so how how have you been though like overall like last time we spoke was quite a while ago I was also in Toronto when we last spoke so that's uh yeah it was about a year ago yeah yeah it have to be a year ago yeah you guys did like a documentary you guys are doing some cool things there let's talk about that let's start with that yeah the documentary took up so much about time when um I pitched it to our videographer and Joel it was meant to be like a 20 minute YouTube video you know leading into competitions that we were doing in at the end of last year and it just turned into this Beast of a video like it was hard to get it down to an hour so that was a lot of filming a lot of editing in my opinion it became a really good product and I tend to think that there's a lack of bodybuilding documentaries out there there's some great ones from the 70s and 80s of course and then it just seems to be this drought where no one was doing a great deal probably after like the 2000s or at least the style was a lot different and then you have some of the more recent ones in my opinion are pretty average to watch and they're probably more aimed at like their meat head type whereas we wanted to kind of pay homage to those older ones like we do everything else and um yeah I think it came together pretty nicely considering we didn't plan much and didn't have the budget that they did how do you watch that it's currently on our patreon because it costs so much we put a little price in front of it of course we don't go bro I'll send you the link it's about an hour okay that's cool I'll make sure to put the link in the show notes so for any of you interested in watching this documentary definitely check out more than muscle on patreon yeah yeah yeah awesome and and it kind of exposes Joel's dark side like people realize that he's genuinely an [ __ ] so clears any doubt in people's mind is he cranky because he's dieting or what's the situation there uh no it's just his personal it doesn't really change okay have you guys been training together quite frequently for that documentary or leading up to it at least we genuinely hardly saw each other throughout the process we film separately I guess cuz we were kind of competing against each other it's better to go into it unknown almost you know like I get in my head very easily and I'll chop and change things and second guess myself as it is so if I saw that Joel was making quicker progress then I'd probably make drastic decisions I shouldn't you guys aren't helping each other that's what I'm hearing not at all far from real rivalry going on within the company I see yeah I love so with the competition say that again business is healthy business is yes good is the result of the competition is that left for those who watch the documentary or has it been announced uh hasn't been announced no no okay so if you want to find out you got to watch the documentary yeah good pitch good style all right all right cool well you mentioned that most of the time you were training by yourself right that's accurate like you guys don't train at the same gym or you do and just train at different no no we train at different gyms we have done for the last maybe the last two years okay I find that interesting because you work at the same facility yeah yeah but I clock off at 5: Joel's usually there at 5: we completely miss each other our schedules are very different actually so even if we were at the same gym we probably wouldn't be able to line up too many sessions but since we finished the documentary and since the competition's finished we've trained together a couple of times we've kind of passed the branch and kissing made up yeah yeah yeah good good glad to hear that so Pete Hartwig you guys were training with him I think there was like a video that was posted on YouTube was that like way before though because I know you guys are pretty late with the uploads yeah that was about a year prior um okay we it um we're getting better okay that's good better we actually have another video with Pete that we shot the same day that still isn't out it's a more interview style the thing is Joel's recently started working on more than muscle parttime because the amount of designs that we do and emailing and all that stuff packing and sending orders that takes up a lot of time and I still work full-time there's not much time left to edit and then we've got to be careful with not overspending on filming and editing but we've got a few videos in the pipeline that are pretty much done and ready to go up nice okay that's cool that's something to look forward to for those who tune in to your channel more than muscle on YouTube for those those who uh haven't got the memo on that yet um I'm sure most listeners have though guys are quite popular so I'm pretty I'm pretty sure uh most listeners or most of you guys who are tuning in know who more than muscle is Brock and Joel right we've had them on twice now both of you so that's really cool try to keep you guys on the roster regular occurring guests right that's the idea so get get the scoop at once a year you know yeah yeah so it's not full-time but it's progressing in a direction where it po could be or do you think that like what's the situation there or what's the goals if you will it's such a hard thing to balance you know and you never know when the right time to jump into it is but we're going to let the business dictate it if the numbers make sense and if the workload requires us both to be on full-time then we will at the moment we've been able to pay Joel which is great perhaps I'll be able to work on it you know this year or next year a little bit and then I think naturally if we're both working on it productivity is going to grow and sales and increase and then we'll both be able to work on it full-time It's Tricky cuz I love my job and I love more than muscle as well so it's really hard to make a call either way and um it's a good problem to have to win-win really and I think um if I can guess that Joel would ideally want to do that fulltime the more the muscle yeah yeah with your training let's talk about that did anything change with your training leading up to the documentary the competition I'm assuming the documentary is what captured leading up to the contest and then after the contest then the documentary ended I'm assuming right yeah with the training how was that though it was pretty good it was fairly manageable it didn't change a great deal I gave myself a fairly long Runway leading into the competition because I the comps were in I think late October but I had four weeks in Europe in the middle of the year so I thought well if I'm away I'm not going to be training for four weeks I'm going to be eating nothing but Noy there's no did you say noi yeah yeah that's delicious yeah had some yesterday yeah jealous I I thought well if I start my cut and training after that I'm not going to be ready I was half getting ready for two months before Europe then went away and came back and kind of goes through it in the documentary but I was tracking every day my training cardio and nutrition and I just made sure to be really particular about tracking that making sure it was really consistent and only changing it when my body was plateauing in the past I might have rushed into a cut and you end up eating next to nothing and you're 3 months out so this time I just kind of took it pretty easy went from you know a 5day split to 4day split 4 days drop setting down down to 3 days 3day drop sets 3day super setting and that's the most extreme of got 3day super setting interesting and sorry go ahead sorry no no no you go well I was going to say you said the three day uh just so I understand correctly and for the listeners that's a 3 days split as in like you do three days and then repeat that same cycle again so you train six days a week yeah then have Sunday off or just do cardio Sunday and then with the 4 day what was it like four days and then you take a rest day and then repeat the four days again I just waited until the end of the cycle and kind of determined how I felt so I do four days either have a rest or just repeat when did you start the diet was that pretty much when we spoke last because when we spoke last you were talking about your trip to Europe that you were going to take four weeks you did you were talking about that yeah so I'm assuming it's it started around that time then like about a year ago right yeah it would have been about May and then late June I left and then back like July yeah because we spoke and I have it right here yeah May 4th yeah that's when we spoke last so that's right around the time then yeah all right that makes sense yeah yeah I see first week of May it started and it makes sense because yeah we were talking about your trip to Europe so basically you were running with like yeah about 5 to 6 days a week training from that that point onward right because I think you were saying there was a period where you were training 4 days I was doing five days up until mid April and then I I didn't realize but I started from 4 days straight away from May yeah so like four days per week you mean no no no four days SPL four days split got it got it and then you would just repeat it or see how you felt if you needed a rest day and then repeat it yeah correct gotcha did you find that one work better for you though for from uh I guess recovery or do you don't care about recovery I don't care and your body gets your body gets used to it like it's mindset right a lot of this stuff yeah that's right and you can't give yourself an option you can't think well this is unachievable or this is hurting too much so there was never an option what you peeled back down to so you started at what weight and then what did you end up at 88 kilos and so what say is that 195 is pounds yeah and then dropped down to I think I got say 77 kilos 170ish okay so about 25 PBS nice over the course of like about five months four months five months you took your time yeah yeah that's good good for muscle retention right like maintaining muscle that was the plan yeah and my body just clings onto fat so I knew that I had to give myself a long Runway and you know when I look back at it I dropped my split from five days pretty quickly to four as I said and then then as soon as I was back from Europe in July I went straight to 3 days my diet didn't start very high because so many guys can start eating you know 3,000 3 and a half thousand and still lose weight but I was um maintaining weight at 2400 even 2200 yeah was that difficult like from uh just feeling satiated what was the point where you're like man I'm getting really hungry pretty light really it was fairly I don't know why it was fairly manageable until probably a month out when I was down to 1650 calories and doing 3day Drop set fasted cardio cardio after working like for an hour that type of thing that's when I thought this is getting a bit tricky that was to get to that 170 where you feel like that's like your Peak condition yeah yeah you're what 511 uh 5'9 okay that's like yeah man that's impressive that's upside down for like 12 hours I'll be 510 yeah yeah no but that's uh that's impressive cuz like when I've spoken to a lot of the pro natural bodybuilders I've had on yeah it's it's you're like a middleweight like I would say if you is that what you compete at like is that the middleweight category or is it not working with uh weight categories where you're yeah they don't they were natural comp so they don't care about weight what's the organization and ICN as well ICN right we interviewed someone from Australia who competed at the ICN Brandon kempter do you know Brandon yeah he's impressive his physique so leame I'm so jealous um you don't think you could get to that level of though I try I try and I potentially could get close if I was willing to lose muscle because I was like I said for six weeks straight I was eating 1650 calories which is next to nothing an hour of cardio day heaps of supplements to help recovery and fat burning not that I think it really works and that's after you know a pretty long prep like I don't know if I could do much more if I just kept going I might lose a bit more body fat but I'd lose a lot of muscle like I'd love to get leaner but I also don't like that look who does your diet but is it all done by you or do you work with like Pete I know Pete is doing coaching like cwig or is it just you take care of it yourself yeah I take care of it myself like I've learned things from different people getting diets done by a few different people in the past I've learned a lot about what not to do by my own experiments and by crafty coaches so I felt like I was never getting quite the results that I would have loved with Co Coes because I do genuinely think that they weren't used to someone who didn't lose body fat that quick I think it was a shock that I wasn't losing body fat it should have been a lot easier with other clients you know when you're dieting do you tend to track your nutrition to the gram like you weigh everything out on the scale versus what Joel does okay so you you do take that approach where I know Joel doesn't do that yeah really different approaches have you guys like talked about it and asked each other why you do this versus why maybe you do yeah yeah one day if you're just going by sight and how you feel you might eat, 1500 calories the next day you might eat 2500 and it's so easy to convince yourself that you can eat more but you can go easy on yourself if you're like well I'm hungry or I probably haven't eaten enough sure you can squeeze in another bowl of rice blah blah blah and I've tried it before and it got me to a certain point but never further it's just different faque like Joel's I would say more blessed where he can hold a lot of muscle and lose body fat pretty quickly does use like a measuring cup for certain things he was saying like he's not eyeballing every I think yeah I guess like a lot of it would be eyeballing and then some of it would be yeah wow that is blessed then he's blessed for sure because if I eyeballed it I'd be gaining weight for sure that's my yeah yeah I hear you man I'm with you on that yeah there's very few people that could probably do what Joel's doing and get to really lean levels of body fat how's his appetite compared to yours are you a big eater I wouldn't say a big eater and I know that in in the past he's been a big eater I feel like we're both getting old and our metabolism slowing but I think he's probably eating less than what he has in the past I know I am like actually in the documentary I made I was going through all my food every meal of the day and I had it all out on the table and the videographer said Gee that's a heck of a lot of food CU he like he didn't really understand the concept so it could be be just I've been in that industry in that realm for so long I think I'm eating next to nothing but other people it could be a lot yeah yeah for sure it's all relative right and they might think well I'm eating I'm eating nothing but most of their calories and macros might be coming from you know that really you know high sugar or processed food that where you can get a lot of calories very easily so on a plate it might look a lot smaller than what I'm eating were you eating the occasional things where you could fit in certain foods or did you just remove it all from a health standpoint no I I removed it all completely um if I'm not dieting I'm not that fast you know I don't eat crap but if piece of dark chocolate slips into my mouth I'm not fast I'm not losing sleep over it but I found that actually when I was in Europe after about 3 days of eating whatever I was craving veg and craving meat and eggs and I found it so hard to come by I made my poor wife Crepes around the Italian beach side looking for eggs it was just like I've never really experienced that where it's like my body was going you've been eating fairly nutrient-dense meals for 10 years every day you've had nothing for nearly a week yeah that was interesting no that's uh understandable I've been there if you just start to eat out and very high fat High carbohydrate meals that can get old rather quickly if you're used to this lifestyle of eating a certain way eating healthier Whole Foods that type of thing and your intake is managed in a way that makes sense for your body composition goals like you're not overeating fats or undereating protein like pretty much the opposite what you would do do you find that you don't experience any cravings when you're on a specific diet like that you feel good I definitely experience Cravings absolutely okay but when you make a deal with yourself and you're committed like the end goal was I wanted to be in the best shape I've ever been in we had it on camera I wasn't going to chap myself you know perfect that's the way to do it man or else you're not reaching the goal mindset man for those tuning in you want a goal you want to achieve that goal you got to do the things and make the and depends on how you look at I was going to say sacrifices but but is it really is it truly a sacrifice if you think about it right oh no because every time I finish a diet and you thinking I'm going to have the best meal after this I'm going to have such a nice burger blah blah blah or I'll have pizza for 3 days you have one cheap meal or so often I like the day of a competition I'm like filling up on sweet potato or whatever and my Cravings are gone completely like you're just eating a little bit less than your body wants and then as soon as you bridge that Gap you're you're pretty find anyway your Cravings just disappear you have one meal out and you're like oh it really wasn't that great the end result is so much better than having a few hot chips yeah yeah like I'll give you an example too like when I'm let's say I'm doing the Netflix thing in the evening time trying to wind down before bed kind of thing everybody's different that works for me right for like an hour or something like that that's a time where I'm like oo some Cravings start to pop up but if I don't give into it and the hour's up I feel amazing right before bed when I'm brushing my teeth I'm like yeah I did that I didn't have I didn't give into that craving I don't know if you if you if you if you've experienced something similar maybe the people if you guys tuning in have experienced that I'm sure uh at some point right yeah yeah for sure for sure next thing is the big three when I say the big three bench squat deadlift and do you implement that specifically and when I say the I'm talking barbell bench barbell back squat and deadlift from the floor um deadlift I could probably count on my hands how many times I've done that