Fix the Weak Link: MECA Founder David Lawrence on Training NFL Athletes and Getting Your Health Back

On this week's Dealer Out of Office, hosts Jake and Frank sit down with David Lawrence, founder and CEO of MECA, strength coach to more than 100 professional and Olympic athletes, and the guy who rebuilt Frank's offseason training. Dave and Frank go back to Central Michigan, where Dave was a walk-on and Frank was a young player on the rise. The conversation covers a broken foot that never healed, a $200 loan from his mom, and why Dave tells busy professionals to eat 30 grams of protein before they open their inbox.

David Lawrence didn't plan to build the busiest personal training business in Michigan. He planned to play in the NFL. When injuries and bad training took that away, he decided to spend his career making sure other athletes got everything they had in them.

The Walk-On With a Broken Foot

Dave walked on at Central Michigan, and he was good. He ran a 4.5 forty with a 35 inch vertical as a sophomore and earned the attention of the strength staff after a championship season. Then he severed his fifth metatarsal. The bone never healed, and he played his last three years of college football on a broken foot.

Poor training took the next piece. A degenerative knee issue, which he traces back to how he was being trained, cost him more speed. By the following season he'd gained 18 to 20 pounds, his forty slowed to a 4.8, and his vertical dropped to 29 inches. Speed had been his edge, and once it was gone, he says, he was pretty average.

That was the moment that set the direction for everything after it. Dave says he never reached his potential as an athlete, and that stayed with him. He wanted to help the next kid in his position get everything out of his career, whether that career ended in the NFL or not. His estimate: maybe one in 50 athletes feels good about how their career ended.

He Couldn't Pass Math 105

Dave's degree was in physical education. He planned to be a gym teacher. Then he failed to pass Math 105, which took teaching off the table. His line on it: those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. If you can't teach gym, you become a personal trainer.

A Phone Call on Thursday, a Job on Monday

A teammate, Nick Bellore, kept telling Dave to check out strength coach Charles Poliquin. Dave bought Poliquin's book, Modern Trends in Strength Training, and read it in a day. Then he bought the rest of them. When Poliquin's Chicago center had an opening, he applied.

The call came on a Thursday night. After a quick phone interview, Poliquin asked if Dave could be in Chicago the next morning. Dave was in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. He couldn't. Poliquin told him to be there Monday and hung up. Dave borrowed about $200 from his mom to get there.

In his first week, he says, he worked with five first-round NFL draft picks. He describes watching the center's owner get Chicago Bears running back Matt Forte running in five days after a hamstring injury that had sidelined him for more than six months. Dave says he learned more in that first week than in five years of college.

$8,000, a Wixom Warehouse, and a $5,000 First Month

Dave and his wife were expecting their first child and wanted to be closer to family. He didn't set out to open a business. He wanted to train people. But the recession hit Metro Detroit hard, and he says nobody was hiring personal trainers.

He had about $8,000 in savings. The gym rent in Wixom was $1,300 a month. His apartment was $750. Between rent, equipment loans, and everything else, he needed about $5,000 a month to survive. The first month, the gym brought in about $5,000, and that's how MECA started.

Frank remembers that first warehouse gym. It was gritty, with random equipment and a small turf area for pushing sleds. Then came Novi, then Royal Oak, Brighton, and Grand Rapids. Today MECA has 45 full-time employees, another 10 to 12 part-time contractors, and more than 30 coaches. Dave says it delivers the most personal training sessions in the state of Michigan, with almost 400,000 sessions since it incorporated.

Find the Weak Link

Dave built MECA around an idea from business called the theory of constraints. An athlete, like a company, is only as strong as the weakest part of the system. So the first job is to find the gap holding someone back and fix that before anything else. It could be strength, tendon and ligament health, an inefficient nervous system, or big holes in nutrition.

Frank is the case study. Dave says Frank added about 90 pounds to his bench press in his first six months, and that he had too many weak links to get strong safely before that. If he had gotten stronger without fixing them first, Dave says, he would have gotten hurt.

Dave also explains why every program has to be individual. He points to seven main factors in program design, and even femur length matters. Long femurs help you run fast and jump high, which is why he says 85 to 90 percent of NFL wide receivers have disproportionately long femurs. The same femurs make squatting harder, and a squat done wrong can make an elite athlete slower. He also sorts athletes by how they respond best: volume, intensity, variation, or speed. Frank responds to intensity. Templates, Dave says, only work for about 18 months to two years.

Frank's First Assessment

Frank walked into his first assessment as a fifth-year NFL player who believed he ate healthy: turkey bacon, egg whites, and PB2 because the labels said healthy. He had just finished a season that ended in the playoffs and he was, in his words, soft. Dave took pre-pictures and calipers and gave him a two week plan with no wheat, flour, sugar, dairy, or gluten.

Then came the humbling part. Frank couldn't do a full pull-up from a dead hang. When he benched with three seconds down instead of bouncing the bar off his chest, 235 pounds felt completely different. The first two weeks were miserable. After that, he got addicted to the results.

Frank says the training added four to five years to his career and two more contracts. He gave up a closer gym to drive 30 minutes to Dave's, and he calls the investment pennies compared to what it made him.

Eat Breakfast. Stop Eating at 7 PM.

Jake asked the question a lot of listeners are thinking: what do you tell people grinding 10 to 12 hour days on takeout? Dave's answer is simple. Most people already know what to eat. They need accountability, and they need it to be easy.

His rules for anyone who wants to move the needle:

• Eat breakfast every day, with 30 grams of protein within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up.
• Stop eating after 7 p.m. and cut back on alcohol, which he says hurts sleep, recovery, and your nervous system.
• Exercise in the morning. He points to the book Spark and says morning exercise makes a big difference in output.
• Eat single ingredient whole foods when you can. His ideal breakfast is steak and eggs, or salmon with avocado, cashews, and almonds.

On intermittent fasting, Dave isn't a fan of skipping breakfast. He says it can raise cortisol, slow your metabolism, and set you up to binge at night. If you want to fast, he says, do it at night and stop eating at 4 p.m. He also points to research since 2022 suggesting that eating protein earlier in the day builds more muscle than eating the same amount later. We haven't verified that research, so check the sources before you quote it.

For Frank's early morning workouts, Dave recommends a clean protein shake that isn't pre-mixed, bone broth with collagen, or an amino acid formula. He created one with Spoken Nutrition that has a gram of tyrosine per serving, which he says supports dopamine and the thyroid and gives you clean energy without caffeine or neurotropics.

Sleep Builder

When Jake asked what a stressed-out parent can do to wind down at night besides alcohol, Dave pointed to Sleep Builder, a magnesium and glutamine formula he helped create with Spoken Nutrition. He says a study with Whoop showed every participant's sleep score improved within five days.

Dave was one of the formulators on the line, along with Andy O'Brien, strength coach for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Jordan Shallow, who has worked with athletes including Shaquille O'Neal. Dave says it was built for athletes and high performing executives, to help you bring your nervous system up during the day and take it down at night.

Try Spoken Sleep Builder (Cherry, 8.8 oz)

Start With Five Minutes

For anyone who used to be an athlete and wants to get back to it, Dave's advice is to start small. Five minutes is infinitely better than zero. Twenty minutes moves the needle for a lot of people. A 30 minute daily walk, he says, improves your mental, emotional, and physical health. Then find something you actually enjoy so you stay consistent.

Dave lifts four days a week because his body breaks down if he doesn't, but he'd rather be playing basketball, pickleball, or mountain biking. He plays basketball twice a week against guys 10 to 15 years younger.

His proof that it's never too late is MECA client Bill Phillips. Bill never lifted before age 63, couldn't do a single chin-up, and at 74 could do 12. At 77 he won a state powerlifting championship, benching about 190 pounds and deadlifting over 300.

Connect With David

• Instagram: @davidlawrencesc
• Train with MECA: mecastrong.com
• Spoken Sleep Builder: spokennutrition.com

Who is David Lawrence?

David Lawrence is the founder and CEO of MECA, a personal training and strength and conditioning company in Michigan. A former Central Michigan walk-on, he trained under strength coach Charles Poliquin in Chicago before opening his first gym in Wixom. He has personally trained more than 100 professional and Olympic athletes, most of them NFL players, and he is a co-formulator of the Spoken Nutrition line. He's a father of five.

What is MECA?

MECA is a Michigan personal training company with locations in Novi, Royal Oak, Brighton, and Grand Rapids. It combines individualized training with nutrition support, food sensitivity testing, and access to labs and functional medicine doctors. David says MECA has delivered almost 400,000 personal training sessions, has more than 30 coaches, and has produced about 250 full body transformations.

What is Spoken Sleep Builder?

Spoken Sleep Builder is a sleep support drink from Spoken Nutrition, formulated with magnesium and glutamine. David Lawrence is one of its co-formulators. He says a study with Whoop showed improved sleep scores for participants within five days. As with any supplement, talk with your doctor if you have questions about what's right for you.

What is the theory of constraints?

The theory of constraints is a management idea that says any system is limited by its weakest link. David applies it to athletes and business alike: find the single biggest constraint, fix it first, and then move to the next one. At MECA, every client starts with a structural balance test that looks at what's strong, weak, tight, and limiting before the first program is written.

What is Dealer Out of Office?

Dealer Out of Office is a podcast hosted by Jake Berkal and Frank Zombo that features conversations with athletes, business leaders, and personalities, covering stories beyond the car business with no script and no filter.

Jake: What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Dealer Out of Office. As always, I'm your host, Jacob Berkal, alongside my good friend Frank Zombo. Today we have a very special guest.

Frank: One of my old trainers, mentors, one of my first teammates, then trainer, then friend.

Jake: Dave Lawrence, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

David: Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Jake: For those of you who don't know, Dave is the owner of MECA. It started in Wixom, then Novi, and now Novi, Royal Oak, Brighton, and Grand Rapids. The guy has blown up. I blame our producer for not giving me enough research before this. Dave, give us a little background on yourself. You're all over the state of Michigan and you've trained some great athletes. We'll get into some old war stories.

David: I'm a father of five, and I'm about to have number six, so that's the biggest thing going on in my life right now. I've been a personal trainer and strength coach my whole life, and I run a business. We have 45 full-time employees and probably another 10 to 12 contractors who work with us part-time. We have four locations and we do the most personal training in the state of Michigan. I've personally trained over 100 professional and Olympic athletes, most of them in the NFL. Frank was one of them, one of my favorite people.

I started as a personal trainer and strength coach because I wasn't good enough to play in the NFL. I had a lot of injuries in college. My sophomore year, I severed my fifth metatarsal. It was broken in half and it never healed, so I played the last three years of college with a broken foot. Then I had a degenerative knee issue, due to a couple of things but basically poor training, that really hurt me my last two years as an athlete. I wasn't good enough to play in the NFL, and that's what I wanted to do. So I wanted to help guys in my boat, or a little better than me, get there and maximize their potential. That's what I've invested my entire life in. The other passion I have is helping other coaches make a career out of this, because it's hard to make a living as a personal trainer. That's what we've been able to do at MECA.

Jake: In the most respectful way possible, those who can't do, teach?

David: Absolutely, 100 percent. My degree was in physical education and I couldn't pass Math 105. I wanted to be a gym teacher. Those who cannot do, teach, and those who cannot teach, teach gym. But I couldn't pass math, so I couldn't even teach gym. If you can't teach gym, you become a personal trainer, and that's me.

Jake: I'm a washed up hockey player. I was never that good. But there's that locker room camaraderie. Is that something you're trying to bring into the business, or is that why you stayed close to the game?

David: No, it was that I loved football so much. It was the biggest thing in my life, and I saw myself progress really well. Then I hit an inflection point because of injuries and other things, and I never reached my potential in sport. That was pretty devastating for me, and that's my big why. I knew there was a better way. I wanted to help the kid in high school or college who was in my position actually reach his potential, whether that potential would get him to the NFL or not. That's not the most important part. It's feeling like you did what you were capable of in the sport you love. A lot of athletes put so much into it, and I'd say maybe one out of 50 feel happy about how their career ended.

Take Frank. When we first started working together, you'd had a hamstring injury and you weren't sure if that was it. You got more years, better years. You'd won a Super Bowl before that, but your level of ability went through the roof with good training. That's what it's all about for me, helping people maximize what they've put their whole lives into.

Frank: Some context on Dave. I was an undrafted free agent with a very slim chance of making it, but I did. Dave was a year older than me at Central Michigan, so he was already there as a walk-on. I remember a group of walk-ons earned scholarships, and it was a huge deal. I was just a doer. I'd get told what to do and I'd do it. Dave was the guy who said, I think there's a better way to do this. After college he went on to learn from one of the greatest strength and performance coaches ever, and then he brought those methods over to teach me and the other athletes.

David: My first two years at Central, our strength coach was Paul Longo. After we won the championship, he pulled me aside and said, Dave, keep doing exactly what you're doing, you have a legit shot at the next level. As a sophomore I ran a 4.5 forty and had a 35 inch vertical. The next season I ran a 4.8 and had a 29 inch vertical. I'd gained 18 to 20 pounds. Everybody has something that makes them valuable on the field. Mine was that I could run pretty well and had a good head for the game. Once the running got taken away, I was pretty average. I didn't have the strength, the size, or the levers to do much. It was a big eye opener to watch my abilities regress. To be fair, other guys made really good progress with a different strength coach than I had. What I learned is that training is an individual process, and what works for one person might not be right for someone else, especially at the higher levels.

Jake: I like to understand why things happen. I'm a level three CrossFit coach and I've been doing it a long time. I finally stepped away because my rotator cuffs hurt. Olympic lifting doesn't love me back like it used to. A 22 year old me would clean and jerk and mess up his spine. In my thirties I can't do that anymore. For you coaching these high level athletes, is everything individualized, or is there something you believe at the core and branch out from there?

David: That's a really good question. There are seven main factors that go into program design, so it's very individual. Even the length of someone's femurs matters. The fastest athletes have longer femurs, which is more advantageous for sprinting. Look at every Olympic sprinter. I'd say 85 to 90 percent of wide receivers in the NFL have femurs disproportionately long compared to the rest of their body. Longer femurs help you run fast and jump high. But they're a disadvantage in something like squatting. A squat is one of the best lifts you can do, but someone with long femurs doesn't have the right proportions to squat in a good position, and you'll blow through their joints. For most people squatting makes them faster. For elite athletes, if it's not done properly, it can make them slower.

Jake: Are you taking measurements down to a skeletal level?

David: Yes. All of our trainers, and we have over 30, are trained to evaluate. We have a lower body and an upper body structural balance test. We look at what's strong, what's weak, what's limiting you, what's tight. Then we write your first phase. Every phase is between two and six weeks, usually three to four, and the phases build on each other. For athletes, we're trying to maximize the speed potential for their sport. As a general rule, the shorter the duration or distance of the sport, the stronger the athlete needs to be.

In general there are different types of responders. Some athletes respond really well to volume, like bodybuilders. Some respond to intensity, meaning higher weight. That was Frank. Frank responds really well to intensity, anywhere between one and six reps. Some respond well to variation, and some respond really well to speed. If a bodybuilder type does an Olympic lifting program, it'll blow through their joints because they don't have the nervous system to handle it. Another principle is that what got you there won't get you to the next level, because athletes adapt, and better athletes adapt faster. Templates work for someone with very little training age, and they work for about 18 months to two years. After that you should be pretty specific.

Frank: My first experience with this was my assessment in Dave's office. He said, what do you eat every day? I said turkey bacon, egg whites, PB2, because the label said healthy. This was maybe my fifth season in the league, right after we lost in the playoffs. I was a bag of mush. He took pre-pictures and used calipers on my sides, and I had a very high body fat percentage. He told me to eat for two weeks with no wheat, flour, sugar, dairy, or gluten. I did it, and my body responded in a crazy way.

Then he said, do a pull-up, all the way down, fully locked out. I couldn't. He said, bench press, but go down like a real rep, three seconds. I'd been bouncing it off my chest. With 235 pounds and a three second descent, I thought, holy crap, I'm not where I thought I was. That was the realization that I could get better, and I got a lot better.

In the NFL you have your team strength coach during the season and OTAs, but you have about a ten week break between the end of the season and mid April. You want to show up the best version of yourself. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Dave's gym was 30 minutes from my house and I was working out five minutes from my house. It's expensive, and I didn't realize then that the investment was pennies compared to what it made me. I was banged up, the season didn't go as well as I'd hoped, and I decided to invest in myself. It added four or five more years to my career, two more contracts. The first two weeks were absolutely miserable. I was throwing up, couldn't do a pull-up, hated Dave. After that it got addicting because you start to see results. After my first ten weeks I had a before and after picture, and the guys who hadn't seen me asked what I was on. I'd get randomly tested three times a month, and I wasn't on anything. I ate correctly and trained the right way, and the next year was one of my best seasons.

Dave, how did you link up with Charles Poliquin, and how did you decide to open your own shop?

David: After college I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I was either going to be a teacher, which wasn't looking good because I couldn't do algebra. One of our teammates and good friend of both of ours, Nick Bellore, and I talked about training all the time. He said, you've got to check out this guy named Charles Poliquin. So I bought his book, Modern Trends in Strength Training, and read it in a day. I thought, holy smokes, this is awesome. I bought the rest of his books, and when they had a job opening at his center in Chicago, I applied and got an interview.

They'd had a lot of turnover and needed a body. I got a call on a Thursday night, did a quick interview over the phone, and he said, can you be in Chicago tomorrow morning? I was in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, at about 8:40 at night. I said no, I can't do that. He said, then be here Monday, and hung up. I figured out a way to get there. I think I had to borrow about $200 from my mom. My first week on the job I worked with five first-round NFL draft picks. I saw some really cool things and got great experience.

Then my wife and I were expecting our first child and we wanted to be closer to family. I didn't want to open a business. I just wanted to be a personal trainer. But we were in the recession of 2006 to 2008, and it carried over in Metro Detroit until about 2014. Nobody was hiring personal trainers. I had about $8,000 saved from two years of work. We opened the gym, and rent was $1,300 a month. My apartment was $750. Everything we needed, food, the equipment loan, heat and gas, came to about $5,000 a month. I think we made $5,000 the first month, and away we went.

Frank: That was in Wixom. It was a warehouse with a gritty feel. He had random equipment and a small area to push sleds. Then I went away to play, came back, and he'd opened a new gym in Novi, with Eleiko weights, which are the best in lifting. Then boom, Royal Oak, boom, Grand Rapids, boom, Brighton. It's been cool to watch him take off.

Jake: When you started working for Charles, was he taking you under his wing, or was it affirming what you already knew?

David: I learned more in the first week on the job than I had in five years of college. We had Matt Forte, who played running back for the Chicago Bears. He tore his hamstring and the Bears messed up his rehab. He couldn't run for over six months. Mike, the owner and head guy there, got Matt running in about five days. They used things like frequency specific microcurrent, dry needling, and ART, methods that are pretty commonplace now but weren't as well known then. The Bears would send over guys they couldn't fix, and they'd get them fixed.

What made the biggest difference for me was understanding how everything works together, from nutrition to supplementation to flexibility to individualized training. That's the missing piece. A strength coach in college or the NFL is often pretty sharp, but doesn't have the bandwidth to handle a hundred guys. The reason I have a job is that guys want to work with me one-on-one because they want a specific result. If you put all of those things together, you can make a big difference really fast, especially if there are major gaps in performance.

I work from something called the theory of constraints. There are books on it. In business or with an athlete, you're only as strong as the weakest part of the organism. The biggest thing you can do is fix the weak link, the constraint holding them back, before you do anything else. We try to find the gap. It could be strength, tendon and ligament issues, an inefficient nervous system, or big gaps in nutrition. With Frank, he increased his bench press by about 90 pounds in his first six months. It wasn't that he lacked the potential. He had too many weak links. If he had actually gotten strong, he would have gotten injured, because he had muscles that weren't strong enough to support the prime movers.

Frank: My back wasn't very strong then. I came to you when I was dealing with a hamstring issue in my third year in Green Bay. When I tried to hit top end speed, it would pull on my lower glute. After that it hasn't bothered me since, until I played pickleball and tweaked it a little. It only took a few weeks to get back.

David: I can't be responsible for that.

Frank: It's not your fault, Dave. I'm not doing as much lower body as I used to. We used to do lower body three days a week. Now I'm an old youth football coach with no VMOs and a skinny neck.

David: When we were back at Central last week, did you feel like you could have helped the team out?

Frank: No. I was at practice yesterday showing the kids how to line up in a two by two and how to collision the wide receivers. I did three reps against eleven year olds and I was breathing hard. Football shape is a thing. I'd give them maybe two good plays.

Jake: A lot of our audience is grinding 10 to 12 hour days and grabbing takeout. They want to be the best version of themselves, but nutrition limits them. Athletes have nutritionists and every resource in the world and still don't reach their potential. What are you doing? Food sensitivity tests? Full labs?

David: We do food sensitivity testing, which is really good. We have access to labs and functional medicine doctors. The guy who runs our nutrition has his master's in clinical nutrition and directs our whole nutrition back end. But a big part of it is that most people know what to do. They just need somebody to hold them accountable and make it easy. We all know what to eat. You eat chicken, steak, eggs, some vegetables and fruit, and you don't eat ice cream. But a lot of people eat ice cream.

The biggest thing is getting people to eat breakfast every single day. If they're struggling with nutrition, you have to improve their sleep really quickly, and the biggest thing that impedes sleep is consuming calories after 7 p.m., specifically alcohol. You can drink, but not seven days a week. Maybe one day, and don't get drunk. Those things affect your sleep, your recovery, your tendon and ligament health, your nervous system. I don't want to say people are stupid.

Jake: Say it. Lazy. It's hard.

David: A lot of people say, I don't want to give up alcohol. Okay, then I'm not the right person for you right now. You're coming to me because you want a result, and I'll tell you what to do to get it. That doesn't mean you're a bad person. But if you're trying to get in shape, fitness has to be one of your top three priorities for at least three months. There's a difference between moving the needle and maintaining. If you want to move the needle, it has to be in the top three, and you have to do the basics. Limit things that cause inflammation. Inputs dictate outputs.

For guys who work a lot and want to optimize their health, eat breakfast, 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. That's huge for mental performance. Exercising in the morning is absolutely huge too. It makes a big difference in IQ and output, and there's a lot of research on it. There's a book called Spark about what happens to the brain on exercise. Keep your blood sugar low throughout the day, and limit food after 7 p.m. Most people who are overweight eat most of their calories after dinner. The worst thing I see people do is skip breakfast to save calories. You're downregulating your metabolism, usually raising cortisol, your stress hormone, and then you're ravenous at night and people binge eat. So eat 30 grams of protein within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up, stop eating after 7 p.m., and exercise during the day. If you want to affect your brain positively, do it in the morning.

Jake: So in your opinion, intermittent fasting is a lot of BS?

David: It depends. If you want to intermittent fast, do it at night. Stop eating after 4 p.m. The other way is a lot harder, and the more protein and amino acids you eat in the morning, the more it positively affects your health. Since 2022 the research has been showing that if you eat protein before about 1 or 2 p.m., you'll put on more muscle than if you ate the same amount later. I can't tell you why, but it's been documented. I think it was the Journal of Nutrition, 2022 or 2023. I can get you the research. I've also seen it anecdotally working with people.

Jake: I get into arguments with people about this. If you starve your system too long it's like an engine, you have to prime the pump again and it runs sluggish for a while. Calories in are calories in, so you have to be smart about what you eat. I intermittent fast, but then I have Five Guys for lunch and I'm like, what are we doing here?

Frank: I wake up early, work out from 6 to 7:30, maybe have a protein shake with coffee, then eat a lot when I get home from work. I can tell the difference when I don't eat after 8 p.m. My sleep quality is substantially better. I usually have a Whoop, and if I eat late or drink alcohol, it's red the next morning. If I do things right, it's green. Dave also told me I'd been wrong about fat. I thought saturated fat was terrible and I couldn't eat a steak. He said, dude, you can have a piece of bacon. I eliminated bread, and back to the food sensitivity test, my body works very well fueling off fat and not carbohydrates. Everyone is slightly different. What's your view on supplements versus whole foods? The marketing is incredible, and some of those macros don't add up, like a 600 calorie bar with 20 grams of protein.

David: Whole foods are, for most people, more bioavailable. You can digest, absorb, and assimilate those nutrients better than stuff coming out of a package. Limiting your ingredient load is really important. A lot of packaged food has additives or processing to extend shelf life, and lowering those lowers your inflammatory response and the detoxification burden on your body. That's why single ingredient whole foods matter. Bodybuilders eat chicken and rice, which might not be the most nutritious thing, but they're locked in because they're trying to lower inflammation as they lean out.

The best breakfast for me is a meat and nuts breakfast: steak, chicken, or salmon with a good fat like avocado, eggs, cashews, or almonds. Steak and eggs is a great breakfast. You want amino acids in the morning. You need them for detoxification of your major organs, for your immune system's repair, and for producing the right neurotransmitters in your brain. Protein in the morning also kickstarts your metabolism, and your metabolism and thyroid are connected. A lot of people who are stressed do intermittent fasting and beat up their thyroid and downregulate their metabolism. It won't hurt you in a week or in three months, but give it six months or a few years and people start complaining about a sluggish metabolism.

What I'd recommend for you, Frank, if you're training in the morning, is a really good protein shake that isn't pre-mixed, nothing out of a package. Thirty plus grams of protein first thing on an empty stomach. Bone broth with collagen works too. You want some aminos going in. And if you're training that early, I really believe in branched chain amino acids. I created a formula with Spoken Nutrition that has one gram of tyrosine per serving. Tyrosine is the precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine, and it nourishes your thyroid too. It's good for your brain, your thyroid, and your metabolism. It's clean energy because it's just amino acids, which are very stable. It's not like neurotropics or caffeine, which I do like, but this is really good. I can give you each a bottle to try.

Jake: I'm an early morning workout guy, and it's coffee on the way in and that's usually it. We have listeners who are middle aged, with kids, expenses, and stress. They get home from a long day, maybe in logistics, then coach a bunch of kids, and they want something to decompress at the end of the day. We know alcohol is terrible for you. Is there something better, maybe a marijuana gummy, now that those are legal?

David: I created something called Sleep Builder. It's a formula with magnesium and glutamine. Glutamine is an adaptogenic amino acid, so it goes to whatever tissue is stressed, which for a lot of people is their gut. I love it. We did a study with Whoop, and it improved everybody's sleep score within five days. Tell me where to send it and I'll send it to you.

Jake: Is there a website for any listener who wants to try it?

David: It's Spoken Nutrition, spokennutrition.com. I was one of the formulators on the line. Another formulator is the top strength coach for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who just came from the Florida Panthers and has won three or four Stanley Cups. His name is Andy O'Brien. Another is Jordan Shallow, who has worked with countless athletes, including Shaquille O'Neal. There's also Ben Prentiss in hockey, a good friend of mine. It was made for athletes and high performing executives. You want to be able to bring your nervous system up, and then you want to be able to take it down.

I don't tell anybody how to live their life. I think people have free will and agency over what they do with themselves. We only have one shot at this thing called life, and I really believe in trying to maximize it. I want to be better tomorrow, or in three months, than I was today. I think learning is really important, and a lot of people stop learning after a certain point. Instead of reading a book for 20 minutes, it's two hours on social media at night. What kind of person do you want to be? We all struggle with that, and I'm not perfect at all. But those little habits stack and make you the person you become. Everybody should know the kind of person they want to be when they grow up. I haven't grown up yet. You should drive to be that every single day, and if you're not, you're not living up to your potential. Life is beautiful and we only have one shot, especially with the time and place we have, being in America and the things we have access to.

Jake: USA, baby. Great answer. Dave, in this age of nutrition, half the guys at Life Time Fitness are on peptides now. What's your take?

David: I'm not an expert on peptides. They're very powerful amino acids, basically, and they can really move the needle. I have two friends who started peptide businesses. One sold it and the other is looking to sell. It's a gray market right now. A lot of people are selling peptides that are quote unquote for humans, but that are supposed to be used only for animal research, and a lot of those sites are getting shut down. There's good research on peptides and some people swear by them, but it depends on the purity and potency of where it's coming from. A lot of peptides are made in China, and there have been issues with purity and potency, and some complaints about affecting people's health. I would never recommend a peptide for a professional athlete. There are doctors who recommend them, and I refer people to a doctor we're associated with. It's not my wheelhouse.

Frank: Are pro athletes even allowed to? Doubtful.

Jake: We're coming up on time. For the average Joe who used to be an athlete and wants to get back into it, what's your advice?

David: Something is better than nothing. Five minutes is infinitely better than zero minutes. Twenty minutes can really move the needle for a lot of people. A 30 minute daily walk has been shown to dramatically improve your mental, emotional, and physical health. It's about being consistent and finding the time every day, even if it's five minutes of push-ups. Beyond that, find something you really enjoy. I lift weights four days a week, but I don't love lifting weights. I like playing sports. I'd rather play pickleball. I lift because my body starts breaking down if I don't, and I like the physical and mental benefits. I play basketball twice a week with a couple of really good runs, against guys I used to coach when I was a college strength coach, about 10 to 15 years younger than me. That's probably my favorite part of my week. I also like mountain biking. I will never be a person who goes for a three mile run. Find something you look forward to and can be consistent with. People get out of shape when they haven't gotten off the couch in six months. That's the problem we see a lot.

If you don't know where to start, go to mecastrong.com, M-E-C-A strong dot com. We've done almost 400,000 personal training sessions since we incorporated. We have over 30 coaches and deliver the most personal training sessions in the state of Michigan. We've had about 250 transformations, where people completely transform their body. If you train with us, you have an expert who takes care of the whole process. You show up two to four days a week, put in the work, and there's no thinking behind it.

Frank: Those first two weeks are the brutal ones, and then you get addicted. I imagine some of your people have been there for 12 years.

David: We have a client named Bill Phillips. He's 77, and he just won the state championship in powerlifting. He never lifted weights before he was 63. At 63 he could do zero chin-ups, and at 74 he could do 12. He bench presses about 190 pounds, he weighs about 170, and he deadlifted over 300. You can really improve your strength as you get older.

Jake: Awesome. Dave, we appreciate you. Anyone who wants to give Dave a look, it's MECA Strong, mecastrong.com. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

David: You guys really weren't prepped for this. Whose responsibility is that? I'm just kidding.

Frank: Dave, thank you again, buddy. It's been life changing for me. I still do the same type of workouts you taught me 10 years ago. It's always great seeing you.

David: Absolutely, same. Thanks, guys.

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