Charles R. Poliquin - Strength Sensei

Full transcript: Charles R. Poliquin on London Real

0:00 Charles Poliquin: Pain plus reflection leads to progress. You have to make mistakes to grow. You never tell somebody they’re good; you only reward effort. I want Joe Average to know what I know about Olympic athletes. Nothing will ever replace hard work. You’ve got to find the best training system for you.

Brian Rose: I’ve just been challenged to run an Ironman on a 100% plant-based diet. Have you trained vegan athletes?

Charles Poliquin: No. Impossible. People who choose veganism have lower IQs. People who go vegan lower their IQs.

Brian Rose: Do you believe the assertions that the entire Russian team has been doping since the sixties?

Charles Poliquin: Earlier. They were the first ones to use testosterone injections. The advantage is 10%, but if you have a 10% advantage and you train like a moron, it doesn’t really give you an advantage. The universe gives to the giver and takes away from the taker. You can have good karma or bad karma; it’s just a matter of choice.

1:21 [London Real promo removed]

Brian Rose: Charles Poliquin has trained over 800 Olympic athletes in 23 different sports. He’s generally recognised as the greatest strength coach on the planet. Tim Ferriss even dedicated an entire chapter of Tools of Titans to this man. Charles is amazing. We talked about strength, about how he trains his Olympic athletes, about feeling their energy, even some Chinese yin and yang elements when it comes to training. And he also told me he wasn’t very impressed with vegans, which isn’t great because I’m on my 100% plant-based diet on the road to my first Ironman, but that’s okay, Charles, everyone has their opinions. I know you’re really going to enjoy this show.

3:16 [London Real promo removed]

4:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Charles Poliquin, the world-renowned strength coach who has trained over 800 Olympic athletes across 23 different events, as well as professionals in the NHL, NFL, NBA and soccer. You’ve been teaching for over 40 years, and many consider you to be the most successful strength coach ever. You’re an expert in muscle growth, strength and sports performance, and you coined the phrase “the myth of discipline”. You’re the author of 14 books, have written over 2,000 articles, and are featured in an entire chapter of Tim Ferriss’s New York Times bestseller Tools of Titans. Charles, welcome to London Real.

Charles Poliquin: Thank you very much for inviting me, Brian.

Brian Rose: It’s awesome to have you here. I’m curious: what goes through your mind when you’re taking that plane and landing at Heathrow? When you think of London and the UK, how do we compare when it comes to knowledge about physical performance and strength?

Charles Poliquin: Very poor. If you look at other countries, the biggest problem is lack of education. But in the last 12 years Britain has caught up a lot. You can even tell by the choice of gym equipment; that has changed dramatically in 12 years. The biggest problem in the UK, I would say, is the mainstream media. There are a lot of myths still perpetuated. The second biggest issue with the British market is actually the medical doctors. The culture of the British medical establishment is, “We’re the second authority after God.” So they have this attitude: “Well, it’s not in the research.” Well, maybe you didn’t read the research since you finished school. So there’s a lot of stuff that is dramatically stupid that is still being done because the doctor says so. Sometimes I work with British executives who say, “My doctor told me this,” and I say, “No, that’s not true. We’ve known that for 60 years.”

Because of socialised medicine, the British medical establishment is limited. I think if they went more private the quality would go up. In the US that’s the biggest difference: it’s a business, so people have to compete to eat. If you have a job as a doctor you get paid even if you were the last guy in your class. You’re still called doctor, and you could have been the dumbest guy in your class, but you’re still going to get work.

Brian Rose: And Canada suffers from the same problems?

Charles Poliquin: Yes, and so does Australia, because it’s a socialised system. It’s not a meritocracy.

7:15 Brian Rose: You mentioned butter and bread earlier, and it made me think of a saying of yours: earn your carbs. Could you explain that to people? I think most people don’t understand that concept, and they think they deserve their carbs.

Charles Poliquin: People have more excuses than a pregnant nun for eating carbs: “My grandmother’s Italian,” or whatever bullshit they come up with. Basically it’s called the equator rule. The closer your genetic background comes from the equator, the better you do on carbs, because the temperature is high and you don’t need to eat fats to survive the weather conditions. But Caucasians, especially from the north, like Norwegians, don’t have a good capacity to metabolise carbohydrates. Now with genetic research we’ve found, for example, that there are genes that control starch digestion. As of today there are six copies of that gene, and people from Pakistan or Kashmir have all six copies, so they can eat a lot of carbohydrates and it doesn’t bother their blood sugar. But if you go to Estonia or Finland, they have zero copies of the gene, and yet the Finnish government will say you need to eat so many servings of bread a day. This doesn’t work.

Your upper back fat is probably your best indicator of whether you can tolerate carbs or not. I’ve been saying that, with research to back me up, since 2007. How little fat you have on your upper back determines whether you can have carbohydrates. Serbians, anybody from the Balkans, are actually the best of the Caucasians at metabolising carbohydrates, so they could have 80% carbohydrates, if they’re clean carbohydrates. I’m not talking about Twinkies, or what do you call it in the UK, Jaffa Cakes. If you have Jaffa Cakes as your source of carbohydrates, you’re going to get into trouble.

Brian Rose: So upper back fat, not abdominal fat, is the best reading. And seeing your abs was also one of your baseline rules.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. If you have thin skin on your arms, you’re healthy.

Brian Rose: What does that mean?

Charles Poliquin: Basically, for survival the least important hormones are the androgens, the sex drive hormones. So if your sex hormones are good, usually you’re lean on the biceps and triceps. The body doesn’t really care about them. If you look at evolution, if you’re having sex with your companion in the cave and a sabre-toothed tiger comes in, forget procreation: it’s flight or fight. More modern doctors say flight, fight or mate. There’s a chemical called pregnenolone that we make in the body, and under stress we’re wired to make it into cortisol, which is a stress hormone. But that precursor is the same precursor used to make testosterone. Because we have so much stress, a hundred times more than our grandfathers, testosterone levels are decreasing and cortisol levels are going up.

People have a smartphone, and even ten years ago people didn’t expect you to call back within five seconds. People write to my website and they don’t figure out time zones, and they complain that nobody answered them. I say, well, maybe it’s Sunday night for you in Australia, but it’s not for us. That demand to respond: people say if I don’t respond I’m not competitive. So we have a lot more stress. When’s the last time you got a handwritten letter in the mail?

Brian Rose: No, you get bills. But within 30 seconds you could be trolled online.

Charles Poliquin: And so our stress levels are way up.

Brian Rose: So you’re saying that because we are more stressed we have less testosterone, because the chemical which is responsible for reproduction is now going towards stress management.

Charles Poliquin: Right. The world average for testosterone has decreased one percent per year since 1950, as measured by the World Health Organization. So we’re looking at 68 percent less testosterone.

Brian Rose: That’s a lot. It’s a big drop. How does that play out?

Charles Poliquin: Well, for example, there are more and more females born and fewer and fewer males, because when you fertilise the female, if you have high testosterone you’re more likely to have male offspring.

Brian Rose: Is that true?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. That’s why if you look at French Canadian or Irish Catholic families with 16 kids, it’s usually males at the beginning and the daughters are born later. In my family we were eight kids; the first six are males and the last two are females. So with decreasing testosterone, if you’re past 40 and you fertilise a female, it’s more likely going to be a girl.

Brian Rose: I never heard that. And how does that play into carbohydrate metabolism?

Charles Poliquin: It’s all linked. If I don’t use the precursor to make my male hormones, I’m making stress hormone. When you’re stressed, you never hear somebody say, “Man, Brian, I was so stressed last night, all I could eat was broccoli sprouts.” If you’re stressed you’re going to reach for a box of Pringles or chocolate, whatever your carbohydrate of choice is. We figured out thousands of years ago that under stress, eating something sweet calms us down, because cortisol and insulin can’t be high in the blood at the same time; they have opposite effects. So if I’m stressed out and I need to lower this, I know that if I choose a chocolate bar I’m going to bring my cortisol down faster than if I eat a ribeye. But you should eat the ribeye if you’re stressed out, because then the blood sugar will be managed for longer. And now with supermarkets, convenience stores and vending machines we can access carbohydrates readily. If you’re a caveman and you want fast carbohydrates, there was honey, so you have to find a bee, and maybe there are no bees because you’re all the way up in northern Finland.

Also, some genotypes are not suited for carbohydrates and require more protein and fats, like the Inuit, whose diet is typically 70 to 85 percent saturated fats, and that’s normal. There are no trees, there are no gardens, so it’s seal for lunch and walrus for breakfast. Once you introduce white man’s food, the two white poisons, white sugar and white bread, they become fat. The most studied population in the world for obesity is the Pima Indians of Arizona. Their genotype evolved on eight hundred calories a day. What is there to eat in a desert? Lizards, cactus, some plants, a few rabbits. You don’t see any bison in Arizona; it’s too hot, so they stay in Montana. When the Americans took over they put them on reservations and said, they can’t fend for themselves, so we’ll give them food, and they got very low-quality food. Pima natives get signs of arteriosclerosis as early as four years old, and they’re the Americans who die youngest; the life expectancy of a Pima Indian is 38. A group of researchers from Laval University in Quebec started to study them and said, let’s give them more of a native diet, and they saw their blood profiles change. It could basically reverse, to some degree, the effects of having a white man’s diet.

15:26 Brian Rose: What can we learn from that study?

Charles Poliquin: Basically, you have to eat according to your genes, according to your genetic profile. And I see this all the time: the first thing you put in your mouth in the morning, provided it’s food, will determine all the neurotransmitters for the whole day. Now in clinical psychology they’ve figured out that the two most important things for regulating neurotransmitters are a high-protein, high-fat breakfast and waking up at the same time every day. A habit we have in the Western world is: Monday to Friday I’m rested up, and I’m going to pay my sleep debt at the weekend. People wake up at 6:00 to go to work, but they wake up at 11:00 on Saturday and Sunday. That’s actually one of the worst things you can do; you age rapidly. The second is what you put in your mouth when you wake up, and what the usual American puts in is Cocoa Puffs, or nothing. Then they take the subway, they rush, and they say, “I’m going to stop at Starbucks,” which is caffeine, which stimulates cortisol, and sugar, and “I’m going to have a healthy muffin.” A healthy muffin is like an honest lawyer or an under-billing lawyer: it doesn’t exist. So people eat it and their blood sugar crashes, because blood sugar went too high and they secreted too much insulin, and then they repeat the cycle of cortisol and insulin, and they get fat, and they wonder: “I eat well, I had the wholewheat sandwich for lunch.” It doesn’t work like that.

Brian Rose: So your rule is that if you’re not under 10% body fat as a male, you don’t need to have a carb meal. And you said there’s an ab test: if you can see each one of your abs.

Charles Poliquin: That’s a rough test for about nine to ten percent body fat. As soon as you can see all the rows, horizontally, not vertically, you’re at about ten percent.

Brian Rose: And then you deserve some carbs.

Charles Poliquin: Correct.

Brian Rose: So most people don’t deserve carbohydrates.

Charles Poliquin: Right. This is for somebody who wants to be healthy. You go low-carb or you die. But they have to be clean carbohydrates, and the best way to determine whether a carbohydrate is clean is to ask yourself: did a caveman have access to it? There’s no such thing as a field of bagels or a tree that grows doughnuts. So what I tell sports people is: if it doesn’t fly, if it doesn’t swim, if it doesn’t run in the field, or if it’s not green, don’t eat it, until they get to their optimum body fat. That’s the most simple way to explain nutrition. Once they’re lean, they can add things like figs, dates and bananas. I got a reputation early on for getting people lean very fast, and that’s the way I do it. No carbs until they deserve them.

Brian Rose: But you get some carbs from the green vegetables.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, maybe 50 grams or less a day. But there are some genotypes, according to a doctor at Stanford, that can genetically only tolerate 20 grams of carbohydrates a day. So it’s a huge range. But if you’re from Croatia and you’re fat because you ate too much pizza, and I keep you on high carbs in a diet, you’ll lose fat faster than if I put you on high protein. I’ve seen that. But they have to be really clean carbohydrates. The thing in nutrition is that we tend to say there must be an optimal one-size-fits-all approach, and there isn’t. It has to be based on your genetics. The closer you eat to what your ancestors ate, the better it is.

Brian Rose: And those 800 Olympians you trained: did you reduce their carbs like that? There’s a common myth that they need carbs for energy, and yet you’re training them pretty hard.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. Do they need that? No, I don’t kill their carbs dead, but it’s a myth. One thing I do is give them a lot of glutamine. Glutamine can restore glycogen stores, the sugar inside the muscle cells that’s responsible for doing lactic acid training, without raising your insulin. So I’ve got a few tricks. It’s easier now than a few years ago: I use exogenous ketones for energy. But I also teach their body to become a fat-burning machine. A long time ago I started to use fish oil and I got criticised a lot, and then in 2007 research showed I was right. I used to recommend 30 grams of fish oil a day, and on the internet I got blasted for it all the time, and then research showed the fastest way for an obese person to lose body fat is 60 grams of fish oil a day. But it’s not a life sentence where you’re going to take that for the rest of your life. As you get leaner you can lower your fish oil intake. Also, if you take just fish oil for too long you can become GLA deficient, but if you do the right blood work I can decide, okay, now you should switch.

Carnitine, the amino acid, helps metabolise fish oil. It also helps you burn fat, and people don’t eat meat any more because they’re told that meat is going to give you heart disease or colon cancer. It’s shit meat that is bad for you. If you buy organic meat, wild meat… Personally, when I’m back in Colorado I only eat yak, buffalo and elk, and I can tell by the blood profiles that it’s much better. That’s why I used to complain when I came to the UK: where can I buy this? I guess you can buy wildebeest here. And then I found a source for the right stuff.

21:32 Brian Rose: So wild meat is what you go for. Have you trained vegan athletes who you think can perform on that diet if they eat correctly? Come on, Charles, give it to me straight.

Charles Poliquin: No. Impossible. You don’t see a power athlete who’s ever been vegan.

Brian Rose: There’s a new film out called The Game Changers, and it’s got a powerlifter, a runner and an MMA athlete. And look at your British boxer who turned vegan.

Charles Poliquin: He tore his calf while throwing a punch. David Haye.

Brian Rose: Well, that could be a one-off.

Charles Poliquin: No. What happens is that you can get enough grams of protein from plant sources, but not quality protein, in my opinion. Okay, if you’re a stockbroker, maybe you can be a vegan.

Brian Rose: What about an endurance athlete like Rich Roll, who does ultramarathons and is on a completely plant-based diet?

Charles Poliquin: Again, there’s a distribution in the population. My friend Mike Mahler is a vegan, and he’s a strength guy, but he’s an oddity. There are different genotypes that can do better on it. But I find a lot of people turn vegan because they have low stomach acid, and of course if you have low stomach acid meat is hard to digest, and it actually tastes worse to them. So if you put a vegan on betaine HCl, which is a source of hydrochloric acid, they can start digesting their food better, and then I say, okay, let’s try this. With vegans, the least threatening protein for them is actually scallops. I don’t start them with a yak ribeye. Then they can digest it, which means it tastes better to them. After a few weeks of amino acid therapy, I also give them the amino acids they can’t get without meat.

But there are two German studies that show that people who choose veganism have lower IQs. Yes, it’s true. And the other thing is that people who go vegan lower their IQs. A very large percentage of humans are not meant to be vegans. And of course they’ll come back and say our intestines are 12 times as long as our body, we don’t have claws, we don’t have fangs, so we’re not supposed to be meat eaters. Well, we only have one stomach, like all the carnivores.

Brian Rose: Obviously, I’ve been hanging out with a lot of vegans.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, but I think it’s bullshit, really. I’ve never coached a successful vegan. I’ve seen people go vegan and get kicked off the national team because of a lack of performance. For example, there was a skier in Canada we thought was going to be the next superstar, and then she went vegan and she kept getting injured, and she would never recover from injuries. If you have a soft tissue injury, what do you need most? Carnosine, carnitine and taurine, and you can only find those amino acids in animal sources in quantities large enough. I’ve seen some vegetarians do well in endurance sports, but they still eat eggs and dairy products.

Brian Rose: And it’s more endurance sports, where you have a lower body mass and a leaner profile.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, a light body weight. But I’ve never seen a gymnast or a speed skater, anybody who needs power, make it as a vegan.

Brian Rose: Okay. I was in New York last week and I’ve just been challenged to run an Ironman in 90 days on a 100% plant-based diet, and I’m eight days in, so I want to get your advice. Just so you know, that’s happening in the background. I’ve had a lot of plant-based people on the show, Dr Michael Greger for one. Dr Greger says what you eat can have dramatic effects on your life and your longevity, which I think you would agree with 100%, whereas almost 100% of the medical establishment doesn’t even consider it, which is of course insane. I’ve had all these people on, and now I’m going to try it myself. My grandpa was a cattle rancher in Arizona, just outside Phoenix, so I grew up on beef, and I’ve been eating sensible animal-based proteins most of my life. But I’ll let you know what happens. And this is an endurance sport. So first of all, do you have any advice for me for the next 90 days?

Charles Poliquin: Well, if you’re going to do it, I would say take six grams of carnosine a day and six grams of carnitine a day.

Brian Rose: For muscle repair?

Charles Poliquin: Muscle repair, but more for soft tissue health, because if you’re going to run an endurance event you’re going to stress your soft tissue drastically. I would also start by doing the HCl test. For your audience, you can just put HCl into the search engine of my website, strengthsensei.com, and there’s a test you can do at home. The odds that you’re HCl deficient are about ninety-eight percent. So just by doing that with a plant-based protein you have an advantage. Let’s say you had a twin brother who wanted to run the race and he’s not taking HCl: you’d already have an advantage over him, assuming you’re identical twins with the same willpower and so on.

Probably the best medical doctor on muscle, performance and ageing is Dr Gabrielle Lyon in New York. I had her lecture to my students, and she showed a lot of data. She showed, for example, blood work from vegans, and they’re ageing prematurely. That’s why I’m not so keen on it. She’s an MD, and that’s all she does: she treats people. In her career she studied under the greatest muscle protein synthesis expert, so she has a bias towards protein, but she says that as you go from carnivores to vegetarians to vegans, health goes down. There are famous vegetarian runners who died of heart attacks. So I think the safe way to do it is close monitoring of your mineral status.

Brian Rose: Your mineral status? How?

Charles Poliquin: A hair test is not really valid. There are two very easy tests to get done. Unfortunately, in the UK you’ll have to go private, but there’s a place in Mayfair that does it. You test for red blood cell magnesium and red blood cell zinc, and again the values you should have are on my website. For example, if your zinc level is really low it’s extremely hard to maintain your immune system, and it’s also really hard to make testosterone. Fertility rates are directly related to zinc stores. When people test zinc and magnesium in the UK they look at serum magnesium, but those values are only going to be dangerously low when you’re going to die in about two hours, so a lot of people never get diagnosed. So people have come up with a test called red blood cell magnesium and red blood cell zinc, because that’s where the minerals are stored in the body, in the red blood cells.

Brian Rose: So I should be testing this regularly, in a few weeks?

Charles Poliquin: I would say test tomorrow, then test again in three months. You can email me your results and I can tell you how often you need to test. It depends how bad you are, but in my experience, if you have a deficiency, testing every four months is plenty if you do what I tell you to do. It is important. Zinc is involved in eighty-eight chemical reactions in the body, and magnesium in over 300. And one of the things you need when you run marathons is a good Krebs cycle, and those enzymes limit your Krebs cycle, your ability to burn fat while you exercise.

Brian Rose: Any other advice for me? I’m going plant-based for 90 days, I’m swimming, biking and running a lot to train for this. I know there are probably hours we could talk, but besides what you’ve just told me, anything to think about when it comes to training and recovery?

Charles Poliquin: One thing: with your sport you actually need to take in a lot of carbohydrates. You’ll earn them through exercise.

Brian Rose: I’m pretty low body fat.

Charles Poliquin: You’re low body fat and you’re doing all that mileage, and if you don’t restore your glycogen stores you’ll have a problem. If you look at the research, you can train somebody for an Ironman using protein and fats only; it’s feasible. But you’re going plant-based, so what I would use is rice-based carbohydrate powders. I would make a seven percent solution to drink while I compete and while I train. Seven percent is the ideal number. It’s not one of those things where more is better, because if you use more, your body has to bring it back down to seven percent anyway, so it’s going to steal water from other parts of your body. So what you drink while you exercise can make a huge difference. And post-exercise, re-establish your carbohydrates, because if you don’t have enough carbohydrates it’s going to be hard when you get to the phase of training where you do a lot of interval training. If you’re doing really long, slow distance it won’t really matter; you can live off your fat, that’s not an issue. But depending on the intensity of your training, how fast you run will be limited by carbohydrate intake after a certain point. Again, I’ve got colleagues who’ll say no, you can do it without, but I’m answering this way because you’re doing plant-based. If you came to my office that’s not what I’d tell you.

Brian Rose: All right. Well, I’m taking this challenge on to learn a bit about myself.

Charles Poliquin: It’s a great thing. We learn best through experience. Look at the shooting in Florida. These guys were supposedly trained, but under stress they choked, because they had not been exposed to it. They may have learned to shoot at the shooting range, but not to shoot under stress. If you look at the best people, we accomplish the most usually because of failures. It forces you to re-evaluate. Pain plus reflection leads to progress. So I’m sure it’s going to be a painful experience, but you’re going to learn a lot.

Brian Rose: I appreciate your insights, Charles.

33:04 Walk me through this concept of the myth of discipline, because when I first heard it, it stood out to me. It sounds like you’re all about breaking down misconceptions; it seems like that’s your life’s work, when it comes to nutrition and strength training. What does that statement mean?

Charles Poliquin: Well, the way we talk influences our behaviours, and our behaviours dictate our personality. People think personality dictates behaviour; it’s the opposite. Your success in life is a function of what your subconscious mind allows you to become. That’s why some people go on a fat loss programme and never lose fat, and some people go on a fat loss programme and are successful. It’s always based on the subconscious mind, and the way to programme your subconscious mind is habits, which the conscious mind creates. For example, somebody says, “I’m going to stop eating sugar.” A person could say, “I can’t eat sugar,” which is being a victim, or you could say, “I don’t eat sugar,” which is assertive. The way we speak has a lot of influence on the way we think, and the way we think influences our behaviour, which influences our personality.

So the point of the myth of discipline is that it’s what you love the most that dictates what you’re going to choose. You could say, “I love doughnuts,” and keep eating them and be fat, but then don’t complain to me. Or do you love having abs? “Yes, I’d love to have abs.” Well, do things that show you love it. So let’s say you’re overweight, obese, and you’re walking on the pavement listening to this show and you think, “Okay, I’m going to get in shape.” Just change the way you talk: “I love being fit.” If you keep repeating that five times a day, you’re going to make the right choices. But it’s easier to have discipline if you make the right choice for breakfast. That’s why I like people to have meat and nuts for breakfast. It changes your brain chemistry, because there are two chemicals that drive you, which in Chinese medicine we would call the yin and the yang chemicals: dopamine and acetylcholine. Dopamine depends on tyrosine, an amino acid you find a lot in meat and eggs, and it’s for drive. But you also need to pay attention, and that’s acetylcholine, and most nuts are a high source of choline. So back in ’82 I said probably the best way to eat breakfast is meat and nuts, but it took until about 2006 before the research backed me up.

Brian Rose: So you’ve always said have meat and nuts first thing in the morning, since ’82, because it gives you the chemicals and triggers the rest of the day.

Charles Poliquin: If you look at the research, there’s very good research out of Harvard and the University of Toronto where they fed kids different types of breakfast and looked at what food they selected throughout the day. The kids who had a high-protein breakfast, versus, say, microwavable oatmeal, made good food selections all day. So it affects your choices for the whole day.

Brian Rose: Correlation or causation?

Charles Poliquin: Causation in this case, and it’s been verified. There’s a Toronto study where they ate only nuts for breakfast, or only muffins, or half nuts and half muffin, and cognitive abilities were greatest in the people who ate nuts, a bit lower in the nuts and muffin group, and terrible in the muffin group. There are studies where they gave kids waffles for breakfast with that fake syrup, what French Canadians call telephone-pole syrup, because it’s not maple syrup, and the kids’ IQ compared to the day before was 20% lower. They appeared dumber from bad food choices. So probably one of the quickest ways to turn around a country would be to have breakfast at school, and a good breakfast, and the kids would be more tolerant. You could give them oatmeal… If I was Emperor of All Galaxies, which is one of my goals in life, I would ban oatmeal. I would ban cereal boxes. Rats would eat the box instead of the cereal because the box has more nutrition.

The important thing with the myth of discipline is that you have to look at what you love. If your child is in danger, you love your child. You’ll do anything, even if you’re not capable of it. You may jump in front of a bullet, because you’ll say, “I’ll take the bullet for my child.” That’s love. You don’t need discipline for that. So approach the world saying, “I love doing this.” There are things like, people say you’ve got to live your passion. That’s bullshit. You have to take a skill, get really, really good at it, and then your passion will come out. There’s a very good book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I think if people read that they’d understand. That’s when the 10,000 hours idea came out: if you want to be good at something you’ve got to devote at least 10,000 hours to it. So with the myth of discipline: that’s love. You love what you do.

38:09 For example, people ask me how I started as a strength coach. Well, I was raised French Canadian Catholic, so I would go to church at ten o’clock, and I had the hots for this girl. I’d see her there, I’d go to church, and I was like 14. Then one Monday, she wasn’t there, so I asked, “Where were you in church yesterday?” She was a girl everybody fantasised about in class, and she says, “Well, I turned 14 this weekend, and my mum says it’s my free choice whether I want to go to church, and I don’t want to go any more.” So I thought, well, if her mum lets her do it, I can do it. So I lied to my parents. I thought, what am I going to do for that 40 minutes when I’m supposed to be in church? Luckily the university library was right beside the church, so I’d go to the library at 10:40, and then I’d walk home. I grabbed one of the pamphlets from the church with the sermon, as proof that I’d been at church, so my parents never questioned me, and when I was 16 or 17 it was, “You don’t have to go any more.”

What happened was that I first went to the periodicals section.

Brian Rose: That’s where Charles goes. You didn’t go to the fiction section?

Charles Poliquin: No, the periodicals, and I stumbled upon a Belgian kinesiology periodical with an article on athletes and the knee. I said, that’s interesting, so I read it, and that started weight training for me. Back then there were no computers, so you had to go through the cards, and I found out that the weight training books were on the sixth floor. But I didn’t speak English, and there were only about five books on weight training from French authors. The rest was English, so I got all the English books and actively learned English. What happened was that as a kid, from ’68 to ’70, we lived in France, and I missed basic English, and when I returned to Canada I was put with the slow learners to learn English. So my English skills were really poor.

Brian Rose: And when you were 14 were you interested in strength training?

Charles Poliquin: Oh yes.

Brian Rose: And it was always of interest, because young men are usually somewhat interested, but some more than others.

Charles Poliquin: I’ll get to that. I would pull out the English dictionary, and I remember distinctly an article saying, “This helps with the bicep peak.” I thought, peak? I remember looking in the French-English dictionary: it’s the summit of a mountain. It must mean the height of the bicep. That’s how basic my English was.

But what got me into weight training: even as a kid I was disciplined, because I loved what I did. I did karate, and there was this Irish guy who did weight training, and in 1975, if you lifted weights you were weird to most people. I said, “Why do you lift weights?” He said, “Well, Bruce Lee does it. It improves his punching power.” My dad had told me it makes you slow and dumb, basically. Then we had a black belt convention, and our master’s style came from Japan, and a Japanese guy came over in the seventies. My sensei was 5 foot 4 and 185 pounds, but he could bench press 400 pounds. The Japanese guest says, “You guys’ techniques are shit. You don’t know karate. Who’s the toughest guy here? We’ll have a fight.” My sensei said, “Let’s go,” and when the referee said begin, my sensei knocked him out.

Brian Rose: Was it full-contact karate?

Charles Poliquin: No headgear, no gloves. Just a straight punch to the face, and the Japanese guy was knocked out. All the black belts in the room thought, well, I guess we’re not going to learn much from him. Somebody revived him, and when the Japanese guy woke up, all of us were gone.

A few weeks later there was a blizzard. I remember watching TV, and they said the buses wouldn’t run, there was going to be so much snow. For buses not to run in Canada, that’s a lot of snow, because they’re used to it. I thought, I don’t want to miss karate. I’ve got to walk, I don’t walk fast, and I’m going to be walking in the snow, so it’s going to take triple the time. So I woke up really early, ate breakfast and walked to the dojo. I show up, and I’m the only kid. My sensei says, “Well, there’s no class.” I said, “Oh shit,” and I put my jacket back on, and he said, “If you wait for me, I’ll drive you home.” I said, “Well, it’s going to save me three hours; I’ll wait an hour.” He started to lift weights, and I said, “Can I try?” And I got bitten by the iron bug. I said, I love this shit.

Brian Rose: And you were 14 then?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. My arms were like linguine. If I drank a glass of V8, I looked like a thermometer; I was really skinny. That was at the same time I stopped going to church, because it was the winter, and then I went to the library, and that’s when I really got into weight training. I read everything I could. I saved my money, and I remember going to the post office, because you couldn’t do credit cards by phone, so I sent a money order and bought this magazine called Iron Man, which still exists. I bought all the back issues and started to read more and more.

43:48 Then there was a famous weightlifting coach who lived in Montreal. He had 90% of the national team. I would get on the bus and take a two-hour ride to Montreal on Friday mornings, stay with him all day, watch him work and ask him two thousand questions. Then one day he told me, “Kid, you’re really smart, but you’re only going to be good if you prove it. You have to start coaching.” So I started to coach a guy, who beat one of the top guys after one year, and that built my confidence.

Brian Rose: And you were a very young coach. Did you ever want to become a bodybuilder, or an Olympian?

Charles Poliquin: An Olympian, yes.

Brian Rose: But why not a bodybuilder?

Charles Poliquin: I admire a guy who puts that much work in, but it’s not something I wanted to be. I would have preferred to be a famous weightlifter rather than a bodybuilder.

Brian Rose: You enjoyed the performance more than the aesthetics.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. Schwarzenegger was one of my idols, but I couldn’t really see myself stepping on stage. What I liked about Schwarzenegger was when I read his biography, which my sisters bought me for my 15th birthday. I said, “OK, this guy is really driven. Look at all the sacrifices he made.” It took me a long time to realise that his discipline came from what he loved. Schwarzenegger was one of my heroes, and for most men of my generation who work in my field, Schwarzenegger is a hero.

Brian Rose: And just to finish off what we were saying, discipline comes from something you love. Schwarzenegger loved lifting and he loved winning. He always says that every rep was easy because it got him one step closer to the goal. Explain how that relates to the myth of discipline.

Charles Poliquin: One of the things Schwarzenegger is known for is that the tank he had in the Austrian army is on the front lawn of his house. When they changed tanks in Austria, he called the government and asked if he could buy the tank. He bought it, went under the tank and found the plates and dumbbell handles he used to hide in there, which tells you how much maintenance they did on the tanks. Back then, if you lifted weights you were a weirdo. So he hid weights in the carriage of the tank, and at three in the morning he would set the clock, get up, pump himself up and put the dumbbells back in the tank, because he loved the feeling he got from lifting. Was he disciplined? Yes, but because he loved to lift weights. He loved the sensation of doing it.

I have found the same with Olympic athletes. They love their sport, they get really good, then they start making money, the money corrupts them, and usually their performance drops. They only improve again when they ask themselves, “Why did I choose this sport? Because I love to go fast as a skier,” or whatever else. Once they figure out the why, and it’s always about starting with the why, they go back and win again. I see that in a lot of sports. A kid grows up in Texas really poor, with nothing to play with on Christmas morning, but once he makes a lot of money it often corrupts him.

Brian Rose: So you’re quoting Simon Sinek, start with why. That’s a great point. You start with “Why am I doing this? Because I love it,” and then the practice follows. If you start purely with discipline, “I’m going to do this every day no matter what,” that won’t last.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. People say, “Look at that guy, he’s very disciplined.” I’d say, “No, look at that guy, he loves what he does,” and that results in discipline. For example, I get a lot of executives who come for consults and ask, “Should I lift weights?” “Do you like it?” “No.” “Do you like stretching?” “Yes.” “Then do yoga. Do something, but don’t sit on your ass all day.” But don’t make them lift weights, because they’re not going to keep it up. Sometimes people don’t like weights because they were not properly introduced to lifting, and you can turn them around. But if a guy says, “I love basketball,” then sign up for a recreational basketball league, put up a hoop, play with your kids. “I like punching people in the face.” Sign up for MMA. Do something. Exercise should be something you enjoy. If you have to say, “It’s five o’clock, I’ve got to go and do this,” that’s not good. You have to enjoy it.

48:35 Brian Rose: That makes sense. Back to your first coaching client. You were what, in your twenties?

Charles Poliquin: Seventeen.

Brian Rose: Seventeen, and you knew you wanted to coach. You’re a natural-born teacher, but the profession didn’t really exist. So that’s your personality, to coach others?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. I did the StrengthsFinder book, and my number one trait is competitiveness. Number two is individualisation, so that’s why I like to individualise things. I don’t believe in one rule that fits everybody. So I was in the weight room at the university, because I’d got into the University of Ottawa, and there was a guy on the national volleyball team who said, “Man, you’re bloody strong for a 17-year-old kid. Can you write me a programme?” I said, “What do you want a programme for?” “I play volleyball.” I said, “Don’t you have a guy who writes your programmes?” “Yes, but they’re terrible. I’m not as strong as you.” So I started training him in my parents’ basement, and when it rained there would be three inches of water on the floor.

Brian Rose: And you could still lift in the water?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And this guy became the highest-paid volleyball player of all time.

Brian Rose: And what kind of training did you put him on?

Charles Poliquin: Basically squats, deadlifts, power cleans, power snatches. Basic weight training, explosive work, but a lot of increasing muscle mass as well. He was six foot four and played at 245 pounds, which for volleyball is a big man. The first year, when the national team tested shoulder strength in extension, like spiking a ball, he was 2.5 times the team average. So the Japanese coach who was coaching the Canadian team asked him, “What do you do?” He said, “I don’t follow the programme. I’ve got a guy who writes for me.” Then Glenn Hoag, who is now a very famous coach in volleyball, said, “Hey, can I train with your guy?” So he came in the off-season and I trained him, and they finished first and second in the fitness tests. Then another player wanted to be part of that group, so I had three guys, and they finished one, two, three. Then the Japanese coach brought me in to evaluate the whole team.

Brian Rose: You were 18 by now?

Charles Poliquin: By that time I was 19.

Brian Rose: And you were instructing the whole team.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And then I had to get paid, and the national team said, “We don’t have a budget code,” because Canadian sport is federally funded, so they had to make up a code. I got paid for the whole year a whopping 400 dollars. The next year the national handball team heard what a great job I’d done with the volleyball team, because by 1983 we were beating the Russians in Russia and the Americans in Long Beach, and we had a good shot at a gold medal.

Brian Rose: And those other teams probably weren’t strength training?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. But then I got fired from my position because I didn’t have a PhD. They hired a British guy who used to be an 800-metre runner, and he had them doing biking for years, training them for endurance. But there’s always the concept of optimal versus maximal. The Kenyans got beaten at the Olympics by the Italians, who literally smoked between sets but had much better vertical jumps because they did strength and power training. Then somebody said, “We messed up.” But the national handball team said, “That’s a good idea, we want you to train us.” I said it was 800 bucks, and they thought that was too expensive. One Olympic cycle later they said, “We want a national team programme for six weeks.” I said it was 8,000 dollars, and they said, “That’s a deal.”

Brian Rose: Because it was the same budget, but you’d become much more well known.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. And now it takes me what, ten minutes to make 400 bucks if I do a consult. The point is, it changed. In 1984, when I joined the NSCA, the National Strength and Conditioning Association, the average salary for a strength coach in the US was 15,000 dollars a year. Now the highest-paid strength coach in the NCAA, which is the universities, makes about 650,000, and the top ten make between 350,000 and 650,000. There’s been a value given to the profession. In soccer, or football in the UK, you now have coaches who are well paid to do strength training, and in 2006 there were very few. So the attitude towards strength training has changed dramatically.

53:23 Brian Rose: Tell us what that was like in the eighties. Take me back. You were quite a pioneer. You were doing things people weren’t doing or talking about, and you were heavily in the library, when most guys doing what you were doing were probably heavily in the gym.

Charles Poliquin: But I was in the gym a lot too.

Brian Rose: You were in both. And is that what armed you for the future, the fact that you knew the science and you were a guy who was actually putting it into practice?

Charles Poliquin: Correct. Like you said about your Ironman training, the best way to learn is through experience. I would observe and say, “OK, we need to do this.” I remember giving a clinic saying we should change the speed at which we lift, because the speed of lifting a weight is one of the variables, and two PhDs in the room told me I was full of it, that there was no research to back it up. I said, “Yes, there’s no research. It’s observation.” So they basically said to my face, “We’ll prove you wrong.” Their concept was the law of specificity in sports training, that you get results based on exactly how specifically you train, which works some of the time. So one research group trained slow then fast, another trained only fast, and another fast then slow, and then they tested them for power. Surprise, surprise, the groups that varied the speed got more powerful than the group that trained explosively all the time. But that took six years after they challenged me.

In 1982 I said you need to lower the weight more slowly than you lift it, because fewer motor units are recruited when you lower eccentrically, so you want to put more attention there. People said there was no research to back it up, and the research only came out in 2016, out of Brazil, showing I was right. If I’d waited for that piece of paper to be published to make my training decisions, I would have missed all those Olympics, winter and summer. One person said to me, “The research is catching up to you.” Literally, it is.

I remember in 1976 I learned about a type of training called cluster training, which is a nervous system type of training, from one of my mentors in Montreal, Pierre. In February 2008 a paper was published in the NSCA’s scientific journal calling cluster training a novel approach. I learned it in 1976, and the research came out in 2008, but Olympic lifters throughout the world were successful doing cluster training. So when the paper came out I asked my coach, “When did you learn it?” He said, “I learned it in ’68 from a Bulgarian.” I said, “Can you get in contact with that Bulgarian and ask when he learned it?” It turns out it was invented in 1948. I made a lot of training decisions on the basis that success leaves clues. If the best nation in the world is winning, it must be doing something right. So I used to spend a lot of money going to Finland and Germany. I saved up my money, went to see the best strength experts, bugged the hell out of them with questions, and then went back and applied it. I found the quickest way to learn was to go and see the guys who were successful and find out what they did. When I was 17 I went to see Pierre. He would say, “I do this,” and I’d ask, “Where does that come from?” To be fair, by 1982 I knew all the mathematics of weight training from him, and he only had a high school education. I don’t think he even finished high school. To this day I’ve taught that methodology in 74 countries, and people espouse it.

It’s my nature. I’m competitive, so I always want to be ahead.

Brian Rose: And you go with your intuition as well?

Charles Poliquin: Mainly observational skills. One British coach who coached Canadian swimming, Deryk Snelling, told me, “Do today what the others will copy tomorrow.” He said that to me in 1984, and I liked that saying.

Brian Rose: Which means be bold, stick your neck out.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And I remember Charlie Francis, who was Ben Johnson’s coach and who became infamous, but he was a very brilliant coach. He was far ahead. He developed correct speed training way before everybody else. We were at the national coaches conference and went for a walk in the forest, and he said, “You’re pretty smart about strength training.” I said I got a lot of grief and haters, and he said, “Listen to me, kid. If you do something that works better than everybody else, don’t ask for validation. Just keep doing it until they copy you.” That conversation was probably the biggest confidence booster, because at that time I was 22, and a lot of people criticised me, but I was the only one getting results. After a while, once I had so many Olympic medallists, people would never debate me. It was more like, “Can we afford him?” So having that initial confidence was really important, and there were two men who boosted my confidence with just a sentence.

Brian Rose: That’s great mentorship, and you being receptive to it.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And I mentor people from all over the world now. People give the millennials a lot of grief, but who created the millennials? My generation. I think it’s just bad parenting. My generation was raised too strictly, and they said they would do the opposite, which didn’t work.

59:18 Brian Rose: You mentioned the lowering phase, and I thought of when I was down in Marbella at your good friend Nick Mitchell’s gym and I had Dorian Yates putting me through a leg workout. Dorian reminds me a little of some of the things you’re talking about, because he was stuck in a basement in Birmingham, completely separate from all the guys in Venice Beach, which was partly intentional, and he came up with his own protocols. Some of his high-intensity training came from Mentzer and people like that, but he did a lot of it through his own research. One of the early things he said was that the lowering phase was really important. Do you see those elements in Dorian’s training?

Charles Poliquin: Dorian’s training is really good, but it suits him. It’s not a dig at him. I tell people all the time, you’ve got to find the best training system for you. You have your own set of genes. Even if you have a twin, it’s similar but not 100% the same. I trained three girls for the Rio Olympics who were training in my basement. One of them was Helen Maroulis, who became the first American woman to win an Olympic gold in wrestling. The first day she came to see me she could do zero chin-ups, and now she can do chin-ups with 60 pounds or more around her waist, no problem. She’s been world champion three times now. Another girl was already an Olympian and still couldn’t do a chin-up, and she was a wrestler. I asked, “Who’s your strength coach?” and said, “We need to change that. You’re going to chin with 50 pounds within a year.” It took me nine months to get there. I remember the girls were training on three different programmes, and after the workout they asked, “Why aren’t we doing the same thing? We’re all wrestlers.” I said, “Because you have three different neurotransmitter profiles. One is like a mongoose on PCP, one is like a bear and one is a jaguar. You’re different animals. No disrespect, but you don’t operate on the same system.”

So what Dorian Yates did is figure out, “OK, I’m this type, and this works for me.” But look at Schwarzenegger, who was Mr Olympia too, and his training is diametrically opposite to Dorian’s. I’m pretty sure that if Arnold had trained like Dorian he wouldn’t have made Mr Olympia, and vice versa. That’s now how I teach strength training. I give people a neurotransmitter test and say, “You’re blessed for volume or you’re not. You’re blessed for intensity, or you’re blessed for variation.” I think there are three types of people. You can’t train with intensity all the time, because you’ll get muscle tears like Dorian did, and you can’t train with volume all the time, because you’ll overtrain and get tonsillitis like all of Schwarzenegger’s training partners.

And there’s a 70% rule. One of my best mentors was Mauro Di Pasquale, a medical doctor and world powerlifting champion and world record holder, and he told me, “Take care of the extremes and the middle will come up.” There’s always that bell curve. What I figured out is that Dorian is at one end of the bell curve for volume and Schwarzenegger at the other, but most people, 70%, will do best with something intermediate between Arnold and Dorian. Now I’ve got shortcuts to figure that out. Before, I would have to train you for a while. I would basically try to kill you and see what you survived. After a while I said there must be a smarter system.

Brian Rose: And is it a blood test, the neurotransmitter test?

Charles Poliquin: No. The problem with neurotransmitter testing is that a lot of companies have tried to come out with a test that measures them in the urine, but they’re too transitory. It hasn’t been done yet, though some people claim they have. Eric Braverman, a medical doctor from New York, came out with the Braverman test, which to this day most neurotransmitter experts agree is the most valid test we have. It’s just a written questionnaire, but you can only do it once, because once you learn the questions you’re biased. And I found that once I gave these tests to athletes I could say, “OK, that’s a volume responder.”

Brian Rose: So you just ask me questions and I write the answers?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. Like, “Do you watch porn?” And you get the answer right away.

Brian Rose: And can you find a personality type in there?

Charles Poliquin: I prefer to call it a neurotransmitter type, because, like I said, behaviours influence personality. After I heard a couple of experts speak on neurotransmitters and praise Braverman, I started to look into it and give it to my athletes, and I realised I was on to something. Now people try to copy it, but they don’t know the background, so it doesn’t work. I’m the one who has done the most work on it. I confronted one guy and asked him how many Olympic champions or world record holders he had trained, and he would never answer the question, because he hadn’t. Mine was tested on them.

So there are archetypes, but usually there are very few pure types. For example, dopamine dominant is only 8% of the population, but they tend to be the most successful in power sports. If you put a shot-putter, discus thrower and javelin thrower in this room, they’re most likely all going to be dopamine dominant. But in basketball, 11 players out of 12 are acetylcholine dominant and one is GABA dominant. He’s basically the quarterback of the team, the decision maker, but everybody else is acetylcholine because it’s a sport where you need to pay attention. You’ll find that snipers are GABA dominant, because you can’t be trigger-happy as a sniper. You’ve got to line up your sights and fire at the right moment, so you need patience. Canada has three of the five world records in sniping, and they’re JTF2, which is the equivalent of the SAS. Some of those guys waited three days for the target to show up.

If you’re dopamine dominant you won’t make a sniper, but you’re the best guy to be first through the door, and the guys behind you can finish the job. Breachers tend to be dopamine dominant. It’s the nature of the animal.

1:06:22 Brian Rose: So say I was an Olympic athlete who had never medalled. I’ve been competing for eight or ten years. I’m sure you get people like this all the time. I knock on your door and convince you to coach me, and I’m sure you’re in high demand. What are those first two weeks like? Do you get to know my personality, do I take the neurotransmitter test, do you watch what I eat? How do you feel people out, and what are the most obvious things you see right away where you think, “I can’t believe you got this far”? Is it blatant things, like you can’t do a chin-up, or blatant diet things?

Charles Poliquin: It depends on the sport and the nature of the athlete. For example, with Helen, she had a lot of anxiety. She’s been public about it. So I helped her with supplements to deal with anxiety, and I found her a very generous sponsor for them. Her training partner, who actually brought her to me, was Elena Pirozhkova, who was originally from Siberia, but she’s more like a bear. She fights slowly and intellectualises everything. Helen has very good attention skills; she’s acetylcholine dominant.

Brian Rose: Is this the five elements applied to strength training? I had Mantak Chia in here and he talked about the five elements and gave me my Chinese reading.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. Earth types should go more towards endurance sports, because they don’t have a real neurotransmitter dominance. When you score them, instead of having peaks they tend to look more like a circle. Those people can tolerate a lot of volume. They’re more like Thomas the Tank Engine. That would be my best example of an earth type.

Brian Rose: Slow and steady wins the race.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. Dopamine guys are explosive. I’ll give you a good story. I had an intern from New York and I said, “Just watch. Don’t talk to my athletes when I coach.” I tend to banter a lot and take the piss out of my athletes. I was coaching Adam Nelson, one of the most decorated shot-putters in history, and I was teasing him, and the intern decided to be funny and said something that went down like a lead balloon. The whole room was full of Olympians, hockey players and football players, and there was dead silence. Adam looked at the guy and said, “Hey buddy, pick a window, because you’re going through it.” I knew he was going to throw the guy through the window, so I said something funny, everybody started to laugh, and I said, “OK, next set.” When I got back to my office I told the guy, “Listen, I just saved your life,” and the guy started to cry and said, “Yes, I realised that.” I said, “Don’t piss off a dopamine guy.” Those are the guys who start fights in bars. They’re very impulsive, but that’s what makes them good shot-putters. They’ve got to be relaxed and then give it one shot. I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily fighters, but they’re the type of person who, when you say, “I need someone to go through this door,” will volunteer and kick the door down. They’re risk takers, and they’re very explosive.

Brian Rose: And what element is that?

Charles Poliquin: That’s fire.

Brian Rose: So that’s earth and fire. Then we’ve got water, metal…

Charles Poliquin: And wood, which is acetylcholine. The problem with acetylcholine people is that they need more variation in training. They don’t do well with volume. That created problems, because before I figured out the system I would have, say, ten American football players in my gym, and a guy would come in and after ten minutes I’d say, “You’re done, you’re going home.” He’d say, “Why? Let’s work out.” The other guys would say, “Why are you picking on me? I still have to stay.” I’d say, “You’re not the same type. Shut up, it’s my gym.” I would send guys home. After a while I said, “OK, with wood types I’ve got to organise the training so they don’t overtrain,” so I started to do shorter phases. For a while I had worked under the 70% rule, because I thought I’d found a magical formula that worked for 70% of the population, but I would lose some guys. So I started changing my cycles.

Now this rarely happens, but Elena Pirozhkova was training at my house. She’s an earth type, but for some reason, with the total volume of wrestling, she hadn’t recovered. She came in and was supposed to do power cleans, and after just 40 kilos I thought, “She’s going to have a bad workout and get injured or depressed.” So I stopped her and said, “You know what, today we’re doing grip work.” She asked why, and I said, “You haven’t recovered. I can tell.” She had a lot of faith in me, so we did an hour of forearm exercise, which doesn’t really tax the nervous system. The next day I said, “Come in and do power cleans,” and she improved her loads quite a bit. Then she said, “OK, now I understand.” I’m not training a computer, I’m training a human, so I do a lot of day-by-day adjustment.

Brian Rose: Do you look at heart rate variability or average resting heart rate to see if people are overtrained?

Charles Poliquin: I didn’t find in practical terms that it actually worked. Pretty much every one of my colleagues who bought into it has that machine in the closet now. No one successful is using heart rate variability as much any more. It was popular in about 2001. But the Finns have developed a ring that measures heart rate variability throughout the day, and I’m interested in starting to look at that, because it’s more long term. You could actually predict when a woman will ovulate, for example. That is something I would explore again. I think maybe the technology had good intent 17 years ago, and now it’s much better.

Brian Rose: Can you touch on the other elements really quickly, and what you would do with those? There’s water and there’s metal.

Charles Poliquin: The problem with those is that they’re not attracted to weight training, so I actually never see them.

Brian Rose: Interesting. But they are attracted to other Olympic sports?

Charles Poliquin: They’re like snipers. A GABA-dominant person could be in basketball, but they’re the decision makers, the guys who can see the whole thing.

Brian Rose: And they don’t usually come to you.

Charles Poliquin: They don’t. One of my best students trains basketball players, and he did the Braverman test with his team after I explained it to him, and he had the same results. When he profiled the team there was always one really GABA-dominant guy. It’s rare to see pure dominance, but there’s one per basketball team. And the last type, the water type, they’re more into yoga. They’re more likely to be vegans. They’re the soft type. You’ve got the really yang one, which is dopamine, and the vegans are the most yin.

Brian Rose: Not the alpha and not the beta. They’re usually doing their own thing, not competing.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. They’re more like Gandhi-type personalities. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s just that I don’t see them. If I was a yoga guru I’d probably see a lot of them.

Brian Rose: Can this be determined by your birth time? Mantak Chia did my whole birth chart, and I didn’t totally believe in astrology. But now it makes sense that the elements are personalities, and it’s amazing to hear you talk about it, because it sounds very real and very practical.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, because I gave it a Western explanation.

Brian Rose: You did. But is it determined at birth?

Charles Poliquin: That’s an interesting question. I would say to some degree, yes. But you could argue that you’re like this because of your upbringing. For example, my parents were against making money. Making money was evil. I don’t think that came from their birth; they were raised Catholic, and you’re not supposed to make money. Also, if you were born during the Depression, you always have anxiety about whether you’ll get enough food or be able to pay the bills.

I like one-liners. Tim Ferriss told me I was the only guy with as many one-liners as Schwarzenegger. I remember a very famous ski coach told me, “The only guy I know who has never made a mistake pumps gas in Kelowna, British Columbia.” He never made a mistake. But you have to make mistakes to grow.

It’s interesting about birth time. I looked a lot at Chinese astrology and athletes, and there is something in it, but I can’t say it’s pure, because you could have an oppressive father and decide, “I’m going to stand up to his bullying.” A friend of mine is one of only a few guys to have made three national teams, but his father used to beat him unconscious. Then he discovered weight training, and he was fighting the demons inside him, and he could stand up to his father. I can’t tell how much is birth, but I think he was born in the year of the rat, and rats in the Chinese belief system are hard workers. He’s the type of guy who had no talent and made three national teams through work. So I would say there is something in it. I’m not an expert by any means, and I prefer to look at a Western explanation, but I got really interested in the elements. One of the most popular articles I wrote was the five elements in strength training, and that was the beginning of me recognising there was a need for investigation. I was trying to find the system, and once I listened to a talk on neurotransmitters, I said, “OK, that is the key.”

There are nine main neurotransmitters, but we tend to explain things with four, because nine is too complicated. When the CIA analyses your personality, they fit you within nine types, and that system correlates with the nine neurotransmitters. The thing with the Chinese is that they explained through poetry things that Western medicine is only explaining now. Before the Chinese there was the Ayurvedic system, but it only had three types, pitta, vata and kapha, and pitta would be the fire type. If you look at it, it’s a continuum. Everything in biology is explainable along a continuum. The Chinese had thousands of years of knowledge embedded in poetry and sayings, partly because it was taboo to do autopsies. For example, they talked about the kidney meridian, and now that there’s been Western research on acupuncture meridians, what they were talking about was the adrenals. Adrenal means on top of the kidney, and the French word for the adrenals also means on top of the kidneys. The Chinese figured out that if you’re stressed out, one of the first things you’ll do is pee. You’ve got an important conference to give, and two minutes before, guys go and pee. Why? Because the kidney meridian is activated. So once I started to study this, I said, “There’s a lot of truth to it. I just have to find a Western explanation.”

Brian Rose: So don’t dismiss it, because there could be some knowledge there.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. I think there’s a lot of truth to it. But again, I’ve seen things recommended in Chinese medicine that I think are very unhealthy. No system is perfect.

1:19:19 Brian Rose: We just saw the Winter Olympics conclude in South Korea, and we saw the Russian athletes compete without their flag. This is on the back of the last couple of years and the film Icarus, which is pretty fascinating. I have to ask you what you think the state of the union is with performance-enhancing drugs in sport and the Olympics, and what you made of seeing all that happen.

Charles Poliquin: Doping is going down, dramatically. And the first sport to clean up, which will surprise most people, is actually Olympic weightlifting.

Brian Rose: Do you believe the assertions of that film, that the Russian team has been doping for the entirety of the Olympics since the sixties?

Charles Poliquin: Earlier.

Brian Rose: The fifties, forties?

Charles Poliquin: The thirties. They were the first ones to use testosterone injections. The first large-scale application of testosterone injections in war was by the Nazis, the SS. They developed testosterone injections to make the troops more aggressive, and to retain protein when there’s no food around. There are a lot of advantages to taking testosterone if you’re a warrior. Then the Russians said, “There are too many side effects with testosterone. Maybe we should look into something else.” Testosterone has anabolic and androgenic properties. Androgenic means it makes you more male; you shave more often. Anabolic means building tissue. The problem with testosterone is that if you use large quantities your prostate gets beaten up, and even the brain can start to shrink if you take too much. So an American doctor called John Ziegler said, “Why don’t I make a molecule that is less androgenic and more anabolic?” That prompted a whole market, and big pharmaceutical companies started to develop different anabolic steroids.

Brian Rose: So were the Russians before the SS?

Charles Poliquin: From what we know, the Russians were the first to use testosterone injections, and for some reason the SS picked up on that and started to give it to the troops, but only the SS got testosterone injections. And there’s a country that shall remain nameless where most of the steroid research we know of for performance was done on special forces.

Brian Rose: Is that Russia as well?

Charles Poliquin: No. But the point is that most of the things we use nowadays to save time were developed by the military: aeroplanes, GPS, things like that. The military tends to push progress and the civilian industry is second to pick it up. So most of the research on steroids and athletic performance was actually done on special forces, because back in those days they walked in or parachuted in, and what mattered was the ability to sustain injuries and come back from them. This researcher spent 45 or 50 years doing that, and it’s too bad it’s not better known, because medical doctors could use it to say, “This is the best thing to repair a bone, this is the best thing to repair a tendon,” because different anabolic steroids act differently. In gerontology there are a lot of applications, for osteoporosis for example, not at the dose a bodybuilder would take, but it would certainly help the health of a lot of people. Because, like I said at the beginning, we’ve been making 1% less testosterone per year since 1950, and men find it much harder to function with less testosterone. My grandfather had 16 kids, and to make 16 kids my grandmother was pregnant many times, so obviously he had quite a bit of testosterone.

Brian Rose: That’s crazy. So the Russian team has been doping since the thirties, and everyone has known this for a long time?

Charles Poliquin: Oh yes, for a long time. The film was just it coming out. I had one of my athletes who competed in cycling in Seoul, and the Russians won the event he was in, and he was told, “The Germans will win the next event.” He asked why, and the answer was that they had the drug for that event. It was known for years. In Canada we have very strict doping control. When Donovan Bailey won the 100 metres they tested him 26 times that calendar year, and every day for the last five days before he competed and won Olympic gold, because politically we didn’t want another Ben Johnson. Since the Ben Johnson affair, Canada has had a lottery every week, so every Wednesday you have one chance in seven of being drug tested, and doping disappeared really fast. Then the Norwegians and the Swedes copied the system.

Brian Rose: And how does America rank for doping control?

Charles Poliquin: It’s probably one of the easiest countries to get away with it, but the federations have caught up. Weightlifting cleaned up. Why? Because they were told, “If you don’t clean up your act, you’re going to be out of the Olympics.” It was the most obvious sport and had the most positive cases, so the IOC pressured the IWF to clean itself up. Now suddenly the US is winning medals in weightlifting, because they’ve been clean for years and now they’re competing on an even field. For example, there’s a Canadian girl I used to sponsor financially, Christine Girard. She was fourth in Beijing and third in London, and when they retested the samples, the girl from Kazakhstan and the girl from Russia were caught, and now she’s Olympic champion. She got her gold. Those two girls passed doping tests in 2012, but with German technology to look at metabolites they found what they had been taking. I saw the list of what they were caught on. It makes a Mr Olympia competitor look like a natural. These girls were on eight different drugs. But she was raised in the Canadian system, so she could never cheat. It’s impossible. And she was a hard worker, trained hard, in a small town.

Brian Rose: What do you tell one of your athletes when they say, “Charles, I’m going to Rio, I’m up against a Russian, I know they’re doping, and I’m frustrated and anxious”?

Charles Poliquin: Forget it. We have better training systems. Helen Maroulis has defeated girls who have tested positive since then. Let’s say Helen had taken drugs and never got caught. She would have won the gold medal anyway, I think. The advantage is about 10%, but if you have a 10% advantage and you train like a moron, it doesn’t really give you an advantage. It’s better to have a good coach, proper nutrition, recovery and so on. When Canada started winning in bobsleigh, the former communist bloc was saying, “The Canadians must have a drug that can’t be detected.” There were no drugs. We were one of the most drug-tested sports. We were identified as a high-risk sport, so when we were in Monaco for a training camp, three British doctors burst into the room and tested everybody. They were sent by our own government to make sure we didn’t have a positive going into the Games. Canada has always been really strict on doping since 1988, but we still won Olympic gold in Nagano, and we had the fastest starts. So you can win without the drugs; you just have to be a lot smarter about training.

In men’s wrestling there’s still some doping going on. The coaches from those countries tell us. But the Americans won the world championships as a team in Paris, for the first time since about 2006, and that’s because there’s so much doping control that a lot of the other guys are getting caught, or they can’t risk it, so they have to come off. Doping control has actually helped the US a lot.

Brian Rose: How should we deal with Russia? Should we point the finger or not?

Charles Poliquin: If you look at the history of doping in Eastern Bloc countries, it was actually run by the KGB in Russia and the Stasi in East Germany. It was a form of propaganda. There’s a very good book by Brigitte Berendonk on doping in East Germany. She analysed all the Stasi files, and it was the East German CIA, for want of a better analogy, that actually controlled doping. When the Chinese started to win in swimming, a few years later they got caught, because the technology got better. The story is that an East German coach went to China, back when East Germany still existed, and he trained the Chinese swimmers like East German swimmers and they weren’t recovering. After a few weeks he said, “Where’s the doctor? What anabolics are they on?” They said, “We don’t dope.” He said, “If you want me to keep working here, I need my pharmacist and my doctor.” So two East Germans came over and there was a lot of doping. This is public knowledge. Then the Chinese started to get caught, and one of the reasons was that some of the Chinese swimmers threw their syringes in the bin, and the maids picked them up and told the police, “We found this.” Then they could investigate what was in the syringe, because if you don’t have a sample of what’s in the syringe, you don’t know what the athlete is taking if it’s a steroid that’s not on the list yet. That’s how they got caught. It was just a maid who handed in the syringes.

Brian Rose: And so what should we do with Russia? Are you telling me the athletes don’t really have a choice?

Charles Poliquin: In a lot of cases they don’t really. And if you are an Olympic champion in Russia, the financial rewards are extremely high. You’ll get taken care of if you win, and there’s not a lot of money otherwise, so I can understand why somebody would do it. The most common drug they’ve been caught on is meldonium, the heart drug that increases endurance. I think that’s what Sharapova was caught on. The drug was not on the list, but it started to show up in tests and they said, “OK, it does give an advantage,” so they put it on the list. With Russia, I think the best thing they did was say you can compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia, but not for Russia. I think that’s probably still the best alternative. It’s eventually going to clean itself up.

Brian Rose: So you don’t ruin the athletes’ lives and livelihoods, but you give the country some sanctions.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. I think that’s fair. For example, there are entire weightlifting nations that have been banned for two years because the nation got caught too often. And the sport that has been the most aggressive at solving its doping issue is weightlifting. If you look at the performances, they’ve dropped, and that’s why they had to change the weight classes. If you’re, say, a 56-kilo weightlifter and there’s no more doping, how can you improve the world record? You’re never going to, because the guy before had a 10% advantage over you. So they’ve had to shift the weight classes twice, so that everybody starts on the same footing and you have a chance to beat the world record.

Brian Rose: Thirty years from now, will we still be having the same discussion? Is there always going to be cheating in competitive sport?

Charles Poliquin: It will probably be gene doping by then. There’s already some gene doping being done. It’s human nature to beat the system.

Brian Rose: What did you think of the film Icarus?

Charles Poliquin: It’s a tell-all. It’s a good piece, very educational, and it’s true. But I think the athletic community will always be ahead. Somebody is going to figure out a way to boost neurotransmitters with some electronic device, and how do you ban that? You would need 24-hour surveillance. But hormone-wise, I think it’s probably dead by now.

1:33:59 Brian Rose: Interesting. And what do you think about drug testing in sports like the UFC? Or should there be a sport where you just open it up and you can take whatever you want?

Charles Poliquin: The problem is, if tomorrow there were a magical way to catch every doper, I don’t think the world champions would change much. The extent to which they can perform would diminish, but there’s such a thing as motivation and hard work, so I don’t think the rankings would change much. But one of the things doping control does is prevent access. Let’s say tomorrow they said, “You can take whatever you want. This is a spectacle.” Then the wannabes who don’t have the talent would use drugs, and there would be suicides, depression and so on. So in some ways there are health concerns that justify it. When people watch a rock band, does the audience care if the guy is on mescaline or LSD? They don’t care, as long as he plays intensely. I think that’s why for a long time they didn’t really enforce doping control the way they could. A new way to pick up metabolites has been around since 1994, but the IOC never pushed for that test. Before, a guy could come off certain oral steroids three days before competition and pass the test. But when the Canadians applied the better German technology at the Pan Am Games in Toronto, they were catching guys who had stopped orals a year before, because they were now looking for new metabolites. Things that were detectable for only three days are now detectable for up to a year.

Brian Rose: That’s the new standard. And with biological passports, people can be caught five or maybe even ten years later, so they have to be careful. But people roll the dice anyway.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. They’ve caught guys from 2008 because the samples were retested. Those samples are frozen. The Australians are pushing for retesting of all the Sydney doping control samples, and one of the reasons is that a lot of Australians would get on the podium, because they were fourth or fifth. If you disqualify the top three in some sports, it changes the world order. But the big countries are saying, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” I’m 100% sure that if they retested the Sydney Olympics, a lot of people would be very disappointed.

Brian Rose: Have you ever trained any UFC athletes, and what do you think about that sport and the way they’ve brought in USADA?

Charles Poliquin: I’ve never prepared anybody specifically for the UFC, but I have great admiration for those guys. They’re probably the hardest workers in the field of sport. Georges St-Pierre is a friend of mine, but I can’t claim I train him. We have the same jiu-jitsu sensei, the brother of the kickboxing world champion Jean-Yves Thériault, from Ottawa, and he’s the guy who worked with Georges on improving kicking and punching power. But Georges has about 20 coaches. I’ve been to his gym; he’s such a celebrity in Montreal that his gym is secret and no one knows where it is when he does his private training. I’ve taught him a few tricks, how to improve chin-ups and so on, and I’ve done a few videos with him on tips for weight training. A very open-minded guy, and probably one of the nicest, most humble men I’ve ever met. I think the UFC is great, and now they’ve changed the rules so it’s somewhat safer, because the first UFCs were quite barbaric. I enjoyed them, but they weren’t for the average public. I think it’s a great activity.

Brian Rose: Do you think their doping system is pretty bulletproof now?

Charles Poliquin: I’m not familiar with how they’ve applied it. But if they did the lottery like in Canada, where you have one chance in seven of being tested every week, doping would drop pretty fast. Some guys will just disappear. I can’t really answer the question because I don’t know how they administer it, but if they apply out-of-competition testing, or a passport, they could. But it won’t change the rankings at all, I don’t think.

Brian Rose: That’s an interesting point, and I think that’s what even Lance Armstrong would say. He was like, “Look, I had to do this to get on the same playing field as everyone else,” but he would argue it wouldn’t have changed the rankings.

Charles Poliquin: I’m 100% sure of that, because he had the why. He loved to win. There’s a guy who is now a US Secret Service agent who used to compete on the same team as Armstrong, and he said, “I’ve never seen a guy that motivated and that pain tolerant.” Apparently Armstrong showed up for his first race in Texas on a bike you wouldn’t give to your worst enemy, but he beat everybody, while my friend had the best equipment. He said Armstrong made the US team just like that, because of his ability to tolerate pain.

Brian Rose: And I’m not even sure why he admitted to it, because he never actually failed a test. There may have been pressure from sponsors. He went on Oprah too. It was because his teammates had all testified against him. It’s a question I’d really like to ask him, why he admitted it. What did you make of all that, the fallout?

Charles Poliquin: I think the guy was extremely driven, and his teammates were not as driven as him. But it cost him a fortune, which is sad.

Brian Rose: You said his teammates weren’t as driven as him. What did you mean?

Charles Poliquin: The guy was obsessed. He did everything to improve performance: the type of bed he slept on, barometric pressure. Apparently he wouldn’t carry the groceries home because he didn’t want his traps to get any bigger, because that would be a waste of body mass.

Brian Rose: So his wife would do it, even when she was pregnant?

Charles Poliquin: That would not surprise me, based on what has come across about his personality.

Brian Rose: What personality type is he?

Charles Poliquin: He has a tolerance for volume, but he’s so driven. He could be an outlier in dopamine production who’s an endurance athlete. It would be an interesting case. I don’t know him personally and I’ve never seen him train, but he’s certainly an outlier in pain tolerance, and there were a lot of financial rewards in the cycling market for doing what he did. There was another guy from Denmark who admitted to doping, and they didn’t make much of a deal of it. From what I can see, Armstrong may have rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, whereas a Danish guy from a small country didn’t upset so many people. And they always want to take down the leader. But regardless of whether he used EPO or whatever the hell they used, which I don’t know, I still think he would have been a multiple Tour de France winner, because everybody was doing it. For years the most doped athletes were the cyclists. And tennis has a lot of doping, and it never comes out, because tennis players can afford people who can give them the right chemistry without getting caught. Tennis is the underestimated sport for drug use.

Brian Rose: Is that going to come out soon?

Charles Poliquin: I wouldn’t be surprised.

Brian Rose: What about American football?

Charles Poliquin: They cut out doping a long time ago. They test a lot for recreational drugs, they’re very strict, and they also test at NCAA level.

Brian Rose: So it’s pretty clean, that sport. There are some strong, muscular guys in it.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, but in the US they’re a dime a dozen. I remember a guy who came to my gym who played American football. I tested him and he was the most fast-twitch human I’ve ever seen, like 100% fast twitch. I told him, “You shouldn’t play football. You should be running the 100 metres.” He said, “Why?” I said, “You’re good enough to play in the NFL, but not to be a superstar, because you don’t have all the skills. But as a runner…” So I took him to the track, and the guy who was coaching Donovan Bailey looked at him and said, “This guy is a super freak.” I told him, “Even if you’re only in the top ten, you’re looking at probably 30 million dollars a year in endorsements.” Usain Bolt makes about 200 million.

Brian Rose: Is Bolt clean?

Charles Poliquin: I think he’s clean. I think his biggest advantage is that he has a lot of elastic properties in his muscles. He’s basically like a kangaroo. But this guy was phenomenal, and both Dan Pfaff and I were trying to convince him to switch. He would have made Bolt look like molasses. But he grew up on football and that was his dream.

Brian Rose: Dan Pfaff trained the British Olympian, the long jump guy. I had him on the show, Greg Rutherford, and he said great things about Dan.

Charles Poliquin: I’ve interacted with Dan Pfaff maybe four or five times. I never worked directly with him, but he’s a friend of a friend, and when I used to go to Texas to coach women’s track I would see him. He’s probably one of the brightest minds in sprinting and speed development. He has a very good understanding of the biomechanics of running and of central nervous system recovery. He made Donovan Bailey. One of the best things the Brits did for London was to hire him.

1:45:46 Brian Rose: Charles, what’s the future of strength training? When you’re 90 and coaching these people, and I’ve got a funny feeling you still will be, what do you think it’s going to look like? How will your day change?

Charles Poliquin: I think in the future we’re going to be able to say exactly what works for you, what’s the right combination. There are three factors in strength training: volume, intensity and variation. Some people do very well with minimal variation, some need variation to make progress, and some need a lot of intensity but need change every workout. I see the future in what people are trying to steal from me, and that’s probably the neurotransmitter approach. But I think in the future you’ll be able to put an electronic device on a guy’s quadriceps and say, “You’ve got to wait two days before you train.” I think that’s what’s going to come, like heart rate variability applied to muscles and the central nervous system. The Soviets, way back when, used tests like these to decide which goalie to put in the net in hockey. People would be surprised: “Why isn’t Tretiak in the net?” “He’s not ready tonight.” I think that’s going to be the future, and of course optimising nutrient intake.

Let’s say I’m Richard Branson and I say, “The UK sucks at sport, I’m going to change that.” I actually wrote an article on that a few years ago, and it stayed at the top of Google for two weeks because it talked about Branson. In fact a Colombian drug lord approached me to apply my ideas to Colombia, but I said it wouldn’t look too good for my reputation.

Brian Rose: And what were you saying in that article?

Charles Poliquin: I explained how you could take a country like England and make it win 12 Olympic gold medals in four years. One of the things I talked about is that wrestling and judo have so many weight classes that one coach can produce a lot of athletes. You could go to juvenile delinquency homes, find kids who are aggressive, and feed them properly and train them properly, because those sports don’t require a lot of money. You need a judo mat or a wrestling mat, and both sports could train in the same facility at different hours. You need a good weight room and a great cafeteria, and you feed them right. And England is a flight away from all these countries. In judo and wrestling, the more people you can fight, the better you’re going to get, and that’s one of the problems that limits the US, because they need to travel a lot to get competition and different styles.

I donate religiously 10% of the money I make to different causes.

Brian Rose: Why do you do that?

Charles Poliquin: Because it always comes back, and there’s no point being the richest man in the cemetery. And I enjoy seeing people have success. I started to sponsor wrestling because I was on my way to Norway, and the guy sitting beside me in first class was the women’s head coach. I said, “You’re a wrestling coach, you’re at the bottom of the totem pole for funding.” He kind of laughed, and I said, “You know what, I’ll give you a donation. I’ll be at your office on Tuesday.” I came back from Norway and I’d torn my kneecap in a tramway accident, so I was a week late, but I showed up on crutches, with somebody driving me, and gave him the cheque. I said, “I’m a man of my word.” I wrote on the cheque that they could only use the money for the athletes’ flights, not for officials having some wine and cheese party, and with an emphasis on the women’s programme.

Another thing I did was rescue tigers. There was a training camp, and I said, “Why don’t you come to the tiger rescue place?” I took all the girls and the boys and they got to play with baby tigers.

Brian Rose: Where are your tigers?

Charles Poliquin: They’re 30 miles from my house in Colorado. Then one of the girls, Elena Pirozhkova, asked me, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” She was really well self-educated; she’s now in chiropractic school after retiring from wrestling. I said, “I wouldn’t do this, I would do that,” and she said, “Can you train me?” Obviously she couldn’t afford me, and I said, “I donate 10%, I could donate my time too.” So I said, “Yes, I’ll train you.” After two weeks Helen Maroulis, who became Olympic gold medallist, said, “Can I train with you?” Then Victoria Anthony said, “Can I train with you?” At three I stopped, because if I took too many, no one would know the difference. And I always liked judo, and my daughter did judo, so I started to support judo too. For example, last December I held a seminar with people from 14 countries. I took all the money, split it between the two sports and paid all the expenses. There was a guy from Estonia, Heiki Nabi, who was number two in the world. He came over and took the seminar, and now I train him. Everybody says his physique has changed. When he went to train with the Americans last week, the Greco-Roman men on the US team were asking him thousands of questions about my training, which he wouldn’t answer. My goal is to have Estonia’s first Olympic gold medal in wrestling. I do it for free, just for the challenge.

Brian Rose: And you want to donate what, a million dollars this year?

Charles Poliquin: I want to donate 1.2 million. That’s my goal.

Brian Rose: So you’re cutting big cheques to these people?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. That paid for two training camps, and two days before I came to England I paid for another training camp. But as soon as I write the cheque, my assistant says, “There’s a group in Poland that wants you to come. You’re already going to Italy, and they’ll pay your fee.” It always comes back. And one of my former bobsledders is now working with Destiny Rescue, which takes teenage girls who have been forced into prostitution off the streets. He supports the Manila chapter, and he said 20,000 dollars is enough to pay for enough police officers for a year. So I said, “On my birthday on Facebook I’ll ask people to donate to Destiny Rescue.” But I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to cut a cheque to double their effectiveness in the Philippines.

I became aware of it one day when I had a stopover in Manila. I was staying in a five-star hotel having breakfast, and I saw two fat rich Americans with prostitutes who were maybe 12 or 14. I thought, “This is disgusting,” and on the way out I spat on both of them. I didn’t get arrested. Then I got in my car to go to the airport and said, “One day I’ll do something about this,” but I just didn’t know how. Then on Facebook I saw my former athlete post about arresting pimps, so I wrote to him last week and said, “How can I help?” and he gave me the contacts and the website. I’m always looking for a good place to donate money, but I want to make sure the money gets there. One foundation I support is the Navy SEAL Foundation. There’s a website, Charity Navigator, that verifies whether the money actually goes where you donate it, and the Navy SEAL Foundation had a score of 99, while other veterans’ organisations scored 54. Three of the guys who work for me are veterans, and the government doesn’t take care of them, so for the same set of skills I’d rather hire a veteran every time.

I think it’s just good karma. Funnily enough, when I donate, these people introduce me to other people who end up being clients. And I find that all the most successful people I’ve ever met are big donors too. They choose whatever they like. I like judo and wrestling, the Navy SEALs, and helping my former athlete. If somebody comes up with something where I’m sure the money will get there, that’s what I do. My father taught me this. My father actually studied to become a priest, but of course he liked women too much, so he never finished. But he had a lot of fellow students who became priests stationed in Taiwan and elsewhere, and I remember my father writing out cheques. I asked him why, and he said, “It always comes back.” I had living proof, so he was my model for this.

Brian Rose: It’s an important lesson for people to hear.

Charles Poliquin: People whine to me about money. “I don’t have any money.” I say, “When’s the last time you made a donation?” “Never, because I don’t have any money.” I say, “You don’t have any money because you don’t donate. Look at it in reverse. Just give one cheque and see what happens.” Within three weeks you’ll say, “That really works.” I remember watching a news report about a shelter for women in Montreal when I was in grad school. I looked at my bank account. I had 350 dollars and I wrote a cheque for 300, so I was left with 50 bucks as a grad student. The next day I got a call: “You wrote a paper on training for volleyball. Can we buy it to put in a book?” I said, “What are you going to pay me?” “600 dollars.” So I’d made my money back. I signed the waiver for the copyright, and three hours later I got a call from the Quebec volleyball federation saying, “We saw the paper you sold to the federal government. We’d like to buy it and translate it into French.” I asked how much, and she said, “We have a bigger budget than them, so we’ll pay you 1,200 dollars.” So I made 1,800 dollars from a 300-dollar donation.

Another time I had done work for somebody, and they offered me a contract, and when I got the contract it was not what he had promised, so I told the guy where to go. My girlfriend asked why I did that, and I said, “I don’t like people who don’t have ethics,” and I hung up. I had written a cheque ten years before, and then somebody phoned me from figure skating, which is one of the biggest sports in Canada with lots of money, and asked, “Can you ghostwrite a book for figure skating?” I ended up making with figure skating the money that had been promised to me. It always comes back. The longest I’ve ever had to wait is three weeks, and I don’t wait for it.

Brian Rose: Because you don’t wait for it, that’s why it comes.

1:58:14 A lot of people watching are either in the fitness business or want to make it their business, and they don’t know how. You probably see a lot of people doing the wrong things, banging their heads against a wall, playing small. Is there any advice you can give them? You’ve clearly been successful in business over the years, and early on you probably tried everything.

Charles Poliquin: If you want to earn more, you need to learn more. You can’t escape that. But you have to learn from the right people, and one of the things people don’t do is vet who they’re learning from. People ask me, “What do you think of Joe Schmoe?” I say, “How many Olympic medallists has he coached? How many world record holders? Has he put people on a national team?” No. One of the lines you’ll see often is, “He has trained numerous Olympic athletes.” I always say, “Can you name one to me, please?” And they always have more excuses than a pregnant nun. Some of the guys out there are so dumb they couldn’t pour the piss out of a cowboy boot if the instructions were written on the heel. I say, “Why are you listening to this guy? He’s an idiot. You can tell by the way he writes.”

I had a guy who copied my material and claimed he trained the Canadian special forces. One of my nephews is a major, and I’d never heard of this guy. So I wrote to him and said, “You’re plagiarising my material,” and he said, “I’ve got a big department. It could be one of my ghostwriters.” And on Facebook he had asked to borrow a gym to film in, so I said, “You don’t even have your own facility.” Then I asked a general in the Canadian military if he knew this guy, and after two days’ investigation it turned out he had handed out socks to the special forces, to our second unit, not our best unit, which is JTF2. So he was a sock handler. That was his only contact with the special forces, and he got kicked out of the Canadian Forces for plagiarism. Somebody made a call to him, and suddenly his big staff, who couldn’t remove the material from the web, had done it in ten minutes.

Brian Rose: So the French-Canadian mafia made a call to him?

Charles Poliquin: I would say it was some milder guy. But anyway, the point is that there are a lot of very good, smart guys, like Josh Bryant, Ed Coan or Matt Wenning, so you have to find out what they’ve done. For example, Josh Bryant bench pressed 600 pounds, the youngest man ever to do it, so he knows how to improve the bench press. People say performance isn’t the point, but you don’t go from a 400-pound bench press to 600 pounds by accident. What got you to 400 is not what’s going to get you from 400 to 600. So I think practical experience is very important. A good friend of mine is Ed Coan, the most decorated powerlifting champion in the world, with something like 77 world records. He’s not formally educated, but I did a teaching tour with him and three times a day I learned something from him I had never heard of, and I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I’d ask where he got it, and he’d say, “I learned this from this guy,” or “I figured it out myself.” He was learning from the best. So I really believe that learning from the best is the shortcut.

I give classes all over the world, and I’m going to start a mastermind group very soon, because I find the new generation has a really hard time with the practical elements of strength training. The guy could be passionate and read online, but I could watch every Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and it wouldn’t make me a karate expert. The best way is to get into 600 fights. We have that thing in fighting sports, that 500 fights is the minimum to learn how to fight. You have to have somebody who has had experience in the trenches. So on the strengthsensei.com website there’s a link to learn more. I also have a membership site, and for your listeners there’s a link where I’ll give them a free book on brain hacking, the best nutrients for sleep, motivation, attention span and so on. We only open the membership site three times a year, and the next time is April, but if your listeners get on the waiting list they’ll get a discounted price when they sign up to the Dojo of Strength. People have to pay for that information. I give a lot of free information on my website, but there’s a principle in life for success. Rule number one: don’t tell them everything you know. The feedback I get from the forums is excellent. People say, “I can’t find this anywhere else.” No, you won’t, because there aren’t many people who have trained Olympic medallists in 23 different sports. And 10% of the money I make from the membership site goes to judo and wrestling, because I promised it to them two years ago.

The next project I’m working on is a mastermind group. People will pay a monthly fee and I’ll give very good seminars, but through the years I’ve made a lot of very good friends in the success industry, whether it’s improving your ranking on YouTube or financial planning, and I’m going to have these guys teach at those mastermind groups. If people want to join, they should write to info at strengthsensei.com and ask for the information. We’re working on the plans, and we’ll give five seminars a year, of which members will be able to go to three. They’ll be all over the world: probably Estonia or Prague for Europe, Phoenix, Arizona, which is always popular because it’s sunny year round, and one in Australia, because there’s a very large following in Australia and South East Asia.

2:04:46 And a basic Japanese principle is that if you’re the sensei, you have to develop a student who’s better than you. I’ve got a guy, who shall remain nameless, who I think is going to be the next Charles Poliquin. I’m growing him. I’ve given him athletes and said, “OK, here’s the programme, do what you can,” and he’s made them very successful.

Brian Rose: Explain that Japanese concept, because it’s the opposite of what most people would do.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. In Japanese martial arts, and I come from a martial arts background, it’s your failure as a teacher if you don’t make somebody better than you. So I’ve been looking for years. There are guys who show promise, but they don’t have the resilience, they don’t follow through, they don’t last. But this guy has had injuries; he got his tongue cut in a hockey fight and they sewed his tongue back on, and he kept coming back like RoboCop. When a guy has that attitude, that’s a growth mindset. I’ve got maybe a dozen guys competing for that spot, and one woman.

Brian Rose: So we all should be looking for that person in our own lives.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. And work on your strengths and buy your weaknesses. One of the reasons I’m so successful now is the team I’ve got. I found a veteran guy for all my IT work, and he’s brilliant. He has the diplomatic skills of Attila the Hun, so when I have to beat up somebody, I let him do the talking. He’s ex-special forces, he’s really good. His name is Scott, and his wife is my right arm. She does everything, and she’s diametrically opposite to me. She’s German, very organised and methodical, and goes through everything. I’ve got Patrick, who handles all the writing, and a French girl from Réunion Island who does a lot of writing and fact-finding. I just started with a new personal assistant. And I learned a lot from Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof guy. One of the questions he asked me was, “Do you fold your socks?” I said, “Yes, I do my laundry.” He said, “You’re too important to do laundry.” So I’m hiring someone to do my laundry. The company is growing super fast, but you’re only as good as your team, and I have a very, very good team.

Brian Rose: You mentioned growth mindset. Can you explain what that is?

Charles Poliquin: There’s a very good book by Carol Dweck on that. I’ll give you a very good example of a growth mindset. I was in Cuba for a World Cup in wrestling with my three girls, and they each won the gold medal. That’s when I first started out in wrestling, and people were saying, “What is that meathead going to do for them?” Then I started to get the attention of the wrestling community. Elena beat the world champion from Germany, and the German coach recognised me and said, “Man, your girls are so strong. We literally buttered our girl’s arm because we knew your girl had a grip, and she still held on.” Each of these girls won gold, and within two minutes of getting their medals they were sitting beside me, and the question was, “Coach, how can I improve?” It was not, “Coach, what did you think of my performance?” I remember telling Helen, “Your lower back is way too weak. If you want to win in Rio, you need to improve your lower back.” I said, “The reason I’m here in Cuba is to watch you wrestle. I’ve got my tests in the weight room, but I can see how you cheat. The body never lies. You avoid situations because of your lower back, so we’re going to work on your lower back.” Elena came and said, “Coach, what can I do?” I said, “Your grip is still too weak. We’ve got to work on your grip.” Victoria came and said, “What should I do?” I said, “We need to do more slow strength. You have extremely good power, but we’re going to work on your slow strength.” This is a girl who barely weighs 45 kilos and chins with 30 kilos.

Brian Rose: So they’re always looking to improve, even when they win gold.

Charles Poliquin: That’s the point. It’s not, “I’m the World Cup champion and the greatest.” I remember the first Olympics I attended, the Albertville Games in France. Teams travel on buses to the airport after the closing ceremony, and every one of my Olympic medallists on the bus would sit beside me and ask, “What do we work on next?” I’d say, “You need two weeks off, then go and work on this.” One of them was Myriam Bédard, who won a bronze in biathlon. She was the first non-European to step on the podium in any of the cross-country sports, and she said, “I need to get better.” She gave me a report card on her own skills: this is good, this is bad, A-plus, D, F. Two weeks later she came with her husband, we filmed everything, I gave her a programme and said, “You’ve got to do less cardio, we’re going to do this and that.” The next year, which was the odd year when the Olympics were only two years apart to stagger the Winter and Summer Games, she won both golds in Lillehammer. In 1993 she came with a report saying, “My elbows are not strong enough. When I plant the poles I don’t feel stable.” I said, “OK, we’ll do more work in that area,” and she won both golds. She was already world champion and an Olympic medallist, but she gave me that report card. Another man I worked with was the most decorated coach in Olympic speed skating, and he would give me a report card too: “We need to improve our starts.” And at every Olympics they won more and more medals.

I find the best athletes, or the best businessmen, accountants, cops or whatever, are never satisfied. That’s what distinguishes us from animals. I don’t think eagles say, “It’s 2018. Last year I ate 618 rats and two lambs, and this year I’m going to have 700 rats.” Animals are not goal-centred like humans are. The reason the human race has evolved so much is goal setting, and I find that all high performers are never, ever satisfied with whatever they do. Sometimes they say, “OK, I’m at the top of this, I’m not going to improve, but I’m going to be at the top of something else,” like Schwarzenegger became an actor and then a politician. You reinvent yourself. In my career I became the best strength coach, then I said, “I’m going to go into education,” and now I’m entering a phase of my life where I want to leave a legacy. That’s why I like to dispel myths, and that’s why I’m on podcasts so much, because I want Joe Average to know what I know about Olympic athletes.

For all these years I concentrated on high-performance people, and that attracted the attention of a lot of special forces guys, who started to show up in my classes. I asked why they were there, and one said, “One of the guys you trained is a general, and he was in the best shape ever, so he paid for my classes.” Because of the task forces, those guys talk to each other, so all the guys in Afghanistan, whether they were British, Australian or Canadian, started sending me their colleagues. I remember giving a class in Phoenix where 40% of the class were special forces from all sorts of branches. And those are the guys I really like, because to pass SAS selection or something similar you’ve got to be highly focused and driven.

Brian Rose: You’ve said before that a life not examined is a life not worth living. So constant self-reflection on where you’re going and what you’ve done.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. You have to evaluate, but you also need to monitor. If you’re my client, I’d submit you to a bunch of tests, because I want to know your extremes. Like I said, I’ll take care of the extremes and the middle will come up. But one thing I’ve learned with time is that it’s better to teach people how to fish than to give them a fish. I want people not to rely on me. A lot of my colleagues want you to rely on them. I don’t believe in that. Like I said, if you’re a good teacher, your students surpass you.

2:14:30 Brian Rose: I was very curious about some of your success secrets, starting with your daily routine. Starting with the night before, how do you start your day, your sleep, and what are some of the morning routines you’ve proven to yourself always set you up for a high-performance day?

[London Real promo removed]

Charles Poliquin: Energy works in 90-minute cycles, so I plan it. About three hours after I’ve woken up I get peak energy again, and I train, and after that I have a post-workout shake.

Brian Rose: What does training look like, typically?

Charles Poliquin: It depends where I am. Here in London I like to go to Ultimate Performance in Mayfair. In Perth I usually train at one of my students’ gyms, because I know they’ve got good equipment and a good atmosphere. At home I’ve got supposedly the second-best gym in the world in a private house. The guy who owns Google has a better gym than me, but he’s got more means than me too. My athletes love to train at my house. I don’t train them at the Olympic centre; they drive 30 miles to train with me. They say there’s strength dust in my gym.

Brian Rose: And what’s your typical routine there? You’re lifting?

Charles Poliquin: Yes, I lift, and then I have a post-workout shake.

Brian Rose: Is it a secret workout?

Charles Poliquin: No, it’s not a secret workout. I try different things. I’ve never prescribed a workout I haven’t done myself. But it’ll be compound lifts, free weights, a lot of old-school stuff. For example, I designed the Watson dumbbells, which are made here in the UK. They’re the best dumbbells in the world; Schwarzenegger bought them. They have revolving handles and fat handles, and there are a lot of reasons they’re the best built in the world. I train on those. My gym is a museum, and I’ve got a load of equipment in my garage. I use Klokov equipment, made by the weightlifter Dmitry Klokov. I’ve got lots of plates and lots of bars, I think 56 different bars with different types of handles. Sometimes I do strength endurance, sometimes I do maximal strength. Since I’m dopamine and acetylcholine, I tend to train the way I recommend to my athletes of that type: intense, and with variation. I need variation.

Then after that I have lunch, and that’s when I write programmes and articles. One of the best books you could ever read is The One Thing. Once I read The One Thing I cut down the amount of work dramatically, and I started to invest more time in my own learning, because I figured out that I grew fastest in my career when I spent so much time going to see mentors. I still really believe in mentors, and one thing I really believe is go to the top right away. It’s more expensive to hire the best guy in the world, but you’ll do it in a record amount of time. I remember a friend of mine said, “Let’s go shooting with this instructor.” Because of an injury I could only shoot with my right hand, and I was grouping with a .45 about this much. The instructor said, “Can I make suggestions?” and within ten minutes I was grouping this much, and he said, “If you come here for an hour, I’ll get you all the way down to this.” I went, and after an hour it was very simple: move your shoulder forward this way, stagger your stance a bit more, and so on. He picked out in ten minutes what the other guy hadn’t picked up in six years. When he was explaining a concept I didn’t understand, I said, “Film me, and show me when I shoot well,” because that’s when you have your best shots. It was worth driving two hours each way to spend an hour with him, for what I learned.

One thing I do a lot is brain-picking fees, because I realised that reading is really good, but I have to read so much to determine what’s true and what’s not. If I go and see a real expert, I always ask the same two questions. First: “What have you learned in the last two years that excites you the most?” That calls on the guy’s emotions. Second: “What is it that you know, that nobody knows, that pisses you off, that you wish more people knew?” I remember interviewing a guy on vitamin E, and when I asked him this question I think he nearly had an orgasm. He went on and explained everything. He was at Harvard, and in that hour I learned more than I had in eight hours reading the latest research on vitamin E. Then I usually have follow-up questions, like, “Why do people say the opposite?” If the guy says it’s white, I ask, “Why do people say black?” And they get excited. It’s good when you can interview somebody and ask questions that excite them, because it makes more of an emotional impression on you.

Brian Rose: It distils their knowledge. So you pay for these brain-picking sessions, or do whatever you can to get them?

Charles Poliquin: Go out of your way. For example, I was at the Genius Network, which is an organisation run by Joe Polish. It’s basically a success club, and Dave Asprey is a member. I had been on Dave Asprey’s podcast, and I said, “Dave, I need to pick your brain about my team,” and that’s why I’ve got a great team now. He said, “Call me at home,” so I called him at home and he gave me an hour-and-a-half consult. I asked how much I owed him, and he said it was free. I said, “I don’t do free,” and he said, “I insist.” But I’m sure he’ll send me somebody and I’ll answer their questions for free. I find that at the top, when I pay brain-picking fees, usually they don’t charge me, because it’s a professional courtesy. I met a woman who helps with YouTube at the Genius Network, and she said, “I’ll do it for free.” But I will certainly return the favour if they have some issue.

That’s basically how I live my day. But one thing that has made the biggest difference is having a gratitude log. I do my gratitude log in two parts, when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed. The first thing I write in my gratitude log every day is, “Today I win the day by…” and then I fill in the blank, because if you don’t make every day count, it doesn’t matter. Just one thing, one goal for the day. It may be, “I have a consult with Dave Asprey. I win the day by asking Dave Asprey how he rose to the top.” Or it could be, “Today I win the day by taping a video on relative strength,” something I need for the Dojo of Strength. If I’ve done that, I know I’ve succeeded for the day. Of course I do more work than that, but I can’t go to bed without doing that activity. The second thing I write is the top three things I’m grateful for. I think it’s good to lower the bar sometimes, because people are repetitive, “I’m grateful for my dog Bonzo” or whatever. So I try every day to come up with three new things. It could be, “I’m grateful to Scott for figuring out the credit card problem,” or “to Karen for finding me an assistant,” whatever it is. I write three things down, and then I go on with my day.

At the end of the day I write three fantastic things that happened today. That one is from Tim Ferriss. Subconsciously I’m telling myself, “You’d better do three fantastic things today, or have three fantastic things happen to you, otherwise you’re having a bad day.” Since I started that, it’s amazing how your subconscious wires itself to find them. Let’s say you buy yourself an Audi R8. Suddenly the road is full of R8s. They’ve always been there, but your reticular activating system never noticed them. I’m sure you’ve noticed that. So I set my subconscious mind to drive my conscious mind to find fantastic things.

Brian Rose: Just like discipline does. Otherwise the subconscious wins every time, because it has a preordained idea of how good you can be and how far you can get, and the only way to affect that is through the conscious mind, via discipline and gratitude.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. For example, I was buying Klokov equipment. I sent an email saying I wanted to buy their stuff, asked for a quote, and they called me back and said, “We’ll send you the equipment for free. Dmitry likes you a lot.” That was one of the fantastic things that happened to me that day, and it turns out I’d made a donation that day too. It’s always like that. And the last thing I write is, “How could I have made it better?” and I write something down, whatever the case may be. I do that every day, and by doing that every day I have a great day.

2:24:50 One thing in the last two years: there’s a principle of success that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and because I was the most successful guy in my profession, it was hard for me to find people I could get excited talking to. So I said, “If I leave a legacy, my students will challenge me. If I pick my best students by creating the mastermind club, that will do it.” But what I also decided was to find the best guys. For example, I became friends with Benjamin Hardy and asked him how I could improve my website presence, and after an hour he gave me better advice than somebody I had paid 170 grand. Joe Polish has a good saying: “The universe gives to the giver and takes away from the taker.” For example, there are people who have stolen my intellectual property and published it, and one of them is going to jail now for fraud. Another guy stole my client list, and now he’s penniless. Bad people eventually get punished. I think you can have good karma or bad karma; it’s just a matter of choice. That’s why I tell people that what you give away, you will get. Whatever you want in your life, if you feel you need more of it, give it away. If you don’t have any money, give money away.

Brian Rose: And that means love as well. Give love away.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. I love my athletes. I still get excited coaching. I find it’s a bucket filler. Let’s say Victoria comes to my house and I put her through a workout. She’s dead, but she’s happy. When Heiki from Estonia trained at my place two weeks ago, and I do it for free, my masseuse was upstairs and thought I was killing him. It was a leg workout and he was screaming like a guy on rookie night at Rikers Island.

Things have to bring you joy. Marie Kondo wrote the book about decluttering, and she’s a friend of Joe Polish. I read the book, and I asked one of my wrestlers, “Do you know anybody who could organise my house?” She said, “I’ve got a girl who studied with Marie Kondo,” another Japanese girl. She did my house, and I gave away 720 books and about 600 pieces of clothing. People gave me shirts and T-shirts all the time, so I gave them away. And all those books I’d read, I’m not going to read them twice, but somebody is going to enjoy them. I had friends come over and pick the books they wanted, and whatever was not picked up I gave to the local library. The way you decide is you pick the item up and ask, “Does this give me joy?” If it’s yes, you keep it, and if not, it goes. I’ve still got a very big library, but the clothing is completely decluttered and she organised it.

Brian Rose: And that has really helped your life? It’s just made things simpler?

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And ten days from now she’s coming back to clean my office. My office looks like it was cleaned up with a grenade; you can’t find anything in there. I barely have time, so she’s going to teach me her system.

Brian Rose: So you’re always looking for ways to improve yourself and your life, and to open your mind to new ideas. It sounds like you test everything.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. Sometimes I teach a class and a guy says, “I don’t agree with you.” I say, “OK, tell me why you don’t agree, because if I’m wrong, I’ll change.” I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll change if it’s better. But sometimes people do things that are just different. I could come to the studio today with my underwear over my jeans. It’s different, and your audience is going to laugh, but it’s probably going to squeeze my gonads, which is not good for me. Better has to be progress, or more fun.

Brian Rose: And you compare that to a lot of what’s going on in the fitness industry. Sometimes they’re just being different.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. I could have the steering wheel on top of my car. It’s different, but is it better? It’s really hard to steer like that. I listen to a lot of people. I remember in 1992 I came back from the Olympics. Canada won seven medals and I coached five of the medallists, so I thought I was the cat’s whiskers. I had come up with a super training system, and it only worked for 11% of my athletes. I had the worst results in September, at the end of the off-season for the winter sports. I said, “I’ve got to get off my high horse.” But that failure led me to more individualisation. I said, “OK, who made progress on that?” It turned out some guys made latent progress. Some guys were overtrained, but they started to show good scores in November. So there were differences, and it was another step to getting better. I’m wired for growth.

2:30:27 Brian Rose: What was the darkest day of your life, and what was the best day?

Charles Poliquin: The best day of my life was when my daughter was born. It’s indescribable. If you’ve never had kids, you don’t understand, but people who have kids do, and she’s a great kid. The darkest day of my life was finding out that somebody had been physically abusive to my daughter, that my mum had Alzheimer’s, and that I was going bankrupt because I’d been defrauded by my accountant. It all happened on the same day. That was not a good day.

Brian Rose: How do you deal with a day like that?

Charles Poliquin: I use the Marine thing: it could be worse. And there’s a Japanese saying with different translations, but it’s something like, “Get kicked in the chest twelve times, get up thirteen times.” Sometimes it’s seven and eight, but it’s always get up one more time than you’ve been kicked in the chest. I saw it on a T-shirt on a jiu-jitsu website and bought it in a few colours, and I wear it because it reminds me. Failures are good. They’re really good.

I remember my estate agent asking me the same question, and I said, “Having open-heart surgery.” He said, “That was the best day of your life?” I said, “Yes, because I realised I needed to change quite a few things, and I learned a lot.” One of the reasons I’m a big magnesium guy now, and I’ve formulated magnesium products for three different companies, is that my heart attacks were not real heart attacks. They were actually caused by a very strong magnesium deficiency, caused by the lead in my teeth from an incompetent dentist. So I got all the lead removed from my teeth, and I got into magnesium, and my magnesium product now sells in 74 countries. Tim Ferriss crashed my site by promoting it for free. I sent him the product and told him, “Dude, don’t drive after taking it,” and he texted me the next day: “Man, you should have a warning on the label.” Within five minutes it works. And we went from two countries to 74 in 24 hours. I guess that’s good karma, probably from some cheque I wrote for somebody, because Tim gets paid a fortune to endorse things, and he won’t endorse things he doesn’t believe in. I was very grateful.

Brian Rose: And that came from the failure, the open-heart surgery.

Charles Poliquin: Correct. I got into medicine. I remember being in my hospital bed, feeling sorry for myself, and a friend coming from Canada brought me my mail. There was an article on magnesium in one of the printed journals I read, and I read it all and looked at all the references. When the doctor came in, he said, “You didn’t have a heart attack. You had heart spasms caused by a very strong magnesium deficiency.” The year before, we were in Switzerland and I was working with Prince Albert’s bobsleigh team. The bobsleigh was stuck, and I picked it up and moved it, and I guess there was too much strain on my heart at that altitude. I said to myself, “I can’t have a heart attack while I’m part of Prince Albert’s entourage,” and I hid in a little cave nearby until the symptoms disappeared, because I didn’t want the media to make up some story. The next day a functional medicine doctor who worked with the team said, “I’ve got your blood work. You’re extremely deficient in magnesium,” and he put me on a magnesium course for six months. I had no symptoms for six months, and then I had another episode of heart spasms. When I got back to Canada I did more tests, and then one of my fans sent me a book on heart problems caused by heavy metals. I got tested, and I had the highest score they’d ever seen for lead. So I got the fillings removed and had chelation therapy, and I brought my lead down from 58 to 3. Since then I’ve helped a lot of people with magnesium and zinc, and it became intellectual property. But if I hadn’t had the heart spasms, it would never have happened. I got kicked in the chest and I got up.

One of my athletes didn’t qualify for the Olympics. She came second and was devastated, but now she’s one of the top ranked, because I told her, “Just get up.” Helen Maroulis didn’t qualify for the London Olympics, and the girl she beat in Rio, the Japanese wrestler Yoshida, had beaten the crap out of her four years before. That was the first time they had met in four years. When she grabbed Yoshida, she sent me a WhatsApp: “Man, she’s weak.” I answered, “No, you’re strong.” And after losing, Yoshida said, “The American is too strong for me.” That’s the best endorsement I ever had. Within 44 hours every wrestling country in the world was asking how much I would charge to come and give a seminar. You always have to look at the bright side of things.

2:36:15 Brian Rose: What scares you?

Charles Poliquin: Walking long distances.

Brian Rose: Why is that?

Charles Poliquin: Because I hate cardio. What scares me? I actually never have these thoughts. As a father, if you ask me what my worst fear is, it’s probably that my daughter dies young. Do I think about it? No. But to answer truthfully, that’s what would cause me the most grief.

Brian Rose: She trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo? How old is she?

Charles Poliquin: She’s turning 17.

Brian Rose: Does she tap you out?

Charles Poliquin: She could beat her father really well, and she could probably knock me out with a punch too. As a young kid I made her do all sorts of different martial arts. She can shoot. My buddy from SEAL Team Six said she shoots better than 90% of operators. When she was 14 she said, “Papa, can I keep the AK-47 when I go to college?” But it’s all good.

Brian Rose: What are you most proud of?

Charles Poliquin: My daughter. She’s a very good kid. We have problems now because we weren’t raised properly, and I basically raised her diametrically opposite to the way my parents raised me. You grew up Catholic; you know about shame and guilt. I never use those cards, and I tell my students never to use shame and guilt when they work with clients. You can take something bad and turn it around. There’s a famous story of a British billionaire who had a twin brother who was a street bum. They asked the billionaire, “Why are you so successful?” “I had no choice; my father was an alcoholic.” Then they asked the bum, “Why are you an alcoholic?” “I had no choice; my father was an alcoholic.” It’s all about how you interpret conditions. One thing I learned is that when something bad happens, you have to write down three things that are positive about it. You may not see them now, but do the mental exercise, and once you see what it is, life is a lot easier.

Brian Rose: What keeps you awake at night?

Charles Poliquin: Nothing. I get excited when I teach a new group. I’m going to teach nearly 3,000 businessmen, and I’m sure the night before I’ll be rehearsing my speech. I gave a lecture to a really elite special forces group, and the night before I didn’t sleep well because I wanted to do such a good job, so I was rehearsing. But nothing worries me at night. Usually if I don’t sleep, it’s because I’m excited about something.

Brian Rose: The most influential person in your life?

Charles Poliquin: I would say my karate sensei. He was really tough, the guy who could bench press 400 pounds, the guy who knocked out the Japanese master, the guy who got me into weight training. I had a good father, but there were eight kids, and my father had three jobs to support eight kids. We all went to college; he paid for all of us. He was basically raised by Catholic priests, because he was the second of a family of 16, and the local notary said to my grandfather, who was the town butcher, “Your two oldest kids are very smart. My kids are stupid. I’ll pay for private education.” So my dad went to a private Catholic school, where basically they were going to train him to become a priest, so his concept of raising kids was completely skewed. He told me the youngest in his family was six years old before he ever met him. Some people blame their parents for what they did or didn’t do, but besides my father, it was my karate sensei. He taught me a lot of things, like how to go through pain: get kicked in the chest, get up, it’s only pain. When I started to coach, it was normal for me to kick somebody in the ribs if they didn’t do their rep.

Brian Rose: Kick them in the ribs?

Charles Poliquin: Oh yes. The guys on the volleyball team used to call me the axe murderer because I was so mean. When my sensei turned 70, I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday, because he comes from Irish parents but had never been to Ireland. I said, “I’m teaching in Ireland in September, on your birthday. I’ll fly you and your wife first class and give you money.” Of course my students wanted dirt on me as a kid, and while he was talking I realised I talked exactly like him. He was my role model. He was what I would call tough love, but if you look at the guys who became black belts with me, they’re all very successful. One of the best doctors in Canada was in that class, and one of the guys was at the top of the federal police. He taught us ethics and the value of hard work, things that are not taught any more. People don’t take responsibility. Every time I go back to my home town, he’s the guy I always have breakfast with. If I’m in town for three days, one of those days I have breakfast with him. I always eat steak and eggs, and I get him to scout where to eat. Last time he brought his assistant and my jiu-jitsu sensei. I think you have to honour your sources and who made you. That’s why I do it.

Brian Rose: Are you the student who’s better than him?

Charles Poliquin: Not at karate. But he taught me the pleasure of teaching, the pleasure of improving.

Brian Rose: Martial arts instructors are very special people. It’s a very special relationship. It’s physical knowledge and training, but it masks a lot of emotional and character training. That’s what’s really going on.

Charles Poliquin: That’s why I like to work with wrestlers and judoka. One thing I told my wrestlers recently is that the reason they’re my favourite to coach is that they always have that growth mindset and they never complain. It’s always, “Yes, what’s next?” One of my good friends is Les Gutches, world champion in 1997. This guy was so feared that people would vomit before wrestling him, but I have great conversations with him because he’s tough on himself. When I want to know something about wrestling I always ask him, because he has no bias. He only has a truth filter. I ask him, “What should I work on?” and he’s blunt, and I like people like that.

Brian Rose: And wrestlers get trained into the pain.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, but what I like about them is that it never goes to their head. I’ve never met a world champion in wrestling who was a dick. Another good friend of mine is Steve Fraser, Olympic gold medallist in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Los Angeles Olympics, one of the nicest guys you could ever meet. He always makes fun of himself. He’s what I call a bucket filler. What I’ve found with wrestlers is that they’re bucket fillers. They come to your place and they increase your energy. I find a lot of pro athletes are bucket emptiers, because somebody has been kissing their ass since they were very young, and they find out pretty fast that I don’t kiss their ass. I had very good success in pro hockey, but the way people sold me to the players was, “Go there, don’t argue with him, just do what you’re told, but he’s going to make you more money.” I had a reputation for doubling or quadrupling guys’ income within two years.

Brian Rose: So the hockey guys listened.

Charles Poliquin: Yes, but they were told, “Just shut up. You’re not special in this gym.”

Brian Rose: I had a martial arts instructor here in London and I trained with him for eight years, every single weekend, sometimes twice a weekend. He taught me jiu-jitsu and boxing, and I was paying him whatever he wanted per hour, but at no point did that ever give me licence to show up a minute late or to complain about anything. We never had an argument in eight years. I always respected his time as a teacher. I saw people come and go, and I saw people ask him to train them and he would say no. I think it’s a special relationship you have with a martial arts instructor, if you understand the rule that their time is extremely valuable and you respect it. If you happen to pay them, that has nothing to do with the relationship. It’s more about them investing their time in you. I guess it’s probably the same with you and your students.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. And I’m going to make sure that when I leave this earth I’ve got somebody better than me.

2:45:55 Brian Rose: I like that. I’m going to try that too, Charles. I’ve always got a couple of questions I ask at the end, and I’m going to ask you now. If you could pick up a magic phone and ring up the 20-year-old Charles and give that young man a bit of advice, I guess you’d probably be training the national volleyball team at that time, what would you tell him, based on your 40 years of training, or just 40 years of life?

Charles Poliquin: Things I’ve only just discovered. I would say look into how the brain learns, and look into how people learn. A very good person to read is Gretchen Rubin. She talks about four types of personality, and once I listened to her in Toronto I said, “OK, that explains a lot of things.” She distinguishes four types: the obliger, who always wants to please you; the upholder, which is me, who is strict on himself but strict on everybody; the questioners, who ask you 200 questions and don’t do anything unless you do a big sales pitch; and the rebels, who are the ones who actually make change in society, because they rebel against authority. Everybody has a value. If no one questions, that’s how you get dictatorships, and rebels overthrow dictators. They all have a function. Now I’m more at peace knowing this, but I wish I could have read it when I was 20, along with knowing about neurotransmitter training. What I’ve learned that’s most important is that there’s a big issue in our society: neuroscientists don’t talk to psychologists, and psychologists don’t talk to neuroscientists. But if you marry the two sciences, it goes a lot faster.

Brian Rose: That’s good. On that same note, the best advice you ever received? It could have come from a coach.

Charles Poliquin: The best advice was from Charlie Francis: if you do something that’s more successful than everybody else, don’t ask for validation. Do it until so many people copy you, and then come up with something better. I was given that piece of advice at 23, and I always kept it. That’s why, when people say somebody said this or that about me, I never lose sleep over it, because I always counter with the question, “What has he done that is so great?” Haters stab you in the back because you’re in front.

Brian Rose: So don’t question your success. See that it’s working and go all in on it.

Charles Poliquin: Or work out how to make it better, how to do it in less time, or how to make it more enjoyable.

Brian Rose: Last question. To the 20-year-old who’s out there now watching us, what advice can you give them about the way they can live their life?

Charles Poliquin: Nothing will ever replace hard work. There’s no easy way. That’s the biggest problem I have with the millennial generation: they think there must be a way to cheat the system. A lot of my colleagues complain about the same thing, that the millennial generation does not respect intellectual property and doesn’t respect your hard work. They want access to your knowledge without doing the work. So the most important thing I could tell somebody who is 20 is that there are no shortcuts. I’m not here because I’ve got a direct line from universal intelligence going right into my brain. And you will make mistakes. There’s a good saying from a Swedish physicist: “Good judgement comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgement.” I’ve made millions of mistakes, and that’s why I’m really good at what I do, because I said, “OK, that’s not working.” Sometimes somebody would convince me of something, I would do it, and after a few weeks I’d see it just wasn’t working.

The best two tips I can give are that nothing is ever going to replace hard work, so you always have to outwork, not outsmart; you have to put so much mileage into it. But if you go and see a guy like me, I can give you the shortcuts, like, “Don’t make that mistake.” The best advice a mentor gives you is not what to do. You don’t want to repeat somebody else’s mistakes. That’s why I was telling you before the interview that the most inspiring man I’ve ever listened to is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He gave us a private speech, and he only talked about his mistakes and what he had learned from them. I said, “This is a guy who, in Pumping Iron, comes across as arrogant, but he actually has his act together,” because he only got to the top because he recognised his mistakes and overcame them.

Brian Rose: Charles, we’ve been waiting many years for you to come to London and sit in this chair. It’s been a huge honour and a pleasure having you here. Your name comes up a lot on this show, almost mythically. When I hear the Poliquin name, people respect you. You’ve done the work, you know your science, but there’s a lot more going on here besides the science and the training. There’s a whole different mindset, and I think we got to see a lot of that today. So thank you for sharing a lot of these old-school basics, to remind ourselves.

Charles Poliquin: One of my classic one-liners is “The basics cannot be beaten,” and you only get to the top when you master the basics. But the problem with that statement is the Dunning-Kruger effect: people overestimate their aptitude. One of the first things I do in seminars is give certain drills and make people face the fact that they don’t know much, and then they start to listen. Today’s generation overinflates themselves, because they’ve been told they’re good. I think the last thing I’d like to say is that you never tell somebody they’re good. You only reward effort. Some of the athletes who come to my gym are like Mr Incredible in strength, but I say, “That was a good workout. That’s a good effort.”

I remember my daughter was at my house when Adam Nelson, the world champion in the shot put, called me. When I’d finished talking with him she asked, “Who was that?” I said, “Adam Nelson. He’s the best shot-putter in the world.” She asked, “Is he strong?” I said, “That guy is super strong.” She was four years old, so I said, “Like Mr Incredible strong.” And he looks like Mr Incredible. She said, “Is he stronger than you?” I said, “Oh yes, much stronger.” She said, “Papa, what are you doing?” She was so disappointed there was somebody stronger than her dad. That made me laugh for days. But Adam is there because of his mindset. He was the shortest man ever to be world champion in the shot put. I wouldn’t say he was very gifted, but his mindset, wow. That guy is driven. There’s a lot of debate on gun control, and most of the arguments on both sides are pretty stupid, but he did a post on gun control last week, and I said that’s probably the only intelligent thing I’ve seen on gun control.

It’s important to seek out smart people. That’s why I love going to the Genius Network, because in there I’m the guy on welfare. But it doesn’t bring me down; it has actually helped me grow in many aspects of my life.

Brian Rose: Surrounding yourself with intelligent people.

Charles Poliquin: Yes. Henry Ford said he was not the smartest guy in his company; he always made sure he had people smarter than him working for him. And I truly appreciate being here. I’m very grateful for it. I think it’s a great show, and you’re a very good interviewer.

Brian Rose: Thank you, Charles, it’s been a pleasure. On London Real we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well in yours, and stop back and see us again some time.

Charles Poliquin: I would love to come back.

Brian Rose: All right. Thank you, sir.

2:54:58 [London Real promo removed]