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Mark Wulfe:
From The Aasgaard Company studios in beautiful Wichita Falls, Texas... From the finest mind in the modern fitness industry... The one true voice in the strength and conditioning profession... The most important podcast on the internet... :adies and Gentlemen... Starting Strength Radio.

Mark Rippetoe:
Welcome to Starting Strength Radio. We're here every Friday with very, very important things to say to you. And if you have problems understanding that these are very, very important things, that's your problem, not ours. Because everything we tell you is terribly important. And this is a good example of it.

Mark Rippetoe:
We're here this week with Stan Efferding. We're going to talk to Stan for quite a while about lots and lots of different things.

Mark Rippetoe:
But first...Comments from the Haters!

All right. These are especially good this week. These are all coming in as a result of the...no, no, there are a variety of things. But Gene Mean says - this is in response to the how to deadlift video - "I ripped my toe once. I was running barefoot through the yard and ripped it on the edge of the sidewalk. I wonder how Mark ripped his toe.".

Mark Rippetoe:
Gene, you realize that's the first time I've ever heard that. Man, I'm surprised that in my 63 years, no one else has ever thought of how that, you know, little play on my last name could be so significantly hurtful to me.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right, "Rippetoe," this is about Olympic lifting, "can you tell me why" there's two h in front of why, "you feel like you are entitled to an opinion on Olympic lifting when you are just a fat, milk-drinking Texas who never achieved anything in oly lifts?"

Mark Rippetoe:
It's so good. Oh, God. Yeah. You need to start. You need to start doing the same thing. It's just too much fun.

Stan Efferding:
I've got some great ones.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Yeah. These this, you know, the bottom 3 percent will type anything on YouTube.

Stan Efferding:
My entire podcasts would just be this.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh yeah you could. You need to start with three or four of them just to just to share the fun with all these other fucking people.

Mark Rippetoe:
I like the part with the two Hs before the why because Yankees pronounce this "Y." "Y" is a letter of the alphabet. "Watt" is a unit of energy. "Were" is the thing before wolf, right? That's like the shape-changer designation. What else? "Were?" "Watt?" "Y?" "Win." Win is what you do at the casino. You know, when you go up to win your rent at the casino. Right. That's what win is. So you all just, you know, take your Hs and shove them up your ass.

Mark Rippetoe:
"I've coached at 900 deadlifter who couldn't power clean 265. So good luck with your deadlifting." Conclusive proof that strength has nothing whatsoever to do with the Olympic lifts.

Mark Rippetoe:
Never enough says, "This guy needs some functional training and some knowledge on nutrition to." Spelled "t-o.".

Mark Rippetoe:
And our famous, very popular, "Why are Mark's nipples hard? Is he some kind of pervert?"

Mark Rippetoe:
I can't get enough of that. I can read that every week. It's just so fucked up. Oh, God.

Mark Rippetoe:
So that concludes this week's episode of Comments from the Haters.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we put reverb behind that so it sounds real dramatic.

Stan Efferding:
Fantastic.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, God. Stan, thank you for being here, man.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stan was doing a seminar in Fort Worth this weekend and we asked him to drive up to Wichita Falls, which is...we'd take is a tremendous favor because driving to Wichita Falls is always a pain in the ass, especially if you're already in Dallas. But or Fort Worth. But it doesn't but take an hour and half to drive down there. So Stan's here. We appreciate it, Stan.

Stan Efferding:
Appreciate the invite. Thank you.

Mark Rippetoe:
Absolutely.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stan is one of our favorite people in this industry. He's an honest man, which is rare in this particularly fucked up industry. He only deals with facts. He only deals with things he absolutely knows to be true. He does not bullshit anyone. And and we like his meals, you know.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stan is the originator of the Vertical Diet and his company EXCELEV8 is - look, these people up online - they sell frozen, prepackaged meals for a very reasonable price. It's cheaper to eat there than to go out and eat. The monster mash with potatoes is my favorite. It warms up in about six minutes in the microwave and you can eat it every day. You don't get tired every good.

Mark Rippetoe:
How did you how did you come up with this idea, Stan? Because this this is brilliant. I mean, we we're considering... we are going to put these- when we get enough gyms to do it - put these things in the gym and a little freezer and sell them out of the gyms, because I'm convinced this is the... This is a good idea. And a damn good idea.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, I know. I'll give you the long story as long as we're here talking about it.

Mark Rippetoe:
We got time.

Stan Efferding:
I'll give you the long story. And you know, to be honest. My grandfather used to call it shit on a shingle. So it's not like...

Mark Rippetoe:
Really like creamed, chipped beef on toast kind of a...

Stan Efferding:
It's been around for a long, long time. Stan didn't invent beef and rice, but I did trademark monster mash. So I do kind of I am kind of the inventor.

Mark Rippetoe:
You had any trouble with the song people?

Stan Efferding:
Not yet. No, I didn't...

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, I'm sorry I brought that up.

Stan Efferding:
But I'll tell you kind of how it came together, to be honest, is many, many years ago I had a surgery for sleep apnea. I had the uvula lasered off, right, which didn't fucking work.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, never does. I know three or four people who've tried that and it doesn't help at all.

Stan Efferding:
But it's the most miserable experience because they actually just burn off your uvula. And so your throat has...

Mark Rippetoe:
A third degree burn in the back of your throat.

Stan Efferding:
Yes. And it goes on for like two weeks. You can hardly eat or drink anything.

Stan Efferding:
So I was originally using two percent milk and I put it into one of those sports bottles that has the tube that you can squirt into the back of your throat. So ike, it kind of bypassed the whole swallowing thing for the roof of the mouth. And after a while, I figured I needed to get some more nutrients. I don't want to lose weight, of course. This was many years ago and when the scale meant everything.

Stan Efferding:
And so I took a look at I remembered that that Derek Poundstone's chicken shake. Remember how he used to take boiled chicken and put it in water and blended it?

Mark Rippetoe:
I heard about that a long time ago. But I thought what kind of an insane person would drink a water slurry of blended chicken? You got to be pretty damn serious.

Stan Efferding:
I tried it once.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah.

Stan Efferding:
Once.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Did it stay down?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, no. I got about one or two drinks into it and choked it back up. So it was horrendous. I do know that that other people tried it. Maybe they had better luck than I do.

Stan Efferding:
But so I thought, well, maybe if I ground up - this is crazy, but - if I ground up beef and mashed it up and mixed it with bone broth of all things, I could create a slurry that I could then squirt through a squirt bottle. This probably sounds terrible. I turned this into a very successful meal prep business. It started out of a squirt bottle, a Gatorade bottle with a hose. And I thought if I put all that together, maybe I would be able to get that far enough to the back of the throat that it wouldn't hurt the lining of my mouth.

Stan Efferding:
And I was able to manage to get something put together and mashed up and in such a way that I could more easily eat it with less pain. And what I noticed was I think particularly it was because of the bone broth is in retrospect, but also because of the the beef was so finely ground, my digestion significantly improved. And I had always struggled with digestion problems. My trigger was vegetable oils. Which once I took those out, I...

Mark Rippetoe:
Just not good for you.

Stan Efferding:
Not good for you. And so I just noticed that my regularity was excellent. I wasn't bloated at all. I felt great. And so...

Mark Rippetoe:
More surface area available to your gut. So...

Stan Efferding:
Absolutely.

Mark Rippetoe:
Makes perfect sense.

Stan Efferding:
Yep. Yep. And so when the throat healed, I just included this mash. Of course, I didn't make it such that you could squirt it out of a bottle anymore, but I would now make beef patties or bison patties and I would grind them and I would put a little bit of...just mash them up and put a little bone broth in there. And I might mix in some scrambled eggs. I might mix in a little spinach and peppers.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right, just various versions of it. Sure.

Stan Efferding:
And everything subsequently kind of became a mash.

Stan Efferding:
And it traveled well too. I was able to put these mashes into a thermos and keep them hot for many, many hours. When I was traveling, I could always have the meal I wanted to eat. I wasn't eating the airport food and I wasn't eating, you know, room service or pizzas, etc. when I was traveling a lot. And it was always just so good on my my stomach.

Stan Efferding:
I also noticed that I was able to eat more of it more often. Which for a power lifter, a strong man, or somebody who hasn't taken a lot of calories without having all the associated bloating, etc.

Stan Efferding:
So, you know, I utilized that with my athletes, obviously with Hawthorne and who was somebody who being north of 400 pounds had to put down a lot of food. And same with Brian Shaw. And these guys had a lot of digestion problems, much like I did throughout my career when I bulked up to over 300 pounds.

Stan Efferding:
And part of the heart of the hardest things to do is get enough calories. And to do it without all of the adverse effects. Of all the diarrhea and bloating and problems that we just endure because we have to get the calories in. And usually we're chasing pizza, pasta and pancakes. And I just found that this alternative, this mash with foods that were easier to digest - incorporated lots of white rice with that which was easy to digest - didn't give you gas and bloating. I was able to stay hungry, I was able to eat more, provide me greater energy. I didn't have the digestion issues. I was regular. All of those things is something that my athletes realized as well. Hawthorne, Shaw and the rest of the guys.

Mark Rippetoe:
So ease of digestion is kind of the is kind of the trick here.

Stan Efferding:
The big thing

Mark Rippetoe:
Especially if you're trying to get 5000 calories a day. It's hard to do without a lot of fat. If you're not... the white rice is an interesting because all the you know, the conventional wisdom is, is we got to have X amount of fiber every day. But, you know, I think if you're running 5000 calories of anything through - constipation is probably not a problem.

Stan Efferding:
No.

Mark Rippetoe:
No. And irrespective of the amount of fiber you're getting.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And I think there's different kinds of fiber. I think some is lower gas than others. I'd make that distinction in the Vertical Diet that I'm just really cautious about using low FODMAP foods, those are those fermentable oligo-, di-, mono- saccharides. The the high raffinose foods, the indigestible fibers that gas up a lot in the large intestine. I try and avoid those.

Stan Efferding:
And so I do select kind of first and foremost - and this is whether it's for a powerlifter, a strongman - I have Nadia Wyatt who is competing in the Miss Olympia in a couple of weeks, who's only 115 pounds, uses the exact same diet. She'll... and last year she had used a completely different diet. And she has more energy, is carrying more muscle mass. She's leaner. She has less bloating and gas. She doesn't have the digestion issues.

Stan Efferding:
So I really focus on that first, because people, I think tend to overemphasize the value of fiber to the exclusion of recognizing what its potential downsides are with certain foods can can cause aggravation.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, in fiber for a sedentary individual is probably, you know, a necessary dietary component, obviously. You know, you've got to keep things moving. But for an athlete who is already moving way more than they probably need to be. You know getting enough calories - we can't talk about this enough. I mean, these idiots here don't understand that training that hard requires -if you're going to get recovered - requires 4000 calories a day at minimum. And for a big man, five or six thousand calories a day and it's a problem. It's just a problem.

Mark Rippetoe:
They are all thinking about abs. We are thinking about muscle mass and a maintenance of muscle mass and the growth of muscle mass. And it takes a lot of calories. And it becomes a giant problem. The milk for a novice underweight kid is the best way to get a whole bunch of calories, but for an advanced lifter, an advanced athlete, your approach to this is far better, far better.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, an advanced athlete that's already taking in bunch of calories is not going to be able to add a gallon of milk to the diet and have anything good happen because of all of the all the the sugar in the milk.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah it can be too much. It's going to be hard for people to digest that much. And so I. And for me everything is definitely individualistic and it's dose-dependent. Some people have a harder time digesting particular foods than others and the quantity matters with just about anything. And so I'm cautious.

Stan Efferding:
And then how the foods are prepared. So not only will I try and prioritize the low gas foods that are easier to digest, but other foods may be able to be prepared in such a way that they create less problems. An example that might be whether or not you have raw vegetables as compared to cooked. Even the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower which are high FODMAP which can cause digestion problems...

Mark Rippetoe:
They need to be cooked.

Stan Efferding:
Particularly in the quantities that some people recommend them for physique and figure and bodybuilding people just for appetite suppression.

Mark Rippetoe:
Half a pound of raw broccoli a day is going to be a problem for anyone that's not a cow.

Mark Rippetoe:
But I want to ask you about how you first... you developed this in your house at the kitchen and you developed these recipes yourself, right?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
How did you do the bone broth?

Stan Efferding:
Well, I just purchased it. I looked and found one that was low in FODMAPS. Some bone broth are made with vegetable oils. Some are made with a lot of garlic.

Mark Rippetoe:
So you bought the bone broth?

Stan Efferding:
So I bought the bone broth...

Mark Rippetoe:
And added it to the meat and rice. And just messed with the quantities and stuff and got it the way you wanted it to taste.

Stan Efferding:
And I thought it was was delicious. And so I went to... I partnered with really a large, fantastic company that has been in business for 20 years and serves over four million meals a year nationwide. And I sat down with their chef and their owner and I... we sourced all of the same stuff that I was getting.

Stan Efferding:
The bison that I was getting from Costco, which was originally from Great Range out of Colorado. We sourced the original ingredients that I really liked the most, that I had the best luck with, that I enjoyed. Same with the bone broth. We made sure that it was actually boiled bones and not just boullion cubes and chicken flavoring, etc.

Stan Efferding:
And we know we... so we homemade our own bone broth is what we did. And we cooked everything without any vegetable oils, which is hard to do because a lot of companies that source their food, it comes with the vegetables in the food.

Stan Efferding:
Eggs, for instance, is one of them. Usually on these - for most restaurants - they have a five gallon bucket of eggs that they ladled from when they cooked food for you. If you go to Denny's or IHOP.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you're ordering scrambled eggs.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, generally they're not cracked eggs. And those eggs that you source - we had a very hard time sourcing eggs that didn't already have... wasn't already cut with canola oil. It was already already in there.

Stan Efferding:
So we had to find ingredients that of course didn't have the FODMAPs, didn't have the vegetable oils in it and to prepare them without those things. And they did a fantastic job in creating this being an established company with the kind of infrastructure that they had. They had multi-million dollar German-engineered, moisture-controlled ovens. They had a modified atmospheric pressure-packaging machine.

Mark Rippetoe:
Where are they located?

Stan Efferding:
They're in Idaho. Yeah. And they they also had flash freezers. So the food would would get frozen so fast that it wouldn't, wouldn't get freezer burned. You wouldn't get the moisture problems. And then, of course, they had great relationships for being able to ship this food nationwide.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, we've ordered them here at the gym for months now. And the only trouble we've ever had has not been from the - not been from Stan, certainly not been from the suppliers - been from the shipper. Every once in a while UPS - now, this is going to sound crazy to you people that deal with UPS. Every once in a while, UPS will fuck something up. I know you've all gotten the package in with the standard toe-shaped dent in the box.

Mark Rippetoe:
We ordered a bunch of meals one time from Stan. They ship Monday and Tuesday. If you order on Friday they're not going to ship till Monday or Tuesday, because they want to get it to you by Thursday, Friday at the latest. And it comes in a very nice, heavy styrofoam container. When that food gets here, I order on Saturday or Sunday, they ship Monday or Tuesday. It gets here Thursday. We get it off of the truck. Open it up. And it is frozen absolutely solid. It is... there is... do not hesitate to order this because you're afraid it's going to show up thawed out.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, UPS one time fucked up an order. And the thing that was supposed to be delivered on Thursday got here Monday. And their tracking information, said it was delivered on Saturday and that's a two bald-faced lie. It got here on Monday. And we opened it up thinking, oh, this is all gonna be spoiled. And it was still mostly frozen a week after it had been shipped. Six days after it had been shipped. Because it left - the tracking information - these guys, when they say they're gonna ship it on Tuesday, it leaves Tuesday.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it showed up mostly - partially thawed. And we re-froze it. And it was no trouble at all. That's how good the shipping on this stuff is. So not hesitate to order this. If you guys are concerned about having it arrive spoiled, it won't. They've got this down. Order some food from EXCELEV8 and you will not. You will not....

Mark Rippetoe:
And you know, the damnedest thing about this is those monster mash with potatoes, the the regular monster mash with potatoes or something like 10 dollars and 48 cents a piece. Is that right?

Stan Efferding:
They're different prices for different things.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, but the monster mash with potatoes is not even eleven dollars. And you can't go out and eat lunch in 2019 for eleven dollars.

Stan Efferding:
I think that when you're talking about, you know, is 900 calories too.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, it is.

Stan Efferding:
That's one of the things that I wanted to do, of course, was be able to provide people more value for their money, cost per calorie.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is very high quality stuff. And, you know, I've always made hamburger meat and rice. And I've always loved it. You know, all my life I've eaten hamburger meat and rice. I mean, you know.

Stan Efferding:
So you invented the Vertical Diet.

Mark Rippetoe:
I know a guy that would claim to have done so were I in my position.

Stan Efferding:
So there you have it. There's the Vertical Diet infomercial.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes. Well, but that's fine. We say it's worth promoting. And I want you to let me know if orders take off after this show airs.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. I'll owe you.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I'll understand how big a bill to send you.

Stan Efferding:
Some profit.

Stan Efferding:
Here's the big thing - and I've said this before - I did a video about supplements and I said they were convenient and they taste good and they're not better than food. And so I'm a food guy. Everybody knows that. I'm the guy that said shakes are for bakes, eat steaks. And that doesn't mean that supplements are worthless, but for the most part, I focus on food. And then making it convenient and taste good.

Stan Efferding:
From what all the research says, and it's quite clear, that that the most successful dieters are are those that comply with the diet. Compliance is the science. And so I just try and make it easier. We also know from studies and research shows that those people who meal prep have a much higher success rate than those who don't. Whether we...

Mark Rippetoe:
Have spent all that money.

Stan Efferding:
Yes, indeed. But whether we...

Mark Rippetoe:
By God, they're going to eat it.

Stan Efferding:
Our goal is to get people to to prep their meals. And I do this... the figure, fitness, bikini, bodybuilding industry, they do this really, really well. One thing they do well, they do a lot of things quite terribly, but they walk around with tupperwares all the time.

Stan Efferding:
And it may seem ridiculous to the general population, but they get success from that because diet is probably 99 percent...

Mark Rippetoe:
Of that particular sport.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And it just - weight loss in general, just calories in general. People running around on their treadmills everywhere, not understanding that that's a very small contributor to the overall success rates.

Mark Rippetoe:
Utterly useless.

Stan Efferding:
The diet is critical.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're burning electricity, not fat.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. So, you know, and same with the big guys that are the athletes that I train along with the dieting competitors. Just most of what I've been successful with with guys like Hawthorne, Shaw is just helping with the logistics. Just managing getting them a meal, you know, that's good.

Mark Rippetoe:
How can I eat six times a day?

Stan Efferding:
When they want it. Conveniently. Especially when they're traveling as much as they do. Because I travel a lot - almost every weekend. I've been in 10 countries and 40 states in the last 18 months. And almost every weekend I'm on an airplane, but I never miss a meal. And I'm always eating the food that I want because I've prepared ahead of time. I use my thermos, throw the frozen meal preps into my checked luggage. I stay at a place with a fridge and a microwave. And I always - on a clock, like I want to - I'm always able to eat the food I want when I want.

Stan Efferding:
So then when I go to the gym, I have fantastic training sessions. I don't ever show up tired and underfed and underslept and underhydrated.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. As everybody that that trains when they travel has experienced.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Like this morning we trained and I felt fantastic. I was fortunate to be able to get that unbelievable lamb last night that you barbecued, which was amazing. Was that a 10 pound chunk of lamb that you put on there?

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably five or six pounds.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. That was incredible.

Mark Rippetoe:
Lamb ham roast. It was pretty good.

Stan Efferding:
It was outstanding.

Mark Rippetoe:
[To the audience] If you're lucky, one of these days, maybe I'll have you out to eat.

Mark Rippetoe:
But yeah, that's... You know, the fascinating part about training hard is that a lot of us have given ourselves permission to eat just exactly like we want to because we train. I think that's important, because I like to eat. I really do. I know I eat a little too much, although I don't eat nearly as much as I used to. Food is important. Food's important to me. Hell, we have scheduled seminars for the express purpose of eating at a restaurant there that we like.

Mark Rippetoe:
My God, we used to go to New Jersey to a CrossFit gym - and it was a pretty good venue - but the reason we went there about three times is because across the parking lot from this place, there was a Greek restaurant that just brings tears to your eyes it's so goddamn good.

Mark Rippetoe:
So food's always been important to me and it's been important a lot of the people we associate with and we all eat real well.

Mark Rippetoe:
And supplements, the supplements are easy to get used to, you know, because they're so damn convenient. Now, whey protein is a fine thing to make a shake with if you haven't got time to cook a meal, OK. But I don't use whey protein. And we're selling a whey protein product. But I don't use whey protein, if I can eat food. Sometimes it's not possible to eat food.

Stan Efferding:
One hundred percent.

Mark Rippetoe:
Sometimes you can't leave. Sometimes you have to avail yourself of the convenience of making a whey protein shake. And when you have to do that, the protein needs to be good. It needs to be something you can digest, which means it's whey protein isolate, not concentrate, and it's useful as a supplement. But a lot of people over the past 15, 20 years, the supplement, the industry has done a marvelous job of normalizing supplements instead of food.

Stan Efferding:
Beyond that, making it seem as though that's going to be giving you an added benefit over a meal. And it's certainly never that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Supplements are...there's a role for it, you know. We just had our buddy Mike Matthews on two, three weeks ago, Mike, sell some supplements, a really high quality supplements, but Mike will tell you the same thing - they supplement food. And I think that a multiple vitamins, a good idea. I've always thought that fish oil is a good idea. I think some vitamin D is probably good for most people to take on a regular basis. But when you start eating bars and drinking shakes instead of food, you're you've been sold a bunch of bullshit by the people who were selling these products and I think that's something you need to revisit. Food is the deal and it should be the deal.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just quantity. I know I work with some some large athletes and I've, you know, done bodybuilding and powerlifting for 30 years. But it's it's also the quality of that food, not just quantity, it's quality. And what I find in the dieting industry as a whole and this is through the competitive dieting industry, bodybuilding, figure, physique, bikini is they tend to overrestrict things when they start cutting out calories. They cut out entire food groups or maybe even entire macro nutrient groups.

Stan Efferding:
And I think it has a deleterious effect. I've seen in many cases where people have cut out a whole...., cut out. What did your diet coach always tell you? And most people in the industry knows. Cut out red meat, cut out dairy, cut out fruit, cut out salt. It's like the first four things they knock off the list. And especially for women, when you cut out red meat, well there goes your iron and your B12.

Mark Rippetoe:
You are going to suffer from doing it.

Stan Efferding:
You're gonna suffer anemia. Anemia is going to gonna definitely be one of the problems. And of course, amenorrhea - cessation of menstrual period - takes place. Then generally they'll tell you not to eat whole eggs, but you'll eat egg whites. The biotin's in the egg yolk - skin, hair, nails. And the avidin in the egg white bind to biotin. And if you don't give it to it and the yolk, it's going to take it from your body. And so you end up with biotin deficiency.

Stan Efferding:
And along with the dieting and the adaptation and excessive cardio, your thyroid starts to slow because they're not having you salt your foods so you have no iodine if you were using iodized salt. Then your hair starts falling out. And that's tragic for these these women who are dieting for these shows. And then they end up at the clinic and they're getting a shot for iron and B12 and generally T3 as well. They're replacing what they took out of the diet.

Mark Rippetoe:
In an industry that purports to represent health. I... you know...

Stan Efferding:
That's that's generally what happens. These people end up becoming deficient in micronutrients and they have obviously all of the problems associated with that.

Stan Efferding:
Plus, the biggest thing about dieting in general - I wont' even you talk about competitors - and this is any diet. This isn't just the vertical diet, any diet, whether it's paleo or keto or whatever diet you choose. The best diet's the one you'll follow. Just about any diet will provide weight loss. Six out of seven people go on a diet, lose weight. But greater than 90 percent of the 95 percent of all gain it back.

Stan Efferding:
The two main reasons they do that is because they get hungry and they get tired. If you didn't get hungry and tired or tired, you wouldn't need to eat more. And they get hungry or tired because they're micronutrient deficient. Because they have cravings for sugar when they're really sodium depleted. Because they don't get adequate potassium, so they have cravings. They don't get adequate iron or B12 so they have energy problems with energy.

Stan Efferding:
So it's really important that that that you use the foods that have the most micronutrient density. And even in the studies, when you compare - it kind of goes on to supplements as well, that the supplements don't offer micronutrient density. They don't have the cofactors with the vitamins working together. Even when they study, say, egg white protein against whole egg protein, they see that the whole egg, when you equate for protein and calories, the whole egg - and the presumption is, is that that because of the increased micronutrient density - provide better outcomes.

Stan Efferding:
And this they did this study was done on I think it was men over 60 in particular, but they had both significantly increased muscle mass gains and and largely significant increased strength gains as a result. And it was an equivalent protein intake.

Mark Rippetoe:
Whole eggs.

Stan Efferding:
Of eating the whole egg - micronutrients.

Mark Rippetoe:
So you know, I'm paying a 1.38$ for 18 large eggs at Wal-Mart. $1.38. I don't know what it is where you live, but eggs are cheap and eggs are good.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I mean, Stan, I don't know about you, but I like to heat up, pan with and put butter in it like a pretty good little slug of butter in it and fry eight eggs until the white gets crispy and brown around the outside.

Stan Efferding:
Over easy, maybe keep the yolk a little.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, keep the yolk. I want the yolk runny.

Stan Efferding:
People complain that you can oxidize those fats if you cook the yolk too hot. And so it's kind of nice.

Mark Rippetoe:
I want it runny. It tastes better.

Stan Efferding:
That's kind of the way it do it.

Mark Rippetoe:
My God. That's good.

Stan Efferding:
It's like nature's multivitamin that yolk.

Mark Rippetoe:
Egg yolk's a wonderful thing. Egg whites are...I'd just as soon eat packing material. I really would. You know, those little styrofoam peanuts. Put a little salt pepper on those and they're egg whites.

Stan Efferding:
Well, we've been sold a bill of goods. Some of it's been because of the bad information that we've got, the stigma against egg yolks and cholesterol, which has historically been just absolutely bad information.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes. Our friend Ancel Keys. That's destroyed so many lives.

Stan Efferding:
That persevered for over 40 years.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's still going on. You and I were talking about the ADA the other day who is still -still in 2019...

Stan Efferding:
The AHA, American Heart Association.

Mark Rippetoe:
They did. Yeah, and both of those...

Stan Efferding:
USDA is finally, with their new recommendations just a couple of years ago they finally said very quietly - hasn't been much fanfare - that cholesterol in your food is no longer a nutrient of concern. Which means there is no upper limit.

Mark Rippetoe:
Which means there really never was.

Stan Efferding:
No, there never was.

Mark Rippetoe:
There never was.

Stan Efferding:
Procter and Gamble...

Mark Rippetoe:
And the American Dietetic Association still want you to believe that dietary fat causes heart disease. And it's...you know, I mean, there's not ever been a study that shown that.

Stan Efferding:
No.

Stan Efferding:
And even the long term studies - Framingham didn't show that. It never did.

No, it didn't.

Stan Efferding:
And the... on the eggs, there's been lots of studies. And I looked deeply into this because I promote eggs for... because I... for everybody that on my diet. I suggest that they eat eggs if they can tolerate them. And usually if someone can't tolerate eggs, it's the white that's causing the problem. And if I can get them to separate the white from the yolk, they have better digestion of just the yolk to the exclusion of the white.

Stan Efferding:
But there's been some great research burn patients as these studies have been done on burn patients. The more egg yolks they eat, the faster they recover.

Mark Rippetoe:
Burn patient studies going back 50 years have have shown not only that high levels of dietary protein provided by three dozen eggs a day

Stan Efferding:
Three dozen. You're right. 36 eggs was in the study.

Mark Rippetoe:
Not only does this promote tissue regeneration much faster than a lower protein diet, but that they have never, ever shown that that high feeding of whole eggs causes an increase in serum cholesterol. It doesn't happen.

Stan Efferding:
No.

Stan Efferding:
And we've known that for years and years and years. We've got studies on burn patients that indicate this. And it's just amazing that the popular culture continues to swallow this bizarre lie about dietary fat.

Stan Efferding:
It's especially pervasive in this in this bodybuilding, figure, physique,bikini industry. They'll take the egg yolk out and then they'll have them put a dollop of peanut butter in for "healthy fats." With high polyunsaturated and incomplete protein. I just I don't for the life of me, understand how that ever happened.

Mark Rippetoe:
Hydrogenated vegetable oil. Look for that ingredient on your peanut butter. Don't eat it. If it's on your peanut butter, don't eat hydrogenated vegetable oil. Do you know what that is? That's Crisco.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's that's where they take soybean oil and bubble gas hydrogen through it and create essentially an unoxidizable fat product. And it's, you know, it's wonderful if you want to preserve the peanut butter, but it's not food.

Stan Efferding:
It's not something cheap.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's not food. Don't eat that.

Stan Efferding:
So. So I definitely don't have any of that in the diet. So these are these are whole foods. You know, what's sad about it is, is that the vertical diet is what people should be eating.

Stan Efferding:
And the only reason that that I present it as such is because they're not eating those foods. I for 30 years - since 1986 - have competed in powerlifting and bodybuilding and seen the worst diets. And some of the things we talked about in the results, the manifestations of all of these of the side effects of these diets, particularly the bodybuilding, figure, physique, bikini with the overrestriction, the metabolic adaptation. Now your micronutrient deficiencies. We talked about hair loss and of course, a lot of muscle loss and anemia and all the rest of those things.

Stan Efferding:
But on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the powerlifter guys. And I've you know, I've done this myself through personal experience. Many, many, many, many times. I've been up over 300 pounds and dieted down to under 5 percent body fat to compete in bodybuilding.

Stan Efferding:
And both ways I've done wrong many times and I had to learn this lesson personally. We didn't have the internet back when I was in college. And even now that we do have it, I'm frustrated that this this isn't more common knowledge and people are still suffering from these problems.

Stan Efferding:
But on the other end of the spectrum, we've got the bigger guys suffering from metabolic syndrome. These are the guys using peanut or pizza, pasta and pancakes to get as big as they possibly can. They end up accumulating too much bodyfat. They end up with fatty liver disease.

Mark Rippetoe:
Which is which is a disease of sedentary people. And it can be brought on by diet, too.

Stan Efferding:
Too much... too much food. These folks...

Mark Rippetoe:
Too much bad food.

Stan Efferding:
Too much bad food bad.

Stan Efferding:
So that's when Thor came to me three years ago. When Arthur came to me, he said, Stan, I'm getting fatter. I'm not getting stronger. And that was a concern.

Stan Efferding:
And I looked at his weight and his body composition. It you know, I think you would you would be able to easily conclude that he had probably had some of those same symptoms. So we did blood tests. And what we decided is in order to remedy this, we would diet weight off of him. He was four hundred and thirty five pounds at the time.

Stan Efferding:
So we brought him down to three ninety five and you got quite lean. His blood sugars came down, his hA1C all the way down to 5.1. His fasting glucose was 83, which is really reasonable. His insulin was down under five. So he was in good shape. His triglycerides came down. So which is kind of a leading indicator of fatty liver diseases.

Stan Efferding:
Fatty liver doesn't necessarily show up in a blood test. You don't see that. You probably have to get a sonogram to really identify it. And you can be accumulating fatty liver for many, many years without showing an increase in blood sugars. Probably the first thing you see is the triglycerides pop up and you'll still have normal blood sugars.

Stan Efferding:
So you kind of got to keep backing into the equation and see what are the leading indicators and how can I, you know, get in front of this. But if it's in existence, then you have to fix it. You've got to drop the weight.

Stan Efferding:
We introduced choline, which is a really critical nutrient that helps either reverse or prevent fatty liver disease.

Mark Rippetoe:
Which is present in high levels in egg yolks.

Stan Efferding:
There you go.

Stan Efferding:
So you would think. Here I get a guy that's got that's got metabolic syndrome and we're dieting him, but I'm throwing whole eggs at him at the same time. And you would... some people would think to restrict those because they're fatty or their cholesterol. Cholesterol is not the problem. Fat isn't the problem. Insulin resistance is.

Stan Efferding:
So that's what we did. And so we got him. So where he was starting to...he was insulin sensitive again, started partition nutrients better. And then we started climbing him back up. From 395 all the way to over 450. hA1C still at 5.1, fasting glucose still at 83.

Mark Rippetoe:
All of his metabolic markers are now normal even at the heavier bodyweight

Stan Efferding:
Even at the heavier body weigh. Because we didn't go back up with pizza, pasta, and pancakes. Obviously, we kept the choline in. We did the 10 minute walks after meals. We got a CPAP to remedy some of the sleep apnea, which was a huge cause of a lot of these problems, blood pressure included.

Stan Efferding:
And so he was able to get much stronger and get back up to a heavier weight and still partitioning nutrients, still being insulin-sensitive.

Stan Efferding:
When you get fatty liver and when you get insulin resistance, the food that you eat just gets stuffed into fat and it doesn't go to muscle as well as it used to be when you were insulin-sensitive.

Stan Efferding:
So I did this throughout my career. I would diet down, I would bulk up, I would diet down, I would bulk up. What I found - and the reason in retrospect that I think I was able to do so well for so long as I started to improve my diet over time - was because these periods of dieting down re-sensitized my body. And then when I would rebound, this rebound effect has long been known for many decades. People talk about the fact that immediately following a bodybuilding show you can put on a massive amount of weight. But if you do it right, you can also put on a massive amount of muscle. If you don't just load yourself with ice cream and pizza.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, you've been catabolic for, unfortunately, for the duration of of the lean out. Duration of the cut you'r catabolic. And suddenly we've got a whole bunch of growth potential again. Because now we're anabolic again without drugs. We're now anabolic as a rebound from the catabolism.

Stan Efferding:
And you're insulin-sensitive and you got great muscle memory. So you're gonna get that back really quick. And if you if you fuel that, then you can rebound. So, many times throughout my career as I started to work my way up to being to powerlifting and bodybuilding, I was able to - every time I got done with a bodybuilding show - I was able to get an extra 10 pounds onto my powerlifting weight. Bodyweights. And then I would diet back down to a bodybuilding show and I'd be a little bit heavier than last time.

Stan Efferding:
And then I would rebound and I'll be a little bit heavier than last time. And this kept going all the way throughout my career. And so I worked my way up from 140 in college to ultimately competing at 275 in powerlifting and over 300 pounds in the off-season.

Mark Rippetoe:
What was your show weight on stage? The best, the heaviest you ever were.

Stan Efferding:
254. But a one year prior, I was 225 when I had done the overrestriction. I had done the egg whites and the chicken breast in 2008 and done some cardio to get ready for the show. Lost a ton of muscle tissue, was on stage at 225. Now, granted, I was meeting a weight class, but I'd never been over 234 on stage prior to 2008.

Stan Efferding:
Then I trained with Flex in 2009 and we did it very differently. I didn't do any cardio. Almost four pounds of steak a day. He had me at times doing up to 600 grams of rice a day because on days that we train twice a day, we had an incredible workload. White rice. And I was 254 that year, one year apart after over twenty years of competing.

Stan Efferding:
At about the same body fat. I will say that I had lost too much muscle previously when working with Flex. I held on to a lot more. So it's not like I gained 30 pounds of muscle. I definitely did gained muscle, but my off-season weight prior to 2008 and 2009 was really different by about eight pounds.

Mark Rippetoe:
So your cut involved far less catabolic muscle loss during those circumstances.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. I've tried keto many times throughout my career. I've always lost a lot of weight and a lot of muscle, got very tired and lost a lot of strength, which I think is directly related to muscle loss of course. But with Flex we didn't do that. I kept carbs in, I took the cardio out.

Mark Rippetoe:
It has certainly been my experience that keto is a wonderful way for sedentary people to lose much body weight, but you can't train on it.

Stan Efferding:
It's really hard to.

Mark Rippetoe:
Hard to train on.

Stan Efferding:
A small group of people who may become fat adapted, who may benefit in endurance sports in particular. And that again, that's not all. That's a small part.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just real good oxidizers.

Stan Efferding:
Yes, those folks. But if but if it's an an anaerobic sport, if it's something it has requires a lot of force production and strength and then you're going to want those carbs in there for your hormones. This has been well studied. So this isn't about a keto versus carb diet in particular, but it's about it's about trying to think about...

Mark Rippetoe:
How do you apply it to the individual?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. What are their what's their goals, you know? And even then, if you want to compare a very low carb keto diet to a low carb diet just for general health, for people with insulin resistance, they can get equivalent outcomes. But what I find is that the low carb folks can comply with the diet better than the very low carb folks.

Stan Efferding:
And this has been studied extensively as well. Compliance on a keto diet is poor. That is the only reason...

Mark Rippetoe:
Because it's unpleasant.

Stan Efferding:
It's unpleasant and because a large percentage of those people don't necessarily adapt or don't even survive the three or four week adaptation period. And if you let them eat, ad libitum. If you put them on low carb diets or even a keto diet and they just leave them alone over the course of the year, they'll creep back up to 150 or 200 grams a day. But if you keep them at, you know, around 100 hundred fifty grams, they can sustain that for a longer period time.

Stan Efferding:
And this is strictly in terms of measuring compliance. This isn't the outcomes and the outcomes don't seem to be significantly different anyhow, assuming they both maintain a similar calorie deficit. So it's just about whether or not you enjoy the diet.

Stan Efferding:
I've said that many times that vertical diet really is about something that simple, sensible and sustainable. Its compliance is the science. And I don't care what diet you use. You can use Vertical with keto. You can use vertical with vegan. I have a whole chapter in there on that because I do get vegan or vegetarian clients.

Stan Efferding:
And my concern is, are you doing that as best as you can to to optimize your health? You know, are you getting your iron supplement or are you getting your B12 supplement? Do you have adequate HCL pepsin in your stomach to be able to digest and absorb the nutrients that you're getting in?

Stan Efferding:
So have a whole host of things that people should do to get to make sure that they're optimizing their diet. I don't care if you do keto. I don't care if you do vegetarian or vegan or paleo or whatever. There's a whole host of things in the Vertical Diet like we've just talked about that are necessary for anyone building a foundation of micronutrients and getting ample amount of EPA and DHEA, getting an adequate amount of sleep, hydrating yourself for exercise. People become sodium depleted based on outdated recommendations, end up with a whole host of problems and headaches and lethargy and the like.

Stan Efferding:
So really, it's just a host of kind of responsible nutrition advice beyond nutrition. The 10 minute walks, the sleep information that I think everybody should use regardless of their their goal..

Stan Efferding:
My diet personally always starts with the foundation. I make sure I get an adequate amount of protein. Okay. Now my choices is to use a red meat with that. A ruminant, whether it's sheep or bison or deer or or cattle. I'll use that to fulfill some of my protein requirements. I'll use whole eggs every day. Again, your choline, biotin, and K2, all the things that are important in whole eggs as part of my protein macronutrient requirement, but very micronutrient dense.

Stan Efferding:
Twice a week. I'll make sure you get salmon in. EPA and DHEA in salmon. You talked earlier about supplementing with fish oils. Those people who eat too 5 or 6 ounce servings of salmon a week are getting, I think all of the EPA, DHEA that it's ever been measured to provide any benefit and would not need to supplement on top of that.

Stan Efferding:
My concern, with a lot of people who are trying to just take fish oils is a couple of things. One, some people use it to manage cholesterol levels or blood sugars. It's really... its major benefit for blood sugars is just that it impairs glucose absorption or digestion.

Mark Rippetoe:
Plugs things up a little bit.

Stan Efferding:
So to me. Eat fewer carbs if I had to than take something that impairs the digestion of the carbs would be a better solution. Plus, it can be a blood thinner. So if you're getting it, I'd rather get it from food. And if you're getting a couple servings of salmon or eating some sardines or something like that would be excellent.

Stan Efferding:
So I also beyond that... So I'll get some protein from dairy. And I think it's important to get a few servings of dairy.

Mark Rippetoe:
And cottage cheese.

Stan Efferding:
It could be cottage cheese. I prefer yogurt. Some people can tolerate milk. Some can't. Yogurt tends to be more tolerable to people who have some lactose resistance or intolerance. And if they can't do that, then maybe some cheddar cheese and aged cheese because it has K2 in it also.

Stan Efferding:
So you see you hear me keeps repeating the micronutrients because that's where I'm focused on is to make sure that you get an array, a broad array of foods, that provide all the micronutrients.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, if I couldn't eat cheese, I really I think I'd just take myself out. You know how easy it is to sit down with a nice 2 pound block of sharp cheddar cheese and Tabasco sauce and eat the whole goddamn thing.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, well, you know, and there's some suggestion - I don't mean to go down too many rabbit holes - but there's some suggestion that the cheese in particular because of the K2 in cheese, is one of the reasons that France and Switzerland, two of the highest consumers of saturated fats in the world, who have the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease and they tend to consume a lot of cheese. It seems that K2 might be one of the critical factors.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's a real important consideration. I'd just like the cheese and the hot sauce.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah.

Stan Efferding:
And some of these foods obviously can increase HDLs, which is reported to be the healthy fat. And what we do know from the Framingham study is that people with a higher HDL content had lower cardiovascular disease, even if they had high LDL.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, it's protective.

Stan Efferding:
Yes, its protective.

Mark Rippetoe:
All of the long term studies, the decent ones have shown that HDL is the one you're worried about.

Stan Efferding:
But I think it's specific to to the changes that are... we don't know whether it's it's the chicken or the egg. We don't know if it's protective because it's HDL or because the foods that you eat that raise HDL are creating this protective benefit. Meaning that if you try and increase HDL using medication, it doesn't necessarily have the same effect. And those studies have been done as well.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, and vitamin D levels are the same thing. There's some evidence that vitamin D levels are just a marker for the circumstances that provide the health benefits and not necessarily cause of it themselves. Just in case, I like to take some vitamin D, especially in the winter. I'm outside quite a bit but...

Stan Efferding:
Well it's another thing that may benefit insulin sensitivity. Now that doesn't mean that if you have an adequate vitamin D level, that taking more vitamin D is going to give you more insulin sensitivity. Be cautious about, you know, mentioning those kinds of things. People can key on that. If I take more vitamin D, I'm going to become more insulin sensitive.

Stan Efferding:
If you're deficient, if you're in the teens in particular, a lot of the athletes I tested and myself to, I've been low at times throughout my career. And when I supplement when I am low, I notice that that I get like my bones ache and I get more fatigue. And I've been trying to lift and I just feel soreness.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, and and and it could very well be that the circumstances that lowered the vitamin D are affecting other variables you're not aware of.

Stan Efferding:
You're right.

Mark Rippetoe:
And thus the the D is the marker not necessarily the leading indicator itself.

Stan Efferding:
So I round out so I get my protein from variety different sources. I think those are the critical sources of some eggs and some dairy. And dairy I didn't mention, but the calcium is hugely important. About a thousand milligrams a day from a food source. If you supplement it, it can be actually detrimental. The cardiovascular disease research suggests it can increase cardiovascular disease as a supplement. It can decrease it as a food source.

Mark Rippetoe:
Is that associated with any particular form calcium or is it?

Stan Efferding:
I don't know specifically. I just said calcium supplements in a specific study. I include...if I mentioned something, the research is included in the Vertical Diet. Being cautious, care to put over 200 references.

Mark Rippetoe:
Carbonate or, you know, carbonate and glutamate are going to be treated differently in the gut.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stan Efferding:
Well, calcium people think it's just for the bones, but actually it's also for nerve signaling, it's a critical for firing of the muscles, as you know, with the troponin and tropomyosin.

Stan Efferding:
So, you know, people don't think that vitamin D is related to a performance and it is. And so I want to make sure that the calcium is related to performance when vitamin D as well, because it increases calcium absorption and that's very important.

Stan Efferding:
So I make sure and get all of those foods in and then we're on to vegetables. And I use root tubers that are low FODMAP. Potatoes is a good one particular because it's high in potassium. Chasing 4,700 mg of potassium day that's hard to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's hard to do without a supplement.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Hard to do. And the supplements are tough because they could be hard in the lining of the stomach. And so...

Mark Rippetoe:
Do you think potassium gluconate's a problem?

Stan Efferding:
I don't know, specifically. It might be for some people.

Mark Rippetoe:
I have been taking that stuff for years.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. If you don't have any problem with it...

Mark Rippetoe:
People don't understand that that... You know what? I think that the RDA for sedentary people is 3,500 mg a day. Three and a half grams of potassium is a hell of a lot of potassium. And the gluconate tablet is 99 milligrams of potassium. You have to take a bunch of it if you're going to supplement like that. But it's better to eat a bunch of fruits, vegetables that are high in potassium.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, I cobbled together a bunch of resources. There's actually a hundred milligrams potassium for every ounce of meat that you take in. I think salmon's even a little bit higher and so you can get potassium from the meats that you eat and salmon. But all potatoes, a thousand milligrams. I can grab obviously fruit. I put that as another item that's on a diet every single day. I eat fruit and I know people squawk about seasonal. My wife's from Samoa. There are no seasonal fruits there.

Mark Rippetoe:
There are no seasons in Samoa.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Fruit all year round.

Stan Efferding:
So people squawk about that in the next thing they squawk about as fructose. And you know, this has been measured even with fructose. If you don't go over 50 to 100 grams a day, depending on when, and you control for calories there's no difference between fructose and other calories at that level. And fruit seems to be protective beyond that because possibly because of the fiber content.

Stan Efferding:
But I don't recommend anybody goes over 100 grams a day of sugar anyhow. Whether it's from fruit source or not. You know, two or three pieces of fruit a day, depending on the size of the individual, provides you a ton of potassium and it's probably not more than 30 grams of actual sugars to begin with.

Stan Efferding:
But also fructose doesn't increase insulin secretion as significantly as as as regular sugar does.

Mark Rippetoe:
I didn't think it actually triggered insulin secretion at all. Yes, there's probably some degree because the flavor.

Stan Efferding:
I mean, I'm cautious never to say all someone out there will probably come up with, you know, a little insignificant number. But it can actually improve insulin sensitivity as opposed to causing, you know, just the opposite problem. So I keep fruits in there.

Stan Efferding:
I'll throw some spinach in there, it's low gas. You can get 700 mg of potassium from a cup of spinach or two cups of spinach.

Stan Efferding:
Some people might be...

Mark Rippetoe:
I really miss eating spinach. I had a...

Stan Efferding:
Kidney stone.

Mark Rippetoe:
I had a kidney stone or five back...oh, that's been. This is 19. That's probably been 15 years ago.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I haven't been eating spinach, but I got on a little kick to where I would get a bag of collard greens. Get a whole bag of collard greens and eat the whole damn thing. Cook 'em with bacon grease. Oh, they're good.

Stan Efferding:
That can be a lot of oxalates and some people are predisposed to kidney stones.

Mark Rippetoe:
But kale doesn't have any. Not a lot of oxalate and doesn't do the same thing. So I eat a lot of kale. Yeah, and I like kale.

Stan Efferding:
And if you can digest it, that's great. It can be harder for some people to digest kale.

Mark Rippetoe:
I have no trouble with it at all. I have no trouble with digesting spinach. I love that kind of stuff. But I don't know. I haven't thrown a stone in probably 15 years. And it may be that there were you know, obviously there were... These things are all multifactorial. You can't all say... you can't ever say, well, it was the collard greens. That's not how things work. And I don't know what else was going on at the time, but it could very well be that I could get away with it now.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, they can interact.

Mark Rippetoe:
But it doesn't take a lot of kidney stone activity to make a person averse to what they think may be causing it.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. I think women laugh at men. Women who've had children laugh at men who claim that kidney stones are painful.

Mark Rippetoe:
Can't possibly be that bad.

Stan Efferding:
It's all a matter of perspective.

Stan Efferding:
Well, I don't know. I'm always cautious as I talk through this. This process that I use to try and find out, you know, how to minimize negative effects and how to get adequate micronutrients that I don't demonize whole entire food groups or foods in general. They can be good and again, individualistic, how they're prepared. The dose matters. And I do have a list that I provide of foods that I think can typically cause people problems. And we talked to some of those things today, and particularly with people like performance athletes who have to get in a significant number of carbohydrates a day.

Stan Efferding:
If I try and feed that to them and oatmeal, it can be really tough on their stomach and it has a cumulative effect. You might be able to handle a cup on Monday, but then Tuesday is fine. And then all of a sudden Wednesday you get bloated and you don't think it's the oatmeal because you been eating it for three days.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just not catching up.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, you're the bacteria seems to accumulate in with the food that you're eating and eventually it gets to a point. Same thing's true with something like sugar alcohols, you might be able to tolerate one of those bars that you pick up at an expo, but when you have the second and certainly the third, you're racing to the bathroom.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, you are.

Stan Efferding:
It's sugar alcohols

Mark Rippetoe:
Sugar alcohol poisoning.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And I even... you know that can even be in natural foods. Avocado has natural sorbitol. And so some people, depending on their sugar alcohol tolerance, and people have different size buckets that they can tolerate, may not be able to handle two avocados, but they can handle one.

Stan Efferding:
And so just make just creating the awareness so that people can look at their foods and understand that certain foods may in certain quantities - and how they're prepared - cause this gas and bloating or aggravate symptoms of IBS. Because I seems that a lot of clients come to me, whether they're athletes or not, present with digestion problems.

Stan Efferding:
They say they have IBS or they've Crohn's or, you know, gout or some sort of digestive problem or autoimmune problem that generally results from digestion problems. So I try and mitigate those as best I can. Ultimately, I think it's quite common that that folks will implement an elimination diet of some sort. Probably the ultimate elimination diet would be like carnivore. You just go down to just eating some red meat, some eggs, maybe some salmon.

Mark Rippetoe:
By elimination diet, you mean eliminating whole food groups until...

Stan Efferding:
Eliminating everything that could possibly be a trigger. Get down to the foods that you can eat and not have those symptoms and then start to reintroduce. The reintroduce part's important because we do want some diversity in the diet.

Mark Rippetoe:
We are omnivores and an omnivorous diet has been part of the human situation for millions of years. And since that first day, we killed something and then ate it, we've been omnivores.

Mark Rippetoe:
Meat's obviously very important. The first organized human activity was hunting. Meat has always been supplemented with other types of foods. And there's just that's just what we're designed to do.

Stan Efferding:
And I tend to let some folks may question the fact that it's proposed that people eat red meat as a priority. Of course, I encourage that we get eggs in every day, that we get dairy in every day, that we have salmon twice a week, but I eat red meat almost exclusively as compared to chicken or turkey.

Mark Rippetoe:
Can you eat any pork? Because you've mentioned ruminants earlier. Do not like pork?

Stan Efferding:
I don't really like it. Bacon to me is so high and fat that it tends not to feel well in my digestion. So but I'm not opposed to it. But it's not a ruminant and I don't know that...

Mark Rippetoe:
DO you feel like there's something about it.

Stan Efferding:
I just think there's something better. If you look at Weston A Price does talk about some changes in the blood system, in the blood that may occur from pork. I don't understand it well enough, but because I don't really enjoy pork and because, you know, bacon tastes great. But if I eat bacon, it seems that when I get when I exceed a certain fat level in a meal, it even happens when I use too much butter or too much cheese. And I so I'll get digestion problems. I just don't feel like I can stay regular on that. So that's just me personally. And so I can make those recommendations to people who also experience the same thing. And not to say those foods are bad, but I think that different people may have different triggers.

Mark Rippetoe:
It could be that beef is a higher quality protein source and pork, but god, roast pork, mashed brown crust of fat on it.

Stan Efferding:
But I'm not a fan of the chickens and the turkeys. I just don't think it's just I don't think it gives you the same value as red meat.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, it's not as much fun either. I mean, if you're going to have chicken and it's going to be fun, it's going to be fried chicken. Every once in a while.

Stan Efferding:
And that's one of the first thing in the dieters cut out is red meat and they preferr to eat chicken.

Mark Rippetoe:
That is silly. That is absolutely silly.

Stan Efferding:
Exactly.

Stan Efferding:
I found so much so much better results in terms of energy level and strength and performance and compliance. I use red meat with all of my athletes and even those that are dieting. I mentioned 115 pounds Nadia Wyatt. We started her out on New York steak.

Stan Efferding:
And then when we wanted to cut calories, we just switched her to a top sirloin steak. We wanted to cut the cut alittle more calories we switched to a top round or a sirloin tip. She's been eating red meat all the way up to this. This prep hasn't done a single second of cardio.

Stan Efferding:
She does the three 10 minute walks after each of three meals daily. But she's eating whole eggs. She's eating salmon twice a week. She's eating fruit. She's salting all of her meals to taste and getting iodine source, which we didn't talk about yet, but also hugely important. If we're going to talk about sodium we got to talk about iodine in terms of micronutrients.

Stan Efferding:
And in her...she's held onto more muscle. She's had great energy. Her strength has been great, which is hugely important to me because we talked earlier about people who tend to do a lot of cardio, tend to lose a lot of muscle. It's the kind of the wrong stimulus for dieters.

Mark Rippetoe:
And how many bodybuilders have done their cut with an hour and half bike every day?

Stan Efferding:
Most of them do. And I think it's disgraceful. It's it's a horrible recommendation when you start losing muscle that that's not the purpose of that whole competition.

Mark Rippetoe:
High levels of endurance and endurance exposure, high...low, long, slow distance. I don't know of a more catabolic event in the human in human existence than a marathon, right?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And you could just look at those athletes and tell.

Mark Rippetoe:
Those people are just... I don't understand it. I don't understand. And the media holds up marathon people and triathletes as the epitome of health, the pinnacle of health, the epitome of human wellbeing. And those people die. They fall over dead.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, those enlarged, thin hearts.

Mark Rippetoe:
Those little bitty thin hearts and all that oxidative damage from all the irritation of the breathing and everything else and running that much oxygen through the system.

Stan Efferding:
I'm cautious, just like I said in the diet. Just like I said about the diet I'm cautious, you know, not to demonize it, but just to talk about the benefits and the potential drawbacks. The same thing here. It's not about comparing one sport to the other necessarily in terms of what you prefer or enjoy doing.

Stan Efferding:
So what's the best exercise? The one you'll do, right? I've always said the best best diets, the one you follow. So I wouldn't discourage anybody from running. But I would say that that you've got to be cautious when you take it to a point of competition. I did a video called "If you want to be healthy, don't compete.".

Stan Efferding:
I don't think that what I did throughout my career was healthy, getting up to 300 pounds and powerlifting at that weight or dieting down to five percent. You make a lot of sacrifices. I don't think playing football is healthy. I don't think you UFC fighting is healthy. I don't think that gymnastics is healthy for a 9 year old.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's so bad. High school wrestling. Those people are criminals with those kids. And it's just, you know, walk into the gym and tell 148 pound kid, I need you at 123...

Stan Efferding:
It was terrible.

Mark Rippetoe:
Next week.

Stan Efferding:
And all of those who works can be fantastic, but at a competitive level...

Mark Rippetoe:
I have always said that competition is not about health. Competition is about winning. And that's all there is to it. You can take a perfectly healthy exposure to an activity and decide you want to compete in it. And suddenly it becomes a detriment to your health.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I have always recommended for people's training just when they're starting training over here in the gym, go ahead and enter a meet because it makes you more compliant with your training because you attach some external importance to this. And we've got a meet coming up and we're not gonna miss a workout, have a goal.

Mark Rippetoe:
But at a certain point, when you decide you want to win the Nationals and you're gonna do anything it takes to win the Nationals. You know that you have made decisions that are not about your health.

Stan Efferding:
I talk about that in my review...Like I said, if you want to be healthy, don't compete. There's a difference between health and fitness. Being fit doesn't necessarily mean you're healthy and being healthy, you might not be fit for a particular task.

Stan Efferding:
The most important thing I mentioned is that you should do everything you can do to mitigate some of the damage. And that's why I had blood tests done monthly throughout my career, I've had over a hundred and fifty blood tests. And so I was able to monitor.

Stan Efferding:
And that doesn't mean I didn't make dumb decisions that were focused strictly on winning. But at least I had an idea of what the cost was. And so that's kind of what I do mostly with my athletes. It's the reason that I created the diet that I created is because I thought that the diets they were using were unhealthy.

Stan Efferding:
So it's not just for performance, it's actually to improve health. All the foods that I mentioned and the reasons why I use them is to try and mitigate some of the damage that's being done with metabolic adaptation or metabolic syndrome. And I know that some of my athletes are pushing their bodies to their limits. And so I'm behind the scenes getting blood tests for them, making recommendations of things that they should adjust in their nutrition or training to try and mitigate some of the damage.

Stan Efferding:
The vitamin D supplementation, the CPAP. You know, a host of other things that we talk about. Choline for fatty liver disease. What I'm trying to do is is lengthen their competitive career, if that's their desire or and optimizer their performance of course.

Mark Rippetoe:
By mitigating damage.

Stan Efferding:
Mitigating damage. Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
If nothing else.

Stan Efferding:
Because that's all training is. That's all you do when you're training is breakdown.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stress. Recovery. Adaptation. You're trying to aid in the recovery part of that equation.

Stan Efferding:
Yes. Hundred percent. Absolutely.

Mark Rippetoe:
Let's talk about Stan for a minute. All this stuff is available online. But Stan, where are you from?

Stan Efferding:
Oregon.

Mark Rippetoe:
Where were you born and raised?

Stan Efferding:
Portland, Oregon.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, I went to Aloa high school. My senior year, graduated from Cambria Heights in Patent, Pennsylvania. Tiny little town. I went back and helped my uncle work his farm and take care of my grandfather for a year or so.

Stan Efferding:
Mostly Oregon. I went to the University of Oregon and stayed in Oregon for quite some time before I moved to Seattle. And then ultimately now Las Vegas.

Mark Rippetoe:
What did you do after high school?

Stan Efferding:
I worked. I went to college at the University of Oregon, but I had to pay my own way. And so I got a job as a as a apartment manager so I could get free rent. And I got a job as a construction guy so I could pay my tuition and worked evenings and weekends helping build homes and demoing and stuff like that. So it's always been just kind of a long entrepreneurial type life for me.

Mark Rippetoe:
You've been essentially self employed for a very long time. Yeah, I have too. It's just a bad habit I have acquired - not wanting a boss. You know, thinking I could do it better, I guess.

Mark Rippetoe:
What other things have you done besides... in terms of entrepreneurship? Besides the current situation?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. You know, I worked for other people. I cut my teeth and I learned I had a good mentor, taught me about real estate. We built multifamily property and I managed large multifamily property.

Stan Efferding:
And then I went on, worked for a billion dollar REIT - real estate investment trust - and managed portfolio properties for them. So I learned a lot about real estate and property management.

Mark Rippetoe:
You still do your math real estate?

Stan Efferding:
I did for many years.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're out of it now.

Stan Efferding:
Out of it now. Yeah. And after I got done, after I decided to do my own thing, while I was doing the real estate, I was also learning a lot about telecommunications because these communities had their own cable and phone systems. And then ultimately I went and partnered with a friend to run a telecommunications company as vice president of a telecommunications company. So I had some good experience there. And with that with that knowledge, I then went and started my own telecommunications company.

Mark Rippetoe:
Where was this?

Stan Efferding:
And this was up in Washington. And we were just reselling home phone service. And ultimately in 20 states, over a hundred thousand customers at over a hundred employees. The call center and we just just provisioned phone service for people for a number of years.

Stan Efferding:
And during that time, I started buying and selling real estate. I started building single family subdivisions about multifamily properties and converted them and sold them as condominiums and had some commercial property.

Mark Rippetoe:
Was that in Washington?

Stan Efferding:
That was in Washington, yeah, pretty much up and down the I-5 corridor there.

Stan Efferding:
And then then the real estate market collapsed and I had significant investments in real estate.

Mark Rippetoe:
'07

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Right in there. And I was I was leveraged, you know, I had significant equity in the properties at the former valuation. Then of course, when.

Mark Rippetoe:
That all evaporated.

Stan Efferding:
That all evaporated to the point where, of course they wanted me to pay down a significant number of loans to get a better debt to equity ratio. When I was investing in and building real estate at the time, you could put a thousand dollars down on a plot of land and get a loan for the entire construction cost and the rest of the land cost.

Stan Efferding:
So they were loaning like ninety nine plus percent.

Mark Rippetoe:
Suicidal.

Stan Efferding:
It was it was crazy.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's crazy.

Stan Efferding:
When I would buy apartment communities...

Mark Rippetoe:
It's no wonder there was a bubble. I mean...and you're aware of the fact the government decided a long time ago that everybody needed to own a home. Which is ridiculous.

Stan Efferding:
They forced the lenders to make these bad loans.

Mark Rippetoe:
Forced the lenders to make bad loans and then penalize them for making bad loans.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
What a bizarre...

Stan Efferding:
Guaranteed the loans.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes. And then.... guaranteed the loans. When the loans went bad, loans got bundled and sold as bundles of bad loans at a real low rate. And because we had to do something with all these bad loans.

Stan Efferding:
It was a disaster. We lost over four trillion dollars in value nationwide in real estate. I lost almost overnight 20 million dollars. In equity in those properties.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's a kick in the balls.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was it was terrible. Overnight, we couldn't sell a single thing, obviously, because you couldn't get a lender loan.

Stan Efferding:
So they were loaning, as I mentioned, that when I bought an apartment community, you could buy an apartment community would lend you 120 percent of its value because you would put you would put forth the pro forma that said that you would be able to sell them at this.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Which is fiction.

Stan Efferding:
Right. And so they would see this potential profit margin. And they would be lending you more than that current value of the property, right? Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
And and then suddenly things got normal again. And now you need 20 percent down.

Stan Efferding:
And of course, I had been a personal guarantor on those. So the dominoes start falling. Then they want your two and a half million dollar house and they want your Rolls Royce and they want your condo and they want your.... So you know, everything is backed up against that. And so it was a difficult time.

Stan Efferding:
You know, of course, times like that, you read Donald Trump's old book about what he went through in the 80s with his billions of dollars in debt. And that it's all interesting.

Stan Efferding:
You know, to me, I didn't grow up wealthy. I've been working since I was eight years old, newspapers, routes and 7-Eleven and flipping pizzas and, you know, a whole host of things.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just like all of us did.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, it was...

Mark Rippetoe:
Just like everybody did that is now productive.

Stan Efferding:
It was monopoly and I didn't take it personally. You know what? It wasn't like I started these businesses aren't my child, you know. So I didn't really it didn't occur to me that that this was something that was devastating. It occurred to me that I need to make some adjustments. And this is...

Mark Rippetoe:
Just a new set of circumstances.

Stan Efferding:
You go through a fire sale, you scrape together what you can. I diverted my attention, started a new company, and within just a few years, we built that into a five million dollar a year engineering firm that we ran for a number of years. And that was quite successful.

Stan Efferding:
And then we went on and started... of course, I did the cooler, which should became as a result of Shark Tank, had a good success. And then now the Vertical Diet has been very successful for me, both the meal prep company - we did over two million dollars in our first year of gross sales. Which to be honest is probably just a testimony to the fact that the meals taste great.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, is this of the company that's making this for you? What percentage of their business is your sales, do you know? Will they tell you that?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. I mean, they were doing they were big company. They were probably doing four million meals a year. And so, you know, we're still a small percentage of their total business, but we're growing and they're happy about that. All of it.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, very pleased. We had there's the market is is... we have a huge recurring high percentage of recurring buyers just because of the taste of the meals.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's why we reorder. Hundreds of times.

Stan Efferding:
You can't get a better product than that.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, it's just so good. I'm gonna go eat one minute I think.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And then obviously the Vertical Diet as a as a product. The the online training and then the manual. We've got a book coming out soon. We're developing the seminar.

Mark Rippetoe:
What's the book?

Stan Efferding:
The book will be the Vertical Diet again.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Victory Belt Publishing. We signed with them. They're going to they're going to publish the book this coming spring and we'll have a hard copy. The Vertical Diet e-book that I've been that I've been marketing for about 18 months now is have been very successful.

Stan Efferding:
And I've since updated it originally came out as version 1.0. And then I added a whole lot of additional information and research and references and it put it 2.0. And now I've got even more. I recruited a co-author is Damon McCune, who's a registered dietitian, PhD Exercise Phys was head of the Dietetic Department for UNLV.

Stan Efferding:
So extraordinarily smart guy. And we sat down and he went through the 2.0 extensively and we found now over 100 well, 200 peer reviewed, published research articles. And I also include a lot of references to just regular articles and videos.

Mark Rippetoe:
So now it's got a bibliography.

Stan Efferding:
It absolutely. And it's it's supported all of the courses. You know, you're always going to get somebody that's going to cry out that that's not factual. In fact, it is.

Mark Rippetoe:
The fact that there's no peer reviewed study on it doesn't mean it's not factual.

Stan Efferding:
Correct.

Mark Rippetoe:
It just means that they if someone has failed to ask the question. We see that quite a bit.

Stan Efferding:
So we put out the 3.0 and we gave the 3.0 to for free to anybody who bought a previous version. So it's kind of a living document and everything that I learn along the way as I have my entire life by seeking out some of the best knowledge in the industry and utilizing what I think of that knowledge worked for me and then know utilizing it with my clients. I think I have a responsibility for them to stay current and to give them, you know, effective information. Then I'll just continue to upgrade it in that way and make it a living document.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stan, you're almost 51. What have you learned about training in the 40 years? What is what is what is the what have you learned about training that goes back to conventional wisdom being wrong?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, but I don't know how it compares to conventional wisdom, but I know when I started I was training way too much and eating way too little. I was using the chicken breast and rice cakes because that's what the guy behind the counter, Gold's Gym was eating. And I was training seven days a week, two hours a day, because that's what the Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Media Bodybuilding told you to do, to get in there and do 77 sets for each body part twice a day.

Stan Efferding:
So I did all of that and it was a hard slog. You know, you get a lot of here you are a 19 year old kid with tendinitis. Trying to figure out how...

Mark Rippetoe:
And I understand.

Stan Efferding:
So once I learned...

Mark Rippetoe:
Overtraining is a problem for committed people.

Stan Efferding:
Once I learned to flip the script on that, I started was able to start growing much better. I started focusing more on food and sleep and less on injuring myself. I learned that that, you know, it's a stimulus to... stimulate, don't annihilate.

Stan Efferding:
I did spend a lot of years training very hard, pushing myself, you know, in that gray area, as you have to do if you're going to compete. But I did have the opportunity to work with you know, I mentioned in 2009 with Flex Wheeler, who completely changed my thoughts. I actually pulled squats and deadlifts out of my routine, as Dorian did historically, because I was so strong in those powerlifting movements. And a lot of that was mostly leverage and a lot of glutes. And that wasn't necessarily the best thing for bodybuilding.

Mark Rippetoe:
And so once I started really focusing more on the muscles going through greater ranges of motion, not using quite as heavy of weights that would create so much fatigue. But in particular on my lumbar spine, which caused my late onset muscle soreness to extend. As I pulled back from that and Flex had us mostly working on, you know, not damaging the body as much. And more volume, more frequency and lots of food I mentioned earlier is the way we train there.

Stan Efferding:
I also learned that the manner in which I dieted and the manner in which I gained weight, both to lose weight and gain weight, made a huge difference in the outcomes. I mentioned previously that when I overrestricted and I took out red meat, I took out salt and took out fruit and I took out dairy that I and I took out carbs, I got smaller and weaker and and more tired. And when I fixed that problem, I didn't get smaller and weaker and more tired. And I still lost all the body fat and got shredded.

Stan Efferding:
And I learned when I was bulking that the gallon of milk a day thing probably works for 19 year old. But as you age...

Mark Rippetoe:
That's who it's for.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. It gained it weighs on you quickly. 19 year old novice.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, that's who that's for and nobody else

Stan Efferding:
The pancakes thing made me fatter not stronger. When I was at the world's strongest pro bodybuilder in 2010, I was 310 pounds and I was not any stronger than I was at 274.

Stan Efferding:
And that was a problem. But I was fatter. I had terrible bloodwork because, you know, I tested my blood a week, a month out. And the day after. I had a habit of doing that, I wanted to see that the worst damage I could possibly do to myself.

Stan Efferding:
So I learned a lot lessons along the way. I encourage folks to kind of step back and take a longer look at at their objective. A lot of folks are just got this three month plan going and then it's just, you know, caution to the winds to reach that three month goal. All right. When I went up to a seminar with Mikaela Coakley, I mentioned some years ago, and Boris Shieko was up there. There they make five year plans and sometimes longer. And they don't...

Mark Rippetoe:
Advanced athletes, Olympic athletes often work on a quadrennial. And that's an advanced athlete.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And so I would encourage folks to learn some the lessons that I learned and apply them now, particularly the guys that are too heavy and haven't had gains in a little while. It might be time to dive back down. You can go back up, do it right. Apply the same program that I implemented with Hawthorne. That's important.

Stan Efferding:
I also found that as I aged, both the frequency, the volume and the load had to start decreasing, particularly for powerlifting. When I started to get up north of 700-800 pound squats, I couldn't do that twice a week.

Mark Rippetoe:
It doesn't take that many 800 pound squats to produce sufficient stress to cause an adaptation.

Stan Efferding:
When I was my strongest, it was when I was the time I was training with Mark Bell back in 2009 and forward, I would squat one week, I would deadlift the next. Squatting twice a month, deadlifting twice a month.

Mark Rippetoe:
Basically what I do now.

Stan Efferding:
And that was it. And so especially being over 40. And I would also employ a whole host of recovery techniques outside of the gym. I talk about the fact that it's what I did outside the gym that made me more successful, not what I did inside the gym. Lots of guys lifted much the same way as I did and trained as often and possibly as heavy and possibly as hard. There's certainly plenty examples of that.

Stan Efferding:
What I did outside the gym in order to set world records and beat those other guys was I had a lot more discipline and consistency with my sleep and my recovery and my nutrition, obviously, but I would say squat really heavy on a Sunday and I had a recumbent bike in my room at the time. I was staying in a hotel room when I was training at Mark Bell's and I stayed there for two months while I worked with him. And previous to that, I'd stayed in a hotel room for three months while I worked with Flex. That's all I did was eat, sleep and train.

Stan Efferding:
I did a video called "Why I'm a Hypocrite" because I was afforded that opportunity. I'd been successful in business. I had the time. I had the resources.

Mark Rippetoe:
Nice work if you can get it.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, but what I did, that's its key. And it's one of the reasons I've kind of landed on this whole 10 minute walk thing, which I preach every chance I get because it's extraordinary for many, many reasons. Compliance being the main one is that I would I would ride that bike. What I found is if I squatted on Sunday and then I laid around all day Monday and Tuesday trying to recover, I wouldn't recover.

Stan Efferding:
I was just sore all the time. Sore, sore, sore And even if I went to a chiropractor and got electric stim or massage, it does nothing. Nothing does nothing. You know, if... you're perceived soreness may go down, but there's no physiological measure that it provides. And this has been studied. I'll go beyond my opinion...

Mark Rippetoe:
And real damned expensive.

Stan Efferding:
Yes. And it could be even damaging if somebody starts to do deep tissue. I mean, you just start compounding the problem.

Stan Efferding:
Anyhow without getting off on that that rant. I would ride that bike three times. I would get up in the morning and I would do a 10 minute HIIT session. 30 seconds with a little bit of tension, kind of fast, and rest for 30 seconds. I would do that 10 times. Took me a total of 10 minutes, but I had a little pump. I was called like a baby pump. I'd get up off the bike and I would feel like I had just kind of worked out my legs, but I didn't.

Stan Efferding:
It's all concentric loading, no eccentric damage. It's not significant, but I pumped a ton of blood through there. This is really the key thing.

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably do the same thing with the prowler if there was a way to do it inside and conveniently

Stan Efferding:
Yep. Concentric and I did that three times a day. Frequency matters. And this is why I like the three 10 minute walks is better than one 30 minute session. Frequency matters. You keep the blood flowing through there, get all those nutrients in there. As you know, the joints, the synovial joints to get oxygen into the the cartilaginous structures, you have to have some sort of movement. And that's not happening through osmosis.

Stan Efferding:
Maybe 10 percent of it can move through osmosis, I suppose, through the gradient. But if you want to move oxygen into those joints because they're not innervated with with the capillaries like muscles are, then you need to move. And the movement is what's going to help provide the nutrition.

Stan Efferding:
So I believe in movement.

Mark Rippetoe:
Infuses things, even in the absence of a vascular bed.

Stan Efferding:
Yes. Right. And I've also found that things you do that are done to you or for you are not as effective as things you do for yourself. And another example of that is, is when Eric got his shoulder surgery, they sent him home with this machine that moved his arm around. And it turns out now from researching that over many years, because they thought that that would be better than just the sedentary. It's not as effective as if you move it yourself. The machine that moves your arm for you is not as effective.

Mark Rippetoe:
Isn't that astonishing? Passive motion is not as good as active motion and muscle contraction, and voluntary.

Stan Efferding:
100 percent. And as you know...

Mark Rippetoe:
When I had my knee surgery I woke up in what was called a constant passive motion machine, CPM machine. That just moved the joint through the range of motion. And I understand the point of of doing that because you don't want the thing to to start to freeze up and everything else. But why was I not encouraged to do that same movement myself? You know, I could've done it myself. I mean, the range emotions obviously there.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Right. Now, that's one of the reasons. My 89 year old man had a hip surgery and the very next morning he's up walking on a walker. They want you to move.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. They've they've gotten bad. This is 25 years ago when I had my when I had this knee surgery.

Stan Efferding:
Even prior to that the passive movement isn't as good as active movement. But prior to passive movement, they were icing the hell out of it. But they were using those game readies where they were putting out those. They're packing them onto the somebody's leg and they were pumping ice on and contracting. Those would impair recovery. You used too much of those too often. And you're going to...

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, there's there's two schools of thought on that. The one is that the cold constricts just because of the temperature - constrict blood flow and reduce swelling. Other school of thought on there is that the body, in an attempt to warm the tissue up, flushes. And you can see the flush on the skin if you ice your knee. But I don't know what's happening at depth. Oh, ice has been revealed to be a less than useful therapy on just about everything except the torn muscle belly.

Stan Efferding:
Didn't the guy who invented RICE say he wishes he didn't have ice in there?

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, right.In fact, because it doesn't do anything.

Mark Rippetoe:
You've got a torn muscle belly. Ice is real good for that. Yeah, but ice.

Mark Rippetoe:
How many years did we ice our knees? And it didn't do a god damn thing.

Stan Efferding:
Well and you know to wrap up...

Mark Rippetoe:
Ice your shoulder, ice your elbow. That's just what we were encouraged to do. It didn't work.

Stan Efferding:
I did that for years. I had 10 years, iced my knees for 10 years..

Mark Rippetoe:
And ice didn't do anything for it.

Stan Efferding:
When I applied this more movement, then I recovered faster. And I applied the same thing to my knee recovery, just like we just talked about with using banded leg presses sometimes twice, three times a day. I was going out and just using just a band and doing this 10 minute, you know, whether it was recumbent bike or the ten minute pressing with a band not creating any damage or pain, but just pumping it just moved in there, just moving tons and tons of blood.

Stan Efferding:
I had chronic tendonitis in my knees for over 10 years, the kind where I couldn't sit in an airplane without just massive pain. Throb at night, you know, I'd injected just about everything you can imagine into those knees from, you know, prolo therapy to...

Mark Rippetoe:
Platelet rich plasma.

Stan Efferding:
Yes, yes. PRP. TB500, BPC157, you name it. I was... I probably got more benefit from just the needle jab than I did from this.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just the physical disruption.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. Everything else that went in there. But nonetheless, it never it never healed. And I did a rant recently on "Keys to pain-free knees" where I talked about the fact that now I have no pain in my knees from implementing these these methods of just pumping tons and tons and tons of blood in there with frequency consistently over a period of time. And now I'm walking down and squatting 60 pounds for reps with no knee wraps or sleeves.

Stan Efferding:
And I've got absolutely no knee pain at all, which is complete.

Mark Rippetoe:
I would enjoy that. We'll have to talk more about that later.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, what do you what do you think about volume recommendations for old guys? If you were gonna train your dad. In fact, you are training your dad. What do you have him doing?

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. He's eighty-nine years old. I got him a little mechanical chair that goes up like this and then he'll stand up and sit down. That's his squat. I got him a little block that might....

Mark Rippetoe:
What does he do sets and reps though?

Stan Efferding:
You know, maybe I turn encourage him not to do it every day. Try to encourage him to, you know, do it maybe three times a week. In just a couple of sets. Just a.

Mark Rippetoe:
Couple sets of five.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
Three.

Stan Efferding:
Sets of five. Three to five. I do the same thing. I have a little block that I set up next to a table that he can hold onto and he steps up on the block. I like to see his legs go through a little bit of a range of motion. At his age he can't get down on the floor and he can't obviously do too much.

Stan Efferding:
I also have him pick something up that's heavy. I have a little rack deadlift setup because of the axial loading. I want to see the bone mineral density being stimulated in addition to the strength benefit. Obviously the studies on elderly people, those who have the strongest grip lived the longest.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that's again, that's just a proxy for total body strength. You know, I saw that you those studies have been misinterpreted so many times. It's just amazing what these people are trying not to see.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah, yeah. They should be building muscle tissue. They should be lifting to whatever degree they can, safely, s long as they can.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Using the most muscle mass over the longest effective range of motion.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And then a little block, he does step ups on the block in front of the table. So that's pretty much it. I have a band set up tied to a post and so when he watches TV he can do band work with his upper body. So I keep moving, but not a lot. Tell him that the recovery is more important, it's just a stimulus. And so we do a couple of sets of five and just the consistency, to me, is most important.

Stan Efferding:
Me. I had to dramatically decrease my volume as I aged and my frequency as I aged, particularly from powerlifting.

Mark Rippetoe:
I've gone to triples instead of fives. And this may just be a matter of laziness. But I just don't like being sore anymore. I'm 63 and I when I was in my thirties, being sore was cool, but now it's not. As the romance is gone and I I have trouble sleeping anyway, and I just find that threes are easier for me to recover from. They don't make me so sore. They don't keep me up at night. And they're and they're every bit as effective as fives for a guy my age.

Stan Efferding:
100 percent agree. Yeah. If you're... particularly as you age, I think that people overemphasize the value of the soreness. It's not the leading driver.

Mark Rippetoe:
The soreness has nothing to do with hypertrophy. I just got through writing an article about that. I see people with these these bands on the wrists like the like the Lance Armstrong live strong thing. That say "live sore." And that may be a brand that I may be impugning, but look, living sore is a stupid idea. If you're pursuing soreness for its own sake, you are pursuing inflammation for its own sake. And that is an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
There's nothing that eats a person up as fast as chronic systemic inflammation. This is what's wrong with the marathon. And if you are sore all the time. Bad things happen to people who are sore all the time. If soreness is is the purpose of the workout, this is the one of the primary problems with CrossFit as far as I'm concerned, is that it rewards soreness, that these people get used to thinking that soreness is the prize, that all the skin ripped off your distal palm is the prize and that this is the end that we're trying to do. We're trying to get sore and soreness doesn't make you strong.

Mark Rippetoe:
Lifting a little bit more weight and recovering from it and then lifting a little bit more weight and recovering from that and doing it again and doing it again makes you stronger. And that process may not involve any soreness.

Stan Efferding:
I totally agree and I don't pursue that anymore. And even though even though sometimes I lift, but what people would perceive to be pretty heavy, I'm not limping around for three days after that anymore. I'm able is certainly able to handle those loads. It's only heavy in comparison to the average 58-year old person, but it's not heavy in comparison to what I used to do.

Mark Rippetoe:
Unadapted eccentric loading causes soreness. And there's nothing there's no better way to get sore than 100 air squats, and there's also no better way to get weaker than 100 air squats.

Stan Efferding:
That's a good point that you made there. I'm busy. Most people are pretty busy. They've got kids, they've got work, etc. So I don't like exercising. That doesn't return something to me. I like training. I like to get something out of it. And if you're just going to the gym and going through the motions and you're not actually, getting stronger, gaining muscle tissue...

Mark Rippetoe:
Going through the process of programming a strength increase.

Stan Efferding:
Yeah. And this is even for folks who aren't trying to compete in something, it they want want to at least maintain muscle tissue while they're dieting and ultimately try and build muscle tissue because it'll increase their basal metabolic rate and it'll improve their their insulin sensitivity and glucose absorption. So those things are critical.

Stan Efferding:
It's one of the key ways they can build a bigger engine long term. And I don't like to do frivolous things. And so people talk want to about cardiovascular fitness. I'm cautious about what I recommend and why. Because, you know, why do you do cardio? Because for cardiovascular fitness. Well well, how do we...

Mark Rippetoe:
Squats do that.

Stan Efferding:
Exactly. That's the point.

Mark Rippetoe:
You poor things don't understand that a set of five squats is hard in terms of cardiovascular. They don't understand that because they've never done it themselves.

Stan Efferding:
You can get an equivalent increase in VO2max. You can get your seven or eight mets of your metabolic equivalents, which is probably what is that? Equivalent of a 13 minute mile? It's not too extraordinary to be able to to garner all of the health benefits that you can from an efficient cardiovascular system that you could stimulate with the kind of work like you mentioned there - squats - that also gives you...

Mark Rippetoe:
That also increases your strength.

Stan Efferding:
Increases your strength. It's a better return on your investments. I am never would assign someone - and when I do seminars, I ask other trainers to please consider when you're giving somebody a 40 minute treadmill assignment. First of all, what's the effectiveness of that? It's not been proven to be very effective for weight loss.

Mark Rippetoe:
No. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Stan Efferding:
And secondly, what's the what's the long term outcome there? What's the what's the compliance of that? Nobody does that for any extended period of time. And so the only benefit would be cardiovascular fitness. Could you get that from an alternate exercise that would give you additional benefit using less time?

Stan Efferding:
And then I just encourage that the 10 minute walks, the three 10 minute walks would provide you all of the cardiovascular benefits that you need. It's sustainable. You can do it anywhere, any time. I do them when I travel at the airport or I walked around the hotel this morning for 10 minutes before I came over. You can. You know walk your kids to school.

Stan Efferding:
It's always something that anybody could do any time. But it provides the added benefit in particular of the frequency that I mentioned, rather than one 40 minute session at the end of the day. Of the blood sugar improvements, because it's twice as effective as using metformin. These researchers have been done as well. If you walk after a meal, it's twice as effective as lowering blood sugars and decreasing the onset of Type 2 diabetes as metformin. The number one prescribed drug for diabetes... It's twice as effective taking three 10 minute walks. So it's crazy that that kind of thing shouldn't be recommended in preference to cardiovascular fitness.

Stan Efferding:
And this isn't... I'm not squawking about comparing weightlifting to jogging. It's not what this is about. Understand what it's for, what you're getting out of it, and how does a busy professional and individual get the best return out of their investment on the least time put in because they don't have the kind of time that we in the fitness industry do. We can train every day, all day if we want to. That's our job. But they can't. And as I've gotten busier and busier, I've tried to figure out how little can I possibly do while still maximizing my cardiovascular fitness, maximizing my strength with the least investment.

Stan Efferding:
And it's it's just a matter of consistency. I use lower volume, obviously, but those are some of the key things, I think, to get across to the average population.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Stan, thanks for being here. Stan came to our seminar in San Diego earlier this year, and it was wonderful to have Stan there at the at the at the seminar because everybody in the room knew knew who he was. And Stan is a perfect gentleman. There are a lot of guys as well known as he is that are pricks. And and Stan went out of his way to be friendly and inclusive to everybody in the room. And it's just, you know, he's just a great guy, just a regular. He's just a regular, great guy. And I really appreciate him saying nice things about us and showning up to do this podcast.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I hope you'll appreciate the resource that he provides you. Go to the web, your website is:.

Stan Efferding:
stanefferding.com

Mark Rippetoe:
stanefferdding.com

YouTube, Stan Efferding. It's great to have an original name.

Stan Efferding:
Nobody else wants that name, but I got it.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's easy to remember, too.

Mark Rippetoe:
So do that. Get the book....

Stan Efferding:
I got to say, before you wrap up here about that seminar. I've spent my entire career reaching out and trying to get the best information I can from the most knowledgeable people. I've trained with some of the, you know, famous, you know, Eddie Coan, Flex Wheeler, Charles Glass, you know, Mark Bell. Legends.

Stan Efferding:
And also in terms of education, I studied exercise science University of Oregon. I spent a year dissecting cadavers. I studied physics and kinesiology. And I thought I knew a lot. And I've always thought I knew a lot, but I also knew there was a whole lot I didn't know. And so I've spent my entire career and now even that I'm retired and I'm helping others, I'm going out. I'm trying to find the best information out there.

Stan Efferding:
And I was very glad that I bought your book. I read your book. I went to your seminar. I learned a lot at your seminar from your coaches, who also teach us how to coach, which was awesome. I became a better coach, became a better lifter from learning some things from from you. The amount of detail that you went through, which really challenged what I thought I knew about physics and kinesiology and how to apply it to lifting, it was extraordinary.

Stan Efferding:
And so for those folks who haven't attended your seminar, if someone like me was spent my entire life studying and applying, you know, lifting and would learn as much as I did, which I think is now contributing to my being so healthy, my joints and stuff now are even better and I'm able to do overhead presses as a result of you. I had a torn rotator cuff that I've been watching. The way that you set up, just set up your hands.

Stan Efferding:
Now I've been able to also help others. I send them your videos and show them if you've got a torn little tiny rotator cuff and you can't move your arm that your major muscles are going to start to atrophy. And then things just going to be constant pain.

Stan Efferding:
If you can get those major muscles strong again by utilizing an exercise in the right fashion, that will allow your rotator cuff not to be injured while you're lifting. I now can actually lift my arm up that I couldn't do for a number of years. As a result of coming there, just endless examples of things that I learned.

Stan Efferding:
I hate to belabor the point, but I think people should know that the information is extraordinary. It was such a great opportunity for me and now I'm utilizing that information. When somebody contacted me and asked me about their squat, I sent them a Starting Strength video. I said, study this, then send me your squat and I'll give you some feedback. Because I couldn't do it any better. Thank you.

Mark Rippetoe:
So that's quite an endorsement. Stan, I certainly appreciate it.

Mark Rippetoe:
Again, stanefferding.com. e-book's available now. Get the e-book, get a hard copy to keep in the bathroom. Most people get a lot of reading done in there. And put one in there.

Mark Rippetoe:
Buy two of them. Put one in the bathroom and put one in your gym bag. All right. Those will be available soon.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stan, thank you.

Stan Efferding:
Thanks, Rip.

Mark Rippetoe:
We thank you for being here for Starting Strength Radio. We'll see you next time.

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