Complete Human Performance Radio

Your butt is important.

Yes, it’s helpful for sitting and a few other essential purposes. However, it’s also a muscle group that can have a big impact on your performance and appearance.

Your glutes — the muscles around your posterior -- play a key role in powering your leg movements and stabilizing your upper body during daily activities. 

If you’re a physique athlete like a bodybuilder or model, then the appearance of your butt also matters. As Bret Contreras says in this podcast — your butt can be a "deal breaker" if you’re competing in a physique sport.

In this podcast, Bret Contreras, aka “The Glute Guy” is going to share his 20 years worth of knowledge on glute training with you. You’ll learn:

If you want to lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you expend.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you should spend every day in a caloric deficit while you're dieting.

In fact, you might get better results if you take structured, intermittent "refeeds" -- periods where you purposely eat excess calories during your diet. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about refeeds which you'll learn about in this podcast.

You'll also learn:

If you've ever tried to lose weight, you've probably heard of "starvation mode."

Maybe you've also heard of "metabolic damage" or "metabolic slowdown."

You learn that when you cut calories and lose weight, your metabolism drops, and weight loss slows.

Then you're stuck. 

You know you need to eat less, but you're also worried that you'll slow your metabolism and make weight loss even harder.

In this podcast, you'll learn:

Losing fat is hard.

Losing a lot of fat is harder.

But neither is as hard as maintaining a super lean physique -- without going nuts.

You're probably willing to put up with dieting if you know the end is in site. What you're not willing to tolerate is the hunger, stress, social isolation and other issues that usually prevent you from staying super lean.

Sure, you can suck it up and be miserable. Or, you can use the strategies in this podcast to make staying lean much, much easier.

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like sleep.

It’s even harder to find someone who gets enough.

For one of the simplest and most effective things people can do to improve their health and body composition, sleep usually gets overlooked.

Most people are struggling to reach and maintain a healthy weight. You know how important diet and exercise are for accomplishing this, but sleep is arguably almost as important. Your sleep can impact what and how much you eat, your ability to exercise, and how much fat or muscle you lose while dieting.

In this podcast, you're going to learn from sleep researcher Dan Pardi on how you can improve your health and lose fat by sleeping better.

Lacrosse is a weird sport.

You get to whack other players with metal poles, you run constantly without any breaks, and you use a small rubber ball that’s basically like an airborne hockey puck. You have to have great speed, endurance, strength, and coordination. 

If you’re goal is to be generally fit, you can learn a lot by looking at the training practices of lacrosse players.

In today’s show, you’re going to learn how one lacrosse coach is taking his sport to a new level. You'll learn how doctor and elite level lacrosse coach Joe Lightfoot is using strength and conditioning exercises, recovery tactics, and a slightly different coaching philosophy to help his players reach the highest level of their sport.

You’ll also learn Joe's best tips for coaching that you can use for own training. If you’re a coach or trainer you can also use these tips when working with your athletes.

You'll find that Joe uses the same general strategy that we use here on imprüvism — he believes in using small, consistent changes to master the basics first, and then and only then, focusing on the smaller details of whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.

We like the idea of doing something that’s scientific.

We want to know that the choices we make to lose weight, gain muscle, and live longer are based on good evidence.

Unfortunately, the "science" that's presented in the media and elsewhere is often misleading, irrelevant, or untrue. It's easy to be confused.

You might not have a Ph.D. in research science and maybe you don’t have time to read research papers every day. However, you can still become fitter, healthier, leaner, and happier by taking a few minutes to learn what to look for in a scientific paper or news report. 

In this podcast, you’re going to learn how to critically evaluate research as it's presented in the media and in the academic literature. Evelyn Kocur, also known as “Carb Sane," comes on the show to teach you what to look for in a scientific study and how to avoid being fooled by yourself and others when evaluating research. After mastering the concepts in this podcast, you'll be able to interpret, understand, and use (or decide not to use) the health science information you see online and elsewhere.

Whether you like it or not, you have to deal with email. It’s a part of life.

It can also start to take over your life if you don’t manage it well.

You know the feeling — that horrible feeling you get when you know there’s over a hundred unread emails in your inbox. You know that eventually, you’ll have to waste an afternoon answering them all.

So you procrastinate. You stress about your full inbox, and you go nuts thinking about whether or not you missed something important.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In this podcast, you’re going to learn everything you need to know to make answering email easy, painless, and productive. You'll hear from Ari Meisel, a productivity coach who specializes in mastering email overload.