Interview with Prep Coach John Meadows - Part 2

Hey Guys,

Here is part 2 of last weeks interview with John Meadows, enjoy!

Mike: Everyone in the UK is still scared of high fats. We are not quite scared of carbs yet. We are still scared of high fat. I’m sure that’s coming over not being scared of carbs next year maybe. At the moment, we are still scared of fat. Can you give us a brief overview of why that’s a bad thing? Why shouldn’t people be scared of fat, especially people who put high loads on their joints and tendons and a lot of injury and strain, how that’s going to help them out?

John: The first thing I would say is that any extreme diet is silly. Any diet that doesn’t let you eat any carbs or any fat is silly. Eventually it will lead to long-term issues for most people. In terms of fat, people have this idea that I think that some people think that I am eating tons and tons of fat. I wouldn’t say is necessarily true. I’m just not scared of it. I don’t avoid it. I eat an egg. I don’t eat an egg white, you know? If you look at an egg yolk and all the nutrition that is in an egg yolk, why would you ever throw that away? I think there is a tie in here with fat and cholesterol because a lot of foods that are high in cholesterol like an egg yolk also have more fat. People lump those together.

Here is what I would say. We had this movement toward polyunsaturated fats and to get rid of all other fats. It did not help long term health at all. People had just as much cancer. They had just as many issues as they did before. It helped none. I think I saw recently where even margarine they were going to stop making it here or something.

John: Years back it was like, “Don’t eat butter, eat margarine”, which is silly that you would think that butter is bad. Anyway, in terms of the facts, if you look at a cell membrane, a cell membrane needs a balance of saturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. You have signals going in and out of your cell that if there is too much saturated fat and the cell is too rigid. The signals have a harder time making it through. Think of it this way, if you are eating too much saturated fat; this is a very simplistic explanation but I think it’s kind of funny. If you had too much, you would be stuck. You would be like rigamortis. You just would be stuck, right?

Mike: Yeah.

John: On the other end of that, if you don’t eat any saturated fat and it’s all polyunsaturated, your cell membranes are probably too fluid and then you would be like the blob. Remember the blob?

Mike: (laughs) Yeah.

John: Mushy everywhere. You need a blend, first of all, just at the cellular level for signals to go in and out appropriately. Then you look at your joints. Your joints have a lot of saturated fat in them. People say, “Oh well, your body can make saturated fat out of carbohydrates.” That’s true but it’s never a good idea to just power down carbohydrates, in the hopes that your body is going to make the right amount of saturated fat. It’s kind of like people say, “Well, I’m not going to eat any cholesterol. If my body needs it, it will make cholesterol. My liver will produce a little more cholesterol.” That’s true up to a point, but there’s nothing wrong with giving your body the raw material it needs instead of pushing it into some kind of self-protective mechanism where it has to compensate for it.

In terms of fat, saturated fats, there are a lot of good folks out there that have written a lot of good things about saturated fat. I really like, there is a lady named Mary Enig. She was writing for the Weston A. Price Foundation. She wrote a book called Know Your Fats. I thought for your listeners out there, they might want to grab that book. That was my introduction to fats and I really liked it. I really liked it. To me, it seemed non-biased. It was a very, very good reading. She is a sweet little old lady but in terms of who I like, she is probably the person I like to read the most when it comes to facts.

Can you overdo saturated fats? Yeah, of course you can. You can probably worsen your insulin sensitivity if you go overboard with it but to be scared of fat when it has so many basic functions. I didn’t even talk about the hormonal piece of this. Cholesterol is the backbone of many different hormones. We have this tie with cholesterol and fat usually in food. I see a lot of people on these low fat diets that have hormonal issues, particularly women. It’s very common. You are not giving your body what it needs. I would also say I think you mentioned inflammation. When all these polyunsaturated fats started hitting their peak in popularity, corn oil, soy bean oil and all this stuff, people’s inflammation levels started rising just because of the high Omega Six concentration in all those oils.

Your body needs a balance of Omega Three and Omega Six and if it gets out of balance, if you take the raw material for Omega Six and Omega Three, for instance Omega Three, flax seed oil for instance and alpha Linolenic acid, it needs to go through a conversion process. Omega Six is the same way. It needs to go through a conversion process before it reaches its end stage. There is an enzyme that helps with that process and when you monopolize it by having both of those pathways, Omega Three and Omega Six share the same enzyme to help this process. It’s early on in the process. If you monopolize it and you have a ton of Omega Six in your body, which has been pretty standard in our diets, you compromise the body’s ability to keep this in balance.

If you do blood work on these people, you will see a high C-reactive protein level that detects inflammation. That’s another good one; by the way, to have looked at every six months is your C-reactive protein levels. The right kind of fats can keep that in balance. You get fish oil. I tell people just to get fish oil so they are getting the end product. As you get older, your body isn’t quite as good at converting the raw material to the end product. In terms of saturated fat, man saturated fat; I like Coconut Oil and people are like, “Oh, that’s all saturated fat.” I think it’s about 92% saturated fat but it has a ton of medium chain triglycerides in it. It has a fat in it called lauric acid, which is extremely powerful. It is very good for your immune system. It is actually in mother’s breast milk. It is one of the reasons why when babies drink their mother’s breast milk, it’s why their immune systems are strengthened.

That’s one of the things that helps anyway. Years ago and I haven’t looked at this lately but years ago, they were looking at it anyway to treat HIV. It’s very antiviral, very antimicrobial, very good fat and people say, “You don’t want that, its empty calories.” Its empty calories, do you understand the health benefit of this? When somebody says that I just write them off as being even more silly than I am. Monounsaturated fats, we talked about HDL triglyceride ratio. There seems to be a relationship with monounsaturated fats and your HDL, avocado and things like that. I think you need all those things. In terms of percentage of it in your diet, it probably varies but anywhere from 20-40% I think on training days when for example, your athletes are training really hard and your guy is training really hard, they need more carbohydrates for energy, in my opinion. They want carbohydrates that are going to turn into fuel and just drive you.

You can only have so many calories. In those days, I might have a little lower fat, maybe 25% of their calories will come from fat because a high percentage are coming from carbs to drive activity, but on days they are not training, they don’t need as many carbs, that’s when I would drive their fat up. You are determining what they eat on their activity levels and not just some random percentage or random numbers. It’s based on what they are actually doing. You are supporting their body and you are keeping it healthy at the same time. Can you imagine your guys trying to have good workouts on no carbs?

Mike: You wouldn’t believe how many people try!

John: How long do you think they can make it into a high-intensity workout?

Mike: Not long but it’s crazy how many people are still trying it to keep the weight down, especially the fat count and things like that. They are trying to cut weight and coming to me with low carb diet and saying ‘I’m training and it feels terrible, I’m feeling run down, I can’t sleep’. Look how many carbs you are taking it. It’s ridiculous. It still happens unfortunately.

John: Yeah and what’s silly is to be the best at what you do, do be the best football player, to be the best track and field fighter, MMA fighter, you have to be able to train hard. If you are not training hard, you are not going to fight or play to your potential. You can’t take your body; think about those old Rocky movies. You can’t take your body to a whole other level when you don’t feel good, when you feel like crap. You know? You just can’t push yourself to that level. I believe in never compromising your training. I believe your training should always be as best possible and you need to support it with nutrition. If you’re trying to lose weight, look at other times of the day. If you are training in the afternoon, yeah, maybe go lower carb earlier in the day. If you are training in the morning, maybe go a little bit lower carb in the evenings.

Don’t sacrifice the quality of your training. I’ve never seen an athlete reach their full potential when they just can’t train worth a crap, unless they are just a completely genetic freak, which I don’t think we should ever use as an example to determine what we are doing.

Mike: No, we shouldn’t use them. I agree completely with that. I think an amount of people make a strong argument out of genetic outliners. They shouldn’t be used for plans for everybody else. Coming back, obviously to making sure that you train intensely. I know that you are a big component of intra workout nutrition and obviously fueling workouts correctly. You have said previously that you think that’s one of the biggest discoveries you made in nutrition recently, especially when it comes to recovery is intra workout nutrition. I personally use it with all my athletes. We are looking now at things like the Di and Tripeptides now becoming available in the UK where people were trying to get hydrolyzed casein and things like that from all different types of different places and combine them to make their own products. People were having digestive issues and it was terrible. If you could give us a quick overview on your thoughts of correct workout supplementation and training supplementation?

John: Let me just start by saying this. I believe your nutrition in this respect should match your training. If I’ve got a body builder, weight lifting is weight training, the way we do it is very catabolic in nature. I’m going to be a little more aggressive with my intra workout nutrition with somebody who is really pounding the weights. If I’ve got somebody that is maybe grappling and by the way, I don’t do a lot of that, I don’t want to pretend I’m somebody that I’m not but if I were to have somebody that’s doing a lot of grappling, I probably wouldn’t be as aggressive but it would still be important though because these guys are burning a lot of calories. There is a lot of stress. The longer and harder they can work out, the better athletes they are going to become.

My experience is that these nutrients allow that to happen. The carbohydrates that I love, really there are two of them. Vitargo has been around for a long time. I think that’s a really good one. It’s very low osmolality, which just means that the gastric emptying rate is very high. It clears the stomach very quickly. It doesn’t cause stomach upset. The other one that is my personal favorite is Biotest Plazma,also very low osmolality. I’ve never seen anybody have a stomach issue with it. I should clarify. The few people that I know that have stomach issues with these products didn’t use enough water in the drink. You can’t be too concentrated.

Once we fixed the amount of water they were using, they were fine. For body builders, those things are also going to drive insulin and insulin response while you train is really good for a body builder because it’s going to help. Insulin is in your blood and your insulin receptors on your cell membrane are going to say, “Okay, cool. I’ve got some insulin.” The insulin receptor, think of it like a key hole and then the insulin comes along and it’s the key. It inserts into the key hole and it opens up the cell. Think of it like a trap door opens. Then you have these carrier proteins, glucose transporters to go to the surface of the cell where this trap door is and the glucose jumps on board and goes back into the cell.

Long story short, you are getting glucose in that cell. You are getting all these nutrients that are in your blood into your cells, into your muscle cells and the interesting thing, this is also true for your fat cells but the cool thing about training when you are training really hard, you are trashing your muscle cells. The preferentially suck in glucose. You have an opportunity to suck in a lot of glucose in your muscle cell, whereas at another time during the day, your fat cells are going to just say, “Hey, I want some of this too.” It’s not as optimal.

In terms of protein, the biggest mistake I see people make is they don’t use the right protein. Instead of using di and tripeptide, which to be clear to all of your folks listening, those are just proteins that are pretty much digested. They are broken down to their constituent di and tripeptide. They are broken down to their basic form and your body doesn’t need to digest it. The last thing you want when you are training is your digestive system to have to digest a lot of food while you are working out. That’s not a good thing. People, I tell them we’ve got to be very specific with the nutrients or this not only will not work, it will make you feel worse. We need to have the right stuff in to get the effect that we are talking about here. Di and tripeptide are pretty much digested. If you get the right kind and not a cheap version, you are going to have probably over 90% of the protein is going to be digested already, so your body sucks it up, uses it, and makes it in your muscle cells. It drives your free amnio acid levels and that in combination with the carbohydrates driving insulin produces this incredible recovery.

You’ve always got this battle going on during the day with muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein breakdown. My contention is this. When you train really, really hard, more so with weights, you create a lot of muscle protein breakdown and from what I have seen, from what I have observed anecdotally with hundreds upon hundreds of people is that if you can control the muscle protein breakdown right there as it is happening, and by the way, this is going to give you more energy too. Hey, that’s great. That’s the way to go, in my opinion. I don’t think that this timing is meant for everybody. I don’t think most people even train hard enough.

I saw somebody the other day who said, “You have to earn your intra workout nutrition.” I like that.

I thought that was good because that’s true. Most of the people, when I go to the gym now are sitting on benches, they are texting or they are talking on their phones. Let’s be honest here, is an intra workout going to help those guys? No. They are not even training hard enough to create this environment that we are talking about. This isn’t for everybody. This is for athletes that train really, really hard and I would say the more the end of the spectrum becomes training with weight, the more this has been official but I still think it is very beneficial for people like MMA fighters because they are breaking their bodies down. It may not be like a weight lifter breaking their bodies down but they are training hard.

What I would do is I would do a smaller version of what I would do with a high-level body builder but the concepts still pretty much apply. I think it’s important to note that too. It’s not for everybody but when you get these guys that are the top of their sport or maybe they think they are at their genetic limit. This is a way to help you get more; get more out of your body. That’s how I think about it.

Mike: Yes, it is something I have observed with people I have worked with to increase muscle mass, obviously is what body builders are after because we have to work within weight class limits, well I know body builders do obviously as well but the recovery aspect. As far as reducing soreness goes, it’s brilliant and people just love it. They don’t feel as though they are running themselves down all the time. It is brilliant. Its creating that environment for people get the most of it. The anabolic environment for example, and you are well known for the type training that you do, mountain dog style training. It’s very high intensity type training.

I’ve observed a lot of your clients go to training seven days a week, like yourself going into a competition. That recovery must be a massive part of the nutrition you do with you clients. Do you put that down to the correct nutrition or do you use extra techniques to help with that recovery as well?

John: Yeah, I should put some context around that too. I don’t train; I don’t have anybody train seven days a week year round.

A lot of people think that. I’m like, “No, no that’s not true.” What is true is that I like for people leading up to an event to be at their physical peak, to be training as hard as they can, getting the best results that they can but the reality is, we are not terminators. We are not machines and we can only handle that level of stress for so long. A large part of the off-season, people are only training four days a week. Then they will go to five days a week. There is a process that I have of people after their contest is over, I bring them back to four days a week. I lower their intensity levels. I let their body rejuvenate and recuperate and also mentally they are pretty drained. Just mentally I let them get back to a good place, you know?

Then as the months go by, I just gradually build their intensity up. Once I build the intensity up in each session, then I add frequency. I start the extra frequency at a lower intensity. Then I build that up. There is a process that is going on here with what I’m doing with people. There are four days that becomes higher intensity four days, which becomes five days, which becomes higher intensity five days, which becomes six days. It’s very well thought out. I’m not just trying to kill people. That’s not my goal. My goal is for people to get better and there is a very structured way that I do this. Now, everybody is different. Some people can only tolerate at their peak six days a week. Most people can tolerate at least six though if you get this right.

There is some variation with people but there is also a general pattern of if you do this right, you can increase people’s workloads. The people who I really can’t get their workload up that much, I hate to say it but probably genetically, they just don’t have it. People talk about genetics in terms of physical characteristics.

“His clavicles are too narrow or this or that.” I think of genetic limitation a little differently. I think about your ability to tolerate stress. I have heard people say they do a leg workout and they can’t recover for two weeks. Mentally they are drained for two weeks. When I hear that, I think this person genetically just might not have it. They are never going to be able to tolerate a lot of stress. That tells me they are probably not going to go to a real high level in our sport. That’s just reality. That’s just what I see.

Then I get people that are just the opposite. I get these guys that are freaking animas and I’m holding them back. I’m like, “No, hold on. Let’s just do five days first” and “No, I want to go seven.” They are animals. Those are the guys that as long as we can control it and do this systematically, they are going to improve at a really, really rapid rate. This whole genetics thing, a lot of it to me is just how much stress you can tolerate. Some people just can’t take it to another level during an actual training session. They feel a little pain and they stop. They can’t handle it. Those guys probably aren’t going to make it to a real high level. Again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, of course you have genetic freaks. Some of the top guys in Mr. Olympia, if you saw them train you would probably laugh because their training is pretty pathetically. They are, they are genetic freaks and they can literally mow the yard and their legs are going to be 32 inches.

Anyway, I build a volume up over time. We peak and this becomes much more complicated when people are competing multiple times during the year but there is always going to be a systematic way to do this. There is always going to be a thought process on how to peak for an event and then how to work your way down.

Mike: Absolutely and a quick last thing. I realize I am taking quite a bit of your time. The last thing I want to talk about is competing frequency. I know body builders compete a few times a year, grapplers and fighters, especially guys looking to climb the rankings, some of them compete once a month or twice a month, which I think is far too much. I still think you should have an off season as it were where you work on weaknesses etc. How often would you see this training for body builders, would you say competing four times a year is too much? Five times a year is too much or just how the individual handles it or do you have guidelines, etc?

John: In body building, you have to look at where the person is in the sport. If they are an elite national level competitor, for example, I’ve got a guy who just missed his pro card by one place. His name is Matt Bursica. He just did the nationals. He missed his pro card by one place. He is right there. For him to take a year off or two years off doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. We’re going to be aggressive. He is right there at that level. The next pro qualifier coming up, he will do it. If he doesn’t win that one, there is another one in three months and he will do that one.

Take that example, that’s one end of spectrum and then you’ve got another end of the spectrum. You’ve got somebody who competes and they’ve got really a lot of weaknesses. They are just trying to win a local level contest but maybe they have body parts that are really far behind and maybe they are just really outmuscled. Those are the guys to be competitive, they are going to need to back off the competitions and they are going to have to put more work into their off season and they are going to have to build their bodies more. It’s very hard to grow when you are going show to show to show very quickly. It’s almost impossible to grow. The only way to do it is through creativity with chemistry.

I’m just being honest there. For people that need to improve a lot to be even competitive, I’m going to hold those guys back and I’m going to say, “Let’s take our time.” Let’s have a good off season. Let’s gain some real good muscle mass but then again the other end of the spectrum somebody may be right there at that elite level, so maybe they could use an extra half inch here or an inch there but those guys, I’m not going to have. They’ve got a window of opportunity. They are right there, so I’m not going to hold them back. I’m not going to say, “Don’t compete for a year. Don’t compete for two years.” We’re going to keep plugging away and we are going to get that pro card. That’s the different philosophies. It just depends on where somebody is at in their development, where they are at on the competition side of things.

It’s really hard for your guys, your MMA guys because I talk about in terms of six months or a year; you’ve got to do that in terms of a month or four to eight weeks.

Mike: Yeah.

John: They need a break.Your programming actually requires a lot more thought than mine.

Mike: Again, it’s all individual. You mentioned in the beginning how we balloon up in weight afterwards. Sometimes you get fighters that do the exact same thing as soon as the fight is done or sometimes if they haven’t got the right people around them and they are slamming fast food and the weight balloons right up and they’ve got such a hard time to bring it down again. It just becomes a vicious cycle. We find that the people are looking to become pros and really take being a pro seriously, people won’t let themselves go over a certain amount. They make their lives a bit easier on themselves. It’s generally the least professional people come to me going, “I’ve got 50 pounds to lose. I’ve got eight weeks to lose the weight. Can you do it?”

Well, I can chop a leg off.

It all depends on the person really. It is the same kind of thing going up the pro ranks, they fight less but the longer camps, the training for specific things, seems like pro qualifiers to have shows in mind that they want to hit and do well on rather than, “I just want to get competing experience”, which I imagine is a similar kind of thing.

John: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: The last thing I want to talk about, I’m trying not to take too much of your time because I know how busy you are. The really important stuff is who is the greatest superhero of all time?

John: I like the cosmic dudes. I like Galactus.

Mike: Really? I’m really surprised by that. I thought you would be a Captain America guy.

John: No, I like cosmic dudes. I like Thanos I like Galactus. I like the Silver Surfer. I think the two best stories of all time; I think the Infinity Gauntlet with Thanos is probably my favorite story of all time.

Mike: Yeah.

John: If you have just seen the recent Thor movie?

Mike: Yeah, the Avengers. It’s good to change that. It’s not gems, its stones now. I don’t know how they are going to fit the gauntlet in with it. Obviously the gem is attached to gauntlet.

John: Right. That will be interesting. For years I’ve been saying, “Make a movie with Thanos. That would be awesome.” Then my other favorite story of all time was when Galactus came to Earth. They did a fantastic floor movie about it but it was absolutely horrible.

Mike: It was terrible, wasn’t it?

John: Horrible. They could have at least spent a couple of minutes talking about how the Silver Surfer became the Silver Surfer, first of all.

Mike: Yeah, you just forgot about that bit, didn’t they?

John: Yeah, they didn’t get into that at all. It would have only taken a five-minute flashback, right? It could have been great and then Galactus was a cloud. I’m like, “Come on.” It was horrible.

Mike: Did you read, I think next year, is it next year or the year after it comes out?

John: I hope it’s a lot better. I heard they were but I don’t know. You hear all these rumors about what they are doing and not doing.

Mike: Yeah.

John: The Thor movies have been pretty good. I like those.

Mike: Yeah.

John: The new Spiderman looks pretty good.

Mike: It looks really good to me. It’s my favorite character, Spiderman.

John: Did you see the new preview with Electro?

Mike: Yeah, yeah and Rhino as well but it’s like a massive electric shoe, isn’t it that Rhino has got? That looks really good. I think Harry Osborne is walking through the Osborne Mansion and then there are the tentacles in the back in the case. It looks really good. I’m glad they didn’t mess it up. They have done it really well. I know it’s not done by Marvel, so I was a bit worried.

John: Yeah, so there you go.

Mike: I would like to say thanks very much for your time, John. It is really appreciated that you took the time.

John: You’re welcome, you’re welcome. It was my pleasure, my pleasure. I’m happy to be on the show.

It was great to have a chat to John and I am extremely thankful I can pick his brains! If you liked this interview, make sure you head over to the website for even more!

Stay healthy,