Interview with Prep Coach john Meadows - Part 1

Hey Guys,

Today I am re sharing an interview I did with John Meadows. This is one of the most popular blogs I have ever done and for good reason! John is one of the best in the business and his thoughts on anything to do with Nutrition are well worth listening to!

Mike: Hi John, can just tell people a bit about yourself really if they are not familiar on your work on T-Nation.com and with the website itself mountaindog.com. Tell us a bit about yourself and your unique approach to nutrition where a lot of people differ with being more health-based.

John: I’ve been around a long time and I’ve had a corporate job for a long time. I left that job a couple of years ago. People have really just started to hear about me in the last three to four years but the truth is, I’ve been around for a long time. I was just one of those guys that would compete once a year and then I would disappear just because of my work responsibilities. I didn’t really have time for much else. I actually started in this industry when I was back early in my teenage years. I actually started competing when I was 13 years old, which is pretty silly when I think back about it. I see this kids now that are 13 years old and I think wow, I was in a body-building show when I was that age. That just seems crazy.

Mike: Yeah, you were a kid yourself.

John: I used to be just a super sponge with this stuff. I remember when I was 13 years old, I remember watching the 1985 Mr. Olympia and I could tell you the placings. It was Haney, Beckles, Gaspari, Makkawy, Mike Christian, Barry de May, Tom Platz, Sergio Oliva, Bob Parris and Frank Richard. That was the top ten. I remember I watched them on my VHS player. I recorded it. Obviously, I watched it over and over and over and I was really inspired. I wanted to look like those guys. I didn’t really know what it took. I would just save up money and if I didn’t have the money, I would go to the store and sit on the floor in the aisle and read the magazines. I really enjoyed it.

I kept training. I was in a lot of sports in high school. I ran track. I played football. I was in wrestling up to a certain point. I gave that up because I didn’t like rolling around on the mat with another sweaty guy. It just lost its appeal to me after a while. I continued into my teenage years. I went to college. I continued to compete. When I was 19 years old, I won my first really good title. I’ll never forget that. I was in college and I didn’t have any money. The guy that was helping me worked for John Parillo. I’m not sure if you are familiar with John Parillo. He was a really, really big name. He is still around. He was a really big name back then in the industry. He is the guy that really brought on the whole fascia stretching stuff. Whether you agree with it or not, he’s the guy that brought that up.

John’s guy had a connection with a food market, so he would bring me boxes of tuna and essentially what I ate for my first contest was tuna, bags of lettuce and an occasional sweet potato.

Mike: Well balanced…

John: (Laughs) Yeah, well balanced. I’m lucky I didn’t die! It was brutal. It was the worst contest diet. It was absolutely brutal. I remember in between every single class at college I went to sleep. I just got back to my room and went to sleep. I was so tired. I ended up winning the show and I was ridiculously lean but not having money made those choices pretty simple for me. I didn’t have the luxury of having filets or all the other things I eat now. I had to keep it really, really simple. Then, of course, when the show was over, I made the classic mistake that everybody else makes. I remember saving some money and going down fast food row here and going from burger joint to burger joint to pizza joint. I don’t even know if I saved money for it. I probably used my credit card. I probably maxed out my credit card in one night.

I remember gaining 30-35 pounds in two days, which is just a ridiculously stupid thing. A lot of the things that I do, Mine are a result of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way. I look at all of the mistakes I’ve made and I try to learn from them and I try to incorporate that into my plans so that other people don’t make those same, dumb mistakes. I continued to complete through my 20’s and here I am. I am 41 now. The last three contests I’ve done, I’ve gotten second place on all three of them. I keep just barely just missing that pro card. That’s okay, it just pushes you to get better.

Here I am now. Like I said three or four years ago I really started getting my views out there. I started thinking a lot more about my philosophies and trying to tie it together. In terms of nutrition, It was in a situation where I got really sick in 2005 and I almost died from a vascular disease I had in my large intestine and that forced me to take a really deep look at the digestive system. I had some time in the hospital and then when I got out of the hospital, it was six months actually before I ended up going back to work because of various issues I kept having. I spent a lot of time just going back to the drawing board and trying to re-learn nutrition. Were my methods good, bad or whatever? I found a lot of holes in my way of thinking. I tried to educate myself.

I was one of those guys that wouldn’t eat fat. I thought cholesterol and an egg yolk was bad for you. I was exactly one of those guys. I’m embarrassed to say it but I was. I also had probably a superman complex where I felt I could go out and pig out on fast food, eat a ton and really the way to get really big was to just shove as many calories in your as you could at no regard. I do agree that sometimes you have to go on calorie overload and your metabolism wants that. That was just my philosophy in general. I just wanted to shove hamburgers and French fries down and have caloric excess and I can grow. That might have something to do to with digestive stress (laughs).

In terms of training, training is what I really, really enjoy. It’s the same story. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve trained in a lot of different techniques. I’ve trained under some extremely smart people. I’ve had some great coaches. The things that I think work really well now, a lot of them are not typical. You take training sequence, sequence of your exercises. I never hear anybody talk about that. In my opinion, that should be one of the biggest cornerstones or foundations of your training routine. There are certain exercises that you could do at certain points of time that are advantageous and the big thing is I look at this now, now that I’m in my 40’s from a longevity perspective. How am I going to be able to train hard for a long period of time without injuring myself? It’s a big deal. I can tell you that if I go into the gym and I do what a lot of these people say, which is to bench press first, squat first, then lift first, I can tell you that I start pulling things and I start suffering injuries.

It’s not a matter of training scared. It’s a matter of training intelligently. If you are a power lifter, you are concerned about getting the weight from point A to point B, if you are a body builder, you are concerned about placing tension on a muscle period. I find that for example, if you do a bench press second or third, you’re not going to be as strong because you are going to be a little fatigued, but your muscles are going to get the tension. You tendon and ligaments aren’t going to take the beating. I have a lot of people, they hear about my routines and how hard they are and how brutal they are but then they tell me, “Oh, my God, my joints feel better than they have ever felt. My joints feel awesome.”

That’s music to my ears because that’s one of my goals is to keep people healthy. There are a lot of things about training too I just really enjoy, I really like talking about. That’s just one example. I know that’s a very long-winded answer to your question.

Mike: No, no it leads us really next to some more stuff. One of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you, obviously, the majority of the people who read this site are combat athletes mostly. They are just grapplers, wrestlers etc. One of the things that is very neglected I think in the sport overall is health. You mentioned before, I know you are very big on getting your blood checked regularly, your cholesterol, triglycerides and everything like that. Many people ignore it completely in combat sports as a whole. I was hoping to get a bit of your uptake on what is the minimum that people should be looking at, say every six months, every 12 months to be getting checked so they are keeping within that healthy bracket? They love the sport, exactly the same as body builders and want to be doing it for as long as possible and this is the thing that no one is getting checked. It’s one of the things I think is really going to come around and bite them in the ass later on. I was hoping to get a bit of your view on the minimum people should be keeping an eye on this as they are going through the training.

John: Absolutely, I typically like to have people get their labs done every six months. Some of the things we are looking for, when I hear the term cholesterol, let me just give you my perspective on cholesterol. I will put a disclaimer out here and say that I’m not a doctor, I’m not an expert but I am entitled to my opinion so here is my opinion. My opinion is that the total cholesterol is a pretty meaningless number. I followed a lot of Uffe Ravnskov’s work. He wrote The Cholesterol Myths and I have followed some other people too, Malcolm Kendrick and some other pretty smart people but based on what I’ve read with people with an IQ that is 10,000 times higher than mine, that total cholesterol number doesn’t seem to mean a whole lot.

People get worried about anything that goes over 200. There is actually a lot of data out there that shows lower cholesterol people have a higher mortality rate than people with higher cholesterol, particularly with older women. There is a direct correlation as their cholesterol numbers lower, they are at more risk. Anyway, I don’t really put too much into that. Then you get into HDL and LDL, lipoproteins. That’s another really, really gray area right now. The traditional thinking has always been that a high HDL is good and I think there probably is something to that, if you look at what it is measuring. LDL is the one that is really, really tricky because we have heard a lot of different things. We have heard that really you have to look at the particle size, these small particles are more dangerous and can get lodged in your arteries and the larger, more buoyant, fluffy particles are like beach balls. They just bounce around. They don’t really do any damage.

There is a school of thought that says particle size is very important and you can get that checked in your labs. Not every lab place will do that but it’s very easy to get done here. I have all my people get it done. Then you’ve got another part of this, another school of thought that is the LDL oxidized or not. You can check somebody’s antioxidant status and you want somebody’s antioxidant status to be good because they are probably going to oxidize less cholesterol. There are actually some pretty cool studies out there with vitamin E. A couple of years ago, I heard about Red Palm Oil. It’s one of these tropical oils, like Coconut Oil that people were really scared for a while, “Oh my God, all the saturated fat” but Red Palm Oil has a really unique blend of vitamin E. It has all the tocotrienol, tocopherol and it has all those things. If you go out to Pub Med and you type in Red Palm Oil and LDL oxidation, you will see some real cool studies that show a reduction in oxidation.

There is a lot of gray area. I’m not sure that I would worry too much about LDL still at this point. The thing that I have always been taught was that the ratios I look at are a little different than most people. What I have always been taught is that your HDL needs to be high and your triglycerides need to be low. Those are the two factors that you really want to look at. Triglycerides, to me, seem like a really big deal. The nice thing about triglycerides is you can control it very easily with your diet, specifically with your carbohydrate intake. You lower your carbs a little bit, clean them up and you will see your triglycerides will lower.

Of course, you’ve always got genetic issue where no matter what people do they are going to be at risk. I’m not addressing that but generally speaking what I like to see is lower triglycerides and higher HDL. If you get those two things in order, I’m not going to promise you that you will live to be 100 but seems like the odds stack up in your favor in terms of longevity. I also tell people to not freak out and worry about this stuff constantly because you know what the worst thing in life is in terms of killing you? Stress. It really is.

We’re built to handle bouts of stress. We’ve got this fight or flight thing that we have that handles that pretty well, but what we are not meant to handle is these constant low-grade levels of stress. Does my wife love me anymore? Am I going to be able to make my house payment this weekend? Should I go bail my kid out of jail? These just are just constant levels of stress.

To me, that’s what does more damage to people than anything. The number one thing I tell people is if you want to improve your health, first of all let’s start figuring out ways to reduce your stress. As silly as that sounds, it makes a big difference to me.

Mike: Talking about stress and things like that, which management is a big thing, again, it’s a neglected thing for everybody I think when reducing stress and just relaxing really and not taking ourselves too seriously. One of the things I read about or it was on one of your podcasts back when you were lowering your own cholesterol and taking a closer look at your own blood is about how much you improved your own blood work. One of the things you talked about was how previously you had a very low fat diet but then now you have a good quality fat at the right time in your client’s diet and your own. One of the things I would like to talk about that obviously is how it helps reduce inflammation in the body that you brought up previously. You mentioned briefly exercise selection and sequence, which helped me. I recently had shoulder surgery, so any kind of overhead pressing but when I sequenced it, it helps me out tremendously, so thank you.

Part 2 coming next week!

Stay Healthy,

Mike