of your spine. It's getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above it or below it. It's going to say to the low back, please help out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it, but at an expense. And that's where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses. You have to address hip mobility issues.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Oh man, they're life-changing. It's part of the why that keeps me going, hearing some of these stories. I had a live event recently, a few years ago, first one that we ever had. So I was a rookie. I didn't know how it was going to go. But part of that event was a competition that we ran. So anyway, we had a guy who was in his late 50s, first one to do the competition. So he drew number one.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
it would be better to have a standing desk or is there no no i think i think standing desks are are great and i i hate to say it because i might actually i might have to hold myself responsible but i feel like it it would be beneficial for me too i think that too much time sitting right there's there's people that call sitting the new smoking like the detrimental effects that sitting can have prolonged sitting can have on your body especially when you couple it with the fact that
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
When we do go to sleep, eight, nine, 10 hours, how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day? You're working all day. There's a big chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you got another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Your body wasn't meant to be that immobile. I think there's an actual...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
compression, so when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space, you're actually getting a bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that's in these joints, like let's say your knees, that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed, and again, with your knee, you're weight-bearing, and then you're off of it, you're weight-bearing, you're off, it's like squeezing and bathing that joint in the synovial fluid.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant and when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions. Being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the load that we're getting from the chair. and probably discourage some of that really bad posture that comes from sitting and doing this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Standing other than that, you're likely gonna at least improve your posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above, like we talked about, but at least from below, you're gonna improve that. But I still think that the inactivity Just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think people need to get up and walk around just a little bit. Five minutes every 30 minutes or so would be ideal. But if you're going to take a phone call, go walk while you're on the phone. One thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I'm going to be on a call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call, just as an excuse to get up and move.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the chair. Anything you can do, I know they're cliche, but park a little further when you're at a store so you have to walk a little bit more. But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking, which is the main problem. I think that...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Even if you added up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time that you're not active, if it was the same exact time of an activity but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects than you do if you're just grouping it. I'm gonna be inactive from this period, I'm gonna be active from this period.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Because again, of that effect of intermittently bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting them to different stresses than just compression, compression, compression. It's one of the reasons why I talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar to decompress your body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So he goes, and the first thing we had was a 300-yard shuttle, which is just a 50-yard distance they had to run to the cone and back. That's 100 yards back and forth again and back and forth again. It was extremely hot that day. It was like 95 degrees because of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work out so well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Even just minimally, again, not that much, one arm hang or so, two arm hangs a day is enough to give your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. And nobody does that. Nobody hangs from a bar.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
for building muscle the two that rank at the very very top of the list are going to be creatine monohydrate or create any form of creatine there's different forms of creatine we can get into those but creatine and a protein powder and some people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder and i guess if you're getting enough through your diet you you don't have to take it it's not a necessity you're not you're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are um
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
that you're not getting through your food, it's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost. If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it's certainly becoming a little bit unrealistic to think you're gonna meet your daily goals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And for me, my daily goal is around, at minimum, a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 grams per pound of body weight, if you're active.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And it's been around forever. Forever. And the benefits have been known forever, right? So that's interesting because that's all related. to the neurological benefits that creatine is showing in terms of depression and degenerative neurological diseases and its improvement, its ability to
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
slow prevent things like MS and Parkinson's by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable bioenergetic state, meaning being able to feed the neurons of the brain with the energy that seems to be lacking in some of these degenerative diseases.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run. He starts to windmill his arms. He's losing his balance forward. And I'm like, oh no. And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over the place. Okay, next kid comes up. He's up now. He goes, by the second station, he's overheated. He tried so hard. He has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, that's going to change quickly because I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take it. She is chronically sleep deprived because of my boys. So she has definitely operating at a higher stress level.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
it's been shown to actually improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived and in high stress states. From a depression standpoint, it's being shown to be very effective, even when kind of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression through pharmaceuticals. It's just got a lot of promise. And the good thing is that there's really no downside, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
They haven't really identified a downside to taking it. there's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video recently where I talked to them and I kind of addressed head on what they were. Jesse, of course, played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked. But like, there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
People think it's a steroid, and they think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. Sure, because the outcomes are the same as, let's say, anabolic steroid use, doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same or the magnitude of what you're going to see from them is the same or even the legality of the supplement itself is the same.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
We're talking about two completely different things. two different mechanisms completely and two different things that the body are going to react much differently to. When it's an anabolic steroid, it's going into the muscle cell, binding to antigen receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
To basically convert, as I did in that video, I said, you're taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You're completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monohydrate, you're just talking about providing a more constant flow of energy those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, what happens when that occurs? You're able to generate more work in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You're also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle cell with the creatine because osmotically, when you pull anything into the cell, you're going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated, and that's a great thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
A hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better, longer in the long run, just like a flower of water would grow better than one without.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Creatine is pretty simple. I always present it in sort of two forms to people because there's one creatine monohydrate and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference is what it's bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule and the hydrochloride is bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that's
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
ingested in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other. So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taken at a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that. I used to think that it was just five grams for everybody.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But now they're finding that people that are upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might benefit from eight, nine, 10 grams per day. So bigger dosages there. And people who are at 120 pounds or so, and maybe some of the females and female athletes, they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatine monohydrate. Hydrochloride is usually in lower dosages anyway.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I was ready to put a stop to the games because I said, we just weren't prepared for this heat in this first time. Anyway, we continued. So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push. And we had put 225 pounds on the sled. But that sled was on the pavement out in the parking lot from this gym that we hosted it at.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So a comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate might equal out to two to three grams of hydrochloride.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. If you want to get there faster, you load. It's five grams, four to five times a day. A total dose of 20 to 25 grams in a day. Some people are going to find that that's a little bit of an overload for them on their gut. There is a byproduct of creatine breakdown. Creatinine is what it's called.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
We get it measured whenever we get our blood test done. that can sometimes pull along with it some extra water, and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown of creatinine, so you might get less of that bloating. That's the only...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
indication why i would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are some of that 15 of people that have some sensitivity to that and a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it so what happens if you don't load you just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace so anywhere from 27 to 35 days or so you're going to reach that full capacity anyway
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you're taking it because you want to see benefits in performance, like power output and performance, let's say, leading up to an event that's a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those full capacities sooner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But I don't really see a need to have to load if, again, in the long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level anyway.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Are there any particular proteins that are better than others? I mean, I like to say since that's mine, that's better. But the fact is that... Anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They're still protein, but there's more on a gram per gram basis.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's 90% versus 80% by volume if it's isolate versus concentrate. So you're getting more protein per volume. But they're not all as advertised, right? Are they? No. I mean, look, I don't ever want to disparage other brands or, you know, I'm not in the practice of doing that, but like there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You know, they don't They're in it to make money. They're not in it to provide high quality. And again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be. How do I spot garbage? I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like, there's something called amino acid spiking.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
People will actually include a lot of glycine in their proteins, like adding glycine to it because they can get the label benefit of increasing protein content, but it's actually not a complete protein. So you're not getting the actual quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I really hate the dyes in food, the food dyes. I think that's a really, I'm glad that things are being done as we speak to try to eliminate them from our foods. I don't know how. Our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it has in Europe. They've known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes for a decade or more, and we're still eating these in our foods all the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And the friction of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted for. It made it even more difficult. Well, again, he's got that bloodied up knee. He's pushing it. He gets it to the end, struggling. And now he has to pick up at the end a 100-pound kettlebell and walk it back. He goes down there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
For what benefit? So it looks more attractive on a package? That's bullshit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
My view is I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be helpful for people that are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. We actually do give it to our children at night because they do have issues with sleep.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
But honestly, the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know you're on the right track, you generally don't need an alarm clock to wake you up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And again, there's a lot of conditions that can... sway somebody in one direction or another. But in general, I think the position that has the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side or crossed over your belly like this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
If you're able to tolerate even more and kind of up in this position here. With your arms up. Just because, again, that actually helps a little bit with some of that internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you were demonstrating up against the wall with that position before.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Not as big a deal, but you have to understand that at what other time really, again, we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you're getting up to go get a meal. At least you're getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty much statically in the same position?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach, you're pretty static for seven, eight, nine hours. there are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant. Like there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
They did something during the night and they all, I must've done something when I slept, right? People say that all the time because they probably did. They probably did.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it or they positioned themselves over an arm and it kind of was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren't conscious of it But then there's the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
They pull their knees up. The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It's like sitting, like you're getting from a chair. You're creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that position. Like lengthen them out, you know, get some flexibility or at least, you know, get some elongation at that joint and those muscles.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
He grabs the kettlebell after a long, multiple attempt to get the sled down there. And I finally run down there and I said, his name is Craig. I said, Craig, dude, you don't have to do this. You're good. You're good. It's okay. And he's like, no. He says, I'm going to do it. And I start walking and he's crossing the legs over each other. It looks like he's going to go down again.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You know, sleeping with a pillow that is too fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most of the back pain sufferers you talked about before, 82%, I believe, of people that report sleep disturbance say it's from back pain. And what happens? They feel it mostly, 77% of them feel it upon waking.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse, because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon waking. And it goes back again, what we were talking about earlier, You see, it all relates. This back pain seems isolated, and we're talking about the thoracic spine, and that's back pain. But now I'm talking about sleeping, and that's back pain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
All these things relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of it. But being in that position with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of... excess flexion of your neck, which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So you might like to do that, but I'm telling you the healthier position is to sleep with a really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high, just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
You're not abnormally propping it up. Not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at night, the on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you're closing down your airway a little bit more. You know, there are some cases where, again, that apnea patient might want to be on their side.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
you know it's gonna be it's gonna be easier for their breathing but in most cases on their back and also too interestingly you know look our most people have tight calves right their ankles are again we sit all day we're not pulling our ankles back towards our head we're not maintaining that mobility towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head well what happens in a bed you get in bed the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom they're pulling your ankles straight down like that and your feet are pointed the whole night
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
further tightening those calves because they're just shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day and your muscles repair and regenerate at night, you're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are pointed down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I always say, if you're going to get in bed, loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you can at least get the ability to move your toes backwards or they're freely moving. They're not being forced into this position. So lots of little tweaks you can make. And some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important given how long you stay in those positions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much time in that position.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think that you don't want to stress yourself out thinking of all the things that you need to do because there's many. And in doing so, become paralyzed by an activity and say, I'm not going to do anything at all because I can't do all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do is they –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I put my arm around him. I said, man, listen, you don't have to do this. He says, no. I get goosebumps. He goes, Jeff, I have to do this. He goes, I was diagnosed with MS four years ago and I can't feel my feet. I got to do this. It's that kind of drive and motivation. And you never know because you don't know what they're dealing with.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think that the commitment's gonna be too much more than what they're doing right now, too much to ask and they can't do it. That's a mistake. Chip away. Dude, make those, we talked about nutrition again, like make that first pass. Take away the obvious stuff. The stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Then make another pass when you're ready. From a fitness standpoint, get yourself to the gym. Try to do that first thing we said, to take that first action. Get yourself out the door. Get a habit of doing that over a period of a couple months. You want to start to adopt a more intense training plan, or you want to start to adopt a more Intricate training, split, fine. After, don't worry about it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
The most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. I'm really noticing that my thoracic spine is not mobile enough, like Jeff said. Hang from the bar. Do that one little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Pay big dividends when added up, but don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going to be healthy. Any investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off, maybe not even right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like you're realizing now at 32, it's going to matter at 52, 62, 72.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And so by doing what you're doing now, you're making the right investment. step in the right direction, that can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do more is going to be so much easier than when you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And rather than making that big departure from what you're doing now and thinking you're just going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you're not. And you're likely going to wind up making yourself not want to do it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Okay. What would I change about me and then why have I not? Wow. Oh, man.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
know there's there's there's not much and i'm thinking off the top of my head here so when i identify something that i want to change about myself i usually do a pretty damn good job of putting in place steps to to make that happen and there are things that are quite personal about myself there are things that from a relationship level there are things from a you know uh
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
self-improvement standpoint, I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those changes. And I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I've wanted to do, I think I always wanted to be more adventurous.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I get emotional, but it's like that's the kind of stuff that gets me going. We had another guy who competed at our event. And he was doing the push-up portion of the competition. It's the second year. And he was doing his push-ups. He wasn't going all the way down. So got down to like, I don't know, two, three inches away from his chest. So I go over to him.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I think that I'm a bit of a homebody, and I think that I might, my wife is a big traveler, and I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous. and taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go to. If I'm looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to want to do that with me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
So I think perhaps I wished I would have changed that. I could certainly use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy, and there's a lot of reasons why I haven't, but it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back to the same places all the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time. And if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be open to hearing the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think, is more of wanting to be heard. Maybe in a time when I was a kid of not being... I was a third kid, so I was probably not heard as much as I often thought I wanted to be. So
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
the opinions come out first as a reflex. But if I could do that, I still wish I could get a little better. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
I'm like, hey, dude, just still a little bit lower. Get your chest down. He says, I can't because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer and I can't get all the way down because of the port. He wound up dying two months after the competition. So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don't like, it's not just to go to the gym to get a six pack.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
It's going there for reasons we'll never know. And I think that those kinds of moments are more than touching to me, as you can tell. But they show the power of will. And that is something that we'll never be able to quantify. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Yes, I saw that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
Well, you realize what you're capable of too. Because I think we undersell our capabilities. And I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, when you're staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire than... again, what level of fitness you have, you realize that there's a much deeper well that you can tap into to do things that you don't want to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)
And I think the people that are lucky enough, like yourself, to have found that, have found the keys to the kingdom to be able to take themselves to another level of awareness and self-awareness that does... 100%, like you said, play out in other areas of your life.