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!

Here's something that should be obvious but apparently isn't: ADHD and the gym should be a natural fit. The gym produces dopamine. ADHD is a dopamine regulation disorder. That math seems like it should close cleanly. And yet if you have ADHD — or suspect you might — the gym is probably also the place where you've set personal records for giving up. You signed up with great intentions. You went for two weeks. You lost the routine, felt terrible about it, and quietly concluded you're just not a gym person. The problem is that's wrong, and the fitness industry is largely to blame.

Here's the thing: Pete Wright co-wrote Unapologetically ADHD. He has spent years deep in the research on how ADHD brains actually work. He knows the neuroscience, the behavioral patterns, the strategies that help and the ones that don't. And he still could not make himself go to the gym consistently for most of his adult life — until Srdjan. This episode is Pete and Srdjan reverse-engineering why that changed: why standard gym advice is essentially designed to fail neurodiverse brains, why Srdjan's approach at ELEV8 is accidentally one of the most ADHD-compatible training environments around, and what a fitness practice looks like when it's built for how your brain actually works rather than how everyone assumes it does. There's real science here (exercise produces the same neurological effect as a low-dose stimulant, which is a sentence that deserves a minute to sit with), and there are practical tools for anyone who has been told their entire lives t

Here's a thing that happens to almost everyone: somewhere around middle age, you quietly renegotiate your relationship with your body. You stop expecting it to perform and start expecting it to complain. You chalk up the stiffness, the slowdowns, the loss of grip strength to "just getting older" — as if decline were a scheduling appointment you simply had to keep. The problem is, most of what we call "aging" is actually just inactivity wearing a disguise. And this week, Srdjan is here to pull the mask off.

The numbers are uncomfortable but important. After 30, you start losing muscle. After 60, that loss accelerates and nearly doubles. That's not a prediction — that's sarcopenia, and it's already happening unless you're actively fighting it. Falls become the leading cause of injury-related death in adults over 65. The overhead bin you couldn't reach last Tuesday? That's not a bad day. That's a data point. The good news — and there genuinely is good news — is that resistance training is not just helpful at any age, it's more important at 70 than it was at 30. Your 70-year-old body can still build muscle. It just needs a reason to.

Of course, knowing that and walking through a gym door are two completely different things. There's the grief of being a former athlete in a body that won't cooperate. There's the terror of looking foolish. There's the very reasonable suspicion that whatever you do at 68 is a pale imitation of what you did at 28, and why bother. Pete and Srdjan address all of it — including the guy who tore his rotator cuff because he refused to accept that his 52-year-old shoulder had a different opinion than his 28-year-old ego. The goal, as Srdjan puts it, isn't to perform like you used to. It's to pick up your own groceries, catch yourself when you trip, and get off the floor without needing a spotter.

And here's the part that should make you sit up a little: clients are coming off medications. Memory is improving. Metabolic markers — blood pressure, cholesterol, inflammation — are moving in the right direction. Resistance training turns out to be doing things that no pill on the market does quite as well, and it's available to anyone willing to start slow and stay consistent. The science on aging well is not ambiguous. The only question is whether you're going to take it seriously before you have to, or after.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!

You had questions after our Programming 101 episode, and Pete and Srdjan are back to answer them. This week it's Programming 102 — a listener-driven deep dive into the mechanics of building a training program that actually adapts as you do. If you've ever missed a week and panicked, wondered whether you can train your upper and lower body on totally different systems, or felt vaguely like you should be doing something "more advanced" by now without knowing what that actually means, this episode is for you.

Srdjan clears up one of the most common sources of unnecessary anxiety in strength training: missing a week. Spoiler — one week off is not the catastrophe your brain says it is. Unless you were seriously ill or running on fumes, you probably just gave your body some extra recovery time. He also breaks down concurrent periodization — the practice of training different physical qualities at the same time, like strength for your lower body while chasing hypertrophy up top. It's not just something advanced athletes do. Srdjan does it himself, and the logic is straightforward once you understand it.

Then there's the big one: how do you know when you're ready to graduate from beginner linear programming? The honest answer is you'll feel it before you fully understand it — when the weight stops going up every session, when you stop getting sore, when the workouts feel too predictable. Srdjan walks through what that transition looks like and introduces the concept of "shocking the muscle" — which, as Pete discovers, has a lot less to do with adding weight and a lot more to do with changing angles, order, tempo, tools, and expectation. Gravity eventually wins if all you do is chase heavier.

Whether you're three months in or three years in, this episode is a useful gut-check on where you are in your training arc and what it means to keep making progress without just piling on plates.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!

There's a remarkable amount of misinformation floating around the fitness world — and the frustrating part is that most of it isn't malicious. It's just wrong, and it gets repeated so often that it starts to feel like received wisdom. This week on Build for Health, Pete and Srdjan take on some of the most persistent myths in strength training and fitness, the kind that keep people out of the gym, stuck in the wrong routine, or convinced that getting stronger just isn't for them.

But beyond the conversation about each myth comes some hidden truths and misunderstandings, and what better information actually looks like in practice.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!

Here's the uncomfortable truth about most people's fitness routine: it's not a routine. It's a vibe. A loosely organized collection of exercises they kind of remember, performed at an intensity that feels appropriately unpleasant, repeated until boredom or injury ends the whole experiment. That's not training. That's just being tired on purpose.

This week, Pete and Srdjan get into what separates people who actually progress from people who have been "getting back into it" for the last four years. The answer is periodization — which sounds like the kind of word a personal trainer uses to justify charging more, but is actually just the radical idea that your workouts should have a plan. A real one. With phases. And a reason.

Srdjan walks through the three main approaches — linear periodization for beginners building their foundation, non-linear for intermediate lifters juggling real life, and block periodization for more advanced athletes chasing specific adaptations. He also explains the deload — the week where you go lighter on purpose, which feels like cheating but is actually the thing that lets you keep going.

They also get into the mechanics of how a real program is built: why you start with higher reps and lower weight before you ever touch anything heavy, what progressive overload actually looks like in practice, and — crucially — why loading your biceps the same way you'd load your back is how people end up hurt and confused.

Pete has questions. Reasonable ones. Like: does more sweat mean a better workout (no), do you have to change exercises constantly to keep making progress (also no), and does every set need to go to failure (please, no). Srdjan dismantles all of them with the patient authority of someone who has watched a lot of people make these mistakes in real time.

And at the end, Srdjan shares what actually makes him feel like the training is working — and it's not a personal best on an app. It's a stranger at a grocery store. Which turns out to be the most unexpectedly useful piece of advice in the whole episode.

Links & Notes

• Submit your questions to the show!
• Looking for a Trainer? Reach Out!