All questions anonymous. Use the video for the full answer with all the colour — use the notes below as your reference if you want to find a specific bit.
"How do I fit my sessions in around life? Eat slightly more, or train 7 days to spread the load?"
Wrong question. The right question is: what can I actually repeat for eight weeks? Adherence beats the perfect plan, every time.
Training 7 days a week doesn't spread the demand — it removes your recovery. And you're in a deficit, so your recovery budget is already smaller than normal. You earn your progress in recovery, not in the session.
Two-a-days are fine occasionally, not as a default. If life forces a double, separate the sessions by 6+ hours if you can — e.g. lift at 6 am, grapple at 7 pm. And learn to flex the intensities: lift hard / roll light, or roll hard / lift moderate. Two max-effort sessions in one day is brutal.
If you're fuelling doubles, place carbs around the sessions (90 minutes before, 30 minutes after — see the pre/post workout document). A full fuelling lecture is coming.
Bottom line: the deficit gets you shredded, the training keeps you an athlete. Don't let the second one quietly cancel the first. 4-5 quality sessions you never miss beats 7 mediocre ones that fall apart by week 3.
"What peptides would you recommend alongside Retatrutide for muscle retention?"
I'll be honest because I always am: I use peptides, and I also own a small peptide business. So before anything I say, I want you to know that — I'm not anti, but I'm not pushing either. Truth as it is.
The two things that actually protect muscle on Reta are not peptides. They are:
- Protein at 1.5-2 g per kg bodyweight. No exceptions.
- Lifting heavy 3-4× per week.
If those two aren't locked in, no peptide will save your muscle. Keep your Reta dose in the Reta guide range too — if you want me to drop my Reta guide in the chat, just ask. Rate of loss matters more than people think — if you're losing weight too fast, you're losing muscle with it.
Then:
- Creatine, 5-10 g/day. Boring, proven, cheap, and probably the single best muscle-retention supplement that exists.
- GH secretagogues or low-dose HGH if you're already using peptides. The real benefit is recovery, sleep quality and soft tissue — which indirectly protects training quality and therefore muscle. Not magic.
- MOTS-c — metabolic and endurance support. Newer, less long-term human data. Promising, not proven.
Direct muscle-retention peptides with strong human data basically don't exist yet. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The real stack: protein · lifting · creatine · sensible Reta dose · peptides for recovery on top of that.
"What PEDs would you suggest? Lots of people on test at the minute."
Yes, I use testosterone. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to lecture you. But I will never push it on anyone, and what I will say is this: stay as far away from PEDs as you possibly can until you genuinely want to enter that world.
The hard truth no one tells you: once you go on testosterone, you're not coming off it. Don't listen to anyone who says "just jump on a cycle, mate" — it doesn't work like that. You jump on, come off, and crash and burn potentially for the next 5-10 years. Going on test is a lifelong decision.
I didn't touch testosterone until I was 28, and only because my blood work was so bad I needed it for quality of life — that's what TRT (back to healthy levels, not stacking it to the ceiling) is for.
Most people aren't ready. You haven't earned the foundation:
- Years of locked-in sleep, protein, training, stress management
- "Man muscles" take 5-10 years of quality training to build — you can't shortcut them
- If you're 25 with healthy numbers, hormones are not your answer
If you do go down that road eventually:
- Blood work first. Non-negotiable, before you touch anything.
- Have a plan. What's the long-term picture? It's not a short-term decision.
- Beyond test, diminishing returns get fast. Test + Primo works well together. Anavar in windows.
"My performance has dropped in the deficit. How do I have energy for rounds?"
Completely normal, very fixable. Three levers:
- Carb placement. Same daily calories, just timed differently. 50-80 g of carbs 1-2 hours before you roll. Simple stuff — rice, fruit, honey, rice cakes. Hard rounds run on glucose; anything above ~140 bpm and your body is burning carbs. Empty tank = round 2 collapse. Backload the rest of your carbs post-session.
- Use the Range Method. Hardest training days — eat at the top of the range, even at maintenance. Rest days — sit lower. The weekly average drives fat loss, not any single day. Stop trying to win the deficit on your hardest days.
- If you're on Reta / a GLP-1: appetite suppression means a lot of people are under-eating and under-drinking without realising. Flat rounds on GLPs are very often dehydration + low fuel, not the deficit. Electrolytes, water all day, pre-training meals as an appointment — not a feeling.
"How does grappling fit into the Shred? I sometimes train twice a day to fit workouts in — should I do them different days?"
Same principle as the first question: train for performance, eat for aesthetics. Grappling is your sport. Lifting supports it. The deficit does the fat loss. The moment you start adding sessions to burn calories, you've lost the plot — that's what the deficit is for.
- Different days when your schedule allows. Cleanest recovery, best quality on both.
- Same day? Separate by 6+ hours. Pick the priority for that day — if it's a hard rolling day, bring the lifting down. If it's a big lifting day, keep rolling light and technical.
- If you genuinely can't fit it all in: grappling stays. Drop a lifting day before you drop mat time. Strength holds on 2 quality lifting sessions a week.
You came here to be leaner — not to be a tired bodybuilder who also trains BJJ.
"DOMS are brutal in the deficit and I'm struggling to fall and stay asleep. Tips?"
Two problems feeding each other — deficit shrinks your recovery budget, poor sleep makes DOMS worse, DOMS make sleep worse. Break the cycle.
Sleep, in order of impact:
- No caffeine 8-10 hours before bed. Non-negotiable. No pre-workout at 3 pm. No "goth juice" at 4.
- Push some carbs into your evening meal. Carbs before bed help you fall asleep — and they will not make you fat. Your weekly calories decide that, not the timing.
- Pre-bed snack if hunger wakes you up. Save 200-300 calories for Greek yoghurt, a casein pudding, something slow-releasing.
- Magnesium glycinate in the evening. Cheap, helps a lot of people.
- Sleep environment. Cool, dark room. Consistent wake time and bedtime — including weekends. That regularity helps more people than any supplement.
DOMS:
- Hit your protein every day. Non-negotiable.
- Daily steps + easy movement on rest days. Flushes the soreness out.
- If DOMS are still wrecking you past 72 hours, the volume's too high for where you are. Drop a set or two, or drop an exercise. A 10% pullback recovers faster than grinding and stalling.
- You also might just not be used to the programme yet. SAID principle — Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. Your body adapts to the demand you put on it. After 2-3 weeks the DOMS should subside.
"Other than GLP-1s, what peptides and supplements help during the cut?"
Proven supplements (tier 1):
- Creatine, 5-10 g/day. Muscle retention, strength, maybe cognitive. Don't cycle — just take it.
- Whey / protein powder. Not magic — just an easy way to hit your protein. UFIT 50 g shakes are lifesavers (about £2.80-£3.20, 280 calories, 50 g protein, taste decent).
- Caffeine. Respect the cutoff — but it works for pre-training performance.
- Electrolytes. Underrated in a deficit, especially on a GLP-1.
- Vitamin D with K2.
- Good fish oil. Foundational health, recovery, joints.
- Magnesium glycinate. (Same as the sleep section above.)
Peptides — opinion and personal experience:
- Injectable L-carnitine. Modest fat-metabolism help, recovery, cheap, basically no downside.
- MOTS-c. Endurance and metabolic efficiency — for a grappler, that's a deeper gas tank in hard rounds.
- HGH. Recovery, sleep, soft tissue. Expensive and a 9+ month commitment before you see real effects.
- GHK-Cu. Solid.
- BPC-157, TB-500. For niggles and soft-tissue injuries.
- SLU-PP-332. Worth a mention, not a lot of studies on it.
Order matters: Tier 1 before Tier 2. Get your foundation locked in first — sleep, protein, steps, stress. Then supplements. Then peptides for the last 10%. Most people invert this and wonder why nothing's working.
If you're on any compounds, get bloodwork done. That's the line in the sand.