34. Jason Ferruggia: Execution for Mastery and Longevity in Health and Fitness

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in healthcare. Before I introduce this week's guests, a quick story time brought to you by LocumStory.com. Today we'll be reading one job, two job. One job, two jobs, red blob, no job, elective doc, emergency doc, summon overstock, summon out a stock. This doc is too abused, this doc is utter used. This doc can't get sick, say, let's try brand new trick. For all the docs about to cry, here's an idea you can try. Look into Locum tendons assignment, a really great option you might find it. Don't forget Locum's pays much better, and you can find assignments in any type of weather. With all this new info, track up in your thinker, go to financialresency.com, slash LocumStory, and use your mouse to thinker. It's here you'll find the unbiased answers you're after, so you can decide if Locum tendons is your next chapter. This week's guest is Jay Faruja. Jay is a highly sought after world renowned, strengthening conditioning specialist and transformation expert. Over the past 25 years, he's personally trained close to a thousand athletes from various professional organizations, including the NCAA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball. He's also worked exclusively with Hollywood stars and entertainers. But in addition to being a world renowned coach, Jay is a entrepreneur and author and a speaker. Having helped shape the modern day fitness industry, Jay is a pioneer in every sense of the world, although he prefers the term renegade. But in this show, we touch on several topics pertaining to health and fitness. Some of the things Jay talks about include execution with every rep and achieving mastery despite being an expert. We talk about working with the aging athlete, which is a lot of what his practice entails today, but of course he works with people in all phases of life. We continue on the theme of longevity training and how Jane Corpus Cardi Vascular exercised into his training programs. If you've been following Jay's work, you know he's basically synonymous with the word relentless. In fact, that's tattooed in his arm, but contrary to popular belief, he's a huge proponent of not going hard all the time. Obviously, one cannot have a discussion about longevity without touching on nutrition. So we do cover that and get his perspective on how he tackles that with his clients and athletes. Ultimately, you'll notice that this episode is a mix of a bunch of topics consolidated into an hour. The reason for that is that I've been following Jay closely for over a decade and have had the chance to work with him early in my career. So selfishly, I took this opportunity to ask him as many questions I could and the things that I wanted to know about the evolution of his philosophy. My hope is that we'll have him back sometime in the future so we can dive deeper in some of these topics. But until then, you'll have to appreciate the small dose of the original Renegade, Jeffrey J. Jay, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Dude, super excited for this conversation, but first I got to ask you, man. I know we quickly touched on that you've moved quite a bit. Last I checked you were in Austin, but I understand that you moved again. Were you at now? Yeah, where am I at now? Austin was great. We just had to get out of Cali. Things were getting a little crazy. So we left. We went to Austin. We had some friends there. And it was good. You know, it was funny because when we first got to Southern Cali, it was like, man, about a year into it. I was like, I wish we stopped and lived in a bunch of places for like three to six months, but we're never leaving Cali. So it's too late that ship has sailed, but you know, then nobody saw 2020 coming. So now we got to do that. We lived in Austin for six months. Now we're living in Miami. I'm not sure what we're going to do next. I love it, man. That's awesome. So you're enjoying it there, huh? So far, it's good. Yeah. I think I'll always compare everything to Southern Cali living on the beach there. The 10 years we had there was epic, but it's good. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. So it almost seems a bit silly for me to ask this question because I've been following your work for such a long time. You're an author. You're a speaker. Recognizing I think in the field of health and wellness, but for some of my colleagues who might be listening to this, they might not know your story as well. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your kind of journey into health and wellness and kind of what is it that you do? Yeah. So I, you know, it was a typical, stereotypical kind of just skinny wheat. Well, first, fast and skinny fat, kind of just, you know, nerdy on athletic kid. And I always want, I always watched Saturday morning. I always watch wrestling. And even before that, I grew up watching superheroes, and I was like, man, I want to be one of these larger than life figures. And so I got into training around the time I was 12 or 13. And what happened to coincide with the time that my cousin who lived down the street from my started dating a professional wrestler, which was super cool. So I got to see him around all the time. And then it was kind of just, you know, once you get bitten by the bug, like that was it forever. I was always obsessed. And so in college, I started like interning in the weight room and switched my major. And then I got to burculosis, which was insane. Like sophomore year, I got to burculosis, I had never hurt anyone yet. And I had to go home and be on bed rest. And so for those six months, it actually turned out to be great because back then before the internet, I was able to just order every book and course the certification out of the back in the magazines. And I got my first certification started training people that summer when I was 19. For whatever reason, like I really wasn't that good at training people. And I was, I had no knowledge of business, but by the end of the summer, I was on pace to make six figures at that first year. For a variety of reasons that I could get into or we could do, you know, whatever, but so I was blowing up. And then a few years later, I decided to start writing. So in 2001, I started writing online. Then I started getting off for some old magazines. I eventually got my own column, the hard game or column that's fitness for years. And then just a backtrack for a second, the first couple of years I saved up every dime. And so that I was able to invest in some space, get it under, it was literally under the ground, it was in a basement. And every dime I made, I bought equipment with that money. And for the next 15 years, that was kind of what we did 10 years, 10 or 12 years in the original spot. And what we did was so different than what everyone else was doing. That's why I was able to have this massive growth because back then, you could only go to like valleys or goals or whatever and kind of do, you know, bodybuilding from the 80s, classes, whatever. And I came in when you'd walk in an NWA and public enemy was cranking and we had all these signs, like, you know, making you feel not welcome. Like we put up a velvet rope with an edge and an attitude, but it was so different. I think great business advice for anyone, any small businesses is this, make sure that this is not like, like doesn't look like sound like smell like tastes like anything else in your market with anyone else is doing, don't be desperate for sales. And we weren't like, if you came in and you didn't like it, we were like, you'll get to fuck out. You're not even walking in here, you know? And then what would happen is we bred such a culture with those guys that they would become the biggest walking billboards and when people would come in, like, you had to earn your way in and earn respect for those guys. So that was super cool and you know, that was kind of how the business blew up, the brick and mortar blew up and then getting into the magazines. I was putting out info that was really unique and unheard of at the time. I mean, we were doing sledgehammer and chains and saying bags and all stuff long before anybody else was. I was popularized the Underground Warehouse kind of gyms and I always say that I invented group training half jokingly half not because there really was only personal training or you did an aerobics class at Balli's, there was no group training with strength training. And I was really the first person that I knew of and started doing that simply because I had a bunch of high school and college athletes and I was like, man, they would have more fun if they trained together and then all of a sudden that just took off and that became the model for the rest of our days is kind of just, you know, group strength training. I don't know how to keep going for it, but that's kind of the early days. Where was that initial underground facility? Well, part of Jersey. That was in Jersey, more central Jersey. Gotcha. Okay. So, you know, I've heard you talk about the story of TB that kind of decommissioned you for several months and that kind of really spiked because you maximized that opportunity, right? I know you've talked about this at length and I always think about Ben Bruno, right? I know you know him well. He's got a similar story where kind of he had, he talks about a major back surgery and he kind of took that time to learn as much as you can and really that catapulted him and then he went on to get that internship with Mike Boyle, but I'm wondering, you know, not a lot of people maximize those types of opportunities, right? Where life just gives you gigantic lemons and you try to maximize that. What do you attribute that to? Like, was it a parent, a mentor that kind of gave you that, hey, like, you know, let's use this and learn as much as you possibly can and come out, rise from the ashes, if you will. Yeah. I guess, you know, probably some of that was instilled from my parents. I mean, I've just always been that way, you know, you know, that's why I have the word of relentless time. Like, I tend to never get too down about a loss or a failure because I know that like, recently I had a loss. I had a goal set and something went wrong. We did a few things and it was a loss, but I was so excited about it at the end of the week. I can't believe you're like, I was like, yeah, dude, you learned so much more from a loss. I love this. Like, now I know what to do better. So anytime I have clients or friends that get down, seems like the end of the world. And you don't want to hear it the first day or so, but you know, give yourself a little time, 48 hours, 72 hours later, it's like, look, you know, things happen for any cliche you want to think of. Things happen for a reason or the light at the end of the tunnel, the, you know, the rain, but all these things. And I do believe that anyone successful, that's one of the key attributes is, you know, when you're down, when you take an L, you got to just, okay, how do I learn from this? How do I get better? How do I keep moving? What's the silver lining? You know, because if you stay down with, you know, you're dead, you're dead in the world. You have to just keep moving. Right. So Jay, to, to dovetail on this concept of learning, right? You start at 12 years old. And what I'm interested in is, who are your mentors, right? What was your training program like at 12 and your how old now, 40, 47, all right? Do you have almost 30 years of experience, right? So I'm interested in your training program at 12 and in 30 years, what have you learned? Like, what was that evolution of training like for you? Yeah. So I mean, there was really no good information back then, like, there were, I don't think there were studies on strength training until like 2004 or five or something. Like, there was no study. There were studies on like Olympic athletes in power, but there's never anything about like, you know, muscle growth, hypertrophy, things like that, you know, certain things here and there. But so back then, all you really had was like bodybuilding fitness magazines, like Flex, muscle and fitness. And then what was good was finally in the back of Iron Man magazine. I can't even remember what the site was, but you could order older stuff from the 60s, from the 70s. And then eventually there was a guy who started selling like George Hackinchmit and Arthur Sachs and like stuff from 1906. And that's when I really started to make progress because at first I was a, you know, a hundred pound kid going from doing nothing to doing Flex Wheeler's 1992 workout two hours a day. It's like, I'm not getting anywhere here. So initially, you know, you didn't have a lot of good info and just it was just trial and error. And then speaking to people who knew more than you, which to this day still remains probably one of the greatest ways to learn anything. But then my, so my training of ball, so eventually, you know, first it was that high volume high frequency bodybuilding type of deal, then I got into all the old school stuff. And that made a huge difference, you know, more focus on way less focus on like isolation stuff, more compound movements, progressive overload, getting strong, like they never talked about that in the bodybuilding magazines back in the 80s and 90s. So really focusing on getting strong progressive overload, the right movements, not overtraining. That was a concept that wasn't really talked about that much. So though eventually, once I got into that, I found my way back into the magazines and kind of got into like Mike Menser and Dory Yates, who were more low volume progressive overload kind of guys. So you know, I literally have tried every single thing ever, you know, over those 30 years, high volume low volume, high frequency low frequency try it at all. And kind of, you know, like Bruce Lee says, like took what was used for objectives, not. I had a lot of success for years, though. I kind of got into powerlifting and Kirk Kawaski and Ed Kohn and their philosophies and Kaz Gokazmire, then that led me to Louis Simmons and Westside. And kind of a hybrid Westside model, conjugate model, was what we used for. That was the longest, you know, probably there was a good 7 to 10 year stretch where that was all we did exclusively. And I kind of modified it more for athletes and, you know, more functional stuff. And then it's, it's, it's continued to evolve, you know, over the last, especially since turning 40 over the last seven years. Now it's just more, it's a lot smarter. It's, there's way less risk involved, which honestly, I wish I knew when I was 27, if I could go back 20 years ago, because then you just feel so much better. Like a lot of times people see my stuff and they're like, oh man, I get it. I wish I knew this 10, 20 years ago. And yeah, so to watch, not just that you're over 40 trained like this, like you should start preventative, you know, preventative medicine, if you will, way back then. So now, so now it's just about execution, like execution, first and foremost, the right movements. So just because somebody, like maybe there's a hundred articles that say the top five movements are bench press, overhead press, squat, deadlift with a bar, and I don't know, cleanser something. It doesn't mean you should do them. Like everybody should do certain movement patterns, but everybody's got a unique structure that you need to figure out what works for you, what doesn't cause pain, what you can do, you know, that you don't wake up the next morning feeling like you've got hit by a bus. Like I'm 47 now and I wake up every day and like, wait, where's the pain? What happened? I don't understand. Knock on wood. What happened to all throughout my 30s, 20s, every day I was like, oh god, this hurts, this hurts, this hurts, you know? Because I was just training like an idiot, you know, as a meathead and it was just pile up more plates on the bar, let your form go to shit, if you did 315 for nine last week, you have to get it for 10, even if you only slept four hours and you're miserable and stressed out. So it's, you know, listening to your body, perfect execution, and then taking that process of achieving mastery to every single rep, like how can I do that, even though I've done this exercise six million times since 1987, how can I make it better than last week? How can I learn today? How can I, oh, if I depress my scapula a little bit more there, actually, that, my shoulder feels amazing. Or if I don't exceed my active range here, like every single day, it's that, that process of achieving mastery, how do you get better? And what's cool is when my clients finally get that and it clicks and they're, let's say they're in their 40s, been training for 10, 20 years, like, oh, dude, this is the most fun I've ever had in training. Now I get what you're talking about. I love seeing that. Yeah, Jay, you know, you talk about execution with every rep, right? I think I've, I've also tried this in the gym and it's just so hard to stay in that flow. Like, what do you do specifically so that you're thinking about every single rep? I mean, if you're doing one or two, I would say, okay, you know, it's really easy, especially if you're living heavier weight, but if you're going for a higher rep kind of workout, how do you stay in that type of flow? Well, first of all, I don't recommend higher reps. I've always said for years, we go back 20 years, I always say there's like a five to eight rep range sweet spot. And until you've really gotten to the point where you have technical mastery in sane levels of focus and the testicular for it to battle through, I said, 12 or above without letting any of those things break down without tapping out, then I would stick in that five to eight rep range because anything above, let's say six reps, there's always each rep above that. There's going to be a higher incidence of injury, a higher incidence of your form breaking down. It's harder to focus, and if you're really dialed in to make sure everything, maximal tension, like after six, eight reps, like that's really hard to stay focused there. So the injury risk goes up. And what I also think is higher reps cause more inflammation, they cause more systemic fatigue, a lot of things. So now I have clients yesterday, I was on a coaching call and I have a client who's close to 50 and he, just in two weeks, his average rep range before we started was like 12 to 15 because you hear, oh, he could older, do higher reps, and I was like, no, I believe the opposite. I want you to do fewer reps and go heavier, actually. And he goes, like, and I got goose bumps to the point where I mean, I love this so much that I almost tiered up as I hear him saying, he's like, dude, I have no joint pain in two weeks. And even I was like, I thought it was going to take a month or so. This is crazy. He goes, I used to have to wrap every single joint and walk around like the mummy goes, I haven't needed it. And I'm like, dude, that's insane. No, I know it. I can deliver these results. It's still like, that's unbelievable. So yeah, I love them and there's so much awesome stuff packed in there. And you know, I think that some of the stuff that I mean, of course, I've followed your work for a better part of a decade, if not more. And I felt like you've weaved in and out from being a specialist to a generalist, especially to a generalist and something that you talk a lot about lately is kind of training the aging athlete. In fact, part of your newsletter this morning, I was reading, it was training people over the age of 40, something that of course you can relate to from personal experience, but also seems like, you know, a lot of those folks have an affinity towards your type of training kind of what you've described. So I want to ask about modifying, I mean, you've addressed the volume component of it, making sure you have mastery before you get add on more volume before you can get more technical lifts and that kind of stuff. You know, one of the things that is super hot right now is people tracking HRV, all kind of these gadgets, whether it's different devices on your ring or, or excuse me, your finger or your wristwatch or whatever it might be. Is that something that you ever use? Do you use that type of data monitoring for feedback for maybe the aging athlete or you recommend that? I think it's a really good idea. I think it does depend on the person's personality. So what's funny is that we're discussing this because I have my woof on, which I had not had on four or five months. So what happened was that at the beginning, you know, they sent me one and I was into it and I used it for, I don't know, eight months or something like that. And then I felt like I was like, all right, I'm kind of dialed in. I don't want to get obsessed with this. I don't like to rely on technology too much or too many things. And then I saw a lot of clients that were OCD that were freaking out about it every day. And I was like, dude, this is adding more stress. It's actually not helping you. We kind of know what worked in terms of kneel timing, in terms of training and getting your sleep dialed in. Why don't you throw that thing away for a few months? And let's see what happens. And a lot of times we're like, yeah, I have less stress and anxiety now. So you got to kind of know your personality or who you're working with, know their personality. The reason I put it back on this morning was because I've been doing some things different with my diet recently. And it's actually not, it's not working, but I knew it wouldn't work anyway. It's just an experiment. So there's some things I want to tweak and optimize and just because we were super busy and stressed out the last two weeks, my sleep hasn't been great. So I'm just going to use it probably for two to four weeks as I get back on track here. And then I probably won't use it as much. But to your original question, I do think it's super valuable, at least for a period of time, at least for 90, like if you were just starting out, like let's say you guys whatever, 35, 48, whatever he is, and he hasn't really done anything serious in terms of a focused plan in a long time. I wouldn't have that be the first thing you do. I'd say let's keep it simple. Let's make some small, sustainable changes. Let's get you training. Let's tweak your diet a little, but you're not going to go from a crappy diet to a Mr. Olympia prep diet. Let's just sub out some of the junk and make that more whole food organic. Or even if I just said eat exactly what you're eating, but just make it yourself instead of getting it at a fast food place, like something super simple, sustainable. I do that. And then maybe, let's see where we're at in 60 days, maybe 90 days. Okay, now we're really dialed in. We're good. Now let's get one of these or get an aura ring or get Joel Jamison's Morpheus, something like that, and we could dial it in more. And then I think it becomes valuable where you can, you know, then the person in the client or even yourself, if you're not working with somebody, can prove to yourself, okay, kind of like studies, right? Like most people who are in the trenches, they do something for years. They talk to their colleagues. They know it works. And then we look at studies to validate the why and how it works. Whereas kind of newbies and guys who don't have a lot of experience will just go on pub bed and say, oh, this is how everybody should train or just how everybody should eat. It's like, now you got to have the experience first to understand the why, um, I don't know, I don't feel like I'm going in circles here, but I love that. I don't really want to emphasize that point. I think, Darshan, I've talked about this online. So I think a couple of years ago, I kind of wanted to optimize my sleep regimen, right? I mean, that's, in residency, that can be a bit. The challenging as a, you know, I think it pretty much any field if you're trying to be successful. It is. And so I, I know Darshan is a fan of whooping. I initially just wanted it for my sleep. So I actually invested in the ordering phenomenal to love it. And, but I haven't worn it in probably over about a year now because I went to your straight and I learned all the strategies that I needed to optimize and I knew what worked for me. I knew the temperatures that I had, right? I've got an ulla and those kinds of things and I knew what, but once I realized after maybe about a year of consistent using it, there was a point that I was getting up and I was running to my phone just to check my sleep score, what percentage I have a deep sleep, putting aside the inaccuracy of some of these tools, I think that's super important. It goes back to your point, but when, you know, if it's adding stress, it's kind of like the good hearts are, right? When that measure becomes a target, then it sees this to be a good measure. And if it teaches you, and the next time you're making a change and you kind of need that to kind of implement new strategies, and that's probably sufficient. And then ultimately, you talk about this a lot about how do you feel, right? That's, like, because I think the biggest thing is- If you wake up in the morning and you're in a beauty score, then you allow it to creep in and get your day, where every day, no matter what, I wake up and mentally I'm so fired up that I don't care if my recovery score is three, like I'm just dominating the first half of my day and I don't even want to see what's going to happen. Now when I get to my workout, I have the experience to listen to my body where if I start doing my ramp-up sets, my warm-up, and I feel weakest could be, okay, then I won't push it as hard that day. And you know what's interesting about this? This just happened to me last night, right? Actually, after a long day of work, a long week, actually, I wanted to go to gym last night, I got squats on the menu, and I didn't feel great going in. Went through my workout, went through plymatrics, felt a little bit better, but I knew I didn't feel great. I was like, okay, I probably shouldn't push it. I got a little back tweak right there. PR'd, though, last night, at 20 on the set. I still had probably two reps left in the tank, but at the back of my mind, I was like, you know what? I wasn't feeling great. Maybe I should just dial a bag. I haven't taken a day off in seven days. And I wonder, and I wonder if sometimes you know a little bit too much for your own good. You know what I mean? When you're invested in the science and that kind of stuff, and so yeah, I think that's a really important point to emphasize for people is don't let these devices kind of anchor you to not do well just because, you know, the score says something, because first of all, they're not that accurate to begin with. Yeah, right. That's so true. I mean, I'll say, I haven't. I think I've won this for a year straight. And for me, it's not because I'm obsessed with it. I'm very data driven, but I use it like you said to tune into my body. So, you know, there'll be days where I'll be at like 30%, right, recovery, or I won't even, I'll be at 80%, but I'll be breathing so heavily. And, you know, sometimes when you're at 30%, your sympathetic system just takes over. And you feel like you're going to crush it, the gym. But then it allows you to be like, why, why am I 30% what did I do last night that makes me 30% right? Is there something I change or tweak and then I kind of get connected by breath and I'm like, you know what, I think this is my sympathetic system just like revving up and I'm not breathing as calmly as I do. And that kind of changes a little bit what I might do with the gym, you know, be on that lookout for all right, let's not, you know, try to stay focused in being that flow kind of like what you talk about, but you're so right. I mean, it comes down to not obsessing over it, right, and still allowing your body to guide that you, you still might be able to crush it if you're at 1% to, to, to all its point. There's been times where I PR where I'm at 20 and I'm like, you know what? Fuck it. I feel great right now. Let's go on like a five more run and just do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, Jay, staying on this thread of training, right? One of the things that you talk about often is sequencing exercises. I think for my exercise science, aficionados, like, you know, learning the basic principles of strength and conditioning, it's, you're putting your compound lifts in the beginning and for those who don't know, it's like squats, dead lifts and stuff like that. You'll put that after you warm up, you know, if you're doing some type of plyometrics, then you'll put that heavy strength movements. You typically advise people to maybe throw a couple of glued hands in, maybe some hamstring curls and stuff like that, doing maybe isolation exercises prior to going through a compound movements. Talk a little bit about that. Like, what's the genesis of that and is that something that you recommend for most folks? Is it more for the aging folks? Like, what's that about? That's for everybody. For sure. I wish I knew that years ago. There's nobody that's going to feel good doing five minutes of mobility drills and then jumping on a massive compound movement. Like, it's just not going to happen. There's no one that I've ever taken through a session that's not like, that's the best I've ever felt. I, it's the first time I've done a squat variation with no hip or back hand. The first time I've done a compound pressing movement with no shoulder pain, it's the first time that my shoulders are almost didn't hurt on a, on a whole day, whatever. So the sequencing is, and what it does, too, is it eliminates the, not eliminates, but it reduces the amount of time you have to spend doing one of those warm-ups. Because you could do, like, on a squat day, you could do 20 minutes of band leg curls and body weight hip thrusts and all these things and split squats and then do an hour workout. But I'm looking for time, the efficiency. Most people are looking for efficiency, the most people are busy. So I want to reduce the warm-up time. So some of this just happened by accident, but I realized so, for example, and you could do this, even if you wanted to train full body, you would still have to have a, a focus for each day. So what I'll do, so, for example, on a push day, I'll never have anyone do a compound barbell press first. So we'll do, we'll do your basic warm-up however long that might be. And the thing about that is, if you need a 20 minute warm-up, something is radically wrong with your training. Like I'm 47 and I, I, I, I could walk into the gym today and go right to my first exercise and be completely fine and be pain free. I used to have to do 20 minute warm-ups in my 20s and 30s that have to warm up forever. Now I don't have to because my training is so much smarter. So, so for example, on a push day, I'm going to do something, I always want to do in the warm-up or as the first exercise, I always want to do something for stability and mobility. So you know, we want to mobilize the shoulders a little so we might just be doing something like scapular circles, internal external rotation. But you could do those, again, I could walk right into the gym if a flat dumbbell press in my first exercise. I could walk in, grab 30s, do that in between, I'll do some stuff and then I might do a half kneeling or even before I grab the dumbbells, maybe I'll do a bottoms-up press and I'm getting some stability stuff, maybe I'll do a push-up on a band, so I'm getting some stability stuff. We want to fire up stability and mobility first. That's huge. If you have more time and you need to foam roll or whatever, I have no problem with that, but make sure it's purposeful and targeted, don't just flail around, most people do. Know that, okay, I know the long head of my triceps are usually tight. Let me just roll those for two minutes each and then that's it. Do you have four dedicated minutes that make sense versus just rolling around with no idea what you're doing? So that what we'll do is we'll do something more joint-friendly that's not compound and I don't want you locked in, meaning on a bar you're locked in, even on a machine you're going to be locked in, unless it's a really well designed machine. So we'll do something like a dumbbell press or a ring push-up first, A, that mainly you get a pump, you feel better. It's not first, so you're just longer into your workout. Most people just notice later into their workout, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, even if you're an athlete and you play a sport, sometimes you notice, wow, by the second quarter, I feel so much better. I'm just more dialed in. People take more time. Your body takes more time than you think a lot of times. So we'll do something like that and then maybe we'll go to a press or maybe I'll do two things. They'll do a ring push-up and a dumbbell press, then we'll do some kind of barbell or machine press. You're going to feel exponentially better and at first, yeah, if you're comparing apples to apples, your weights aren't going to be as much, but of course, because you're doing it second or third, what happens is eventually it catches up, eventually your body adapts. So like on a whole day, I never want anyone going overhead first. That's a risky, precarious position. So we're not going to do chin-ups first. We're going to do one or two row variations first and be super cognizant of not exceeding your active range, meaning some people just won't overstretch everything on a dumbbell press. They're always overstretching everything. You want to know what your active range is, but we'll do two different row variations, get a pump, then we can go overhead and do a chin-up or pull down or whatever it might be. So stretch position stuff I don't like to do early. And then let's say on a leg day, getting a hamstring pump is going to feel exponentially better when you squat. So you can do band leg curls, you can see the leg curls lying, leg curls if you're strong, you do glute hands, you roll or leg curls, whatever, do a few sets of those, take it to another level, do hip thrusts, get a glute pump. Also everybody, I would say across the board needs to improve their ankle mobility, so you can do calves before you squat. Now when you get under the bar, you feel fantastic. And I remember watching, back in the West Side days, I would watch Chuck Bogleful, who's a record holding lifter at West Side. And typically people thought at West Side or any power lifting only, you just go in and you get under the bar and squat. That's your first thing. But Chuck would do like a million sets of glute hands, back raises, sled pushing and rows before he squat it, because now he feels fantastic. So walking in ice cold, no pump and getting under any kind of bar compound movement, you're never going to feel that great, you're always going to feel beat up, you're always going to get injured. And then for me, because I want to limit the amount of weight that I'm either going to put on my hands on a deadlift or on my back, I'll even do, I'll do leg curls, I'll do hip thrusts, and then I'll do a single leg squat variation, which could be a step up, a lunge, a squat, whatever, a skater squat. And I will do some kind of compound, two leg bilateral kind of movements, that could be a safety bar squat, that could be a hack squat, that could be a pendulum squat, whatever. And then there's then it's pain free and it's totally pain free. Yeah. And then even if you want to take that concept and train three days a week, would you like doing full body, like more frequency, have your push day and then throw in a row and a leg exercise at the end, a joint friendly one, have your pull day, then throw in a push up variation and a leg exercise, like maybe a sled push, something that's super easy on your joints at the end, the same thing with leg day, just do an inverted row and a rank push up or something easy on your joints at the end, that's a way to do it. That's why I don't like full body in general as a theory because you can't do the sequencing. And if you're 22 and you have no joint pain, it's fine, but as you get older and get more banged up, it becomes way more valuable. So you typically prefer push pull split or is it just upper lower type thing? I do push pull legs myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, because what I was saying before is it shortens your warm up because instead of having to do all those things in your warm up, they're your work sets anyway. Exactly. If you walk in, you do some ramp up and work sets on those exercises by the time you get to the next one, the next one, everything feels exponentially better. Yeah. So I think what we've spent a lot of time talking about is kind of what I'm hearing is it's all about longevity training, right? That's what you're exceptionally passionate about, that's what both of us are all here about. We know a lot of these issues are chronic diseases, not only cardiovascular disease, kidney disease stroke, but also musculoskeletal problems, right? That's both of us are musculoskeletal specialists here. And we see a lot of people with OA and Knees joints, things that you're talking about. And it's also kind of like a buzz word nowadays, right? And so one of the things you've recently talked a lot about is you don't do a lot of cardio in the traditional sense, whether it's steady state, maybe in high intensity interval training. And you know, there was a period, a long time ago, maybe you had a whole cardio book called the Renegade Cardio. And as I recall, most of the stuff was hit training, right? And coming back to this concept of efficiency, most people tend to prefer that because you don't have to sit on a treadmill for a long time or elliptical, whatever, insert your favorite device. What we're learning from the literature though, that this concept of zone true training or traditionally aerobic training is better when we look at mortality long term. What are your thoughts about that? How do you recommend it? I'm not even curious to. I know you mentioned that for a while, you didn't do any specific cardiovascular stuff. But when looking at for longevity, being healthy in your 80s, 90s, what are your thoughts? Do it. And in one sentence, do a ton of walking. That's the one sentence, but I think so for longevity, that would be my number one thing is do a ton of walking, hiking, get out in nature for all the other benefits, right? Don't be inside on the stair climber, that would be insane. But in terms of, you know, hit versus regular cardio, what's too much, typically from the dawn of fitness, people have done way too much cardio. You don't need anywhere near as much as you think. That causes more overuse injuries. That age is you faster, free radicals, overuse, joint injuries, all the things. So the most misunderstood form of exercise to this day, which sounds crazy to say, but it still is strength training, like people don't understand. The three of us understand, but the average person on the streets doesn't understand. They still think they should be doing hit classes or spending five hours a day, you know, on a stair climber, whatever it might be. So I would say if you dialed in your strength training and you did a lot of walking, and then if you want to get on a, get on a bike or, you know, a row or whatever for 30 minutes, I think you got to build, you know, we could go back to great spring, spring coaches, like Charlie Francis or whatever and talk about you. You need to have your aerobic face and build that and then put in some anaerobic stuff, but it's crazy to take an average person who walks off the street and goes into a class and they're doing the most high intensity intervals. It's like, dude, you say in bulk, wouldn't even be able to do that. What are you doing, you know? So you need to look at, you know, what is the biological cost of your training across the board? Everything you're doing. What is the biological cost of it? And a lot of times, like we want strength training to, we want training, fitness, exercise, whatever you refer to it as to improve your life. Most people go into it with that, but the things they're doing, that's not really going to improve your life. That's actually aging faster in every single way. So you got to be smarter about it and overdoing cardio, no good. Now, again, for longevity, I do think, like I said, walk a ton, get outside and do, you know, two, three days a week, you should get your heart rate in that, you know, that mafatone 180 minus your age range, I think is good, super easy because what people don't understand is we are all stressed out of our minds 24-7 to varying degrees, especially in 2021. I think everyone since March of 2020 has had a higher level of anxiety and stress than they had before, no matter who you are, no matter how mentally tough you are. So you need to realize that you're stressed because of that, because state of the world, you're stressed because of work, your body is stressed because you're not sleeping the way you should be, your body is stressed maybe because you've made you travel too much or whatever it might be, we have all these stressors, trainings just another one of those stressors. So if you're lifting four days a week hard, now you can do, hit the exact same thing as a lifting session, as a squat session or deadlift session. So you've got to ease into that. So build your aerobic base first with super easy low intensity stuff that, you know, again to your point of longevity, but he has been proven now to, you know, have, have stress reducing benefits, it helps you recover faster, it helps with cognitive function, obviously cardiovascular health improvements, things like that, ease into it, and then if you need to do hit, I don't think anyone needs to do it quite frankly. If you want to improve it, you know, for your athleticism, whatever, great, definitely do it. You don't need it if you just want to feel better, look better, be in shape, improve your blood profiles, improve your testosterone levels, things like that. And for most people, I would say start with one session a week, like 10, no more than 20 seconds hard. Most people overdo it. They don't understand, they'll do, like I'll say, hey, look at Olympic sprinters, they go 10 seconds, like you're saying bolt with sprint for 10 seconds, then rest five minutes. Why would you, any shredded, all those guys are shredded, why would you think you're going to do a 40 second interval and rest for 20 seconds, like a Tabata protocol or something like you can't do that, that destroys your body. So I'm all about keeping things like smart and making sure there's a reason for it and longevity is part of the program. It's, it's funny, you say that I'm a sprinter at heart. So I'll do, I'll be at the gym doing 20 second interval, run like a 200, and then I'll just take like six minutes, just go down like two miles per hour, I think you just get stairs at the gym and people are like, I'm going to beat this guy, like this guy thinks he's, like you guys have no idea, and it's exactly what you're saying, you know, and there's always that common thought that look at the body types on the cardio machines and look at the body types, you know, people look in the mirrors, lift and weights, which one you want to do, right in the end, right? Yeah. Well, Jay, on the note of things that we need, we all know that one of the pillars of health is going to be nutrition. Now, we're not going to dive into nutrition because we'll be here forever, but I do want to get your general thoughts. I think that, you know, a lot of times people will come to me for pain, insert pain, right? And you know, we'll talk about what kind of treatment options we have. Of course, therapy, which I look at as rehab, which I look at as exercise as kind of what it is. We'll talk about that. And I imagine people come to you a lot of, for the similar reasons, right, that they want to feel better. And you'll use training as one tool, but we also know is what we put under a mouth is adversely or positively going to affect their performance inside the gym, outside the gym every which way you can imagine. How do you broach the topic of nutrition with somebody? Because maybe somebody comes to you and when you evaluate their current program, they might be doing a lot of things right. But the biggest lever for that person might be what they're putting in their mouths. How do you brush that topic with them that, hey, I know you came to me for X. We need to address all of, maybe, most of energy is on Y right here. Yeah. I mean, it is nutrition is the most important factor, really. I mean, sleep, I would say, is the most important factor, then nutrition, then we can worry about training. Those things aren't filed in. Let's not even worry about it. Sleep would be first. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's a cliche, but you are what you read. You are what you eat. Food is the best medicine. All these things. So I just try to explain to people that your gut health really controls everything. So let's, as much as we can, eliminate the foods that are going to be known disruptors to gut health. But, again, if someone comes in and they're eating five epic muffins for breakfast and a milkshake, like, I'm not, again, I'm not going to do a complete 180. Let's say, let's have, we could clean this stuff up. Can you make that at home? Can you make it with more high quality ingredients? Can we cut out the industrial seed oils? Can we cut out the sugar and the refined foods? Like, I have a guy who lost 100 pounds and he ate pasta twice a day for a year. He's super Italian. He's in his 50s and he's like, yeah, I just can't give up pasta. I'm like, all right, we don't have to. Let's do it. And he was eating like gluten wheat pasta and he was fine and then eventually I got him to switch over to like rice pasta and stuff and then he felt even better. But you know, it's going to be really hard if you try to make someone do an extreme, you know, 180 from the get go. So we try to just make some smart changes. Let people know about the impact of gut health and it really, that influences everything. Oh, you have joint pain. Let's improve your gut health. You have skin issues. Let's improve your gut health. You have cognitive function. You're immune system. You're sick all the time. You've got to improve your gut health. So you know, just kind of getting people to understand that and then helping them make smarter choices. And then of course, the easiest way to convince anyone to get by and to influence, to get them behind what you're doing is for them to prove it to themselves. Eat the way I'm telling you for 30 days and tell me if your elbows and shoulders don't feel better. Tell me if you're not having that weird little runny nose, if you're not getting brain fog, if you're not having to run to the bathroom after you eat certain foods and they're like, dude, I never felt this good. Then they're born in. You know, then you got them forever. And for me, you know, for anything across the board, like if you looked at anyone's business, you would say, okay, there's 99, there's 100 things you can do, do like these five and cross off the other 95 and do them repeatedly forever. If you want to be a really good athlete, what are the five things you should do forever? So I like the same thing with nutrition, like just keep it super simple. Here's a small pool of foods that you should eat all the time repeatedly. Get used to them, you know? And then eventually, once you do that, you don't really have cravings for other stuff anymore. You know, the first 30 days are going to be hard. Maybe it's two weeks, everybody's different, but you're going to have these cravings for junk food. And then eventually it goes away. You don't care about it anymore. Feel better. So the foods I like to recommend for most people is the starting point. It's like a good paleo kind of general, maybe paleo plus rice, you know? But again, if someone's eating gluten and sugar and dairy all day, I'm fine with that too. You need it up a little bit. And it's slowly over time. We'll eliminate some of those things. But for me, if I want to feel best, it's me, a small amount of cooked, really well cooked veggies, fruit, gams, rice, avocado, that's basically it, you know? Right. I love that. It's really about meeting the patient or the client where they're at, right? If you completely, if you're on the opposite side and you're saying, well, this is kind of where you need to be. I need you to jump in there right now. That's a really easy way not to get by and to lose that client or patient. Totally. Another thing that's trending right now is intermittent fasting, right? We talk about this a lot. And I think it's probably more trending because I think the medical literature is fine. You caught up to it. Some people might not know. You wrote a book on this over a decade ago. And the premise of that was that time restricted eating, right? You had talked about, if I remember correctly at the time, you mentioned that it's for most people, it's best to anchor their, you know, fasting window to their sleep and start eating maybe at noon and last meal would be eight. That's kind of what you had said in the Renegade diet, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, some of the, I think it's the opposite of that now. So that's my question for you, right? Some of the evidence that recently come in and a lot stemmed from Dr. Sushin Pond's work is that we're more insulin sensitive at nighttime. So I'm wondering, I know you recently mentioned that that's not something that you are doing personally now. And if you want, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about that. Mixed with stress, high stress environment. But just the insulin sensitive portion, if somebody, if that is a strategy that works for somebody, like, what are your thoughts in that? Is that something that you've changed your mind about curious things? I have a few different thoughts on this. So first of all, just to start with, what we talked about is eating, having your, eating window start later in the day, if we really look at evolution, you would have done, you know, kind of what you were alluding to there, which I was saying, I think it's the opposite, eat throughout the day, throughout daylight, and then once it got dark, you'd stop eating. I think, even back then, I would have probably said, that's a better way to do it, just from a social perspective, it doesn't work, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now, in terms of fasting for the first four hours of your morning or six hours of your morning or whatever, I still think that's okay if that works for you. For a lot of people, it's great. It's just not because there's anything magical about it, like you could say autophagy and all these things are happening and whatever we can argue if that's really happening or not. But it simply just reduces your eating window, so you don't eat as much. The problem is if you're someone who's chugging tons of stimulants all day, you don't sleep well, you're an overthanker, you have high anxiety, you have high stress, it's just another stressor, which we've all been talking about before, to be cardio and all these things. We don't think about all these things as stressors, like we think losing your job or super hard workout as a stressor. We don't consider all these things, so not eating all morning, you send yourself into that cascade of stress hormones, of cortisol and adrenaline, which is why you feel great. You feel like Sam Canis and you're like, oh my, I'm freaking out, that's because, again, you're just running our cortisol and adrenaline, which is not great. And Darcy alluded before to sympathetic and parasympathetic, most times today, most people are in that sympathetic, parasympathetic flight all the time, and you get addicted to it, you kind of love it, but things start to break down, eventually, that's not going to end well for most people, eventually you're going to get sick, you're going to get burnt out, you're going to get hurt. So we got to be more on the other side and do things, live in a way, eat in a way, consume less stimulants, things like this, sleep better, that are going to put you more in that state. So again, if you're the right person, the right personality type, it's probably great. If not, you're going to have, if you're at the opposite end of the extreme, I have personal friends and clients that are really high, strong, really amped up, and I go, dude, are you nuts? You can't be doing that. You've got to eat the second, your feet hit the ground in the morning. And so I get a big meal of meat and potatoes and eggs and everything in the morning. And within a week, you say my life, I feel so much better. I used to be like on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the full noon all day. So now I've now forgot the original guy and I think I went off on 10 different things there. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No, I'm just saying you went. You went. Go for it. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Back and forth. Back. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I know that you just moved to an bend, Like you could say, oh, if I want to live to 110, I'm going to eat an ultra low calorie diet and fast all day and do all the things. And I'm like, what quality of life is that? And I think you're a little young for that. The rocks eating 1,000 grams of carbs a day, I don't think he's losing his memory and he's falling apart. You got to take into consideration what your lifestyle is like and all these things. Like I said, because like we said, it just become this OCD horrible loop that you get caught in. Yeah, I just wrote a tweet on this, right? Like so many of us are focused on living to 110. But if you're not living and loving your date, if you're not loving your day to day, what's going to change when you're 100? Like why would you want to live longer for worse, right? And mentally emotionally. So I guess I want to kind of shift in terms of how do you talk to people? How do you converse with people and influence this change with them, right? That conversation with that person you're just talking about, what are those approaches you have because for me, this is a huge passion of mine is consulting, changing people's lifestyles, but for the right reasons and actually gauging to their psychology. So I have to fight my nature as an aggressive Northeast Italian and kind of come down to the level. But I think it's super important for anyone who's doing something like that to really spend some time mastering people's skills. So read how to win friends and influence people, but not only just read it one time, like read it 50 times and then make it your thing to become a student of human nature. Like why do people do things? What influences their decision? Why do they think this way? And if you've been paying attention since March 2020, you can learn all you need to know about influence and human nature and fear and group think and all these things, like all the lessons were there since March of 2020. But you have to be again aware of it and like, oh, I get it, always be learning. Anytime you're out for coffee with someone, anytime you go to a party, anytime you're at an event, just be hyper where studying what's going on and take notes and really become that student of human nature and why people think certain ways and why they do certain things. I think that's a skill that's so essential. I think now in our current landscape because so many people are gonna have to have so many crucial, important, uncomfortable conversations for now, for the foreseeable future, is become really good and skilled at influence. Like, influence and persuasion are gonna be the two skills of the future. So, any Achille Dini stuff. Achille Dini has influence, which is a little bit of a harder read and then he's got, yes, 50 scientifically, proven ways to be influential, I believe it is. It's a great one. The Soulful Art of Persuasion by Jason Harris. Any kind of books like that are going to be really important to help you. Not only with clients, with patients, but just, again, there's gonna be a lot of things that people are fighting for and that are important that you wanna have crucial conversations is another one. I think you can never go wrong. Just getting better at this and learning all the things that can go into that. Yeah, so Jay, I mean, you talked about the pandemic, how just, you know, it's completely changed the way that we practice, right? I mean, it's certainly changed the way that we're practicing medicine, more teleguided technology. And I think maybe even the, and the just health and wellness fitness industry, I think a lot of the online business coaching model, I mean, you've been doing that for what, like maybe a decade now? More than that, maybe? Well, I started selling stuff online in 2003. Okay, so almost two decades. Yeah. Would you say that the majority of your coaching is now online, or do you still have a record? Yeah. So, you know, I think, again, because of social distancing rules, it's kind of that slope has gone, you know, exponentially has risen, right? A lot of people are jumping into online coaching, you know, social media coaching, influencing, quote unquote, and it can be a powerful tool, but it can also be harmful, right? Depending on your relationship with it, you know, much like anything else, as opposed, nevertheless, we have a lot of people jumping in, maybe because the barrier to entry is so low, but there aren't a lot of people who have been able to be successful, right? Whether it's because of connecting, like kind of you just touched on, or for whatever reason. I mean, so, I know you speak about this, you yourself coaching stuff on it, so I don't want you to disclose all your secrets, but I guess what I'm asking is, you know, what's the recipe? What are maybe a few things that these folks who are trying to jump in are missing the ball on? You know, why are there so many people jumping in, but very few jiffy rouges, if you will? So, so in other words, what do you think it takes to be successful with any kind of online coaching? Yeah, yeah, that's a much, you said it much more eloquently than I did, I guess. So, first of all, you got to figure out, if you're just general right now, like you're never gonna make it, that was a bad, that was always a bad idea, but you could get away with it 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You got to be ultra specific. So, if someone sold a book on time management, they could sell that for 19 bucks, but if it was time management for health professionals, maybe it's 99 bucks, but if it's time management for shift working ER doctors or something like that, now it's like a thousand dollar course, because it's so specific, so I'm speaking to the audience. So, you want to get ultra specific on what you do, who you help, what their pain points are, and be able to kind of articulate those things, because again, if it appeals to everyone, it appeals to no one, and people these days, they're overwhelmed with so much information, they're scrolling all the time, they're getting bombarded with commercials that they're watching TV, so it has to speak directly to that person, their pain point, their problem, and why is your solution better than everything else? And then you never want to be a commodity, no matter what you're doing. Being commoditized is just a race at the bottom, so if you play the price game, you'll always be dead in the water, unless you have the budget of a Nike or a Coke or a Walmart. For the most part, all those type of businesses will go under, they will go out of business, where no matter what happens to the economy or the world, things like a Mercedes-Benz or Louis Vuitton, or something like that are always gonna do well. High price services, high price events are always gonna do well, because those types of people that have a lot of money will always have a lot of money and always be able to afford what you're offering. And there's always gonna be three things, no matter what happens, no matter where we are in the world, no matter how that's the economy, people are always gonna wanna spend a lot of money for health, wealth, and relationships. There's lots of pain with those three things. So, you gotta consider that, if you just come out and go, oh, I know how to help people lose fat, it's like great. So, does every other guy on Instagram and 50 guys just walk down the street, walk pass on the street, no two, and they all have a $19 a month app for me to buy. So, how do you really differentiate? And then I would say to the second thing that's really important, I did this from day one in my gym, which is why we were successful. Like I said earlier, it's gotta look, smell, feel, to completely different, but it's gotta be personality based. So, you have to double down on your personality, what makes you unique, what are your weird quirks, what are you interested in, people wanna buy, people don't generally, especially nowadays, they don't wanna buy from a big corporation or a faceless entity, they wanna buy from you, because they know that you like the same music, and you like the same jokes, and you make the same references, and you battle against the same things. All this is super important. So, you gotta double, triple down on your personality, because at the end of the day, that's what makes you unique. It's customer experience, sure, that's one huge way to differentiate, but your personalities is what's gonna get people in the door. So, I think, I mean, I could go on about this forever, but... No, I absolutely love that, man, but I do think that there's one thing, I know this is not what you're saying, but one thing that's worth clarifying for people is that, you know, we've had many folks come on here, and just in our conversation, talking about the importance of being a generalist before we become a specialist, right? For people in the medical industry, like some of the older physicians that you work with, like the trend that, if you don't know this yet, now is when we're coming out of residency, most people end up going into fellowship now. It's probably been the trend for maybe the last decade. So, people who were practicing maybe the last 25 years ago, they'll kind of poke fun and say, oh, okay, so if you see the right arm, you don't see the left arm, you know what I mean? Like, making joke and people being sub-specialized, which is kind of what I'm doing, and Darshan might as well. And, you know, I had David Ote, come on here, I think a couple of folks are gonna talk about the importance of being a generalist, and I don't remember where I heard this quote from, but it's definitely, maybe it was Boyle, maybe it was Cressy talking about, you know, you need to understand the entire dimensions of the box inside before you can learn how to step outside the box. I think one of the things that people will kind of forget is, I gotta think outside the box, I gotta think outside the box because that's what's gonna sell, but they have no idea what the box looks like on the inside, and we're thinking all that. And so, I'm curious to get your thoughts on that, actually. You have to be a generalist at first when it comes to anything. If you're gonna start your own business, you have to know how to do everything, you have to know how to write a copy and do all the things. So, with any kind of health fitness-related endeavor, you have to know a decent amount of our training, a decent amount of our ability, a decent amount of our cardio conditioning, if you're gonna train athletes, and you know all that stuff, nutrition. But eventually, you need to hone it in and specialize on one thing. I mean, there's very few people that are gonna be ultra successful as a generalist. Like, if you want to get your teeth fixed, you don't just go to your local doctor, you need to go to the dentist, and you have a specific problem, you're gonna go to an orthodontist, and then even more specific, there might be somewhat higher-up that specializes in this type of, in Visaline, for this type of person. Like, you're always gonna trust the specialist more. And inside my industry, looking at colleagues and friends of mine, it's like, the recommender was here for years when he did what we all did, and then he said, no glutes, and then his business 10x. And Pressy was here until he said, oh my god, forget all that generalist off on the shoulder guy, and then he said, took shoulders to baseball, and now he's a strength coach for the Yankees. So there's never an example, unless you don't know what the fuck you're doing, and you screw it up, but there's never an example of someone who goes from a generalist to a specialist and doesn't make more impact and more income. It's always the way to go long-term, but to your point, don't do it at first. The same reason I wouldn't advise a six-year-old kid to try to be Tiger Woods of the Williams sisters, play all the sports, and then when you get to 16 or 18, holding on one, that's the proof and path. Those two examples are the exception to the rule. I love that. So coming back to the online business thing, there's a lot, the positive that can come from it. Clearly, you are the epitome of that, but what are the downsides to it? What do you not like about the whole online fitness, health and wellness model? If that's all you ever did, you wouldn't have the real world experience, so you would have no idea what to do and problems come up. You would have no understanding of all the things that people do in the gym. You don't develop the necessary, it's hard to develop relationships online. It's hard to, I mean, quite frankly, if the three of us did this in person, Darshan, I would have a much closer relationship forever versus this where the reality is on Zoom and online and everything, it's not even the same stratosphere. It's just, it is what it is. Like you can't connect as well. And again, you just don't get the same experience. Like in the gym, you're reading someone's body language, you're seeing the mistakes that they make, and you're seeing two where, oh, when I say that, they have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, I gotta dumb it down a little where you're just spitting shit out online. Sometimes you don't have that real world feedback. Like I'll even be a dinner with friends sometimes and I think they've heard me say the same things a million times, but I look at them and they're like, oh, that blank stare, they don't know what I'm talking about. I gotta jump this down more. So I think there's just so many essential life skills and the people skills that I'm talking about before and just what goes wrong, you don't learn that online. So anything you're doing, I think is always gonna be better if you have some real world in-person experience. Absolutely, I mean, there's so many things that you just cannot replicate through a screen and you set us up perfectly. Well, man, this has been absolutely incredible. I want to thank you so much for your time, dude. I mean, it's just, I've been looking forward to this such a long time. It's, I can't remember how many years it's been since we've finally had a face-to-face, again, just because you're doing so many amazing things and you're super busy, guys. So I do want to thank you for your time. I think this has been super informative. It's been fun, but before we let you go, I want to ask, man, you've been crushing it for the last 25 plus years. And I've known that for the next 25 years you're gonna continue crushing it, but I do want to ask you, man, what's next for you future directions? Something you're super stoked about for the next year or two years that's coming up. I think nothing shocking kind of just what we discussed is I'm still trying to just get better at the basic things every day. So I want to continue to grow the podcast and continue to grow our coaching program. I just get even, you know, just better at those things. I love speaking and doing events. I just had the chance to speak recently in Seattle. It'd been a long time since I was on a stage. So I love doing that. I constantly want to get better at those things. And I just wake up excited every day. Not for some new grand thing that's coming. It's like, man, I could just get better at all the small things that I do repeatedly every day. I can make people feel better. I can improve my relationship building skills. I can continue to do what's not natural for me is to try to be better at communicating and being more charismatic and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Cause, you know, for 30 plus years in my life, I was super insecure and shy and socially awkward. So I love pushing myself every day in that. And then I know that without even meeting dorsh or anyone, he has just so does everyone. Anxiety, stress, something he's unhappy about, something he's insecure about, something he's struggling about. And so when I wake up every day, I'd like to kind of have that external focus on other people where for so many years, it was like, oh, how can I get better? How can I make more money? How can I get more jack? And I've kind of, you know, taken, there's so many quotes about it where, you know, Muhammad Ali says, you know, service to others at the rent you pay for your room here on earth or Dr. King talking about anybody could be great because anybody can serve. And that doesn't mean like sometimes people misinterpret that like, oh, I don't have all this money to donate or I don't have that much time to go work with the shelter all week. Well, it's like, no, I could serve someone by making them smile, you know, I could serve someone or, you know, be of service to them just by engaging them just by looking making eye contact with them and, you know, telling them a joke or noticing something about their sneakers or something and talking about them. So I wake up excited to do that every day to make other people feel good. When I go to the gym, I just want to get better every day. Nothing like huge or anything. I just like to focus on simplicity and basics and how do I do these things repeatedly but better every single day, you know? Jan, yeah. I just want to thank you as well, man. I mean, that's an underrated perspective that more and more people in this world need, man. Well, getting 1% better every day, waking up with gratitude and waking up and how are we going to change the world just through service and it's a small thing. So thank you so much for that. Again, anyone that comes onto this podcast and brings up books, it's not a like, it's an automatic love. So thanks for doing that. Where can people find you, man? I know you've got a lot of social media, you've got a podcast, list those things out for us. Jay.fit is the website Jay.fit and then most active on Instagram, that Jay Farugia and Renegade Radio on iTunes. Awesome, man. And then the last question we ask everyone, man, is how do we add the help back in healthcare? Oof, yeah, how many hours do you got there? That's usually the response we get. Yeah, I mean, dude, I don't know. And it would be, it would probably be a totally different answer in February of 2020. Shit, man, I don't know, is it too late? I don't know. It's like, I think the reality, it's like anything else, people have to take personal responsibility. Long before 2020, I would always say, you know, no one's coming to save you. Like nobody owes you anything. You have to take responsibility for everything, for your help, for your fitness, for your finances, for your relationships. Like Jaco talks about 100% extreme ownership, wherever you're at in life, it's on you. And now this might be, for some odd reason, that's might be controversial to say nowadays, but a simplistic view of how your immune system works that nobody wanted to talk about for the last few years is like, I know every time I've ever gotten sick, I knew why I got sick. I wasn't like, wow, what happened? It was just here, because I barely slept more than four hours the last three nights in a row. I drank a bottle of vodka. I was stressed out of my mind. My recovery score was three, but yet I trained like a savage for three days in a row and took four flights during that time. Yeah, of course I got sick. So like if the three of us were out, we're hanging out at a party. And I grab your drink by accident and drank it and you were like, I'll do it, I'm sick. If I hadn't done any of those things, I'd be sleeping well, managing stress. I'd be like, oh, that's cool. I know 100%, I'm not gonna get sick. Maybe a little bit for the most part, we know. We know why we get sick and why we don't. But if Darcy were like, dude, I'm sick as a dog and I was like, oh, I just did all the other things. I slept four hours late. I'll probably be second, 48 hours, you know what I mean? These simple things, like you need to take responsibility for everything first and foremost. I think that's been forgotten about a lot. And then, again, my answer in January 2020 would be like, man, let's teach people nutrition, let's teach people all these things instead of just being so motivated and inspired and financially motivated to just prescribe drugs, drugs, drugs, you know, let's go back to, you know, what's opportunities to people like that talked about. But I don't know, guys, you're in a better position to fix it, maybe than I am, I don't know. Right now, it's not looking good. Now, man, I think the basics is driving home and as most people have seen by the logo, I think kind of the things that we've touched on, you know, you got to address the basics first and nobody does that better than you, man. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, man. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Jay. If you like what you heard, I highly recommend you go check out his show, The Renegade Radio. You can also find him in all social media platforms and I promise it'll be worth the follow. Also, for my doctors, remember, the story has changed. Visit financialresancy.com slash locom story to see if a locom tenon assignment is right for you. It's here you'll find the unbiased answers you're after so you can decide if locom tenons is your next chapter. And before you sign out, please remember the important disclaimer that everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine nor should it be construed as medical advice. No physician-based relationship is formed and anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health-related issues. However, if you enjoy the show, please be sure to subscribe, review, and share with anyone who you think will gain value from this. 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