Coach Darian Bates

Squatting is basically an argument between several differently sized levers.

Two people can both squat well while using noticeably different positions because they’re solving the same mechanical problem with different proportions.

Training can most definitely improve mood and cognition but that doesn’t make training therapy, and it definitely doesn’t make you immune to the physiological cost of training.

Your body has to recover from the total amount of stress being placed on it. Poor sleep, dieting, work pressure, relationship problems, financial stress and training don’t exist in completely separate little boxes just because one of them involves you picking s**t up and putting it back down.

Normally, training is a stressor you adapt positively to. But when your overall stress load is already high, your ability to recover from that training can change.

I am not suggesting that when s**t hits the fan, you stop training but I am suggesting that you adjust the dose. Reduce some volume and intensity instead of trying to set fu***ng PRs while your life is falling apart.

Don’t confuse using training to help manage your problems with using training to avoid dealing with them.

Women tend to have a larger carrying angle on average, but that doesn’t create one universal “female” push-up technique.

During a push-up, your forearm is pronated and your elbow bends, so you can’t measure someone’s carrying angle while standing and magically calculate their perfect push-up technique.

Turning the hands slightly outward may feel more comfortable for one woman and completely unnatural for another. Use the position that allows your wrists to remain comfortable and your elbows to track naturally.

And an additional fun fact for you…

Women also tend to have wider hips, which creates a larger Q-angle (the angle from between the quads and patellar tendon).
That’s 11-20° in women vs 8-14° in men.

This means more lateral force gets placed on your knee joint during squatting patterns.
What LOOKS like knee valgus (knees caving in) from the front OFTEN ISN’T actually problematic.

It’s just your Q angle making it appear that way. Your knees tracking slightly inward might be completely normal for YOUR structure.

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When little to no progress is made, many people assume they’re no longer growing, so they start sacrificing technique, shortening range of motion, or turning every set into a circus act just to move a heavier number.

But progress isn’t always visible in real time.
Especially once you’re past the beginner stage.

Your job isn’t to force overload. Your job is to provide a stimulus that your body can adapt to and recover from. Over time, performance improvements are simply one of the ways those adaptations reveal themselves.

(In case you missed the text on screen, I still think visual assessment is the best tool for estimating BF%, and I should have said on “any given hour” opposed to day, the latter may imply consecutive days and whilst certain things could definitely result in prolonged water retention, I don’t want people thinking that if you always look “softer” its not BF… cause it probably is)

Your physique is a lot less consistent than your body fat.

You can look leaner on Friday, softer on Saturday and somehow like you’ve been replaced by a slightly worse version of yourself on Sunday without gaining even a little bit of body fat.

I had a client recently tell me she was feeling softer and was worried she’d somehow gone backwards.

Yet her weight, measurements, performance hadn’t changed. And, perhaps most importantly, literally the week before she was feeling fabulous about how she looked.

But yet, nothing had actually changed except how she looked and felt on that particular day.

Which is a pretty good reminder that your perception of your physique can change much faster than your physique actually can.

In one study, shallow-fried foods ranged from 4.9–13.1% oil absorption, while deep-fried foods ranged from 7.6% all the way up to 43.2%.

Even changing the cooking temperature matters. Research looking at beef pan fried in olive oil found the oil penetrated roughly twice as deeply at 180°C compared to130°C.

So imagine two people both log “10 g olive oil” because they used the same amount in the pan.

One cooks a relatively lean piece of meat quickly at a lower temperature and has a visible amount of oil left in the pan. The other cooks something porous for longer, loses substantially more moisture from the food and finishes with f**k all oil left behind.

It makes very little sense to assume they both consumed exactly the same amount.

But it makes even less sense to assume they both consumed exactly 10%.
For tracking purposes, you have two reasonable options:

If you’re cooking something where most of the oil clearly ends up in the food, just track what you used. You may slightly overestimate your intake, but it’s probably more accurate than pretending you’ve performed calorimetry on your chicken breast.

Or, if you’re using a substantial amount of oil and lots is left behind, weigh the oil going into the pan and what remains afterwards if you really care about being more precise.

For most people though, cooking spray makes this entire argument wonderfully stupid. Use a few grams, track a few grams, get on with your day.

Stubborn fat is physiologically different from other fat stores.

But understanding the mechanism doesn’t automatically tell us how much difference manipulating that mechanism makes in the real world.

Take fasted cardio, for example
Training in a fasted state lowers insulin and can increase fat mobilisation and oxidation during that session. It doesn’t mean fasted cardio produces greater fat loss than fed cardio when calories and protein are matched.

The same applies to HIIT

High-intensity intervals create a large catecholamine response that may increase mobilisation from more resistant fat depots. That’s a plausible physiological mechanism but it doesn’t automatically mean HIIT is superior for reducing stubborn fat in every situation.

And the same applies to yohimbine

Mechanistically, it blocks alpha-2 receptors, removing some of the inhibitory brakes on lipolysis. Whether that translates into a meaningful difference in body composition is much less clear and depends heavily on context, including your overall energy deficit and how lean you already are.

This is an important distinction because increasing fat mobilisation is not the same thing as increasing net fat loss.

You can release more fatty acids from a fat cell, but if those fatty acids aren’t subsequently oxidised, they can simply be re-esterified and stored again.

And this is why trying to manipulate “stubborn fat” when you’re still carrying plenty of body fat elsewhere is largely pointless.

Regional differences in fat mobilisation exist regardless of how lean you are, but they become practically relevant when you’re lean enough that the remaining fat is disproportionately concentrated in those more resistant areas.

You don’t suddenly unlock stubborn fat at 10% body fat because your adipocytes received the memo.
It doesn’t change the fundamentals.
A calorie deficit is still required.
Patience is still required.

Hunger is information, fatigue is information, fullness, cravings, recovery and performance are all information.

But information isn’t necessarily an instruction.
And none of this requires insulin resistance, PMOS, or any other four-letter abbreviation to explain it.

You should absolutely pay attention to what your body is telling you. But then you need to interpret those signals within the context of what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Fresh vs canned pineapple 🍍

If you’re eating pineapple around your protein-containing meals for the potential digestive benefits of bromelain, fresh is the better choice.

Canning involves heat, which largely inactivates bromelain, while fresh pineapple retains its proteolytic activity.

Is this going to meaningfully change your gains? Probably, definitely not.

But pineapple is a convenient source of carbs around training anyway, and also delicious.