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294: 7 Secrets For Better Results In The Gym (And What Mistakes To Avoid) with Borge Fagerli

You probably learned how to exercise by reading blog posts, and magazines, and following online workouts. Some of them got it right. Most of them definitely got it wrong. In this episode, our special guest Borge Fagerli, reveals seven fitness and healthy lifestyle secrets that will help you get better results at the gym.

 

Brief Bio:

Borge Fagerli is considered one of the most knowledgeable trainers on nutrition and exercise in Norway. He has developed Myo-Reps and the Biorythm diet. Børge runs his own coaching company Børge Fagerli Coaching Inc.

Børge has coached people engaged in disciplines ranging from long-distance running and various sports to fitness, bodybuilding, powerlifting and strongman. Under his tutelage, average performers have turned into National and World Champions. His coaching philosophy is figuring out how to make each individual person the best they can be.

 

You’ll learn:

  • Understanding the challenge of customizing your diet and exercise plan (6:15)
  • Why some people get great results from a workout while others don’t (8:42)
  • A little-known workout “secret” that will lead to better results (12:55)
  • Exploring the connection between testosterone and gym performance(15:28)
  • The impact of sleep deprivation on fat loss and muscle building (19:18)
  • Why doing more sets or more exercise may lead to worse results (31:42)
  • How a stressful lifestyle can stop your progress in the gym (33:56)
  • The right way to perform your sets for optimal muscle growth (38:12)
  • What Myo-Reps are and how to perform them the right way (40:00)
  • A sample program for you to try out (48:54)
  • Borge’s thought on heart rate variability (HRV) (57:11)
  • How to use Myo-Reps to build your glutes (1:01:14)
  • The best time to use Myo-Reps in your workouts (1:03:50)
  • And much more…

 

Resources:

Watch Myo Reps Video

Cybernetic Fitness Project

 

Connect with Borge:

Borge’s Website

 

Related Episodes:

 5 Training Techniques That Will Make Sure You Never Plateau

 

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Podcast Transcription: 7 Secrets For Better Results In The Gym (And What Mistakes To Avoid) with Borge Fagerli

Ted Ryce: What's up everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Legendary Life Podcast. I'm health and fitness expert, Ted Ryce, and you're listening to the show that's all about taking your health, your body, and your life to that next level. I've got a fantastic guest for you today. His name is Borge Fagerli, and you may or may not have heard of Borge. 

But you have definitely, especially if you're a Legendary Lean member or if you have purchased our workouts before, you're very familiar with something that Borge came up with, which is Myo-Reps. And if you don't know what Myo-Reps are, well, you're not a Legendary Lean member and you haven't been doing my workouts because every single person gets Myo-Reps in at least one phase of their program in my workouts.  

And you can find those at legendarylifepodcast.com/store if you want to learn more.  

But back to Borge, Borge is a Norwegian strength coach, and he is one of the most brilliant strength coaches, personal trainers, fitness experts out there, better known in Europe, frankly. So, you may not have heard of him before, and if that's the case, you are going to learn a lot today because he is a wealth of information. I already want to get him back on and do several more interviews about his approaches and what he does. He's someone that you want to learn from. 

He's here today to talk about Myo-Reps, how he came up with it, how he's experimented with it, and how he uses it to get great results with his clients. Now, it's not the only thing that you should ever use, but it is a powerful technique.  

We also talk about lifestyle and how sleep and our circadian rhythms are so important and much, much more. So again, you're going to love this episode. We do a deep dive into all things health and fitness and how to get the best results from your workouts. Without further ado, let's get to the interview with Borge Fagerli. 

Coach Borge Fagerli, welcome to the Legendary Life Podcast.  

Borge Fagerli: Thank you.  

Ted Ryce: It's great to have you on here. I'm a big fan of your work. I'm a huge fan of Myo-Reps, and as I talked about in the intro, you're a person who's invented this method, this highly effective method for busting past plateaus, especially when someone's been stuck with the typical methods that we use, say drop sets or high rep sets or even low rep sets. It's such an effective method. I want to get into why it works so well and some of your other training techniques and high-frequency training.  

But before that, you have a very interesting story, Borge. You got into fitness because you have a story there, and I'd love for you to tell it. I don't even want to give any of the details away because I think it's really important. Can you talk about what led you from the sports realm into being the coach that you are today? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah, sure. It's a story I've been telling in many presentations before. But the gist of it is that, as a child, I had a lot of illnesses. I had asthma, I had colds every three weeks, I had allergies, I was kind of skinny and weak, and I was always the last guy to get picked when we were playing soccer.  

So, for me, I excelled in academics. I was a bright kid. I learned to read when I was four, did advanced math when I was in elementary school, just by reading my dad's math books that I found in the closet. So yeah, I was kind of a nerd, but I had friends that were strong and fast and good in soccer because soccer is really big here in Norway, so obviously you have to be good at that to be socially accepted. I figured, well, if my body isn't the best, maybe I can use my brain to at least figure out how to make my body better.  

So, this just led me into reading a lot of books. At that time, of course, we didn't have the internet, so I would have to go to the library and find stuff there and order stuff from magazines. So, I just read everything and devoured the muscle magazines. But I quickly realized that we've all been there, doing the Arnold Schwarzenegger routines, and that didn't really work all that well.  

So, I listened to my intuition, to my instincts, and I guess my talent lies in just filtering a huge amount of information and distilling it into practical recommendations. Since I started really early advising others on what to do and noticed that it worked really well for them, it quickly led me into the whole coaching mindset because when I found something that worked well for me, it would always work like twice or three times better for others. So instead of letting that go to waste, I used it to my advantage and just found joy in helping others become better.  

Again, there's so much research, so much apparently conflicting research. And if you go online and, like it used to be discussion forums and you would talk to people there and now it's Facebook groups and you talk to people there and it's so much conflicting information. It's really hard to figure out what to do on an individual basis. That's been my primary driving force, to figure out how I can make every single person better instead of just using generalized concepts and principles based on research where you often just put like 20 or 30 people in two different groups and you apply two different training methods, and you say, "Well, on average, this one training method works better than that training method by like 3% or 5%." 

But in every group, you have the outliers, the high responders, and the non-responders. People are actually losing muscle mass in a 12-week strength training program. From my perspective, I think there are ways to make everyone better, not by looking at averages, but by comparing different methods in one single individual. 

Ted Ryce: I love that, and that's why I wanted to get you on this show in particular. I'm very picky about who I reach out to, I care less about their huge following or splashy marketing. You're someone who has bridged that gap between the research and the textbook physiology that we know about how muscles work and how hypertrophy or muscle building happens.  

You've been able to come up with this really cool method. I love Myo-Reps, and what you're saying is so important. The research is great and it helps us reduce uncertainty, but we have to take into account the individual.  

You just said there have been studies where people on a 12-week program are gaining some serious muscle while others on the other end of this spectrum are actually losing it. Can we talk a little bit about why you think that's happening or what the research says with why do some people just not respond so well to training programs while other people respond in the middle or are extreme responders? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, I think there are a variety of factors involved, but we can't discount the role of genetics. You know, that's huge. We know that probably explains from 50 to 70 percent of the training effect.  

Ted Ryce: Is it really that high? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah, definitely. It could be that high. But I have had many clients who claim to be at a genetic disadvantage, and there are stats confirming that, but I got some pretty good results in those too.  

I would say sometimes even more impressive results because some of the more trainable clients tend to be so confident in their ability to get stronger and bigger that they don't really put in the effort. So, effort is huge. You know, if you can sometimes outwork genes, if you put your mind into it. 

Ted Ryce: When you say effort, do you mean the consistency with the training program or the effort given inside the training session? Can you clarify there? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. I would say concentrated effort is really big. I mean, you've all heard of the 10,000-hour rule to get into expert status, but it's not 10,000 hours of just practice or 10,000 hours of just work. It's concentrated, focused effort that counts. So, you know, Martin Berkun termed the concept "fuckarounditis," and I think a lot of people are really inconsistent when it comes to their training and nutrition.  

They tend to forget that progress or progression is the primary driving factor in getting results. If you're not seeing progress, you should change something. And I guess many people tend to just stick to a routine. Obviously, the consistency variable is there, but if you're not seeing progress, then that program is wrong for you. 

And there was this one study done a few years ago, I think it was in 2006 by Beaven. It's a study I keep referring back to because I think it's really interesting. They put a group of people through four different training protocols: three or four sets of 15, sets of 10, sets of five, and then an explosive protocol with light weights and sets of five.  

They measured their testosterone response and their cortisol response and classified people into high or low responders depending on what training protocol produced the most testosterone and the least cortisol.  

For three weeks, one group got to train on the best protocol for them, and then they were put on the worst protocol for them, and the other group had the exact opposite sequence. There were no non-responders; everyone gained, but they gained on different rep ranges and training methods. That's where the individuality factor comes in. 

Another thing that was really interesting is that they didn't talk about it in that study, but I managed to dig out some cool discussions in a discussion forum where people from that study were talking about how the different training protocols felt. It turned out that just enjoying training in the 15-rep range also correlated well with having high testosterone output and low cortisol output. So, if you're doing a 5x5 program and you feel beat up and hate training, it's probably not a good fit for you. 

And I've seen this correlation in you know all of my clients, when I do some testing just to see where do the fall on the spectrum on the, like the strength, endurance, power, explosive, um, high end strengths,  absolute strength. There tends to be a really nice correlation between what they thrive on and what they do well on. So I think that's huge. 

And I think that's a fact that shouldn't be discounted because you can read textbooks and you can read studies and you can say, well, this rep range or this exercise is the best. But then again, it doesn't really work for you and you just create a lot of negative stress and create a lot of cortisol and then you're not getting the training effect that you should be getting. 

Ted Ryce: The enjoyability factor of training. I mean, it's hard, hard to argue with something like that. And, that's one reason why I love Myo-Reps so well, because I so much because I love lifting heavier, but I've been having a harder time with my connective tissue, which is something I actually want to get into because most of our listeners are in their late thirties and up, but you've made me love high rep training. 

With,  you know, with,  that method and it works so, so great. So, for everyone listening, if you're not enjoying your routine, that could be a significant factor blocking your results. And even I, you know, I'm so glad you brought this up or again, because I know a guy who says. Very prominent guy. And he's, he's actually pretty good with most of his recommendations, but he says everybody should lift in that four to six rep range. 

And it's like, hmm, not everybody should. Quick question: you talked about testosterone and cortisol in this study and how it relates to.  people thriving on different workout programs. There was some research by Stuart Phillips, looking into how, or, or he found two things really.  

One that high rep training works just as well as low rep training provided you work to exhaustion. But he also found that there wasn't a big effect from the. Hormones that were circulating in people's bodies. Are you, you're, I'm sure you're familiar with this study I'm talking about. Can you talk a little bit about that and, and, and compare it to what you were saying before with the study you were talking about before? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, because again, looking at on an average basis on a statistical basis, there's, I agree, there's no correlation between testosterone output, uh, on a population basis or demographic basis and the training effect. I mean, because it's not that transient testosterone increase that's creating the training effect. 

  

So, so the explanation for, for, uh, the divergent results. If you compare these two studies is I think, or I know that it's, um, it's, it's mainly due to the testosterone to cortisol ratio being, um, a signal being a marker for the stress you're creating in your own body. And that's, that's not to say that you should never stress your body beyond its capacity, because obviously that's, that's a big part of the training effect. 

  

And there are. Like, I remember Glenn Pendley discussing this from, from, uh, the five sets of five program that their experiences on that was that you could overload or overreach people and create a higher cortisol to testosterone ratio. And then unload or deload and get a super compensation effect. So there, there's obviously some value to doing stuff that you don't like some of the time and creating like a, um, a greater stress. 

  

Um, but, but I tend to approach it from. The angle of sustainability because for, for athletes that might, that might be worth doing. I mean, to, to overreach intentionally overreach to create some type of super compensation effect. Now I'm going to add the caveat there that I think this effect mainly applies to power and strength and, and, uh, to athletic development. 

  

I don't think it applies. As much to bodybuilding or muscle mass building, I think the muscles will acutely respond within 24 to 48 hours on the stress you imposed on it. So I'm not really huge on on doing something now to create an effect 8 to 12 weeks down the line, but to sort of get back to the main point, um. 

  

Although you don't really see the correlation between testosterone output and the training effect per se, I think it's, um, it's valuable to look at the systemic response in an individual from your training. And so creating positive stress because I mean, I consider all stress positive as long as the dose of that stress is followed by an appropriate amount of recovery to balance out the stress and allow the body to adapt. 

And so you get a negative adaptation if you overdo the stress versus how much recovery you, you can allow, or, or you can, you can, um, how much effort you can put into your recovery. And, and that, you know, that goes back to the biorhythm stuff that I've been doing, you know, a lot of research into for the last three to five years. 

And just discovering that the framework that your overall lifestyle can dictate. The training effects you get out of any given program. And that's like a really under underestimated, uh, variable, like sleep, for instance, if you take people from a normal eight, seven to eight hours sleep schedule, and you put them on five, five and a half, maybe six hours of sleep, that's just. 

The typical work week for most people, that will cut down on your fat loss efforts and your muscle gain efforts by 50 to 60 percent in only four days of sleep deprivation. 

Ted Ryce: What mechanism do they think is at work for that, Borge? I think I heard you say that before. And, talk about this study, what mechanism is it hormonal that's causing it? Is it a shift in the protein breakdown versus synthesis? What's causing that mechanism with muscle growth and what's causing the mechanism with impaired fat loss as well with sleep deprivation. 

Borge Fagerli: Well, there's many factors involved there, but the main thing is definitely that it impacts the hormonal system. It impacts systemic protein balance. And you just touched upon connective tissue health. I think that's also a major limitation because a muscle can usually withstand a lot of stress and adapt even under constant stress, such as in a synergistic ablation study. But connective tissue quickly becomes a limiting factor.  

And so, when you have a desynchronized biorhythm, like the social jet lag that we often use as a term, terminology for it. It's like you stay up late, you eat late, you expose yourself to electronic lighting, indoor lighting, and you make your body think that it's daylight longer than it actually is.  

So, sleep deprivation is part of that because if you, if you stay up longer or expose yourself to a lot of artificial lighting, smartphones, Facebook, all that stuff, it will inhibit melatonin release and stops the sleep-inducing hormones from doing their work. It can disturb both sleep latency and sleep duration and also how much REM sleep or deep recovery sleep you're getting.  

So, again, it's just a multitude of angles and it's really complex, but definitely sleep does affect your recovery hugely. And we can discuss high-frequency training, we can discuss optimal training and nutrition, and all of that stuff tends to be ruined by not prioritizing your sleep and your rest recovery efforts. So, yeah, that's underestimated. 

Ted Ryce: I'm glad you're bringing this up because as I told you, this is a mostly a 30 late-thirties plus crowd. They're all professionals. They're all doing well. And unfortunately, the Type A personality that leads to them either getting an advanced degree and starting a career like that or perhaps starting a business or climbing the corporate ladder, whatever it is for them, it leads to them taking that sort of approach to training.  

And the more is better and less rest in between sets so you can get more in because time is money. And if sleep, if I can sleep less than I can do more because I'm awake longer, but it really has that point of diminishing returns where you start burning the candle at both ends. So, what, I know you're coming out with a book on this. Is that going to be sometime soon? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, it's kind of hard to say because as it is now, I have been taking on too many clients. I realize that now because I work really in person face to face, or I do Skype consults and talk to people on a regular basis. So, I spend a lot of time trying to make people better.  

And so that's been dealing from the time I have left to write. So, it's kind of hard to say when that book will be out, but I changed my mind on publishing it in Norwegian first and then English. So, I'm going to do all my stuff in English from now on, just basically go for the international market. 

So, I'm going to be probably first of all releasing a small e-book on my latest diet experiment, the zero-carb experiment, but the biorhythm book and how that relates to performance, productivity, nutrition, training, hopefully early next year. But yeah, I do work with a lot of CEOs and obviously I'm running my own company.  

So, I know all about the time management and stress management issues that that leads up to. And what I've found is that we have this illusion that working more or working harder is going to generate bigger results. But it's more about, as I mentioned earlier, focused effort. Some of the most productive people, ranging from authors to inventors to investors, from Warren Buffet to Stephen King, know how the brain works, either intuitively or instinctively. Some of them do this from an evidence-based perspective.  

We tend to think that we can multitask, that we can work for 5, 12 hours and do great work from that. But what these people have figured out is that the brain can focus on something and be really productive in something like 45 to 90 minutes at a time before you start losing focus, sometimes without even noticing it. They tend to block out times of the day where they are the most productive, again relating to biorhythm.  

But if you have an optimized biorhythm, your most productive time of the day is usually going to be early or mid-morning, perhaps sometime before lunch, after lunch, depending on the chronotype, whereas your physical strength and endurance is going to have some. Well, you can obviously get used to a lot of stuff, but there can be a really nice correlation between when you are most productive and when your physical strength and endurance is the highest.  

Blocking out a time where your brain is operating at peak efficiency and doing the most focused work at that time will give you the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule, where actually spending 20 percent of your day doing that type of work, really focused, shutting off all distractions like your smartphone or Facebook or mail, whatever, is going to provide 80 percent of the results.  

So, looking at the most productive people, they actually work between two to four hours per day. I've heard several authors say that they had joined a writing group with other high, bestselling authors where they almost competed, writing as much as possible in a single day. It was actually Mark Manson. Mark Manson said this when he wrote his bestselling book. He realized after many months of writing that 80 percent of it was crap. He could just throw it away.  

He figured out this on his own but later related it to research looking into brain chemistry and how our brains really work. Concentrated focused effort for blocks of two to three, maybe four hours, broken up into 45 to 50 minutes with 10-minute breaks, doing something completely different, really made him write a lot better and be more productive. You can see this again with a lot of the most prolific and productive people on the planet, they actually don't work all that much. 

They tend to block off, certain parts of the day for focused working into one area, and then do something completely different, and that's making them, much, you know, better in their endeavors. 

Ted Ryce: So cool. I was not expecting this, this path we took in conversation, but I feel like it's the conversation that should be had, right? 

Because so many people, and you're bringing up so many great points, where I feel like we're still, or at least many of us are still stuck. Maybe not you or I, because I intuitively listen to my body. I'm pretty in touch with it. I'm sure you and many other people who are sometimes right. 

But, I feel like a lot of people are completely out of touch with how they feel, and they try to rely on external cues instead of internal cues. And that's left over from a great deal, at least from the industrial revolution with electricity. 

When the sun goes down, let's flip the light switch. Let's get that second daytime on, or, you know, which gives us that social jet lag that you called. That's a great name.  

Borge Fagerli: Yeah, I, I know, I know, I know it's, it's, completely true. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And, even a lot of people in the gym, I'm sure I know you've seen this as well. 

People are counting reps instead of feeling like, am I, am I working the right muscles here? Am I working until the right muscles are fatigued because the reps don't really matter, right? That's just a metric and arbitrary metric we use to kind of help us,  you know, see how well we're doing, but in the end, it's really about that internal feeling. 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. And again, it's efficiency. I mean, focused effort and people tend to forget that the first set, you know, after warmups is actually providing 75 to 80 percent of the training effect. And so, each additional set is only adding a few more percents of the training effect and also potentially adding more recovery time. 

So long term, if, if you, if you go too high on frequency or you go too high on volume, it's going to limit you. I mean, you're basically just doing junk volume. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And another thing that I think a lot of people don't understand is that if you do too much volume you start losing that muscle stimulation risk, that response, and you start generating an endurance response via the AMPK. 

Can you talk a little bit about that? Because a lot of people have that more is better. Let's do five sets instead of four sets. And can you just talk a little bit about that and how you can actually end up with worse results by doing more volume? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, I think, I think the best example of this is, I mean, most physiological adaptations in the body operate on a spectrum. 

There's a dose-response curve for everything. I mean, you drink a glass of water, you, you, you get hydrated. If you, if you drink 10 liters, you will die. And the most common, um, the most common example we use is getting a suntan. I mean, if you have a winter white skin with freckles that freckles easily and you go near the equator and you go out into the sun for 10 minutes, that's probably going to, you know, it might give you a sunburn, but that's probably going to make your skin respond appropriately. 

And then create a nice suntan, but you need to gradually increase the exposure time or the intensity depending on, um, you know, where you live. But if you approach it with the mindset that most people approach training, you're going to go out into the sun and just lie there for two hours and get a crazy sunburn. 

And then, you know, do a D load or, you know, do whatever smart thing you've heard someone mentioned online to create a super-compensation effect and, you know, wake up like a black guy in, in two, two weeks or something. That's not the way it works. I mean, you need to find the correct dose. And give the body rest so that it can recover and, and rebuild itself stronger. 

Now, I'm, I'm not going to go all the way into the Mike Menzer inroading concept, but, but I think you need to consider both local and systemic adaptation processes.  and, and again, that's, that's where people tend to forget that the body is a system and everything plays a role, like sleep, nutrition, by rhythm management, stress management.  

And so, training is a stress that causes an adaptation. But if your life is also full of stress, your food quality is bad, your sleep is bad, you're worrying about your personal economy. your wife, whatever, that's all going to play a role in how much stress from training that you can adapt to and do well on. 

And so, I always do a complete screening and evaluation on every client where I ask them all types of questions on how their lifestyle is and their mental attitude because stress is also subjective. It's not just objective. You can have two people with the same exact life situation. One is a pessimistic warrior, whereas the other is like, they're really optimistic, happy-go-lucky guy. 

And the optimistic guy is always going to be able to handle more training stress than the pessimistic guy that, that worries about everything because they're, you know, creating stress all the time from every single minor detail.  

They're creating stress, even obsessing about the program so much that, that just,  worrying about whether they should do five or 10 reps, it's actually limiting their progress more than just going into the gym and doing five or 10 reps, depending on how they feel. 

So, so yeah, it boils down to efficiency. And like I said, if you can get 80 percent of the results by doing just one set, you do two sets, maybe you get 85, 87%.  

You double or triple that volume, and once you get into the four to six set range in a given muscle group in a given workout, things actually tend to taper off if we're talking hard sets here and, I mean, there's been like the German volume study that looked at five sets versus 10 sets, and there was a definite advantage to the five-set group, whereas the 10-set group experiencing overreaching symptoms. 

And so again, if you just look at, if you just look at research and you try to put stuff into context, when you start chasing volume, the risk of creating overreaching or, um, or not recovering from it really increases. So, by going from one to two sets, I mean, we can usually defend that.  for most people, that's probably going to be just, just fine going to three sets. 

Yeah, I think we can go there, but again, you have effectively tripled your volume and tripled your workout time just to get a few more percent, training effect.  so adding more sets.  

You also need to consider are you really working hard and if you're doing one really hard set to failure That can actually be sufficient if you tend to be someone that needs more warming up and it takes a while to really hit that spot, then, yeah, you can defend doing more sets. 

 some of the studies looking at really high volumes are usually doing submax work. You know, you're not working to failure on eight sets in squats. That's just physiologically possible for most people. And and so you always need to consider the effort versus the volume because you can do lower effort and submax work and you can do higher volume, but you can't do both. 

Um, and so just going back to Myo-Reps, that's where I came from. When I created that, I was trying to see how can we make training, time efficient and, um, a central part of the training effect is creating high muscle activation or muscle activity. And, on heavy loads, you're already getting that from the very first rep. 

If you're working in the four to six rep range, you're usually creating high muscle activity on every rep, but you're not getting as much volume on four to six reps . Volume being reps or just basically how long that mechanical stimulus is working on the muscle, on the tissue itself. And so, the muscle just responds to the mechanical tension or how hard are you stretching or tearing on that muscle? 

And for how long are you doing that? And sets and reps is just a way to apply that, but. To get the tension applied to all muscle fibers, you need to work at a high muscle fiber activation level.  

And if you're not using heavy loads, you need to work closer to failure. You need to get approach that point where rep speed is slowing down, and it's requiring more effort from you to complete the set. 

And then you can see still not 100 percent as you do with heavy loading, but you can get really close to it. And what I saw, or I actually got some inside information here from, some guy called Mattias Wormbaum was that blood flow restriction training where you create an occlusion effect, you're basically just shutting off blood flow to the muscle and also oxygen flow will create a metabolic milieu, environment, that spikes muscle activation higher. It's basically just creating some sort of stress that makes the muscle compensate by activating. Um, earlier than it usually would. 

So, for instance, some of the early re research just used 20 to 30% of one RMM loads and used a blood pressure cuff around the leg or the arm. And this is a load most people could probably do 50 to 70 reps with. But when you do blood flow restriction, you can usually just do 30 reps with it. So that failure point or fatigue point occurs much earlier. 

And, and the reason for this, or, or what you're actually seeing is that it just spikes muscle activation much higher, much, much sooner than normal. And so, what Myo-Reps is striving to do is first of all, I create internal occlusion by keeping constant tension on the muscle. And that's another way to create this effect.  

You don't actually need an external cuff, although that does increase the effect, but we're just trying to reach failure as soon as possible and then staying at that point by doing short rest periods and short sets to maintain that high muscle activation level. Thus, exposing all muscle fibers or as many muscle fibers as possible to that mechanical tension.  

So, it's basically just instead of doing four regular sets with two minutes of rest in between. You're just compressing that. So, you're doing the first set as normal, then doing a short rest period. I'm talking three to five deep breaths usually. So just a few seconds where you just unload the muscle and put the weight down, pick up the weight, do another three to five reps, thus imitating or copying the last few reps of the previous sets. 

And this., I've seen the EMG readings on this. It just spikes the muscle activation even higher than the first set managed to do. So, you are kind of getting into that heavy load territory with lighter weights. And so, there's definitely something, I don't know.  you know, we haven't really mapped out all the pathways and the signaling and all that stuff.  

But it works. Just spikes muscle activation really high and. And you get the mechanical tension stimulus and you like, if you were to do four normal sets at that loading, you would probably, it will probably take you 10 to 15 minutes. But a Myo-Rep set can take only like two minutes. And you create that same training effect. 

I would say for some reason, it does seem to be more effective. One Myo-Rep set seems to be more effective than, than three to four regular sets for some reason, probably because of the muscle activation, stimulus there. I'm not really sure yet. But it does seem so. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And, people are using this technique or I should say organizations are using this technique when teaching personal trainers internationally. 

I heard you say it's, it's a really cool thing. And I want to get back to why I'm so happy to have you here. But besides the fact that it's such an effective technique is you've really bridged the gap between what we know about muscle physiology. Some of the research on different rep ranges and the effectiveness in terms of muscle building and created this very cool training methodology that like I said, I love it because it, you do this one long set and then these short sets and the short sets, it gives you that feeling that you're lifting heavy because you're so, you're so fatigued and, but it's much less stress on the joints and you get. 

This, this great hypertrophy response, at least I did muscle building response. I want to just quickly jump in or summarize what you had said before, because some people listening, they're, they're not quite up to the level that you are and they don't do this professionally.  

But what Borge was saying is that if you've ever heard of occlusion training, it's where you tie if you, and probably not a lot of people listening to this show is have tried it and even less have, or I'm just most haven't heard of it and even less have tried is what I'm trying to say, but you tie something around your upper arm or your leg and what that does is it causes a higher level of fatigue in your muscles, you end up recruiting more muscle fibers and that leads to a better response in terms of muscle growth.  

And what Borge has done is thought about the physiology of behind why that occlusion training works. Which I haven't tried occlusion training yet.  I'm getting into this hypertrophy phase now where I really want to change my body more. It was more 

Borge Fagerli: Is really painful, really painful business. Beware.  Occlusion training for your calves is like giving birth. Not that he has any reference points, but right. It's good to say female clients is try like your calf training with occlusion. No, with the, with the elastic wraps around his knee. And, it's, it's just as painful as giving birth.  

Ted Ryce: And it's not the, it's not during the set? It's afterwards when it fills up with blood is the painful part?  

Borge Fagerli: During the set and after it's crazy burn. 

Ted Ryce: Interesting. Yeah. I kind of want to try it now. I used to compete in jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu, so I need like something a little more, you know, stimulating than just lifting. So, I'll try it. 

Borge Fagerli: A running joke is do not try full body occlusion by tying it around your neck. Yeah, I did that once and it just made my head bigger. So, yeah. 

Ted Ryce: which you're joking about that.  

Borge Fagerli: Of course, of course Don't do it! 

Ted Ryce: That's how they find you, right. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So, um, it's, it's such a cool, cool concept and it works out in real life. And I love to get into, you've talked a little bit about how you do it. You do this one long activation set. Then you take a few breaths. Five to 15 seconds to rest, then you do these mini sets to prolong that end of the set feeling where, where you're very fatigued and by doing that, that keeps that you get better results than even doing like multiple sets, multiple conventional sets. 

So, I think we should talk about exercise selection because this is not something you want to do with deadlifts from the floor or even something maybe with overhead pressing or, you know, can we, can you talk about how you use it in terms of exercise selection? Like what should, what exercises work really well, 

what should we be careful with? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah, good question. You should definitely try to avoid the big compound lifts because you will usually run out of breath way before you can actually fatigue the muscles.  I have seen people doing it on squats and, and I think that's more an exercise and self-torture rather than training, but, you know, a leg press would be a much better choice for Myo-Reps because you're using low. That's. It's usually going to allow you 15 to 30 reps on the first set, where you fall on that spectrum is kind of individual and depending on the, um, on the exercise.  

I tend to use 40 to 50 percent of one rep max as a baseline. But usually. It ends up being between 15 to 30 reps and, um, isolation exercises are usually going to be better because you can, you can focus on that one muscle group at a time. There's a safety aspect obviously. So, bent rows, I usually advise against that lift as you mentioned.  

Overhead pressing, I would use dumbbells or kettlebells. So, you know, you're not risking losing the barbell on your head or something, but like bench press, it can be done, but I would use dumbbells there as well, for obvious reasons, unless you have a good spotter. So, so anything that's. That requires you to keep the lower back under constant tension, isometric tension to do the exercise I would, I would not do. I would also not do exercises that use a large part of the musculature at one time. So, deadlifts and, and squats.  

But it can work really well on, on any other type of exercise for sure, but I do tend to find it more effective, like in a full body workout, you can do normal sets on your squats and deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts or bench presses. And then you can add in isolation work with Myo-Reps and get a really big, synergistic effect.  

So, you would, for instance, do two to three sets of a bench press and follow that up with one Myo-Rep set on pec flies, you will get a tremendous pump in your chest muscles.  

So, so that would be one way to program it. I, I also like to use the template where I have one day of moderate rep training and using like unilateral training, for instance, um, like a dumbbell overhead pressing. Push-ups and dips, um, Bulgarian split squad, stuff like that.  

The next day I will do all Myo-Rep training with isolation stuff. And the next day, or, you know, you obviously could add one rest day in between, I will do the heavy compound training, so. They would do, you would have the squats and the deadlifts and heavy benches and overhead pressing and chin ups and that kind of stuff.  

Ted Ryce: So, wait a minute. Let me, can you break that down again? You start the, you talked about three consecutive days of training. The first day was unilateral work, you said? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. So, you would do exercises that require or are more related to body weight training and unilateral work. So, you would do one arm and one leg work.  when I say unilateral, I'm not saying like one, one leg, or unilateral leg extensions, one leg extensions, but I'm saying like split squats, a Bulgarian split squats, lunges, that kind of stuff. And that's usually safer or better to do in a moderate rep. 

The next day, it doesn't have to be the very next day because then we're, you know, into really high-frequency training where you're training maybe your whole body three days in a row. Um, but it could be like on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.  Monday would be the moderate rep. Wednesday would be the Myo-Rep high rep work pump work and Friday would be the heavy work.  

So, you would do the heavy lifting and have two days off during the weekend to recover before you restart the cycle all over again. 

Ted Ryce: Interesting. And why would you put the heavy work at the end versus the beginning or the middle? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, Mike Zourdos did some research a couple of years ago where they looked at the sequencing of your training. 

What seemed to work better was the, cause most people might do the lights training first, then the model training, then the heavy training it did, or it looked like in that study that doing the model rep or hypertrophy work first, then doing some power work. Which is light load training. And in this case, just high rep, Myo-Rep training followed by strength training or a low rep training worked much better. So that exact sequence, and it's probably due to recovery, that allows it to work. 

Ted Ryce: So, the heavier strength day, you get the two days that the most, most rest. That makes sense. 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. Yeah. So, you get the two days of rest after the heavy work. I'm pretty sure that doing the heavy work after two days of rest could also work really well. 

But, in my experience of this, this really varies again, it goes back to individual variability, but I have seen people tend to boost their performance during the training week. And then after two days of rest time to tend to not be as good at heavy work or explosive work. So, so they, they kind of need more time to get going. 

 this also goes into tapering or achieving peak performance, by the way, because it's very different for some people, they, they do need some type of work to, to be fresh and to be stimulated and to really perform well on heavy strength work. Whereas others can take a lot of time off, go into the gym, do a 100 max and perform much better than, than they did before. 

So, it's, it's really, it really varies, but, but for most people I've seen better performance placing the heavy work at the very end, or at least after some lighter work or, or power work. And then having some rest following that because the heavy work places a lot of stress on your connective tissue and joints and that kind of stuff. And the connective tissue and joints has a slower protein turnover and does requires more time to recover. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. So, for everyone listening, that's something to experiment with. I typically have, I wasn't aware of that Mike Zourdos study, even though I am aware of him, I typically have put the heavier lifting first because I found that sometimes you get a little bit of a strength boost if you recover and later in the week. 

I was able to use a bit more, more weight, but that's mostly been like convention. Just standard. I've got to experiment with this. 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. Try, try it both ways. And I mean, you, you quickly see if it works or not. I have an actually a simple test that I just started using for judging CNS readiness, I mean, there's different tests you can do. 

But CNS readiness, basically means how efficient or, um, how recovered your central nervous system is. And so, um, there are various tests, and you have the more expensive, um, gadgets like the Omega wave that measures variability, body temperature, all that stuff.  

You can have a simple finger-tapping test where you just go and, and see how consistent and how many finger taps you can do in like a 10-second or 15-second period of time. So, when your CNS is fried because you've done too much volume or intensity, you will notice that the tapping is really inconsistent, and you can't tap as fast as usual. I don't find that test to be all that reliable for myself. 

So, I just test my hand strength. And so, I just have a dynamometer. It's really just a simple plastic gadget, or you can use the iron mind grippers or whatever. And some people actually notice this in the gym. Sometimes you can pick up the 45-pound plates by just your fingers and carry it around.  

Whereas other days you get into the gym and you try to grab it, and it just slips out of your hand. And then that's because handgrip strength is, is, um, is mostly determined by genetics. And it's not as trainable as other muscle groups in your body. So, you can get a pretty consistent reading just doing a handgrip measurement in the morning or prior to your workouts and get a decent baseline there.  

And if it varies a lot in a single day, like, for instance, you lose two to four kilos on that grip strength test, you should probably back off that day, even take a rest day instead of training, but at least do more reps in reserve, do lower volume, lower intensity. If you get a sudden strength boost, well, hey, maybe you should go in and just do some one-on-one testing or do the heavy work because your CNS is, is up and running. 

And you can then also judge how yesterday's workout impacted your central nervous system and recovery just by doing that handgrip strength test. So, I found that to be pretty, you know, interesting. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. That is fascinating. I've been using HRV. Is that something you've experimented with something that you put a lot of value? 

Borge Fagerli: I have, but I actually don't find it as correlational with strength training. I find it more valuable for conditioning.  

Ted Ryce: I've found  the same thing. I feel like it's so difficult for me to screw up my HRV with strength training, whereas when I was doing, you know, Brazilian jujitsu, which is obviously a lot more conditioning, it would, it was much more helpful. 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah. I know Joel Jameson of, eight weeks out is using HRV as a, you know, is by a force, measurement up. And that's really great for fighters. I work, I also work with a lot of fighters. Nature of the training is a really great tool to assess, conditioning improvements and also recovery.  

But for powerlifters, bodybuilders, fitness enthusiasts, just doing regular strength training in the gym, I don't find it as useful. It can be used along with other measurements, but as a stand-alone indicator, I don't really find much value in it, no. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, I've found the same thing, and I've, I've had Joel on before, and I've had his book for a long time, but and he has some articles about hacking strength with HRV, but I haven't found, I haven't been able to put into practice the way that he explains. I don't know. He's supposed to come back on soon, and maybe we can get into that.  

But I want to get back to the Myo-Reps and I know we're coming up on an hour here. I want to be respectful of your time. Are you cool with a few more questions?  

Borge Fagerli: I'm good. Yeah.  

Ted Ryce: Awesome. Cause I'm having a, I'm a man. I've already know I have to have you back on the show. You we're just so much to talk about and I'm trying to stay on topic. Yeah. It's so hard with you though. You're so knowledgeable.   

Borge Fagerli: If you get me going, I, I almost can't stop.  It's just stuff, full body inclusion stuff, making my head bigger. So I have a lot of stuff here. 

Ted Ryce: I love it. But I want to get back to the Myo-Reps really quick because I want to say something really important first is, for all the female listeners, maybe they got the sense that maybe this is not something for them. But if you are looking to build that booty, this is something that you can use, and you will get much better results, and you'll get that perky butt.  

This is something I use with my female clients who are not after big traps or big quads or big arms, but they love the effect when I do Myo-Reps with hip extension exercises or hip abduction exercises, anything that isolates the glutes really well. And the second thing I want to say is that I wrote a program with Myo-Reps, and my client did three.  

He misread when I wrote it, or maybe I didn't explain it well enough for you. One of the two, but hard to tell, but he did three MyoRep sets for every exercise, and it took him 90 minutes to do the workout. And I'm like, and it took him 90 minutes to do the workout, and I'm like, and I'm like, "Are you doing three Myo-Reps, or did you do one MyoRep?"  

And I remember he was like, "One MyoRep takes 90 minutes. Is it supposed to be longer?" And I was like, "No, it's supposed to be shorter." But he had read it wrong and did three MyoRep sets instead of one, and I was like, "That's not what you're supposed to do." It's just one. I think it's, that's where I got it from. 

Can you talk a bit about that? And also, I'd love to talk about, should we do an entire workout for a while with Myo-Reps, maybe a four to six-week workout just with Myo-Reps. 

Borge Fagerli: Because you know, I've tried every iteration of,  Myo-Reps and how to program it. And, um, you know, as we discussed, the time efficiency aspect of it is, is, is one of the major, um, advantages of Myo-Reps. 

And I would, I would actually say, um, outright that I have never had any one client do three bar-upsets for anything. So, that's a lot. Um, I'd also like to say that. I agree. It works really well on hip extension exercises.  Because the glutes are, um, more type one dominant, in most people and in women in particular, and women in particular do seem to do better on higher reps.  

Also, this from, from previous testing. And so, getting that booty pump, um, by doing like hip thrusts and those types of exercises is, is amazing on Myo-Reps. I have, I've had girls. That just couldn't, like, feel their butts at all, get a really great result from just adding Myo-Reps to their routine. But as far as volume goes, and as far as programming goes, um, since one MyoRep set tends to equalize the volume of three to four normal sets. 

Then it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about volume seeming to plateau or around, around four to six sets, hard sets for most people. So, you're effectively doing, you know, six plus sets, regular sets, if you're doing two MyoRep sets. So, um, I, I know it's, it's hard for some people to, wrap their heads around because. Again, most people are used to just doing more work for more results. But with Myo-Reps, you really need to start at the minimum volume and add volume only if you see that you have more, you have room to spare in terms of volume. I would say if you are able to do more than two Myo-Reps, you're probably not working hard enough. 

Ted Ryce: You got to raise the weight or you're, or what? 

Borge Fagerli: You should go closer to failure. You should actually be. Cause, cause I don't, um, if you're pushing hard enough and you're training as close to failure as needed, you're not going to see sets like 20 reps plus five plus five plus five plus five. I don't, I don't, I don't, it's usually going to be something like 20 plus five plus five plus four. You know? Right.  

At the most, I just tell people to do five sets in the Myo-Rep series at the most. So your maximal, set, duration is going to be 20 plus 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. I mentioned an example of just integrating Myo-Rep into your normal routines. You can do it on the same day, you can have a separate day of Myo-Rep training, but after a layoff.  

And also, after having trained with really heavy weights for a long time, I do like to have three to six-week phase of Myo-Rep training only really well because it just increases blood flow. It allows your connective tissue to recover. And, um, it just seems to stimulate a lot of, um, mechanisms, physiological mechanisms that can enhance your training results later on in the training cycle and increases the blood flow nutrients supply. 

It also seems to affect something called satellite cells, which are dormant muscle cells that are basically lying next to the muscle cell. And a central part of growing muscle is to have these satellite cells literally melt together with the muscle cell and donate their nuclei, which is sort of the command center of the muscle cell and the muscle size is determined by how many myonuclei you have in that muscle. 

And so, if, if, um, to grow a bigger muscle, there's a certain balance between how big the muscle is and how many command centers it has, just like on a big ship or, whatever, on a spaceship. And so, you need this satellite cell process. To happen during training to allow room for growing that muscle larger in the future.  

And we see that in advanced lifters, this satellite cell process tends to stagnate and stop. And so, if you've been training for many years, it seems like, there doesn't seem to be much added. Satellite cells, so you just need to work with what you have, but some research on blood flow restriction and also some, um, some research that, that used a protocol very similar to Myo-Rep training, just using internal occlusion. 

It was called like a free flow states indicated that doing this type of training seems to reinitiate the satellite cell process. And so, the theory is that it can create room for more muscle growth for someone that has been training for a lot of, for many years. And there's some interesting data looking at really advanced lifters and seeing. 

That indeed, satellite cells were being reactivated in these advanced individuals. Now, we don't have more data, so I can't say anything for sure. Perhaps it was just an outlier. Perhaps it's just, you know, random chance. But if that's true, and it does seem to be, because I've seen it work in advanced lifters. 

Doing a three to six-week phase of Myo-Rep training only with lighter loads, gradually working up in load and then transitioning into the heavy loading, it might actually raise your potential for muscle growth and, and allow a bigger muscle in, in the future. And practically speaking, I've seen the work in the real world, so, Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that. 

Ted Ryce: Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. I've, I've talked a bit about myonuclei on here and why, you know, satellite cells, AKA satellite cells are so important, and we know that steroids, one of the reasons they work is they. They help with that process. But this is something you can do naturally and that's, that's fantastic. 

And, and I, what I would say is experiment with it because I've experimented with it personally, which, you know, that's the first Guinea pig for coaches and then I've had great success with my clients as well. As long as they're able to do it correctly. And that brings us to, I guess my final question, because I want to be respectful of your time, which is this: 

I've noticed that some people, either they don't work hard enough in that first activation set and then they're thinking, oh, because I got to get those five other sets, right? Yeah. Those five sets of five. That's what I want because more is better that, you know, I train mostly CEOs. But that's not what we're after. 

We're actually trying to hit that point where we can't get the full five sets of five mini sets after the first activation set. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Borge Fagerli: Well, you're trying to basically balance fatigue and activation. So, you need to be at the threshold point. And, and so. You might, you know, it might be beneficial to save that one last rep. 

If you tend to be a guy that if you do 20 reps and you try to do three more after a short break, you can't do three. You, you, you can barely get one then. Yeah, you should probably. Have one rep in reserve. You should probably do a slightly longer rest period. So, the point here is, and this is something that people should play around with just balancing how close to failure you're working and how much rest you have in the Myo-Rep series to get an appropriate volume in there. 

Cause again, we don't want to trigger AMPK and the strength endurance adaptations. We want to stay within the muscle building, strength-building realm. So, getting like the perfect set, I would say would be like 20 or 25 or 15 plus three, three, three, three, three, or, you know, if, if you tend to see 15 plus five plus two, and then it stops. 

And so, try to balance that out and end up somewhere between my notation for Myo-Rep is15 to 25 plus three to five X. And I just tell people to make it simple, do three to five reps for three to five sets. It's with three to five deep breaths of rest in between.  

And so, at the very maximum, you're going to have five sets of five; at the very low end, you're going to get three sets of three, and somewhere in between there is where you find that the lucid balance of attention, mechanical stimulus, metabolic effects, and again, the metabolic effects, like the blood flow occlusion effect, is just amplifying the mechanical tension. So, make no mistake. 

Mechanical tension is at the very center of the hypertrophic process, but we're using muscle physiology knowledge here to just amplify that effect. So, we don't need to work at three to five or six reps all the time. We can actually take advantage and potentially add a logistic effect from the lighter load training as well. In a very time-efficient manner. 

Ted Ryce: Very time efficient, which is huge. Is huge for all the people who are like, "Oh, I can't spend an hour, an hour and 15 in the gym, warming up and doing three sets." And so, yeah. 

Borge Fagerli: I mean, I had one guy, and he had been training four to five days per week, spending 90 minutes at the minimum in the gym. I had him do a Myo-Rep phase of, I think it was four weeks.  

He spent 20 to 30 minutes in the gym, three times per week, and his gains in those four weeks were better than the last four years of training. So again, it could be a deloading effect, obviously that for the first time got some recovery, but there's definitely something going on with Myo-Reps that just makes it really effective for a lot of people. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. That's a funny story. Too much volume. One more thing.  

Borge Fagerli: And, I mean, if you were to invest your money in something, wouldn't you rather invest in something like in the stock market that you invested like a thousand dollars in Bitcoins, 15 years ago, you would be a millionaire today.  

And I guess this is kind of the same perspective. I mean, wouldn't you rather invest in something time-efficient that provides a huge return on investment versus just spending a lot and hoping for a 3 to 5 percent gain in many years time? I just can't see how that, you know, how some people approach training in the way that. Well, they approach a lot of things in life, that just do more to get more. I mean, physiologically, that's not how the body works, and that's not how the brain works as we talked about earlier.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And you're bringing up such a great point. Cause I feel like a lot of people use exercise as their medication and they got to get into the gym. And also, I feel like people are more concerned about burning calories in the gym instead of building muscle, which is arguably much more important to change the way you look and your ability to partition all those nutrients into the right places instead of into, you know, your hips, thighs, or around the waist, as in my case. So, great point. 

Borge Fagerli: But then again, if you're, if you're spending, cause most people tend to overestimate how many calories they can burn in the gym. And even if you're in the gym for 90 minutes, maybe you're just burning like four or 500 calories. I mean, don't, don't use to your polar watch or Fitbit or something to measure your calorie caloric burn. 

Cause you're, you're only burning calories as you're lifting the weight. You're not burning calories when you're standing around the water fountain, uh, fountain chatting up to ladies. And so, a regular weight training workout is usually just burning two to 300 calories per hour. But if that workout is making you so wasted and fatigued that you just need to sit around or lie around for the other 23, 22 hours of the day. 

Then you're not burning as many calories total in a day that you think. And so, you can leave that big Mac menu, uh, as is, I mean, you don't need to think that now we can really gorge on calories because it just burned so many calories and need to build muscle. Sorry, that's, that's not going to work.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Well, you just opened up a whole another can of worms. Maybe we'll say that for part two. 

What I want to ask you is, because I feel it's important for the listeners who want to try this technique, you recommend one to two exercises per body part. So, if you're doing a whole chest workout, this is not the technique you want to use for every exercise. Can you talk a little bit about that, and then we'll wrap things up? 

Borge Fagerli: Yeah, at the most, I would just do two exercises per muscle group in a given workout. Most of the time, I just do one exercise and make it high-quality work. I might do one heavy set of something and add an isolation exercise. If, for instance, I have a set of squats, you could do a Myo-Rep set on leg curls, leg extensions, and hip extensions if you want. But, for the most part, I'm talking.  

Yeah, two, two exercises at the most for a given muscle group. Then we're talking overlapping work. So, if I'm doing, say, double bench press Myo-Rep, then yeah, you can add like a Pec Dec fly or a cable fly for the chest as well. But you might consider doing incline double bench presses and then doing a cable fly that works sort of more of the middle or lower pec to get some overlap and work one part of the muscle with Myo-Rep and another part with primary mechanical tension.  

There are so many ways of doing this. I don't really have any prescription-based stuff, but I just got my Norwegian e-book on Myo-Rep training translated. So, I'm going to get that edited and publish it as soon as possible in English. You can go on YouTube, and if you search for Myo-Rep and my name or Myo-Reps and biceps, I think you should get. The very first hit should be me demonstrating Myo-Reps on bicep curls, just to get an idea of how a Myo-Rep set looks like. 

Ted Ryce: Excellent. Well, I'll find those videos. I'll put them into the show notes for the ease of people learning how to do them properly and definitely make sure you learn from the originator. There are some people out there. I've heard you say before, Borge, that people are kind of imitating.  

Of course, it's a very successful protocol, so they're imitating or even ripping off. You want to learn it from the guy who came up with it, who really understands all the details of, of when has messed around with all the iterations of programming. So, you want to learn from the original. I'll have all that in the show notes for this episode. 

All right. Well, man, it's awesome. I can't wait to have a part two with you. Maybe we can talk about your book if it's out. We can talk about the zero-carb diet. We haven't even touched on nutrition at all, really. So, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I feel like I've just stepped up my knowledge simply by spending an hour with you. 

Borge Fagerli: Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. 

Ted Ryce: Absolutely. I can't wait to, we need to get you over to the state, so I can get you to a course. Yeah, it would be fun. 

Borge Fagerli: I plan to, I plan to. 

Ted Ryce:  Excellent. And so, for anyone listening who wants to check out Borge's work, his website is BorgeFagerli.com. If you just Borge and Myo-Reps, he'll come up as well. But is there anywhere else that you'd like them to go to?  

Borge Fagerli: Well, we've been working on it for three years, so I'm not going to promise anything, but maybe by the time this podcast comes out and www.cyberneticfitness.com is probably going to be the place where it's a collaboration project with manual Hanselman's where we created this artificially intelligent training program generator and diet generator and it's probably going to be featuring most of my muscle building muscle focus training-focused articles on there, whereas my main site is probably going to go in a different direction to cater to a different crowd and to sort of niche it down a little.  

So, but for now, BorgeFagerli.com. is the main site. Yeah. 

Ted Ryce: Excellent. Well, Borge, thanks again. I learned so much. I know everyone listening  can't wait to try out Myo-Reps for themselves and can't wait until next time. 

Borge Fagerli: All right. Thank you. Bye. Bye. 

Ted Ryce: Welcome to Ted's takeaways. This is the part of the interview where we go over the top lessons that our guest shared in today's episode. I know this was a long one, so I'm going to keep this very brief. But the biggest takeaway is that there's a method that you probably haven't tried that you should try. 

And it's called Myo-Reps, and I've actually written an article about how I use them. And you should definitely check out Borge Fagerli's website and learn more about how he uses them. And I want to challenge you because you may think, especially if you're a guy. That you know, all about training and, you know, all about lifting. 

And what I want to tell you is there are so many things out there now. Most of it's just garbage and it doesn't work, but there are a few gems out there, a few secrets or, you know, strange tricks or whatever you want to call them, biohacks. That really work, and this is one of them.  

And don't close your mind off. Don't think that, you know, everything because there are so many, so many knowledgeable people out there that are helping to refine how to get better results from our workout programs, from our lifestyles, from nutrition, and it's just an incredible opportunity to have them on this show. I hope you appreciate having them on, being able to listen to them as much as I'm thankful for being able to interview them.  

So that's all I have to say. If you want to try some of my workouts where I include Myo-Reps, again, I include them in at least one phase in every single workout because they're so effective. Make sure you go to legendary life podcast. com/store. If this interview really resonated with you and you want more like it, make sure you share this episode.  

Sharing is caring. I really appreciate when you share and share with someone who maybe hasn't heard of Myo-Reps before, and they could use a little boost to their workout. Lastly, if this is your first time listening to the show, make sure you click the subscribe button, and that way you will get every episode delivered to you as soon as it's published. That's all I've got. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I will speak to you soon. 

Ted Ryce is a high-performance coach, celebrity trainer, and a longevity evangelist. A leading fitness professional for over 24 years in the Miami Beach area, who has worked with celebrities like Sir Richard Branson, Rick Martin, Robert Downey, Jr., and hundreads of CEOs of multimillion-dollar companies. In addition to his fitness career, Ryce is the host of the top-rated podcast called Legendary Life, which helps men and women reclaim their health, and create the body and life they deserve.

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