Ep. #547: Layne Norton on Training at Home, Pandemic Dieting, Overcoming Fear, and More

Mike: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I’m your host, Michael Matthews. All right, enough of that. Hello? Hello. Here we are. Coronavirus. The only thing anybody is talking about right now as it continues to upend life as we know it, and. Highlight all the things we’ve been taking for granted.

Things that we are all looking forward to. Getting back to like, I don’t know, eating at the local pizza joint or walking more than a couple hundred steps per day and, uh, I don’t know, maybe leaving the fucking house. And then of course there’s the fitness fallout, what with lifters everywhere, yearning for their usual diet and training routines.

I do understand. Driven to boredom and overeating by lame home workouts with soup cans, and. Small children for resistance. And if all that weren’t enough, there’s also the scum pot of scammers and losers clogging up Instagram with pills, powders, and potions that will purportedly ward off C Ovid 19 and prevent the virus from even infecting you.

And so understandably, you have questions about stuff like what to do with your diet right now, how to best work out at home. How to help keep your immune system working at full capacity, and that’s why I wanted to bring Dr. Lane Norton back onto the podcast. It has been a while. It’s always fun to chat with Lane, who is a professional bodybuilder, accomplished powerlifter and published scientist, and also an all around.

Reasonable and knowledgeable dude who’s known for putting things in context and putting diet and exercise gurus and zealots in their place. And in this interview, lane answers questions that people have been asking me quite a bit, including, am I gonna lose all my gains if I can’t go to the gym? How can I make my home workouts more effective?

How can I support my immune system? Will the carnivore diet help? Should I cut right now and more now before we get to the show, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you wanna help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workouts and post-workout supplements, fat burners, mold.

Multivitamins, joint support and more. Every ingredient and dose in every product of mine is backed by peer reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent, no proprietary blends, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check it out, just head over to legion athletics.com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps.

Use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase, then you will get double reward points on your entire order, which is essentially getting 10%. Cash back in rewards points. So again, that u R L is legion athletics.com and if you appreciate my work and if you’ll wanna see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.

Hey Lane, it’s been a while, man. I’m looking forward to, to catching up and hearing your thoughts on some topical things.

Layne: Yeah. Well, I think we were originally trying to schedule this, what, back in December, something like that. The landscape has changed quite a bit, so I’m sure we’ll have a thought to discuss

Mike: and now we’re both sitting at home and, Hey, here we are. We can do it.

Layne: Exactly. Now all of a sudden I have time for podcasts.

Mike: You could be doing less productive things as your time. So, uh, hey, that is true. So I wanted to bring you on to talk about, of course, coronavirus related things, not so much the state of things. I think there are a million different places to get that information right now, and I.

With any lock, we’ll see. Maybe some positive developments. Maybe this isolation phase will have worked fairly well. We can, we can have hope, right?

Layne: Sure. I mean, I think that if people do what they’re supposed to do, based on what their experts are saying, should make a decent impact on this. The downside is we’re probably not gonna see that for a month in terms of getting the actual data back.

So I guess, you know, this is one of those things where I don’t really think there’s a playbook for it. We just gotta trust the people who are the experts and hopefully things will work out. I think it’s gonna work out one way or another. I don’t think this is the end of civilization or society. Thinking the other direction doesn’t really help us very much.

We still got the internet. We still got running water. I’m not gonna panic just yet.

Mike: Whole Foods is, uh, Full of food.

Layne: So I saw a meme the other day and it said, everyone calm down. Your grandparents were called to fight and die for their country. You’re being called to sit on the couch, calm down

Mike: with endless entertainment and calories on demand.

Layne: I said, this is literally happening in the best time it could possibly happen. It’s true. Think about it. If our economy had already been repressed or something like that, we were at all time high. Further, you got Netflix, you got Hulu, you got. Video games

Mike: if you wanna learn some stuff, you have endless resources online to learn.

Layne: Absolutely.

Mike: Literally anything you wanna learn.

Layne: Absolutely. I probably should have led with that since I sell online learning stuff, but hey, I’ve never been a real sales man. I, I teed it up for you. Yeah, appreciate that. Yes, we do sell eBooks and books and whatnot, and actually I just released my first online nutrition course, so Nice.

Mike: Where can people find that?

Layne: That was a collaboration I did with Clean Health Fitness Institute. If you just Google Lane Norton. Science of nutrition, clean health, it’ll come up. Alright, so let’s give some more good news. Let’s talk about some at home workout stuff. Now, I did just do a q and a. It was a synopsis of like a 10,000 word article I wrote on at home training and gave a bunch of workouts, beginner, intermediate, advanced body weight.

Mike: Bands dumbbells. So some of this might be a little bit redundant, but you’re probably gonna explain things a little bit differently than I did and make some different points. And this is something you were commenting on before we started recording that you’re seeing. I guess you could kind of summarize it as maybe a bit too much of an all or nothing mentality, right?

So, yeah. Okay. We’re not in the gym doing the workouts that we want to be doing. Sure. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t get in good workouts. It doesn’t mean that we can’t maintain muscle and strength and burn calories and get. The health benefits of exercise, right? Sure.

Layne: I mean, if we’re talking health benefits, there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat.

Look, I, I get it. I love to lift heavy weights. I think a lot of people who go to the gym love the feeling of, you know, going hard, going heavy, and they’re used to having a lot of options. Now you kind of have that taken away from you, but now isn’t the time to just give up. You’ve done all this work. Are you gonna make gains during this time?

Obviously people with home gyms, like I have a home gym. It’s pretty basic, you know, squat rack, bench press, deadlift platform. I do have a belt squat, which is nice. Some adjustable dumbbells and bands. I’m actually able to do quite a bit of stuff with that, you know, getting creative. But most people can get exercise bands, and I’m not talking about the little ones that you see in fitness videos.

I’m talking about kind of more so the power lifting style or, or pull up a assist bands.

Mike: And for anyone listening, if you can find them in stock on Amazon, you’ll see that they’re the same thing over and over with random, nonsensical brands slapped on ’em, but it’s the same products. And so they go from like, 25 pounds up to 125 pounds.

Right lane.

Layne: Right, exactly. You can get a lot of resistance with that. Now, obviously it’s variable resistance, but there’s endless ways that you can use those. There’s also, especially for females, they’re seeing a lot of glute bands. You know, my wife actually has a glute band company, my glute factory.com, and they sell.

Like different variable resistance for bands. You can do quite a bit with those as well. In terms of lower body stuff, you know, those are only 25 bucks. And then if you get those resistance bands, I think those can be anywhere from, you know, getting a few for like 40 bucks up to like maybe a hundred for a big set of them.

I mean that’s $125 right there potentially. And now you’ve got quite a bit of options to be honest.

Mike: Yeah, I mean you combine what you can do with body weight and then how you can make it harder with bands. Right?

Layne: Exactly. And then if you can, you know, go and actually get some adjustable dumbbells, I mean, you’re talking less than 500 bucks and now you actually have a pretty feasible way to create some progressive overload.

So are you gonna make gains during this period? It just depends on what you have access to and what you’re willing to do. Now, obviously there’s body weight stuff, even if you’re somebody who’s pretty strong, like for me, a pistol squat is pretty challenging. Yeah. You know, I actually have to do an assisted technique.

The It is hard.

Mike: Yeah, very hard. I do assisted as well. It’s just hard,

Layne: but there’s no reason you can’t create progressive overload that way.

Mike: Russian hamstring curl. If you have somebody that’s, that’s a deceptively hard exercise.

Layne: Oh yeah. Very hard. You can get those doorframe pull up things. I can’t speak to the quality of some of them.

There’s a lot of different things you can do, and here’s the thing to take heart with. The first thing to encourage people out there is that what it takes to build muscle is way more. Than what it takes to maintain it. I don’t wanna say specifically and say this is a hundred percent accurate, but I think effort and volume needed to maintain muscle is something like a quarter or less than the amount of effort and volume it takes to build that muscle.

Like let’s say you didn’t have access to anything, no bands, no dumbbells. Nothing. If you just did a few sets of pushups and you did five sets of pushups to failure or close to failure every other day you did some kind of pull up to failure or close to failure, and you did some kind of pistol squat to failure almost every other day for a few sets, you’re probably not gonna lose a whole lot, to be quite honest.

As long as you give your body a reason to hang onto it, it typically will. Are you going to build much during this time? Uh, if you have access to equipment at your house, a little bit easier. Obviously. It also depends on where you are in your training journey, right? Like if you’re a beginner, if you just started training, you’ve only been doing it for, let’s just say, Four weeks and this thing hit.

If you continue to do some of those things at home, you’ll continue to make progress because the dosage that’s required of exercise to induce adaptation is so low. Then you’ll continue to progress. Now, take somebody like me, I’ve been training for over 20 years. If I start doing at-home body weight stuff, am I going to progress?

No, most definitely not. But could I maintain a big portion of what I have? Absolutely. In fact, we were talking earlier, there was a study from Jeremy Liney where they showed people who were untrained. Just flexing really hard for long periods of time actually caused hypertrophy.

Mike: Have you come across the research showing that just thinking about doing sets in your mind can prevent strength loss?

To some degree,

Layne: I think yes, but I do think that that was with smaller muscles.

Mike: Oh, sure. I’m not saying that like that’s gonna be nearly as effective as training, but it just goes to show that under certain circumstances, simply thinking about training can influence your muscles. What about. Actually doing a little bit of training.

Layne: Exactly. What I would recommend is for people, like if you have a routine that you had before, try to stick to it as close as you can in terms of like time of the day that you train, put your music on, don’t have the TV going. Do it in an area of your house where you’re easily distracted or anything like that.

Like try to make it. Yeah, treat it like a real workout, right? Yeah, exactly. Put your music on, go hard, and if you’re willing to spend a little bit of money at this time, you don’t need an elaborate setup to make progress. If you’re willing to spend, you know, up to several hundred or a thousand dollars, they’ve got squat racks that fold up into the side of your garage.

I can’t remember the name of the company that makes it. Oh, I’ve seen that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s got like some arms in a cage that kind of folds down, and then if you’ve got a bench, So there’s a pull up bar with it, man. You can do a lot of stuff for those with home gyms. Another idea is getting a landmine apparatus, so something where you can attach a barbell to it, especially if you’ve got a dip belt that can function like a belt squat, actually.

And now you can do landmine presses, rows. You got all kinds of. Options. So there’s a lot of stuff out there. Even if you’ve just got access to minimal stuff, just do what you can with what you got. Right now. We are all in the same boat. It’s not the time to just tank on your goals. The other thing is too, is like if you’re a competitor or somebody who really wants to, you know, push yourself, this is where you separate the wheat from the chaff, win out, the weak, right, the cream will rise to the top because here’s what’s gonna happen.

The people who aren’t serious about it or don’t have the same level of discipline as those who are. Those who are, they’re gonna find a way and they’re gonna get it done. Those who aren’t real serious about it aren’t gonna get it done. So when it comes, you know, back for competition time, whether it’s power lifting, or weightlifting, or bodybuilding, whatever it is, hey, those of you who are really hard workers, you’re gonna have a leg up on everybody else.

This is actually a time where you’re gonna separate yourself from other people because you’re not gonna quit. You’re gonna get it done. And the other thing I’ll tell people is like, you know, we have a coaching company, so obviously we’re biased. We’d mostly do nutrition coaching, not even programming necessarily.

If people say, oh, well, you know, can I put my coaching on, pause, this and that? Well, we’re telling people is, Hey, listen, if you can’t train or you can’t train, the same way, nutrition doesn’t suddenly become less important. It actually becomes more important. Now than ever.

Mike: I think that’s worth elaborating on.

I just saw a headline. Now this wouldn’t apply to most of my listeners and followers. And your followers, but I dunno if you saw that there’s like a nationwide Oreo shortage and now what they’re seeing is a dip in traditionally like quote unquote healthy foods, right? Organic. Foods and interesting and stuff that is actually in many cases, more nutritious and they’re seeing a surge in junk food and comfort food.

Layne: That doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I think that feelings and you know, people are stressed and that kinda stuff, and I’m not here to shame anybody about their habits.

Mike: It’s worth elaborating on that point of like, why do you say that now’s not the time to just eat a box of Oreos a day?

Layne: Well, only if you want to.

End up in a much worse place than you started this thing at. Yes. Right. I’ve never really understood that mentality, but I’m a little bit different. I realize not everybody’s wired the same way, but for those of you who struggle with like emotional eating or binge eating or comfort eating, that sort of thing, you’re just gonna have to practice a lot of mindfulness during this period and really try to keep yourself busy.

Everybody’s been told to stock up on food, right? So being at home with a lot of food available is a big trigger for some people. Now is the time to really try and keep yourself busy, whether it be through training, educating yourself, you know, now is really a great time for self-development as well. You know, if you can’t work, a lot of us can work from home, thankfully.

But if you can’t work, now’s the time for self-development. Now’s the time to take that online course of something that you were wanting to do. Science and nutrition. Shameless plug whatever you wanted to do, right? Because now’s the time to do it because. You might not have the opportunity in the future if you’re just sitting at home bored all day and there’s a bunch of food.

Yeah, that could be a problem. There’s a lot of anxiety with people right now. I’m not worried about myself with regards to this virus. I don’t think if I got it, it’s going to kill me, but I would be worried about infecting other people. I’d be worried about people who are susceptible. I’m worried about overall herd immunity, and what I’m really worried about is when can we get back to kind of life as normal, right?

Because everybody’s business is taking a hit. Unless you’re in the toilet paper or hand sanitization industry,

Mike: there’s the conspiracy. That’s it.

Layne: Big TP organized this, created the virus, Proctor and Gamble. Yeah. I get it. It does suck. But you know, trying to find the positive, what’s the silver lining like, what can you do with this time?

I think that a lot of people really should be asking themselves that question.

Mike: I agree. I mean, that’s how you get through any hard times. I can attest to that personally. I’ve gone through some hard times in my business. I’ve gone through hard times in my personal life, and that’s the mentality that. Has always worked for me.

I’m sure there are other ways to get through it, but in the end, I’m most interested in results. That approach has always gotten me through and allowed me to not just maintain what I had before, but continue moving ahead.

Layne: I’ve talked about this a lot. In 2017, it actually was about a two year period. I was going through a divorce.

I had lost my supplement company and I had gotten kicked out of another company by my business partners. Then was engaged in a pretty, I don’t wanna say lengthy, but it was over six months. Uh, legal battle with them trying to. Get them to pay me what my shares were worth. ’cause you can’t just kick somebody out of equity.

And that was a really, really hard time. Things were so bad financially, I owed more to attorneys than I could write a check for, which was extremely scary, especially as somebody who had been kind of financially secure previously. My personal business was aired out online by various people. I made mistakes, I handled things poorly, but you know, having to go through that was very, very difficult.

But during that time, what I kind of kept telling myself was, okay, there is going to come a day where you’re gonna be on the other side of this. It’s going to happen. This isn’t gonna last forever. But what I need to keep doing, and I remember like literally verbally saying this out loud to myself, you need to keep your feet moving because when this passes, if you just quit and give up and go, woe is me, you know, cry about it or whatever it is.

Hey, I did cry about it a couple times, but if you just sit and wallow, once you get to the other side of it, now you’re gonna be so far behind the curve of where you could have been if you had just kept your feet churning, right? It’s kinda like that. Running back who hits the hole, and he immediately gets stuffed by like five guys.

And you choose to go down. Or some of the times you see like a Marshawn Lynch where he just keeps his feet moving. He just keeps his feet moving, just keeps his feet moving, and then all of a sudden you see him burst through the other side. And that’s kind of how I visualized it was like, all right, I’m just gonna keep my feet moving.

And then when I get to the other side of this, boom, I’m gone. And that’s kind what happened. Like I eventually did get to the other side of it. Legal stuff got settled, and then I started launching our books, which have done extremely well. We expanded our business and now things were great up until. Last month.

So I always approach something like this or something that’s hard like this as what is this gonna teach me? What am I gonna learn from this? And I think if you have kind of that attitude, you’re gonna be fine in the long run. And keep in mind too, like don’t be a victim first off. There are real victims out there and people who are really dying.

So if you’re complaining about having to sit at home on your couch, You’re probably not gonna get a lot of sympathy from me. Secondly, we’re all in the same boat. Everybody’s been asked to do the same thing again, chill out. Most people are happy. 80% of people don’t like their jobs and are happy when they get to miss a day of work.

I think I saw a meme that was like people before the coronavirus, and it was like everybody’s saying at home, like watching Netflix, playing video games. People ask through the coronavirus and everybody’s outside walking. Like interacting.

Mike: Yeah. I was joking with my neighbor yesterday ’cause I work a lot.

I’m usually out early, come back late. A number of my neighbors are the same way. You know, I was out walking with my family yesterday saying hi to neighbors I hadn’t spoke to in a while. We were laughing that like, this is kind of unique actually. We don’t really see each other all that often,

Layne: but I do encourage people to get outside.

You can still practice social distancing while being outside?

Mike: Yeah. I spoke to him at a distance of about 10 feet.

Layne: No, I actually think getting outside is probably a good thing for most people, but they’re just saying. Don’t go to a concert,

Mike: don’t do what people are doing in DC right now. I just saw a picture where I guess it was a food market and it was packed.

Like, come on, just mind your own business. They’re just asking for two weeks. Come on.

Layne: Yeah. Well that’s the thing is like I tell people like we can all sacrifice a little bit right now. Kind of really hit this thing hard, flatten the curve as they’re saying, and then we can get back to our lives. Or we can screw around with this thing for several months, kind of doing half measures and stuff.

And then it might get bad enough to where they’ve really gotta shut everything down. And we’re in martial law like, do y’all want that? Just stay home. I understand if you gotta go to the grocery store, that sort of thing. Just be smart about it.

Mike: I’m with you. Just play the game. Be reasonable.

Layne: Miami, like a week ago, they had like large amount of young people who were just getting drunk on the beach and chanting about how they were scared and stuff.

And it’s like, you idiots.

Mike: Did you see Clearwater Beach? I mean, I think it finally got closed.

Layne: It did. I took my boat out this weekend, took the kids out. We went to a small beach that private, but the business was closed and we were very nice and we. Handled with care. There was nobody there. It was great. We just had the whole beach to ourselves.

Mike: Private beach, live and large.

Layne: Yeah, exactly. The bright side.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. There’s some white clouds in the sky.

Layne: Yeah. All the introverts are very happy right now.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. This is a win.

Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of. Their lives. Please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed. Scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legion athletics.com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps.

Use the coupon code. Mfl at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That’s essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the U R L is legion athletics.com and if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love.

Like producing podcasts like this. I, I wanna back to something you were saying when you were going through that rough period. How did you deal with fear of the unknown, which is a lot of what people are dealing with right now and Yeah. That to me is the most annoying part of all of this is because there’s been so little testing.

There’s just this big looming unknown of what happens next. It’s human nature. How have you dealt with that personally? And this is all of us. We all have this. Inclination toward catastrophizing things. You know what I mean? I’m just curious.

Layne: I mean, I’m not gonna pretend like I haven’t had moments where I’m like, oh my God, if this thing drags off for six months, like we’re gonna have cashflow problems and that sort of thing. Like Of course.

Mike: Yeah, of course. I mean, I’m in that same position. Sure. Things are fine now, and I’ve taken precautions and I’ve managed my finances well. But yes, there is a point where all of us are like, I guess I’ll be living on credit cards now.

Layne: Yeah. So I think the first thing is that, let’s play out the worst case scenario.

Well, the worst case scenario. Is the complete and utter collapse of the US economy, which means anarchy, chaos, and without rule of law, that’s bad. But in that case, there’s not a whole lot I can do to prevent that, right? Like I’m not gonna be the person that prevents that. That is a large scale, and that’s kind of outta my control.

I. So what can I do? Well, what I can do is I can do the best to try and keep my business afloat during this time and provide value to people. Right? So for example, we’ve already pivoted. I have a, what we call a workout builder on bio lane.com, where people play a membership fee of 1299 a month, and they get customized training templates and whatnot.

Well, obviously a lot of people now don’t have access to a gym. So we’ve created new training templates that are either basic home gym setup or no weights, nothing, or you know, bands or bands plus dumbbells or dumbbells or whatever. So we’re creating a lot of different training templates for our members.

And then we’re also gonna provide some free to the public as well. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna try and provide value. And also, you know, keep business afloat. I’m not gonna pretend like I don’t wanna make money. Of course I do. I’ve also got 12 employees whose mouths need to be fed. It’s not just me ’cause I don’t wanna lay off people, you know what I mean?

Mike: Yeah. As a business owner, you probably will drastically cut your pay before you would touch theirs

Layne: last month. I didn’t take a paycheck.

Mike: Yeah. Well there you go.

Layne: I’m very sure that everybody in the business took home a more net than I did last month, so it’s not always like that. Obviously. Like I’ve had a few real good years and whatnot.

Mike: But no, that’s the thing. That’s what you need to do as a business. That’s the right thing to do. I mean, I totally understand. I have worked it out with my guys. This is what’s gonna happen. We get to this point, then my income is gonna go from this to this, and some of the more higher compensated executive people in my organization.

Like we’re all gonna be taking a pay cut guys if we need to. I’m not gonna be laying anybody off. I’m not gonna be cutting pay. We’re gonna take the pay cut. Let me just make it clear.

Layne: It’s so funny when people say, well, look at these business owners that make this much, and they’re employees that make this much, and it’s like, yeah, but they also take all the risk.

You know what I mean? Totally. I’ve had good months where I’ve taken a huge dividend, which is awesome. I’ve also had months where I’ve had to put. Money back into my business from my personal account, right? I always say that I think everybody should have to own a business for at least two years before they can vote.

You know what I mean?

Mike: Full franchise democracy is an unmitigated failure. Maybe we could at least start with pay taxes. You have to pay taxes and then you can vote.

Layne: There’s no perfect solution. I think that, again, like using this time to try and pivot whatever it is you do, right? If you’re an entrepreneur, obviously you’re worried.

My advice is don’t give into the inclination to use a pandemic. To use fear to sell things unless you’re already a P O s. And in that case, you know, you’re just doing what you do. There’s a lot of people out there, the first sign of things go bad and they’re like, oh, well hey, this thing can help with C Ovid 19 or whatever.

And I’m just sitting here shaking my head.

Mike: That’s a good segue. And that was the next thing I wanted to get your thoughts on. I’ll lead with, and this is funny timing, so over at Legion, you’re familiar with Legion. We’ve been working on an immune support supplement, and I stand by the formulation, or we’ve been working this product for nine months.

Right? I would say mostly conceived by Curtis Frank, who’s the co-founder and former lead researcher and writer [email protected]. I don’t know if I’ll meet somebody else who understands biology and supplementation like he does. His level of knowledge and expertise is truly impressive. It had been on our calendar to release this product in March for months now, and it had been nine months in the making right.

So I released it and I didn’t say that it’s gonna treat C Ovid 19. I didn’t even say it’s gonna prevent you from getting infected with the virus. When I write these emails, half it’s to amuse myself and half. It’s maybe a bit of a strategy, but I make jokes and try to make people laugh as part of the process, right.

So it came off a bit tone deaf and I got a lot of positive responses where people thought it was hilarious and it was a nice reprieve from all the gloom and doom. And then some people got upset about it because they thought it was insensitive, which I understand. Looking back, I could have done a better job.

I was kind of just looking at the situation through my eyes. And then other people though, were attacking it on the grounds of it, is not possible to boost your immune system, period. There’s no evidence. At all that you can do anything to boost your immune system. And to that I was like, what are you talking about?

So, okay, if you deprive yourself of sleep, let’s say you sleep four hours a night for two weeks, you’re gonna impair your immune system and then you sleep enough, you’re going to boost your immune system. Dictionary definition here, enhance or support, increase the activity of, right? Yes. Okay. So now look at the available evidence on garlic if you eat a clover, two of garlic per day.

And if you disagree me, then I would be curious to hear your thoughts, but my understanding of the evidence. Is what we currently have available strongly suggests that eating a clove or two of garlic every day literally boosts your immune system, like enhances NK cell activity and enhances T-cell activity.

I didn’t know this. Immune boosting has kind of been stigmatized by scammers who just sell like vitamin C and lysine pills and. Immune support or immune assistance helping the immune system. I guess those are more palatable ways of phrasing things, but if you say anything boosts the immune system, you’re a scammer.

Layne: I’ll be honest, people had messaged me and said, have you seen, you know what Mike said and this and that? And I said, well, no, I haven’t seen what I said, so I’m not gonna comment on it. People don’t understand this. They think I like seek this stuff out. Most of the stuff that I talk about, it’s sent to me, but nobody had sent me the specific comments.

You’ve always come across to me as somebody who is pretty genuine and. And tries to do the right thing. I think it’s all about how it’s marketed. What I’m concerned with when it comes to people who are talking about, well, this diet could help you or this supplement could help you, is people thinking that they’re protected when they’re not.

So I think the most important thing is to say, this is not a treatment for this virus. You still need to practice the major things, which is hygiene, social distancing, all this kind of stuff. This isn’t bulletproofing your immune system. Can you increase the activity of some of these things? Sure. Maybe does that mean you should just go out and like walk into a, an infectious disease wing in a hospital?

No. Sadly, that’s what a lot of people think. One of the people I really went after was Paul Saladino, carnivore md. He never clearly came out and said, do the carnivore diet. By my book, it will protect you against C Ovid 19. But it was very cleverly worded. But basically, and I’m paraphrasing, it was something to the effect of the conversation around the coronavirus is all wrong.

We need to be focused on building the most robust human being possible. And you’re not gonna do that with plants. Now, of course, he doesn’t provide any evidence, such a ridiculous statement. It’s is kind of like a rah eat meat. So he is like, you’re not gonna do that. Plants, and then he kind of parlays that into, I wrote this book about the carnivore diet, which will make you a robust human being.

Now. He never says it’s gonna protect you from clo. He’s very smart implications. But then at the end he says, I’m a doctor and I’m not afraid. Well, he’s actually a psychiatrist, so, all right. You’re a doctor. Like kind of I’m a doctor.

Mike: It’s like the chiropractors when they Right. They don’t want you to notice that DC They want you to.

Layne: Exactly. People were like, well, he didn’t actually say it. I’m like, look at the comments on his post. There were people saying, I’m not scared of the virus. I eat only meat, and my immune system’s never been better. And I’m thinking, did you go get your lymphocyte count and your white blood cell count done or something?

Because I kind of doubt it.

Mike: You made a comment on this earlier. That’s also not the point. I’m with you. I’m not concerned about getting the virus myself. If I get it, I get it. But I don’t want to be spreading it around. That’s the point. Exactly. Someone like you and me, we might get it and have no symptoms.

We might not even realize it, but we could still be passing it around.

Layne: I’ve talked to a few doctor friends of mine who are saying that there are actually some young people who are getting sick, and I think in Italy, some young people have actually died from it as well.

Mike: I looked at numbers this morning. I mean, it’s very rare.

Layne: Yeah, it’s very small, but there is a possibility. It’s like, do you wanna take that chance? Right. Like is it worth it for you to go down to the bar and get a beer? You know, like the other thing that I, I think it’s important to point out is. People are straw manning my argument. They’re saying, well, lane’s saying there’s nothing you can do nutritionally that will strengthen your immune system.

That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that if you haven’t been doing it for the last six months, or practicing good habits for the last six months, There’s nothing you’re gonna do inside of a week that’s gonna make a huge difference. That’s what I’m saying. Am I saying you can’t have a strong immune system while eating, say a keto diet or carnivore diet?

No, I’m not saying that. I think if your overall lifestyle is good in terms of you get enough sleep, you exercise, I would argue that it’s probably better with plants. Than it is without it. I’m not saying that you can’t have some of these other nutritional protocols and be healthy,

Mike: at least for a time, I would challenge anybody following a corn bore diet to remain I agree.

Healthy for like 10 years.

Layne: Then that’s the thing. It’s like, well, I feel so much better. It’s like, you need to go study the placebo effect my friend. Yeah. No shit. I will say if you’re somebody who’s like been unhealthy and now you’re like, this was kind of the thing that’s like, I wanna do everything I can.

Okay. Well, eating a healthy diet, Exercising, getting enough sleep, those same healthy habits that we’ve been talking about for a long time, those can still help you. But understand, you’re not gonna see like a complete 180 in a week. That’s like saying, I wanna build a 600 pound squat. And you go in and you’re like, what squat boosting workout can I do this week to get a 600 pound squat, get a forklift?

You know, like it’s not gonna happen, right? But if you put in the work over time, it can get better, even if this two week kind of lockdown thing works. It flies to the curve and we can kinda start getting back to life as normal. It’s not like this thing is just gonna suddenly drop off the face of the planet.

Like we’re gonna be dealing with this for a while.

Mike: It’s probably just a part of the viral ecosystem now, if that’s even a term, but it took over a year, I think, with SARS for the W H O to declare the pandemic over, and I haven’t looked at cases since then, but I highly doubt it’s. Just now part of, you know, stuff that comes and goes,

Layne: at least from what I understand, again, I’m not an immunologist expert.

Mike: Oh, that’s did did it mutate out of existence actually. That’s exactly what happened. Yeah, that’s right.

Layne: That’s right. A virus can mutate and become worse, but typically they actually mutate and just stop being so contagious. That’s actually one of the. More likely ways that they say this will end. Yeah. Is it will likely be that this will mutate into something that’s no longer contagious and be done.

It’s also possible it could mutate into something worse, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But yeah, if you start doing those healthy habits now, and again, this is just completely theoretical, so nobody quote me on this is like, this is the way it’s gonna happen. Hey, maybe you’re somebody who’s obese, you don’t sleep well, you have an unhealthy lifestyle.

But you start today and you start making good habits, good choices. You do that for six months and hey, you come in contact with this virus. Well maybe now instead of being hospitalized, Now your body’s able to fight it off on its own.

Mike: If nothing else, your body will do better.

Layne: Well, the other thing is you’ll have less comorbidities, so it’s not always that this virus kills you.

It’s also that a lot of these people have other comorbidities that now they’re not able to fight off because of this virus, because their immune system’s so overwhelmed. So now if you get healthier, you’re gonna have less comorbidity. And honestly, it’s just a good idea overall. But I think most people, again, they want a quick fix, and the scammers out there are taking the opportunity to capitalize on it.

I just hope when the tide goes back out, everyone remembers who was skinny dipping. Everybody remembers who tried to gain the system or who tried to use this to make a bunch of money. Right? There was another popular supplement. Person who I called out on Instagram, and again, it was the way it was marketed.

It was an immune booster, just the post itself. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t ready to go bear my teeth. But then there was a comment under it. One of their followers said this C Ovid 19 has nothing on this stack. And the supplement owner under that says, damn right. And I’m like, holy shit, dude. Are you fucking kidding me?

Like you’re gonna have people thinking that they can take this supplement and they’re protected. And this is somebody who was, you know, well respected and who I respected previously and uh, yeah, I called them out, then they threatened to sue me and then, you know how that goes.

Mike: I was gonna ask, are you sure it was him?

Uh, or was it somebody that runs his account for him? But it sounds like he stands by

Layne: Uh, no, it was him because this person said, well, how would you like me to let everybody know a phone call we had a few years ago? Which I called this person a few years ago when I was gonna start my company with bodybuilding.com because they had been affiliated with bodybuilding.com and I wanted to know, hey, uh, what was your experience working with them?

That was the phone call. He claims that I said I was gonna cash in. I don’t think I used that verbiage, and if I did, I’d have to hear the context. I used it, but I kind of doubt. I said that you wanna pick out a private phone call from six years ago as your Gotcha. Okay. Good luck with that.

Mike: Yeah, totally.

Now I think I know exactly who you’re talking about.

Layne: In any case, it’s just been really disappointing to see how some people have handled this. I’m hoping things will get better, you know, again, are there things you can do? Yes. But just like anything else, it’s gonna take time. It’s gonna take consistency, and it’s nothing that’s gonna happen overnight.

Mike: Agreed on the immune point in particular, are there any other thoughts that you have in terms of enhancing immune function? And the reason why I’m following up is this is just something that I’ve been asked for example, here’s a question I’m getting a lot. I don’t know if you are. Should I be cutting right now?

Is that smart?

Layne: Great question. I’m glad you brought this up. So I’m going to give you what the data says and also my opinion, if you are somebody who is overweight or obese, the research shows that actually being a caloric deficit may actually enhance your immune function. Slightly. That being said, I would make sure you are in a gradual deficit.

Now is not the time to start a protein sparing modified three day fast. It’s not a good idea.

Mike: Or just water fasting like, ah, I’m just not gonna eat for five days.

Layne: There is some data to suggest that like extreme calorie deficits can impair immune function. Now if you’re someone who’s normal weight and you just wanna trim up a little bit, like you’ve got a little bit of fluff, again, I think that’s probably fine.

I would just go slow, make sure you’re doing it smart, gradual, you know, that sort of thing. If you are somebody who’s already lean and you’re gonna say, I’m gonna use this time to get shredded and do three a days and all that kind of stuff, I would not do that. Getting obese and non-obese or getting normal to lean is a whole different ball game than getting lean to fucking shredded.

That’s a whole different ballgame. There’s not research necessarily that I know of in competitors, but I would be shocked if it did not negatively impact immune function. So for those of you out there who’d been prepping for shows, now’s probably the time to kind of. Maybe hit the maintenance button, unless you’re just not that lean yet.

But if you’re getting to a point where you’re pretty darn lean, and I have several clients who are in prep right now, and one of them I’ve actually told, Hey, you’re lean enough. Let’s hit the maintenance button. Let’s stay here and let’s wait until these shows start coming back on the radar, and then let’s push forward.

Let’s not do it now. Now’s not the time.

Mike: Yep. That’s great advice. And, uh, I think of some research, you’ve probably seen this with, um, marathon runners and triathletes that shows that they Yeah. Over training. Yep. They tend to get sick more often after their events ’cause they’ve just pushed themselves so hard.

So there’s something to be said for easing off the gas right now if you’re just going balls to the wall. Yeah,

Layne: no purposeful phases of overreaching. Like if you’re sore after a workout, don’t get freaked out if your sleep’s constantly bad, you’re always sore. You know your workout performance is declining.

All that kind of stuff. Pump the brakes just a little bit. I like it.

Mike: Alright my friend. I know you have to run, you have another call to jump off to. I, I really appreciate you again, taking the time. It’s always fun. Chatting with you. I look forward to the next one. And let’s just wrap up with where people can find you and your work.

And again, let’s just let everybody know what cool and neat things of yours can they check out while they, uh, are sitting on the couch, uh, for the next week or so.

Layne: Totally. So the most exciting thing we got coming up is our app that’s gonna be dropping, it’s called Carbon Diet Coach. That should be in a few weeks time.

So this app, it’s for iOS and Android. Basically when you sign up, you plug in your goals, your current metrics, like body weight and some other things. And it generates customized nutrition recommendations based on your goals. And then every week you check in just like you would a coach, and it will adjust you based on your progress and optimize your performance.

We understand there’s other apps out there that do that now, but ours is the best. You know, it was designed by myself. My wife, Holly Baxter, Keith Crocker, who’s a registered dietician, one of our coaches, we’ve been working on it for a long time. It’s very good. I’ve been using it. A lot of people have been seeing on my story, on my Instagram.

I’ve been getting a lot leaner. I’ve been using it to coach me for the last six months, and it’s been fabulous. I don’t wanna give away everything, but there’s like a diet planner. So you could do, for example, we operate on a weekly macro budget. So you can do high and low calorie days. So if you go in and let’s say you want more calories on Monday, ’cause it’s harder training day and you up those calories, it’ll automatically adjust all your other days so that your weekly balance is still the same.

That’s great. So you don’t have to do any thinking. It takes the guesswork out of it in the back end of things. It’s a lot less, uh, volatile than some of the other apps out there. Like for example, if you drop two or three pounds in a week, a lot of that could be from water. Some of the other apps will have you overcorrect because it looks like you’re losing way too much weight and your calorie deficit is way too steep.

The way we’ve built ours, it’s not gonna have big overreactions like that. It’s gonna moderate it and wash some of that noise out. It’s very good and it has a built-in food tracker. Food diary as well with barcode scanner, the whole deal. Super easy to use. Food diary. I actually. Love the food diary. I never used a tracking app before this.

I would start one and I hated it. Mm-hmm. I was just happier to do it in Excel and this is the first one I actually use, so I love it.

Mike: There’s something to be said for that I understand. I’ve always just stuck to excel myself

Layne: and it’ll be $9 99 cents a month. Super affordable for people and it works great.

Obviously we’ve got our books, we’ve got fat loss forever. The Reverse Dieting Guide, the Complete Contest Prep Guide. Our educational books are phenomenal. We get great reviews about ’em all the time. We’ve actually got people messaging us now who have lost like over a hundred pounds using fat loss forever.

Pretty cool to see that. You can find all the [email protected] whenever Carbon comes out. You can find [email protected], and obviously in the iOS and the Android store. We got a bunch of other stuff coming too. We got the science and nutrition, my short course on nutrition. We’ve got another course coming out called Training the Physique Athlete.

And then next year I’m gonna have a actual, like full on certification coming out. It’ll be called the Physique Coaching Academy, and it’s between myself and Professor Bill Campbell. I. And it’s gonna be a complete utter certification. If you wanna be a physique coach, this is gonna teach you everything you need to know.

That’s awesome. That’s gonna be a super amazing high-end product for people. We’re gonna have a research review that’s gonna be coming out for bio lane.com as well. That’s a few months in the future. Then, uh, I may be. Joining you back in the supplement game here before too long. Yeah, I heard that. I heard that.

So a lot of stuff going on. You can find [email protected] Other than Carbon, which you can [email protected]. My social media is all, uh, bio Lane. So I hope you see you guys out there and uh, thanks for listening and thanks for having me on, Mike.

Mike: Absolutely my pleasure. Look forward to the next one.

Thanks buddy. All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever I. You are listening from because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever.

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