How to Naturally Optimize Testosterone Before TRT

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Most men over 40 who feel tired, foggy and flat get told the same thing. Your testosterone is low. Here’s a prescription.

Nick Urban [00:01:02]:
My guest today is a men’s health coach who spends his days talking men out of that. Ollie Matthews believes your hormones are a readout of how you live, not simply a number to medicate. And that starting testosterone before you fix the basics can actually make things worse. We get into what to fix first, why your gut runs your hormones. And. And the one testing question he and I don’t fully agree on. Welcome to the show.

Ollie Matthews [00:01:30]:
Thanks for having me. I’m intrigued with that question.

Nick Urban [00:01:32]:
Now let’s set the stage for anyone new to your world. What is functional medicine in plain terms? And what does it look like when a burnt out guy in his 40s walks in convinced he needs testosterone?

Ollie Matthews [00:01:48]:
Functional medicine, if we say conventional medicine or western medicine and functional medicine, when we look at blood markers, the easiest way of describing this is that blood markers that we see on a blood test are sick or not sick, they’re high or low based on what is essentially the average of a sick population. Functional medicine is finding the most optimal place in there where we feel the best. And then using nutrition, nutraceutical supplements, lifestyle interventions, more things that we actually have control with than we actually realize. And it’s working with the body. What I call from a top down perspective that if you have a headache, having medication for having paracetamol here in the UK or I’ve gotten what it is in the US but having a medication for it is one thing, but if that paracetamol, if that headache is for dehydration, we need to be drinking more water. So it’s finding the root cause of the problem and targeting that. And then what does it look like for a burnt out guy? Right, that was what you said.

Nick Urban [00:02:49]:
Yeah. In his 40s, convinced he needs testosterone. Where would you direct him?

Ollie Matthews [00:02:54]:
I’d Be looking at blood work first, because so many people think they need testosterone and it’s not testosterone that’s the actual problem. First off, even if your testosterone is a little bit low, we need to have a discussion to see how is your lifestyle. Are you drinking alcohol? Are you smoking cigarettes? Are you eating junk food? Are you pre diabetic, are you sleeping four hours a night, are you highly stressed? Are you not doing any exercise? Because all those things could potentially suppress testosterone on a blood test. But then we go to actually take testosterone replacement therapy, which hands up that I actually take testosterone replacement therapy. It’s the last thing that I’ve had to do before I end up. I tried every single thing, screwed up my hormones. We can go into the backstory beforehand. And then I needed that.

Ollie Matthews [00:03:39]:
I honestly feel that every guy should be checking their testosterone, but testosterone replacement therapy should be the last option. It’s a very invasive procedure to inject yourself multiple times a week or put cream on your balls or gel, whatever form that you go to have. But it really should be the last option for everything else to be in place. And if everything else is in place, you have that testosterone therapy, then basically that’s where you’re going to get the best results. But guys are going to be going in saying that they’re low on testosterone. Maybe it’s because they end up, they’re going to the gym and they’re not getting the results, but maybe they’re not actually training as hard as they think. Maybe they’re not eating as much protein as they think they end up. That they’re hiding a lot of things when it comes to alcohol.

Ollie Matthews [00:04:27]:
I’ve seen people come to me and they’ve told me that, yeah, I’m on trt, I’m on testosterone replacement therapy and I’m getting loads of side effects, but they’re drinking 10 bottles of beer at the weekend. And I’m thinking, hang on, I can see why you’re not getting the results. I can see why you’ve got high levels of estrogen and you’ve got full high levels of water retention. You’re feeling sluggish, you’re feeling depressed and you’re not feeling good. But a lot of people can’t see that.

Nick Urban [00:04:57]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean that. I think even if they can see it, they don’t want to see it because it’s.

Ollie Matthews [00:05:02]:
Yeah, yeah. I think it’s hiding it.

Nick Urban [00:05:04]:
Right, yeah. So when you’re looking for root causes, you mentioned blood work earlier and it seems actually that we have more overlap there than I initially thought because I think it can be helpful. But it doesn’t tell even close to the whole story. You might see a marker as out of balance and that could be the dysregulation, could be because a constellation of others, or it could be things that won’t appear anywhere on the blood labs. And most comprehensive blood labs measure what, about 200 biomarkers, if that’s comprehensive and there are thousands, many thousands of processes going on in the body and that only looks at the biochemistry for the most part. So I think there is a lot more there. But it can be a good place to figure out where to look and where to dig deeper. How do you like to help people figure out what area they should be focusing on?

Ollie Matthews [00:05:54]:
I feel it is conversation, it’s building up that clinical picture of what has happened in that client’s life. I’ve just turned 40 and my life has been 40 years on this planet. It’s also been what my parents health was like before I was born. When we look at epigenetics and we look at transgenerational trauma and health and everything else that the what, what has been pushed down on us from different generations and then how, how this world is then essentially like altered, how our body works and very much that with this as well. When we look at Western medicine and we see a doctor’s appointment here in the UK, doctors are targeted for around 10 minutes, maybe even less, to actually find out what’s going on in that person’s life and then to give them medication. There’s not really any lifestyle intervention that they can go into because we need context and that is a massive flaw. I’ve been with clients and we’ve had three or four consultations and we’ve been building up the story, having the line of notes from consultation one couple of weeks later, 2, 3, 4, and then they say something which they didn’t think was relevant and I’m like, okay, so you grew up in a room with black mold. That is relevant and something that happened in childhood is relevant.

Ollie Matthews [00:07:19]:
And we need to take every single thing into account. And I feel that’s what blood work doesn’t always tell us. We can look at things in iron panels like ferritin being high and there’s inflammation going on. We can look at red blood cells and we can see that there may be some nutrient deficiency anemia as well. And we build up this different pattern that’s happening. But where is that person’s mental state at as well? What else is going on in their life. And that’s where conversations help so much. And then again as well, testing wise, right? If we have someone that I’ve had, people that we really want to get a deeper hormone test, something like a Dutch test, dried urine test for comprehensive hormones.

Ollie Matthews [00:08:02]:
And I’m saying why, why do you want that test? Because you’re eating crap, you’re still drinking alcohol. It’s the things that we need to work on beforehand because what’s the point of spending another 300, $400 on a test that we’re still going to have to implement the same things beforehand, Right. So, and that pretty certainly it’s nice to know blood work and I really like every client to get blood work. But if someone’s eating loads of crap and they’re on a little bit of a budget, that’s the place where we start. And I have, I have different questionnaires where it’s brain screening, gut screening, they’re based on symptoms, they’re not like invasive tests or anything. They’re basically. Do you get cold, handsome feet? Never. You click 0 all the time.

Ollie Matthews [00:08:43]:
You click 4. So that gives me a little bit of information that we need to look at the screening process and piece every piece of the puzzle together. And I’m not sure about you, but I’ve seen people that have spent thousands on different tests, gone from practitioner to practitioner, loads of supplements, and they’re not getting anywhere. We end up stripping the supplements back, getting them eating real food, getting them doing some breath work, doing some mindfulness stuff. I hate the word mindfulness, but I’m going to use it there anyway. But doing some, some mindset work, that sort of thing, and they start feeling better and they’ve just over complicated things elsewhere.

Nick Urban [00:09:28]:
I love that you also use symptomology as a first layer because yes, you can go ahead and do like the fancy designer blood labs and get all kinds of crazy stuff done at the same time. Like you were saying, if you’re neglecting the basics, you might see something interesting, you might see some false positives and false negatives, but either way you’re gonna have to do the basics at some point anyways. You might as well just wait until after you’ve implemented them for a bit and then you can get a test and, or tests and get a, a checkup. Is this working? Is this not working?

Ollie Matthews [00:09:58]:
Yeah, and, and as well. But when you look at the markers, some of the markers are going to be great to, and need to be retested sort of every 12 weeks or something just to see the markers of progression. But do we really need to test every single marker? If some of them are absolutely fine, yeah, they may move slightly up and down. But if it’s not relevant for what we’re then working on and their symptoms don’t point towards that, should we then just pick the markers we need for the retest? This is, this is if a client is on a budget for client is on a zero budget, then again I would still question why I’m getting certain tests. But full bloods every three months is a great place to be just to. I get mine done every three months. It’s a great place to be to be able to do that. But again, could we then just get so much information, get paralysis by analysis and not get anywhere?

Nick Urban [00:10:51]:
So what we’ve discussed so far has been largely individualized. If you talk to someone and you figure out their life story, you can usually find things to link it back to. You get blood labs done, you have some like ideas of where to focus based on the way they uniquely present. What is the most common thing that you find amongst the clients you work with that the guys generally have no idea is wrong?

Ollie Matthews [00:11:17]:
I feel things if we’re looking at hormone panels specifically in this side like as how I’m answering the question is something like high sex hormone binding globulin. So they’ve got normal testosterone. They feel like rubbish. Free testosterone is actually rock bottom. And here in the UK when they go to the NHS the doctors will pretty certainly only test total testosterone, not the free usable testosterone. And so many times guys are saying you’re absolutely fine when they’re not because they’ve got symptoms of low testosterone. But we wouldn’t then say they’ve got secondary hypogonadism and need TRT or even obviously not primary if their totals at the right level. So that’s one thing I would say.

Nick Urban [00:11:59]:
Will you define what those are primary and secondary.

Ollie Matthews [00:12:02]:
So primary would be more. I would say your testosterone has gone down with age or it’s been trauma like someone’s had severe injury to. To their balls basically to their testicles and then need. Or the brain to have. Yeah or the brain they need to have TRT as an intervention. Pretty certainly secondary is what we see a lot more often where it’s usually lifestyle interventions can, can really improve that. And when they don’t, we may need to top up with testosterone therapy, but pretty certainly not at the levels that a lot of people are doing without labs. That’s not testosterone therapy that I see.

Ollie Matthews [00:12:44]:
Especially when you’re in Facebook groups and people are saying, yeah, I’m on like, 300 milligrams of testosterone a week. Oh, you’re on a steroid cycle, are you? And it’s. It’s. I’m on 12 milligrams a day, that’s what, 84 a week? And that gets me into high, normal levels. That’s just out of putting things into context. When people are then putting way over double that and they’re not getting the results in the gym. Your training’s not right, your nutrition’s not right, it’s not the testosterone that’s the problem. And then, so we’ve got primary, we’ve got secondary.

Ollie Matthews [00:13:18]:
And it’s not to say, as I say, like, with secondary, that you can get the need, the need for trt. If someone’s been shut down for such a long while, it could be that they’re not going to be kicking their levels back up. And that’s where the conversation happens. Do you need to have testosterone therapy?

Nick Urban [00:13:37]:
Ollie, how did you get involved in all this? I know that you came from a hard, personal place.

Ollie Matthews [00:13:43]:
It’s. My whole backstory is kind of. There’s. There’s two places where I went, like. The whole thing where I got to working with guys in their 40s, primarily dads, is that my dad died when I was 15, he was 47. He died from stress. He was wanting to retire at 55, constantly working, didn’t drink much, wasn’t overweight, wasn’t what you would class as an unhealthy lifestyle. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s a healthy lifestyle with working all the time and not really doing loads of exercise, but doing some.

Ollie Matthews [00:14:11]:
But he suffered with migraines, he suffered with problems of sleep. And even a week before he died, he said, this job’s going to kill me. A week later he was dead and he went into hospital with a migraine, had a stroke. We had to turn off his life support machine. As I say, I was 15 and that transformed my childhood to the point of going away to summer holidays and then coming back in my last year of school, where I suddenly had to grow up. And then I started going down the eating route and I’d already been growing up in a room full of mold. Let’s just leave that as a side note with the testosterone side of things. But I went on a really emotional eating roller coaster and put on a lot of weight to the point where I ended up.

Ollie Matthews [00:14:54]:
I was getting bullied at school and found the gym in my early 20s. Lost nearly 100 pounds. Competed in bodybuilding naturally, for six shows, naturally. And then I done started like, right, I want to get bigger, I’m going to use steroids, I’m going to like bite the bullet and do that. And at the same time I had disordered eating, so I would take testosterone, not at these crazy levels. I probably went up to, well, it’s crazy for TRT, definitely crazy for TRT, but went up to 350, 300 a week. And then you would put other compounds in, tremblone would come in, master one would come in, other things would come in and before you know it, you’re getting more insecure because these things that they start messing with your psychological aspect side of things. I’m still worried about how I look and I became totally obsessed.

Ollie Matthews [00:15:46]:
I now know that I was diagnosed with autism. I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago. So that obsession was basically I was just learning the bodybuilding world and competed in another show. 2012 was my last show and before you know it, those cycles got a little bit longer, those cycles of steroids and the time off got less. So you weren’t giving your body this time to recover. There’s people that do steroids on and off with cycles and they don’t seem to get negative health impacts, they’re not abusing them to drastic levels. But then the people that have that I want, I’m chasing something, I’m chasing security because if I grow muscle I’m going to get secure. But actually I had to work with my brain, I had to work with my mental health, I had to work with that mindfulness, I had to work with that to actually improve how I felt about myself.

Ollie Matthews [00:16:35]:
And when I eventually did try and come off, my levels just would not go back up and I was stuck down in low. I was about 7 or 8 nanomoles a liter here in the UK and 8 is low by the NHS range. Went to the doctors for it and they said, oh, you’re within range 20 or what was I, 29 when I went there? And the doctor says that you’re in range when you’re at rock bottom levels, which it just frustrates me, but it is what it is. So I started trying to self medicate with trt. Learned a lot. I was a trainer, I was a performance nutritionist, working with Olympic athletes in the Rio Olympics and Tour de France and like top of the level endurance athletes as Ultraman world champion one year and it was cool. But then I started getting obsessed with doing those sorts of things. At the same time, I was trying to optimize my testosterone so severe over training and everything else.

Ollie Matthews [00:17:34]:
So I went down the TRT route. Wasn’t working for me, found out how to do it, started doing it better, went with a lab and then it came to the point where we decided we want to have a daughter. Oh, well, we want to have a child. Who didn’t we say door? I wanted a son, but I’ve got a daughter now. Spoiler alert. Careful what you wish for. If we wanted to have a daughter and we were told that it’s going to take over two years for you to get your numbers back to where they were. I’d been on trt, sperm count was pretty much zero.

Ollie Matthews [00:18:02]:
I said that it won’t take me that long and I now know a lot more protocols with testosterone to keep fertility or boost fertility when you need it. Don’t believe everyone needs HCG when they go straight onto trt. I think it’s just, it’s easier to market two or three drugs to one person than it is one drug to two or three people, right? So people are putting things in left, right and center, different clinics. It’s when you need that fertility, we need to work on a protocol and everyone’s going to be different. I’m not going to prescribe anything on here, but it was things like hcg, hmg, Clomid, like all these different things and in six months my numbers were looking good and in nine months we froze sperm and now we have like a 16 month old daughter, which is amazing. But that time off testosterone where my numbers went rock bottom and they started coming up and I was hopeful that they were going to keep coming up. I was hopeful that I’d done the work and that I wasn’t going to need to go back on trt. But then they started dropping again and I remember at one point my numbers were 1.1 nanomoles a liter.

Ollie Matthews [00:19:11]:
Bearing in mind UK 8 to 29 is the range. So they were rock bottom. My estrogen had crashed as well, so my brain function wasn’t working. And at the same time, you’re pushing the nutrition, right, you’re pushing the training and you’re doing everything seemingly right, but you’re not getting the improvements. And I would wake up, I would be crying for no reason. And I’ve always been a guy that would not get emotional and cry at films, but unless it was a dog. And now it’s. I don’t know if you’ve got kids at all, but like Now I basically cry at kids in films.

Ollie Matthews [00:19:49]:
Now I’ve got a kid. I didn’t think I would ever do that, but I was more emotional than ever. And you’re trying to run a business, your brain doesn’t work. And some complex cases that I’ve worked on, clients of epilepsy, clients with Crohn’s, like a lot of deep autoimmune conditions, Lyme disease and stuff like that, and I’m like, I can function for an hour a day. So I had to go back with a clinic and get it all prescribed here in the uk, which is another talking point, I suppose as well, is that when you can get testosterone underground lab for like 10 of what you pay for a clinic, it’s hard for people to justify going to a clinic and paying for that medical advice. But even I have bounced ideas off of the doctor that I work with. I do a podcast with the doctor that I work with as well, but I bounce ideas all the time off of him and ask second opinions. And that is priceless.

Ollie Matthews [00:20:46]:
When you actually get those second opinions, rather than putting those ideas to a Facebook group where, again, people don’t know the context. And just because there’s 10,000 people there saying, start off with 200 milligrams a week and see where you go. No, start low and build up, like to a decent amount, but build up from there. And that’s where I am now. It’s a. It’s a long journey of what got me here. But originally going back to pre bodybuilding days, as I say, I had signs of that low testosterone in my early 20s. I went to the doctors with.

Ollie Matthews [00:21:20]:
With low sex drive and couldn’t sleep, and they gave me Zopiclone and they gave me Viagra as a guy in his early 20s. And I look back now and I grew up from 2 to 18 in a room of black mold. And that was. I was overweight during puberty as well. And I think that’s an un understated thing that we need to look at. Is the health of a boy turn into a man in puberty or growing into a teenager in puberty is vital for optimal testosterone levels. And we have youths that are more and more obese than they’ve been for generations beforehand. So is this testosterone problem gonna get better? I don’t think it’s getting better anytime soon.

Nick Urban [00:22:10]:
Yeah. What do you see in your male clients now that you recognize from your own younger self?

Ollie Matthews [00:22:21]:
It’s a good one, but I mean, I primarily work with guys that are around my age or a few years younger. But I would say that there’s a frustration that they’ve got to ask for help as guys. A lot of us don’t like to ask for help, especially in an age where we’ve got AI and we can get some amazing stuff from AI. But I have coaches in business and different people I speak to in health, because AI doesn’t keep me accountable. And I feel that’s a key thing, is that the people I work with, their families are looking out for them. My wife is needing my support, my daughter’s needing my support. I want to support my mum, I want to support my stepdad, I want to support my family. So I should be the one that’s able to step up without doing this.

Ollie Matthews [00:23:07]:
But there’s a frustration that these guys have had to invest in order to get the results. That essentially is helping them be a better dad, a better leader in their business, a better partner and everything else. And there’s also. There’s this frustration as well, that. And just because something like going towards the erectile dysfunction side of things, it doesn’t just mean you’ve got erectile dysfunction, you’ve got low testosterone. There’s far more. That’s far more to it than that. You may have fine testosterone and different causes of erectile dysfunction, but guys think they’re letting their wife down, they’re letting their girlfriend, they’re letting their partners down and they get embarrassed about it.

Ollie Matthews [00:23:54]:
I think about once or twice a month, I put on Instagram, I put a story just saying, hey, I never take it for granted that guys are coming into my DMs, they’re talking about problems with testosterone, they’re talking about anxiety, panic attacks, erectile dysfunction. They’re talking about problems that are very personal. And I’m so grateful that they feel they’re able to do that. Most of these guys don’t sign up as a client. I’m picky on who I work with, but they come in and they ask for advice and I’ve got so much content, I can just say, go and look at this, go and look at that. Let’s chat through it. Let me see whether I can help you. Let me look at your bloods.

Ollie Matthews [00:24:30]:
Let me see what we can do. And I don’t. I don’t feel ever take that for granted. I hope I don’t take it for granted, but you never know. But I hope I don’t ever take that for granted.

Nick Urban [00:24:43]:
For a guy who’s frustrated and starting from zero. Walk me through your One method, the

Ollie Matthews [00:24:49]:
one method we have, own it, nourish it, elevate it. Now the first phase, own it when someone comes to me, is exactly that. What’s happened before, we can’t change that. We’re working on that. It’s about drawing a line in the sand. And with that, a lot of times we can keep bringing up the past and everything else. The past has got you here, it’s made you into the awesome person you are. We don’t want to forget that.

Ollie Matthews [00:25:15]:
We have to use that to actually look how we move forward. But we don’t want to keep using it as an excuse. We don’t want to keep using it is the reason we’re not there. It’s happened, it’s. Every single person is different. I’ve worked with twins and they get into their 50s. They are completely different people and we have to recognize that that’s where owning it. We look to test it, we look to look exactly what you’re doing food wise.

Ollie Matthews [00:25:37]:
We look to start just building the foundations in there and then we move on to the second phase. Nourish it. And the nourish it phase, as you can think, is about nutrition. Now we might have been a bit more supplement heavy to get quicker feeling, better results. The nourish it phase comes in. We want to pull as many supplements out as we can. I’m about getting real food in there. I’m about making sure that people are able to nourish their body effectively and that supplements are crossing the T’s and.in the eyes.

Ollie Matthews [00:26:07]:
They’re the things we may need a little bit extra of. And at different times we put more in, we put less in and we might have heavier supplement times, we might have lower supplement times. There’s very few supplements. I mean I have vitamin D3 and K2, I’ll have a good omega and a magnesium glycine. It pretty much throughout the year and like the other things, I’ll go in and out of pretty much a lot of the time. And then elevator is the consistency, elevator is bringing the training into the level we want. So many times we chuck every single thing in and we become overwhelmed. We, we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s not working, we don’t know what we need to adjust.

Ollie Matthews [00:26:46]:
And this is usually over a three month period but some people will compound it down into a smaller period. They may already be training and we just, we look to maybe back off some of the training. Some people, very rare people are training too Hard when it comes to the right stuff in the gym, they might be doing too much volume, they might be doing too much cardio, they might be doing too much strength. And we need to balance it up a bit. But that third phase is where we really look at optimizing the training. We’ve got this foundation in place. And I wrote a chapter in my book about Mount Everest. And just a side note, I’ve become friends with Bear Grylls and we’ve worked together with some different things.

Ollie Matthews [00:27:25]:
And I quoted him in my book in 2018 when it was released. And it wasn’t until earlier this year that I actually was like, oh, giving him my book. I better ask to use that quote. But there’s a quote from Bear Grylls about Everest in there. But when people climb Mount Everest, they have to first trek to Base Camp and they have to acclimatize at Base Camp. They are the foundations. And I really feel that health is. We need to look at how people climb Mount Everest to improve our health.

Ollie Matthews [00:27:50]:
And we need that foundational level of health. When you’ve got health, we need good sleep, we need good strength and cardio training. And we need to stay on top of seeing what’s actually going on, just to develop a full picture when it comes to ideal blood work. And then when people climb the the mountain, they go up to Camp 1, they do rotations, they come down and they start to recover, they acclimatize, they go up to Camp 2, Camp 3, they might come down, then they might go Camp 4 in the death zone and summit. And the key thing that we need to look at is that people go to their goal and then they fall off. People go to the summit. More deaths happen on the way down from the summit than they do on the way up. And that’s crucial with health.

Ollie Matthews [00:28:33]:
We have different seasons when we need to push to Camp 1, we have different seasons to go to Camp 2, and we have the goal that we want to get to. Maybe it’s dropping £100. Why do people put things back on board? Because they haven’t built those foundations in place. They’re going and having weight loss jabs to lose that weight and it’s number on the scale rather than foundational health. And then they hit that goal, stop the jabs and then start the habits again. Even without jabs, people have done it for decades where they’ve lowered their weight without changing the methods, done unsustainable things, not looked at the psychology, and then they’ve hit the summit, they’ve hit their goal and then they’ve come back down. I used to do it all the time with bodybuilding, where you’d have this on season and off season and suddenly you’re just this bloated mess. Two months after the show.

Ollie Matthews [00:29:17]:
You spent three, four months of dieting cardio most days. And it’s so unsustainable. But, but you’re doing it for a reason. It’s not healthy. You’re doing it for a specific reason to get on stage. Although I would have argued that it was healthy back in the day, it wasn’t healthy at all. And then you’re a bloated mess afterwards. And I feel that we need to constantly be in that base camp level of health.

Ollie Matthews [00:29:40]:
And that’s where the elevated phase in the one method we just elevate to certain things or we have certain goals. I have clients that do hyroxes and we do like A and B races. They might just optimize for hyrox, they might be doing jiu jitsu, they might be doing a half marathon, they might be doing a photo shoot. It’s very rare. I will help people with photo shoots now because I want healthier methods that I’m working with people they might be doing. I’ve worked with MMA fires and we’re doing weight cuts and things like that. And again, it’s. You need those foundational levels of health to actually get much further ahead in life.

Ollie Matthews [00:30:16]:
I believe

Nick Urban [00:30:18]:
you said two things there that I want to double click into. The first is that at the time you would have argued that your approach to living, your cutting and I guess regaining in preparation, like the cycle around the shows, you would argue that was healthy. You also used to work on the psychology in order to make sure that the changes, the desirable changes persist. How do you reconcile those?

Ollie Matthews [00:30:43]:
So getting healthy after the bodybuilding stuff,

Nick Urban [00:30:48]:
if at the time you thought you were in a healthy state and looking back on it, you don’t think you were. And psychology is really important to make sure that the ideal changes persist in the way you want them to. How do you go about actually implementing that?

Ollie Matthews [00:31:05]:
It’s hard to say how I done it individually because to 2012 being my last show, now being in 2026, that’s what, 14 years of different self work. And it probably was two, three years after competing, when my business started doing really well and I was growing, working with endurance athletes, that I realized that that wasn’t a healthy lifestyle. That was the extreme, literally the extreme of extreme where you, you’re fighting for A plastic trophy. Basically you’re fighting for pictures, which are great to show your grandkids and stuff, but even now I’m like, should I do a photo shoot? Clients don’t care about me being ridiculously shredded. They hopefully they care more about me being able to get them healthy, get their energy back. And then I do feel that guys should be able to be close to seeing abs and like get just see abs. Maybe not be shredded year round, but abs aren’t just for the beach. They are a sign of health as well and a sign of lowered insulin resistance and so forth.

Ollie Matthews [00:32:09]:
But you don’t need to be photo shoot ready year round. You don’t need to be. Definitely don’t need to be stage ready year round and even health wise as well. I’m about 20 kilos heavier than when I competed, but I’ve been another 20 kilos heavier on top of this. And that was not comfortable. That was not comfortable. When you can’t sleep because you’re waking up and there’s pretty. Certainly would have been sleep apnea at the time.

Ollie Matthews [00:32:36]:
And that’s not a healthy thing to be. Whether it’s me, as I say, getting into my 40s, whether it’s becoming a dad, whether it’s. Whatever it is, is that if you focus on aesthetics only, chances are you get unhealthy. If you focus on health, chances are you get much better with your aesthetics. And I was focusing on the aesthetics. I was focusing on getting on a stage and it was always chasing that because you get on that stage and you think, I need more definition in my quads. I would look at pictures now and I remember taking those pictures thinking that I was overweight. I was literally like a week or two out from a bodybuilding show.

Ollie Matthews [00:33:19]:
I wasn’t Olympia, don’t get me wrong, I was. This is like smaller stages and stuff that it was very much like I was 72 kilos when I last competed. I’m like 90, 93, 94 at the moment. So it was a big jump where I am now compared to where I was before. Say it’s been 14 years, but it wasn’t a healthy place to be at. But then psychologically, I think that is underestimated how much we have to work on our psychological state, our mindset when it comes to improving our health, even as to why we get unhealthy in the first place. I’m a Christian and one of the big quotes when we look at Jesus’s quotes is to love your neighbor like yourself. But I would argue that we started loving our neighbor like we love ourselves.

Ollie Matthews [00:34:10]:
A lot of us would not be loving our neighbor. We wouldn’t be saying kind things to them. We wouldn’t be treating them the way we need to treat them. A lot of people will treat their family, their friends better than they treat themselves. So if we can actually look deeper in and say we do love ourselves, we might start to get further ahead. If we can look at the reasons why we may be emotionally eat and everyone does emotional eating. If you want to see if we do emotional eating, do you eat birthday cake? Do you eat different at Christmas? Those are emotional ties. But when people emotional say binge eat, for example, which I definitely have been guilty of that before.

Ollie Matthews [00:34:50]:
And at times if things get really stressful, I do crave extra food. People are only human. When I was going through the testosterone stuff, I was eating really well, but I was craving so bad. And, and even times where there’s been things happen in life and business. And I remember when my nan died, that was like 2016. Yeah, 16. I went to like three days of just eating crap because there was a lot of. I used to have a lot of roast dinners with my nan.

Ollie Matthews [00:35:22]:
I used to have a lot of like the, the candy bowl, like all the different things where you would remember these things. So a lot of things were tied to emotions. And people underestimate. When we go to improve our health, we need to know why. Why do we really want to do it? And I filmed a real the other day and it was talking about Ryan Reynolds and how Ryan Reynolds kicked me in the balls to improve my health. And 2016, this is when, as I said, I was working with endurance athletes, really doing well in the nutrition side of things. But I tried to run The London Marathon 2014, basically blown both my Achilles. It took over a year to get back in shape.

Ollie Matthews [00:36:02]:
We were planning my wedding going into the 30th birthday in 2016 as well. And I just was like, okay, I can’t do much nutrition wise. I need to just, I’ll go down the powerlifting route. But I couldn’t deadlift properly because my Achilles had issues there. I had to see a doctor. I was going to LA for a conference or I’ll see one of the world’s best doctors about it. So we started working on that with some physical therapy. But it was very much that I was massively, massively overweight.

Ollie Matthews [00:36:33]:
And I remember a week after my wedding, May 1st was my wedding, May 21st was my birthday. So it was in between that time we Started watching Deadpool and the first Deadpool when Ryan Reynolds has got his top off and he’s absolutely shredded. And then he gets in the acid. And I’m like, my wife had just made the comments like, I remember when you used to look like that. And I’m like, wow, she’s just said that she’s kicked me in the balls and that hit me enough to then start to do something about it. I remember it was about 35 pounds that I dropped between May and then our honeymoon in September because, wow, I had enough of it. But it has to get so bad that we know we can do something about it and we know why. So that was.

Ollie Matthews [00:37:19]:
My wife is looking at another guy and then basically, yes, it’s a Hollywood actor. It’s someone like, they’ll. They’ll pretty certainly be like women and stuff like that that you look at like that. Even though yet again, Christian, we shouldn’t be looking at that with like, watch where your eye goes. But it’s very much. We see these things and we need to know why. I look now when, when clients come to me and they hear my story about my dad, that they may be 47 and they know they’re hitting all the stresses that my dad used to have. And they’re like, I want to be here for my kids.

Ollie Matthews [00:37:53]:
And I know myself say my daughter being just over 116 months old, that if I died when my dad died, he was 47, my daughter would be 8 years old when she loses her dad. And I know that I’ve got to do every single thing to move my health forward, to be here for her, knowing what it’s like to be a 15 year old without a dad, to drastically change your life in one summer holidays, to instantly have things like happen. I’ve said so many times, and I said it before my daughter was here, but I did not know what it meant until my daughter actually was born. Is that if you can’t get healthy for your child, you never will. You can’t look at your child and think, I have to improve my health. I have to stop eating so much junk food, I have to stop drinking so much. I have to do something at the gym. Doesn’t mean go to the gym five, six times a week.

Ollie Matthews [00:38:52]:
That’s something where people then end up just doing so much that they can’t keep it up, that there’s an excuse to actually say, I can’t do it. It’s doing the bare minimum to move ahead. If you can’t look at your child and Say I’m going to do everything so I can grow old enough to see them, to see her walk down the aisle, to see my grandkids being born, to see whatever it is chapter in their life, then no one will ever improve their health. If they can’t do it for them, they never will. And I’m so passionate about that. I’ve said before about my mission of I want to help 1 million dads not die before seeing their children grow up. And it’s something I’ve said before. My daughter was here, but when my daughter came and I held her in my arms the first time, I was like, whoa, I’ve got to do something about this.

Ollie Matthews [00:39:44]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:39:46]:
Wow. Behavior change is notoriously, really difficult, especially when there’s so many tempting shortcuts. And how do you help people get clear on what is their one overarching reason to stick through things when they get tough, and then also to reverse engineer their path there? Because like you said, people either tend to not do enough or to do way too much. And if they do, if they do way too much, then it’s not sustainable and ultimately they throw up their hands and quit eventually. So how do you make sure that someone’s able to actually walk the, the path in between those two extremes?

Ollie Matthews [00:40:23]:
I like to get them to say what they’re going to do, what they’re going to commit to. I think that’s a big thing. And if someone tells me that they’re going to go to the gym five times, I will start them off on three times. Because people always want to do everything at first and we need to just pull back from that. And I feel that if I can get them doing the minimum, their brain can’t use it as an excuse. I’ve had people simply take an omega free supplement and they take that supplement and they start to say, okay, what else can I take? Or if someone’s for example, having, hopefully they’re not, but having like 12 McDonald’s a week, my goal is to first get them to eight, to get them to six, not to completely cut that out. And we have to do it in stages. This world is a quick, fast, instant results world.

Ollie Matthews [00:41:09]:
We see people, as we’ve said, having weight loss jobs that are losing 50, 60 pounds in a few months, which is causing other issues on their body. And again, we can get into that if we want to, but it’s causing other issues in our body which then loss of muscle tissue and things going on there. But we’re sold quick fixes. Influencers are getting Paid to sell quick fixes of supplements, supplements that they’ve never even tried, which still I hate that if someone comes to me for a supplement, I’m like, look, if you want me to promote it, send me some to try it first and if I like it, I might have a look at it, but if not, I’m not even going to think about it. I don’t care what you pay me. No one’s come to me for a million dollar supplement investment. Hopefully that would stay the same with that. But it’s very much we need to, as we say, if we know why we’re doing it and we set this realistic time frame, it’s still going to be having that conversation with them multiple times a month to say we are on track.

Ollie Matthews [00:42:04]:
You’ve lost a couple of pounds this week, you’ve lost a pound this week, you’ve got stronger this week, you’ve stayed consistent this week and finding the wins. I had a couple of my clients where one of one of their friends, their daughter committed suicide. And this is a. A young girl, 14 years old, committed suicide. And my client came to me the week after and was like, phil, just like, I’ve just let you down because I’ve eaten crap of like, not exercised. I’m like, look, there’s other things going on. You’ve got your three girls, you’ve got to make sure that one of her girls was, was the girl’s friend. That life is just more than just like, you went out for pizza, you enjoyed that, you had family time and you’re still on track.

Ollie Matthews [00:42:57]:
There’s no deadline to this, but we need to move things forward and I think everything needs to be put into context. People share the highlights on Instagram. I like to share. I don’t like to share things, but I do share things when they’re not going well as well as they’re going well. But I’ll still not share every single thing. Right. And I think we’re all guilty of that to a degree. Is that don’t want to, like, you don’t hang your dirty laundry out in public is what they say.

Ollie Matthews [00:43:19]:
Right. But it’s. People share the highlights. We only see what good is going on in the world. We don’t share what’s bad all the time. We don’t share the crap that people are going through, which then makes people think that people aren’t going through this as well. It’s. Is it men’s.

Ollie Matthews [00:43:38]:
It’s Men’s Health or Men’s Mental Health Month in June and Guys don’t talk enough about this stuff. They don’t talk about what’s going on. And we want this quick fix. They think that they’re going to put 20 pounds of muscle on in a year. They’re going to go from 300 pounds of being overweight to 200 pounds being jacked, and it’s going to just click their fingers and it’s done. It’s a lot to lose weight. We could argue we’re in the easiest time in the world to lose weight with the science we’ve got at hand, with the supplements and with the, the medications we’ve got. But to lose weight healthily, to keep it off and to keep those habits sustainably, it’s not just doing the habits, it’s fighting the devil that the.

Ollie Matthews [00:44:19]:
The person on your shoulder that is telling you to go down the other route of the quick fix because it’s going to be easier. People jumping. We look at peptides as well, right? It’s a conversation where, like, I love looking at peptides, but then you could be on a peptide cycle and then chuck something else in. Chuck something else in, you don’t see what’s worked. You need to be patient with that stuff. And people will jump on peptides without optimal hormones. People will jump on hormones without doing anything else themselves.

Nick Urban [00:44:48]:
Ollie, I’ve heard you say that you fix your gut, you fix your hormones. What exactly is going on there? Because also there’s the psychology side of things that you mentioned. It’s important to get that in place in order to have sustaining, durable results. But then also there’s like the biochemistry and there’s the gut. Why is working on the gut for the goals that you’ve been talking about important?

Ollie Matthews [00:45:11]:
I think there’s a piece of the puzzle. So, like, it’s a bit absolute same, fix your hormones. I feel it’s one big piece of the puzzle because we have to be able to absorb nutrients, the nutrients we put into our mouth, the raw materials for hormones, we need to be able to get those into our body and we do that for absorption through the gut and then we have good gut health. It’s going to help with glucose management, which is going to help with better sleep quality, hopefully as well, and which is then going to be better detoxification and also where we create things like testosterone as well in our, in our deeper sleep. But. But a lot of people have problems with their gut and then it’s take a probiotic, take a prebiotic, take a postbiotic, or whatever it is that people want to then take. They end up that they’re not then dealing with the gut where it needs to be. So there’s information there.

Ollie Matthews [00:46:03]:
We need to sort that information. People have got reflux, they’ll take reflux medication and stop absorption even more. And the gut is a big part of the picture. If we can have good gut health, we can absorb the nutrients to create hormones. We can also work more effectively on clearing hormones as well. Once hormones have essentially been used and we go through the cycle, we see a lot of people with cortisol buildup or so they’re slow metabolizing cortisol and so then their body stops producing cortisol as effectively. So we don’t have the good metabolism of it. The same with estrogen clearance and everything else.

Ollie Matthews [00:46:41]:
And gut health is just going to help us overall with that stuff.

Nick Urban [00:46:49]:
Is there a particular approach or sequence or thing you like to do to help people with their gut health? Of course it’s going to vary depending on what the person has like their terrain. But then are there any general principles?

Ollie Matthews [00:47:01]:
I feel we do need fiber and it’s massively a big thing on social media where people are going down the carnival diet. I feel great. But then we look deeper into what’s going on adrenals and everywhere there and we see burnout further down the line. And if someone isn’t able to digest fiber it tells me that there’s problems with their gut. Same if someone goes plant based and they say I feel better. It’s either they’ve moved from a junk food based diet to a healthier plant based diet. Could be similar with, with carnivore as well. But tells me they haven’t got the stomach acid to digest the protein, the, the animal protein.

Ollie Matthews [00:47:44]:
So we need to. Again, I don’t like to go extremes with diets. I’ve had people go carnival for a period of time or keto for a period of time. I’ve had people go more plant based for a period of time. Very rarely, very rarely I’d have more plant based like it’s. I want to work someone towards the point where they can eat what they want to a degree. And because if their body’s not craving stuff then, or if they’re not craving stuff, they’re not going to necessarily want to eat it. If we get the emotional stuff sorted right then they’re not going to want to eat certain stuff.

Ollie Matthews [00:48:16]:
But they don’t have to follow the extremes because when you then start traveling to different places in the world, right. So hard to follow A diet if you’re eating out all the time and then the same thing with seed oils and stuff like that, and overarching like, I don’t want loads of seed oils on people’s diet. But if people are so stressed out about the fact that their body is going to react to having a meal where it’s cooked in seed oils once or twice, that’s going to cause issues as well. So it’s consistency over perfection is like, don’t have seed oils where you can’t have seed oils. Eat real food. When you can eat real food, eat fiber to a good degree. And I think fiber is just one of the big, big things that people underestimate how much we need. And then we’ve also been pushed to eat five portions of fruit and veg.

Ollie Matthews [00:49:03]:
It’s your five a day when it comes to fruit and vegetables. So people go for the fruit rather than the vegetables. And I see parents who tell me their kids don’t eat vegetables. And I say, well, I’ve seen your food diary and you don’t eat many vegetables, so why are your kids not eating vegetables? Look at you. Like, fiber is a big thing when it comes to the gut, but again, the gut needs to be able to absorb. It has its own nervous system, the enteric nervous system, if you are stressed. And this is where I suppose the psychological aspect comes in, because we need the brain to be functioning right. Neurological inflammation isn’t a good thing at high levels and going into trauma and prime glial cells and everything else and having to work on that side of things.

Ollie Matthews [00:49:47]:
The brain is going to be dictating what happens with the gut. People say the gut is your second brain. Yeah, but what came first, the chicken or the egg? You’ve got the vagus nerve sending messages from the brain to the guy. Sending messages from the gut to the brain as well. So we need good health in both of them, but we need this, the stress perception, to be right. There’s the book by Robert Sapolsky called Behave and then why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and talks about. Just because someone’s poor doesn’t mean they’re inherently going to be stressed. It’s what that perception of being poor means to them.

Ollie Matthews [00:50:23]:
And I feel that’s so overlooked. I’ve seen people that are multi millionaires that are stressed out so much and they’ve got to that level with a dopamine hit and then that’s not enough. They need to be earning more and more, opening more businesses. And I’ve seen people where I’ve been lucky enough to speak in Colombia and we trekked into the rainforest and there’s people there literally in a hut and they are just happy. Then you see that and it puts things into perspective that actually there’s a lot of stress we put on ourselves in the Western world. When we start putting things into perspective. That. That girl, my.

Ollie Matthews [00:51:01]:
My friend’s friend who. Who committed suicide, her life was gone. Her family was changed instantly for stuff that they were going through. My dad died instantly over a week from having a stroke and having to turn off his life support machine. Life is too short to. I still stress out about things, but I say this hoping I listen back and hear it myself, that life is too short to be stressing out about. Some of the things we stress at. If you’ve got an iPhone, if you’re listening to this podcast, if you are like driving in a car, if you got a roof over your head,

Nick Urban [00:51:36]:
there’s

Ollie Matthews [00:51:36]:
a lot less to be stressed out than actually people think. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:51:40]:
Recently I’ve been practicing just feeling and being happy without needing to have some kind of external reason for it. Just because I feel like being happy. And it’s interesting that it’s hard for me to decouple. It has been hard for me to decouple, like my internal state and something external, but I find that it’s rewarding and it hopefully is a good practice that will enable that kind of thing in the future as well.

Ollie Matthews [00:52:07]:
That’s a cool thing. How. How are you doing that?

Nick Urban [00:52:13]:
When I wake up and I feel good or decent, I don’t. I stop myself from looking for an. An external reason about why that would be. Or if I just notice my mood changes. I don’t necessarily need to find something that attribute it too. I’m totally fine just being in that state and not needing to know why. And then the more I do that, the more easier it becomes. Just like when I notice myself in a weird state to just pause for a second and be like, huh? Why? Overall, I’m going to zoom out on my life in this situation that I’m in right now that is making me sad.

Nick Urban [00:52:47]:
I say in quotation marks, it’s ultimately going to be a blip in the radar. Yeah. If you zoom out far enough. So like, do I really need to let this get me down? And that’s different than just like bypassing the experience. Like, I’m okay feeling sad temporarily as long as I can, like feel it and then move on, but I don’t need to like let it color my day, month, year, decade.

Ollie Matthews [00:53:10]:
Yeah, that’s a good one. It’s a good one. I tell you. With my daughter, I remember it took about six months of me before I sat down. I remember on a Sunday morning I couldn’t put her in her cot. Like every time she napped, I’ve got to put her in her court and she would wake up again. So I remember just sitting there holding her and didn’t have my phone on me. And I was thinking, this could be a 20 minute nap or it could be a two hour nap.

Ollie Matthews [00:53:37]:
It was a two hour nap. But that was amazing because I’m just there, I’m listening to her breathe. And that this creation that we were told we couldn’t have kids, we’ve now got her. And you’re sitting there just present. And there’s a film, Peaceful Warrior. Have you seen that?

Nick Urban [00:53:56]:
No.

Ollie Matthews [00:53:56]:
And he talks out, talks about taking out the trash. It’s a true story about a gymnast. And one of my mentors got me to watch was amazing. It changed my life and changed my thinking just about. They walk through a park. This isn’t a spoiler for anyone. Anyone watches it. They walk through a park and they like pushes.

Ollie Matthews [00:54:17]:
This guy was going over a bridge and he pushes him into the water, into a lake, and he’s like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he’s like, what are you thinking in that moment? Nothing. You were present, you took out the trash and then suddenly it zooms in and there’s like a bird feeding its young. There’s a couple having their first kiss, there’s a guy throwing a frisbee for the dog. So what’s going on? Nothing’s going on. There’s never nothing going on. And we need to take out the trash and be present. And so many times we are just go, go, go. We’re walking down the street, we’re scrolling through social media and I think there’s one thing that I’ve learned from being a dad, that one big thing, there’s a lot of things I’ve learned is just trying to be present, which is ridiculous, ridiculously hard.

Ollie Matthews [00:55:06]:
When you’re self employed, you’re running a business and so forth, but trying to be present and actually in the moment, as you say, is this moment gonna matter? Like those are the moments that matter, but the ones where we get stressed out, are they really gonna matter next week, let alone next year?

Nick Urban [00:55:26]:
Yeah. And I think if you are actually completely present, you’re not able to, to feel stress it’s when your mind goes to the past and links to the current situation, to the past or to the future and thinking about all the potential outcomes of this, that’s when this stress is built and amplifies. Because you said something earlier that is important to circle back on. And it’s not necessarily the absolute level of stress that is the big issue, it’s the self perception of it. And it’s nice to know that on one hand as like a thought experiment. But then how do you actually go about altering your perceived level of stress?

Ollie Matthews [00:56:03]:
I think it is practicing being in the moment we’ve just spoken about. I honestly feel that is the case. But it’s easier said than done. Don’t get me wrong, like life will throw curveballs at you and you have that instant reaction and then catching yourself again. It’s hard to do, but it’s very much that. We just have to practice it. And don’t get annoyed if you catch yourself after that moment where you’ve been, you know, been pissed, you’ve been pissed off and suddenly that ah, you’re frustrated because you didn’t catch yourself. Catch yourself.

Ollie Matthews [00:56:37]:
Then someone cuts you up at a roundabout or something. I know that in the US it’s more like traffic lights and stuff, but someone cuts you up at a roundabout, you don’t know what’s going through that person’s mind, whether they’ve just lost a loved one, whether it’s they’re on the way to get their child from hospital after they’ve just been born or whatever it is. Don’t judge the people just did. Did anyone get hurt? They cut you up. They may not even known they cut you up. They may not have known, they didn’t indicate. But so many people, and this is. You could go into genetics with like comt.

Ollie Matthews [00:57:09]:
Genetics and stuff like that where it’s like struggling to wind down and things. But so many times we. It’s like call someone an idiot or worse, they’re a dick or whatever it is and we don’t know what’s going on in their life and we’re never going to know what’s going on in someone else’s life. I’m never going to know exactly what my wife’s thinking. Be crazy if I did. Like but. Or what my daughter’s thinking or whatever it is. We’re never going to know anyone.

Ollie Matthews [00:57:35]:
But these eyes, like my eyes, you’re never going to know anything but seeing through your eyes. So we’re never going to actually truly understand what it’s like to be in someone else’s mind or from their perspective. We can think, but we’re only ever going to know ours. And I feel, as you say, that we can hold on to something, we can let it go, and it’s something. Again, I say this because it’s stuff that I work on as well. I don’t have this all in check. I don’t even pretend to have it all in check. It’s stuff to constantly be working on.

Ollie Matthews [00:58:05]:
What, all the work in progress.

Nick Urban [00:58:07]:
Yeah, I like that. And when you feel your blood starting to boil, that’s the. The trigger. That’s the cue in itself, the that this is where that kind of work is the most needed to just to insert the wedge between the stimulus and the response for a second, and then you can decide how you want to react or respond to the situation.

Ollie Matthews [00:58:27]:
Now, someone said to me, they said, when you’re pointing a finger at someone, there’s three pointing back at you. The things we get annoyed at in other people are usually the things that we’re doing ourselves that we need to work on. And that is so true.

Nick Urban [00:58:39]:
Yeah. Because a lot of times these things, objectively, if you take a hundred people and you put them in the same situation, some of them will not respond the same way that you do. And if some people don’t respond that way, it means it’s not a universal thing. It’s specific to you. And however many other people in that lineup do the same thing. But there’s other ways of approaching the same situation.

Ollie Matthews [00:58:58]:
Yep, exactly. I like that. I like it.

Nick Urban [00:59:00]:
Well, Ollie, we’ll start to wind this one down pretty soon. What is a question about men’s health that you wish someone would finally ask you on a podcast?

Ollie Matthews [00:59:09]:
Oh, that’s a good one. We covered the things with regard to that. It’s not just about injecting testosterone or cream or whatever it is. We need to look at the foundations of it. I think stuff about testosterone isn’t just a men’s hormone as well. Women need it as well. And that’s understated when we look at hormone replacement therapy for women. Yeah, I don’t know.

Ollie Matthews [00:59:33]:
Honestly don’t know what the question would be.

Nick Urban [00:59:36]:
Well, that’s a good one. I think those are all valid, and I think you can take that from the conversation about testosterone specifically, and you can expand it to a lot of other topics before implementing whatever the latest trend. Flashy thing is, get the basics in check. And then the thing that you add on top of it, the next layer, the thing that everyone likes to talk about will become much more effective and potentially with fewer side effects.

Ollie Matthews [01:00:00]:
I think as well. We’ve touched on a lot of the mindset stuff here and that’s understated so much, how much that we need to work on that stuff, that it’s not just the supplements, it’s not just the nutrition, it’s not just the medications or even the training. Most guys, when they come to me, that arm, I’m just going to go to the gym for a bit and they’re not. That’s the easy bit. It’s the bit where it’s. The sexy stuff that people talk about on Instagram is doing your bench, PBS and everything else. But it’s very much we need to deal with the uncomfortable stuff, the things that go on in our mind. If we’re putting it to the side, we need to deal with it.

Nick Urban [01:00:41]:
Yeah, yeah. The more you won’t resist something specifically, it’s probably the right area for you to look. I mean, even with your example of fiber earlier, if you can’t tolerate fiber, it means that there’s something that’s going wrong because you should be able to consume fiber and not have any bad reaction. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the right approach is just to slam a bunch of fiber right then, but like to figure out what’s going on in the gut so that you can, you can build up to a healthy dose of fiber. And again, you can take that principle and apply it to a lot of areas.

Ollie Matthews [01:01:11]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:01:11]:
Health and wellness.

Ollie Matthews [01:01:12]:
Yeah. A lot of people go to the extremes. Right. And I think that’s a very. Women do it, but men do it a lot more. As we say, like higher dose of testosterone, go from zero to like, oh, we’re gonna. 50 grams of fiber a day. I’m stuffed up.

Ollie Matthews [01:01:23]:
Yeah. I’m not surprised that we need to gradually and it’s patience. We want that quick result. We want to drop that 50 pounds, we want to put on those 20 pounds of muscle. We want to be the strongest person in the gym and all that stuff, it happens over. It’s compounded over multiple sessions, multiple weeks, multiple months. The minimum time I work with someone is three months. But most people, I tell them that we need to be working at least six months.

Ollie Matthews [01:01:52]:
And my goal is to get them in that place where they can then go and continue these things themselves. But health is a lifelong journey. There are going to be things that throw me health wise that I don’t know about yet. There’s things that have thrown me as I’ve said about with, with the low sperm count, with the testosterone issues, with dealing with anxiety and depression and panic attacks and stuff like that, that you never know when it’s going to come. We need to adjust and be able to switch things up and move at the time and learn new things. We need to be open with that, but we need to be patient and underlying. As we said and as I’ve said that that base camp fitness, that base camp health, definitely where I would focus on. Make sure you’ve got some foundational level of health, stay on top of checking it and you’ll know where your body’s going as well.

Nick Urban [01:02:45]:
Beautiful. Ollie, how do people connect with you if they want to work with you? Where do you want to send them?

Ollie Matthews [01:02:50]:
I would say Instagram’s the best place. Ollie Matthews Health or we’ve got OJ Health, OJY Health. Behind me.com is my website where you can, there’s a slot you can book in for a call if you want to have a health chat. And yeah, I’m, I’m happy to help where I can that. I’m not someone that’s going to be you booking for a call. I’m not going to push you to sign up. If I can help you on that call, I will help you do that. As I say, a lot of times though, we need more context.

Ollie Matthews [01:03:18]:
So it’s about learning things and I’ll point you in the right direction. I want to help people if I can. I absolutely will.

Nick Urban [01:03:26]:
Awesome. Well, Ollie, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.

Ollie Matthews [01:03:29]:
Appreciate you having me, Nick.

Nick Urban [01:03:32]:
Until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned@outlier.com until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized and be an outlier.