Stereotypes In Fitness & On The Internet - Zack Telander - #168

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, my beauties, welcome back. My guest today is none other than Zack telander, Coach ZT, as he's known on YouTube. He's got one of the biggest YouTube channels in all of weightlifting, and I absolutely love him. I think his content's fantastic. I was recently on his show, and he did me the solid of returning and coming on modern Wisdom. So yeah, today's really cool. It's just a chat. It's just a sitting down for 90 minutes and talking about his history, how he started his YouTube channel, his history with lifting, his thoughts on different training methodologies, weightlifting, CrossFit, powerlifting. We go through some cliches and stereotypes about different types of athletes in the gym and how they behave and what their history would have been. It's just a cool catch up. He's a really good guy and I'm sure that I'll have him back on. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Coach ZT. Talk to me about what your favorite pre-workout drink is. What's your pre-workout of choice?

**Zack Telander** (1:16)
I love caffeine. So, like, you know, there's, do you know who Omar Isaf is?

**Chris Williamson** (1:25)
No.

**Zack Telander** (1:25)
He's a, he's a, he's kind of, he's a YouTuber. He actually does have a lot of good knowledge around fitness and, you know, strength and culture and stuff like that. And his product is called Ouroboros or Ouroboros. And it's, it's really like clean. It's, there's only like five ingredients. You know, it's like caffeine, creatine, beta-alanine, like the five core ingredients to a pre-workout. And it's only 200 milligrams of caffeine. Now you should try to take that half hour before training.
And then I, I like to have a relatively kind of empty stomach before I take my pre-workout. So I, sometimes I will wake up and you know, I might have like, I always drink like a green drink to get my greens in. And then I might just like take my pre-workout and go to the gym, like without anything in my stomach. But if I'm gonna train a little bit later, like say, like two, three, four p.m., I'll have oats or like some sort of carb and then I'll just chill for like two hours and then go. I will never really, sometimes I guess I'll have like scrambled eggs too, cause like for me it's really hard to get all of my protein in per day. So if I'm not eating protein for, you know, four of the hours of the day or five hours a day and then I go to the gym and I come back, now I'm in this huge kind of hole where I have to gain back all the protein.

**Chris Williamson** (3:08)
It's a never ending treadmill of trying to eat it. Everyone that's listening that's got a diet that requires them to have high volumes of protein in. Mine at the moment, my calories are like, I think 210 grams of protein per day, which isn't like ridiculous, but I'd say it's like moderate high for someone who's in 80 kilos range. And fuck man, like you're right, if you get to 2 p.m. and you've not had any protein yet, like that's going to be the remainder of the day is going to suck bad.

**Zack Telander** (3:35)
Yeah, I mean, I do like to train an empty stomach, like ideal world, you know, like, or having a big meal and then chilling, letting it all digest and then going to the gym. I'm not a believer in like eating a pre-workout meal. I don't like, I don't think that that's, I think that's kind of like bro sciency type stuff. And then yeah, I just do caffeine. And then after, you know, I have to, you know, sometimes I want to get 250 to 270 grams of protein because of my body weight. And like, I have to have two or three shakes, you know, a day, just cause I can't, I don't like eating that much like chicken breast and meat. But I do actually notice the difference on high protein. Like I really, really do. And now just physique wise. Like I don't, and that's something that I don't really care too much about, but it's nice to have, you know. As a weightlifter, your primary focus is to be healthy and in shape so that you can perform what you need to perform. It's not about aesthetics. But I know that if your aesthetics are right, there's a chance that your body composition is right and therefore you're maximizing your weight class. Or if that makes sense, you know, if you have too much body fat, it's too much weight for your weight class that is not usable. And so something I've noticed on like a very high protein diet is that I can be a little bit more sloppy, if that makes sense, in the way that I eat. But that's a big stipulation. That's a big thing to do to try to get enough protein.