Build for Health with Srdjan Injac

You can do everything right in the gym and still undo it on the couch at midnight. Lifting doesn't build muscle while you're lifting. It damages muscle and sends a signal. The rebuilding comes later, mostly while you're asleep, and it depends on conditions that a short night takes away. This episode goes inside that night shift. Deep sleep brings a major pulse of growth hormone, but calling it "th...

Most of us walk into the gym assuming the body is on duty and the brain has the hour off. It's the other way around. Every squat starts as an electrical signal. The awkward first weeks of a new movement aren't weak muscles, they're a nervous system learning a skill. Strength, it turns out, is partly something you know how to do. That's the door into a bigger question: what does lifting do for the...

Training is the stimulus. It is not the adaptation. That happens later — in the hours we treat as leftover time, and describe with words that all mean absence: rest day, off day, recovery day. This week Pete brings Srdjan a piece of research that has nothing to do with the gym and everything to do with it. In 2007, Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz published the Recovery Experience Questionnair...

Cortisol gets described online as the thing standing between you and the body you want. It's actually the hormone that gets you out of bed. It runs on a daily curve, highest in the morning and lowest at night, and it regulates blood sugar, blood pressure, inflammation, and how much energy the body makes available when something demands it. Exercise raises it. That's the point of exercise. A hard s...

A calorie deficit takes energy away. Building muscle demands it. Whether you can do both at once depends almost entirely on where you're starting from, and the answer for a beginner is not the answer for someone ten years in. Exercise order comes next. The case for doing compound lifts first has nothing to do with those lifts being better. It's about energy: what a squat asks of you versus what a...

Part one covered the fight. This one covers the food. Four peptides get walked through one at a time. BPC-157 and TB-500 are the recovery pair — the ones most often discussed together, and the ones most often sold together. The claim is that one improves the conditions for healing by supporting blood flow and collagen production, while the other helps repair cells reach the damage faster. Neither...

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. That's the entire definition. Insulin is a peptide. So is the drug in Ozempic. So are BPC-157 and TB-500 — compounds athletes have used for injury recovery for years, and which the FDA moved to a restricted list in September 2023, citing limited human safety data. In late July, an FDA advisory committee spent two days voting on whether pharmacies should b...

A two-week break feels like a setback and mostly isn't. What changes first is muscle fullness, not muscle tissue — glycogen and the water bound to it, drained by less training and different eating. The muscle deflates. It doesn't shrink. In trained lifters, strength has held steady across exactly this kind of layoff. The harder problem is the gym itself. Walk into an unfamiliar facility with a pro...

At a routine physical, a doctor charts blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, and triglycerides — a page of numbers meant to forecast the years ahead. None of them measure how strong you are. That's a strange omission, because muscle strength is one of the most reliable predictors of both lifespan and healthspan that researchers have found — in some studies, a better predictor than the blood-pressur...

ELEV8 trainer Devon Castro joins hosts Pete Wright and Srdjan Injac to take on a familiar fear: that a vacation will erase a year of training. It doesn't hold up. Muscle is durable: meaningful loss takes weeks of true inactivity, not a long weekend, and the "deflated" look people notice after a few days off is water and glycogen shifting — not muscle disappearing. Cardio fades faster than strength...

Spend ten minutes on the wellness internet and you'll learn that women's health runs on one vengeful hormone, that carbs are a betrayal, and that the fix is a protocol synced to your cycle. The kernel of truth — most fitness research was done on men — keeps getting buried under products, calendars, and miracle drugs. This episode digs for the science underneath. What actually changes when you trai...

Most people picture the skeleton as a rigid frame — inert scaffolding that holds everything else up. It isn't. Bone is living tissue, constantly broken down and rebuilt, and it responds to stress exactly the way muscle does: load it, and it grows stronger and denser. That one fact changes the whole question. Bone health isn't something you're stuck with — it's something you build, and the same tra...

t starts with one of the most common questions Srdjan gets at the gym: "What should I weigh?" A client asked it that very morning — wanting one number, for her height, that would mean she was healthy. But that number doesn't exist, and chasing it might be the thing holding people back. Healthy weight isn't a point on a scale; it's a range where your body functions, recovers, and performs well. Fro...

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 fou...

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...

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 sur...

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...

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 c...

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 shou...

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,...

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 p...

If you’ve ever had a great week in the gym and then let a bathroom scale talk you into thinking nothing’s working, this episode is for you. Pete and Srdjan unpack why body weight is such a noisy, unreliable metric on its own—because it can swing for reasons that have nothing to do with fat loss or fitness progress. They talk through what’s actually in that number (water, sodium, stress, sleep, inf...

This one is about the part of training nobody romanticizes: coming back after injury or surgery without letting impatience take the wheel. We start with a real-world case—Pete’s business partner Andy facing back-to-back knee replacements—and uses that as a proxy for anyone staring down rehab, physical therapy, and the uneasy question of “When am I actually ready to train again?” Srdjan lays out wh...

Knees and shoulders might be the two most over-policed joints in the gym—by people who mean well, by people who absolutely don’t, and by that one guy who taught you to fear squats in 2004. Pete and Srdjan break down what actually makes these joints cranky, which “rules” are myths, and how to tell the difference between real injury pain and the normal discomfort of undertrained tissue waking up. Yo...

The question sounds simple, but it carries a lot of baggage: if you don’t eat right after a workout, are you undoing all your hard work? In this episode, Pete Wright and Srdjan Injac take a calm  walk through one of fitness culture’s most persistent anxieties—the so-called anabolic window—and explain why it’s been overstated. Srdjan reframes the conversation around what actually drives progress: d...