Most of us treat metabolism like a mystery dial somewhere inside the body — one that worked fine in our twenties and quietly broke sometime after. In this episode, Pete brings that exact theory to Srdjan, who gently dismantles it and replaces it with something far more useful: a four-part system you can actually influence, starting today, without setting foot in a gym.

Srdjan walks through the four components of total daily energy expenditure — your basal metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food, exercise itself, and NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis, a.k.a. the steps, fidgeting, and standing-up-from-your-desk that quietly run the show). The numbers are surprising. BMR alone accounts for sixty to seventy-five percent of what you burn in a day. Exercise? A modest five to fifteen percent. Which means the hour you spend grinding in the gym is genuinely valuable — and also not the lever you think it is.

The conversation moves into the supporting cast: sleep, stress, and hormones. Srdjan explains why under-sleeping cranks up ghrelin and tanks leptin, why chronic cortisol makes your body fight your goals, and why protein does double duty — it builds muscle and costs your body twenty to thirty percent of its own calories just to digest. Pete arrives at the radical conclusion that the most effective thing he could do for his metabolism right now is take a nap and eat a steak. Srdjan, to his credit, does not disagree.

The episode closes with a listener question about manual labor — does a physically demanding job count as training? — and a clear takeaway: focus on what you can control in those other twenty-three hours, and the gym becomes the multiplier, not the whole equation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Metabolism isn't one thing. It's four: BMR (60–75% of daily burn), thermic effect of food (digestion costs), exercise activity (a modest 5–15%), and NEAT (everything else you do all day).
• "Broken metabolism" is almost never the right diagnosis. Metabolism is highly adaptable and responds to sleep, stress, diet, movement, and muscle mass.
• Protein is the most metabolically expensive nutrient — your body burns 20–30% of those calories just digesting them. Carbs are 5–10%. Fat is around 3%.
• Muscle is metabolically active tissue. More muscle means a higher resting burn, which is why resistance training pays compounding dividends.
• Sleep is non-negotiable. Under-sleeping raises ghrelin (hunger), lowers leptin (fullness), worsens insulin sensitivity, and drives sugar cravings.
• Chronic stress sends the same signal to your body whether it's coming from work, relationships, money, or excessive dieting — and it sabotages recovery either way.
• The 23-hour rule: what you do outside the gym matters more than the hour inside it. Ten thousand steps, standing, walking, daily chores — that's where the real burn lives.
• Cardio and resistance training do different jobs. Cardio burns calories now. Resistance training protects the system that burns calories later.

Links & Notes

• Check out ELEV8 Fitness in Hillsboro!
• Submit your questions to the show!

You can hit the gym four times a week and still be quietly undone by your chair. That's the uncomfortable thesis behind what's been called "the sitting disease," and in this episode, Pete Wright sits down (ironically) with strength coach Srdjan Injac to walk through exactly what eight to ten hours of daily sitting does to the human body.

The conversation moves region by region. The thoracic spine stiffens. The diaphragm gets compressed and breathing goes shallow. The hip flexors tighten until the glutes — which are supposed to be one of the strongest muscles in your body — essentially clock out. Lower back pain gets blamed on the back, when the real problem is everything around it. And then Srdjan goes inside, where the sitting disease gets genuinely uncomfortable: glucose handling declines, insulin sensitivity drops, and within sixty to ninety minutes of sitting, an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase — the gatekeeper that pulls fats out of your bloodstream — falls off a cliff.

The payoff is practical. Stand up every hour. Take walking meetings. Get the steps in, not because anyone needs to see them but because your metabolism needs the movement. And when you do get to the gym, expect the work to be uncomfortable in the right way — split squats that finally stretch what's been flexed all day, exercises that activate muscles you forgot you had. The mindset shift here is the whole episode in one sentence: hurt is not broken. Hurt is on the mend. Movement isn't a workout you complete and check off. It's a feature of your day.

If you've ever wondered why you're doing everything right and still feeling stiff, sluggish, and slowly heavier — this episode is the answer, and the way out.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!

A few weeks ago, ELEV8's Srdjan Injac went on a bike ride. He came home with an oblique fracture of his radius, a Saturday-night ER trip, and a Tuesday surgery that left a plate and eight screws in his forearm. This week, the strength coach who teaches people not to get hurt sits down to explain how he got hurt — and what he's doing about it.

Then we get into the comeback. Srdjan walked out of surgery with a six-week timeline for the bone to heal and three months before he could lift heavy. He's quietly trying to cut that to two, and he's running a one-man clinical experiment on his own arm to do it: red light therapy two to three times a day, weekly IV cocktails of B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium, amino acids, and NAD, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that nearly broke him at sixty feet of simulated depth, an electro-muscle-stimulation suit, and a strange-but-real protocol called the cross-education effect — training one arm to keep both strong. Pete walks Srdjan through what each of these actually does, what the evidence says, and what it feels like from the inside. (Spoiler: the chamber is a lot.)

But here's the part that matters whether or not you've ever broken a bone. Srdjan is recovering ahead of schedule, and the doctors and PTs are crediting muscle memory — the plate and screws stayed put, the bones snapped back into place, and the rehab is moving fast. Not because of any single therapy. Because there was something to come back to. This is the case for muscle as insurance made visible. If you've been waiting for a sign that strength training is worth the effort, watching your strength coach come back from a plated forearm surgery ahead of schedule is probably it.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!