Most people get injured at some point. 

Whether it's an obvious problem like smashing your leg into a four-wheeler (like we talk about in this podcast), or a chronic injury like low-back pain that seems to come out of nowhere, we all end up in pain eventually. Especially if you tend to be a more obsessive, driven type.

When you're injured, you would do anything to make the pain go away. There are a lot of myths about the best ways to kill pain, which means it's east to waste time, money, and effort on treatments that don't work, or aren't optimal.

In this podcast, Dr. Jonathan Fass dispels some of the most common myths about what does and doesn't cause pain. He also fills you in on the latest research about how to kill pain, and gives you practical strategies for dealing with acute and chronic painful injuries.

Getting into "peak" shape at a specific time is much harder than you might think.

Whether you're preparing for a bodybuilding contest, a photo shoot, or just a personal goal, there are a lot of ways to mess up your diet and training before the big day.

In this podcast, you'll learn the most common mistakes people make when trying to reach their peak level of leanness, and how to avoid them. You'll also learn... 

• How to deal with the psychological and emotional challenges of getting lean.
• How to properly time your carbohydrate intake to look leaner
• How to set and adjust your calorie intake during a "cut."
• The truth behind water and salt manipulation.
• Layne Norton's best tip to stay lean over the long-term.

You can't multitask.

As someone who's determined to squeeze as much productivity out of every day as possible, that's hard to hear.

However, if you want to get more done, in less time, with fewer mistakes, you need to stop multitasking (at least most of the time). Here's why.

Your butt is important.

Yes, it’s helpful for sitting and a few other essential purposes. However, it’s also a muscle group that can have a big impact on your performance and appearance.

Your glutes — the muscles around your posterior -- play a key role in powering your leg movements and stabilizing your upper body during daily activities. 

If you’re a physique athlete like a bodybuilder or model, then the appearance of your butt also matters. As Bret Contreras says in this podcast — your butt can be a "deal breaker" if you’re competing in a physique sport.

In this podcast, Bret Contreras, aka “The Glute Guy” is going to share his 20 years worth of knowledge on glute training with you. You’ll learn:

• How to avoid the most common mistakes people make when training their glutes.
• The best exercises you should use to train your glutes.
• How and when to use these exercises in your workout program for best results.
• How to modify your glute training for aesthetic versus athletic goals.
• Why men and women may need to train their glutes differently, and how to do so.
• How your genes affect your glute development.

If you want to lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you expend.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you should spend every day in a caloric deficit while you're dieting.

In fact, you might get better results if you take structured, intermittent "refeeds" -- periods where you purposely eat excess calories during your diet. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about refeeds which you'll learn about in this podcast.

You'll also learn:

• Whether or not you need to do refeeds.
• How to set up a refeed.
• What, and how much to eat during a refeed.
• How frequently you should refeed.
• How to change your refeeds as you keep losing fat.

If you've ever tried to lose weight, you've probably heard of "starvation mode."

Maybe you've also heard of "metabolic damage" or "metabolic slowdown."

You learn that when you cut calories and lose weight, your metabolism drops, and weight loss slows.

Then you're stuck. 

You know you need to eat less, but you're also worried that you'll slow your metabolism and make weight loss even harder.

In this podcast, you'll learn:

• Whether or not your metabolic rate actually drops while dieting. 
• If so, how much of an impact this has on your ability to lose or maintain your weight.
• 13 ways to minimize, avoid, or reverse metabolic slowdown during and after dieting.

Losing fat is hard.

Losing a lot of fat is harder.

But neither is as hard as maintaining a super lean physique -- without going nuts.

You're probably willing to put up with dieting if you know the end is in site. What you're not willing to tolerate is the hunger, stress, social isolation and other issues that usually prevent you from staying super lean.

Sure, you can suck it up and be miserable. Or, you can use the strategies in this podcast to make staying lean much, much easier.

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like sleep.

It’s even harder to find someone who gets enough.

For one of the simplest and most effective things people can do to improve their health and body composition, sleep usually gets overlooked.

Most people are struggling to reach and maintain a healthy weight. You know how important diet and exercise are for accomplishing this, but sleep is arguably almost as important. Your sleep can impact what and how much you eat, your ability to exercise, and how much fat or muscle you lose while dieting.

In this podcast, you're going to learn from sleep researcher Dan Pardi on how you can improve your health and lose fat by sleeping better.

Lacrosse is a weird sport.

You get to whack other players with metal poles, you run constantly without any breaks, and you use a small rubber ball that’s basically like an airborne hockey puck. You have to have great speed, endurance, strength, and coordination. 

If you’re goal is to be generally fit, you can learn a lot by looking at the training practices of lacrosse players.

In today’s show, you’re going to learn how one lacrosse coach is taking his sport to a new level. You'll learn how doctor and elite level lacrosse coach Joe Lightfoot is using strength and conditioning exercises, recovery tactics, and a slightly different coaching philosophy to help his players reach the highest level of their sport.

You’ll also learn Joe's best tips for coaching that you can use for own training. If you’re a coach or trainer you can also use these tips when working with your athletes.

You'll find that Joe uses the same general strategy that we use here on imprüvism — he believes in using small, consistent changes to master the basics first, and then and only then, focusing on the smaller details of whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.

We like the idea of doing something that’s scientific.

We want to know that the choices we make to lose weight, gain muscle, and live longer are based on good evidence.

Unfortunately, the "science" that's presented in the media and elsewhere is often misleading, irrelevant, or untrue. It's easy to be confused.

You might not have a Ph.D. in research science and maybe you don’t have time to read research papers every day. However, you can still become fitter, healthier, leaner, and happier by taking a few minutes to learn what to look for in a scientific paper or news report. 

In this podcast, you’re going to learn how to critically evaluate research as it's presented in the media and in the academic literature. Evelyn Kocur, also known as “Carb Sane," comes on the show to teach you what to look for in a scientific study and how to avoid being fooled by yourself and others when evaluating research. After mastering the concepts in this podcast, you'll be able to interpret, understand, and use (or decide not to use) the health science information you see online and elsewhere.

Whether you like it or not, you have to deal with email. It’s a part of life.

It can also start to take over your life if you don’t manage it well.

You know the feeling — that horrible feeling you get when you know there’s over a hundred unread emails in your inbox. You know that eventually, you’ll have to waste an afternoon answering them all.

So you procrastinate. You stress about your full inbox, and you go nuts thinking about whether or not you missed something important.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In this podcast, you’re going to learn everything you need to know to make answering email easy, painless, and productive. You'll hear from Ari Meisel, a productivity coach who specializes in mastering email overload.

You're sick of getting misled by false information about health and fitness.

You're sick of getting distracted and disappointed by pseudoscience and unproven ideas.

You’re not alone. There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet. Luckily, there are some simple principles you can use to find the good stuff.

In this podcast, Bryan Chung teaches you how to use the internet to educate yourself about health and fitness without getting duped. Bryan runs EvidenceBasedFitness.net, a website dedicated to “Defying the Madness of Fitness Mysticism.” Bryan is an intelligent, skeptical, and funny guy who really knows what he’s talking about. Make sure you listen to the end of the interview where he shares some of his best tips on how to navigate the online fitness world. 

Injuries suck, plain and simple.

If you’re a runner, you’ll do almost anything to avoid them (except stop running, of course).

Barefoot running is one simple method that many promise could help you prevent injures. Some people claim it’s a near panacea for avoiding aches and pains, while others aren’t quite as sure of its benefits.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from Alex Hutchinson — a world renowned journalist and magazine writer who does the popular “Sweat Science” column for Runner’s World.

Alex breaks down exactly what the science says about barefoot running for injury prevention. At the end, he gives you some practical tips to help you decide whether you should run with shoes or without. He also offers some advice on how you can safely transition to barefoot running if you choose to do so.

You hate dieting. To you, the word “diet” usually means:

• Hunger. 
• Strength and muscle loss.
• Low of sex drive.
• Lethargy.
• Constant cravings.

Luckily, you can limit, or even completely avoid most of these problems if you train and eat intelligently for fat loss. 

In this podcast, Eric Helms teaches you how to create a diet and exercise program that will help you lose unwanted body fat without going insane. You’ll also learn how to create a sustainable lifestyle that allows you to stay lean without obsessing over food, losing strength and muscle, and constantly fighting food cravings. 

Choosing supplements is a pain.

Every supplement claims to be better than the last.

They all claim to be backed by the latest scientific evidence.

They’re usually expensive.

Most don’t work.

However, there are some supplements that do work. The problem is that until now, it’s been hard to translate research into actionable, simple advice on what supplements are the most effective and offer you the best value.

In this podcast, you’ll learn how to use Examine.com's “Human Effect Matrix” to easily do your own research on what supplements are the most effective. Kurtis Frank, one of the co-founders of Examine.com, discusses how they created the Human Effect Matrix, and how you can use it to make wiser choices when shopping for supplements.

Learn why most treatments for exercise related muscle cramps don't work, and what to do instead.

Pickles.

Probably not the first word that comes to your mind when discussing performance enhancing substances.

New research, however, has shown that drinking pickle juice may be an effective way to reduce the duration of muscle cramps. In this podcast, you'll learn how you (may) be able to use pickle juice to avoid and treat muscle cramps. You'll also learn the real reason this research is so exciting (hint: it's not about the pickles).

Your brain doesn't always think rationally. Sometimes, it makes mistakes called logical fallacies, aka, thinking errors. One of the most common logical fallacies in the health industry is the straw man.

You've almost certainly encountered the straw man argument before. You may have made it yourself. The straw man argument is a common diversion people use to discredit your ideas, especially when they're defending a position that lacks evidence.

In this podcast, you'll learn how to identify and defeat a straw man argument. Most importantly, you'll learn how to avoid making one yourself.

Cyclists are good at lying to themselves.

No matter how bad they feel, they can ignore pain, suffering, and fatigue. Unless they have an objective number (or person) telling them that they’re doing too much, they can easily dig themselves into a deep state of overtraining.

Luckily, a relatively new technology is keeping cyclists honest. Bicycle mounted power meters have made it possible for cyclists to push themselves to the limits of their ability with a much lower risk of overtraining.

In this podcast, Hunter Allen, one of the leading experts on power meter training, will teach you how to enhance your cycling performance without damaging your health or compromising your long-term success.

You'll learn...

The crucial difference between overtraining and overreaching.

How cyclists become overtrained.

The key factors that increase your risk of overtraining.

Why a power meter is the ultimate tool to avoid and manage overtraining.

How to know exactly when you're recovered from overtraining.

How to know if it's okay to keep training when you're tired.<

How to use Chronic Training Load, Acute Training Load, and Training Stress Balance to accelerate your fitness.

How to recover from overtraining and/or overreaching.

Do you want to gain muscle?

Are you tired of using your precious time in the gym on unproven "broscience" instead of scientific methods to maximize your results?

This is the podcast for you. Brad Schoenfeld, MSc, CSCS, CSPS., is a world renowned fitness expert. He's regarded as one of the leading authorities on using diet and exercise to gain muscle and lose fat.

In this episode, Brad gives you some of the most practical and valuable tips from his new book, The MAX Muscle plan -- a scientific guide to gaining muscle.

Eating healthy meals while traveling is impossible.

Well, not impossible, but it certainly feels that way for many people. This is especially true for athletes who are often more careful about what they eat. Traveling should be fun, and it shouldn’t have to ruin your nutrition plan.

In this podcast, exercise physiologist and chef Allen Lim will teach you how to find, prepare, and enjoy healthy meals no matter where you go.

If you’ve ever had back pain, you’re not alone.

For many people, low-back pain becomes a chronic problem that can resurface at any moment. In a previous podcast, you learned why most treatments for low-back pain don’t work. In this episode, you'll learn about a simple, safe, and cheap treatment method for low-back pain that might actually work.

There’s a lot of debate about what causes low-back pain, and a lot of misconceptions. Despite their best efforts, even doctors often don’t have an accurate understanding of low-back pain.

After listening to this episode, you'll understand why most low-back pain treatments and prevention strategies don’t work. In the next episode, you'll learn what treatments might help.