Build for Health with Srdjan Injac

Throw the Scale Away

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. From there, Pete and Srdjan take apart the whole toolkit we've been handed. The bathroom scale tells you nothing about muscle, metabolism, or health — two people at the same weight can be worlds apart inside, which is how "skinny fat" happens. BMI is worse: Pete traces its strange pedigree from a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet, who built it in the 1830s to describe the statistical "average man" and explicitly warned against using it on individuals, to physiologist Ancel Keys, who rebranded it as the Body Mass Index in 1972 after studying white European and American men. It stuck because insurance companies wanted to predict how likely you are to die. The conversation moves into what Srdjan does measure instead — muscle mass — and why the body fat percentages you see on social media are a temporary, miserable, peak-week illusion that even competitors can't hold onto year-round. A genuinely healthy, strong person looks kind of normal. You'll know it by how you feel — energy, strength, good labs, the ability to get out of a chair unassisted at 80 — not by whether your abs show in July. And because a body that's causing you stress and anxiety isn't actually healthy, the real goal is feeling good physically and mentally, without the extremes. Build muscle, stop measuring the wrong things, and throw the scale away. KEY TAKEAWAYS * Healthy weight is a range, not a number. It's where your body functions well — balanced muscle and body fat, stable energy, good recovery, healthy labs. * The scale measures the least useful thing. It can't see muscle, metabolism, or visceral fat. "Skinny fat" — thin on the outside, metabolically unhealthy on the inside — is the proof. * BMI has a questionable pedigree. Built by an astronomer for population statistics, never meant for individuals, popularized by insurers tracking mortality. It can't tell muscle from fat, which is why Srdjan himself gets classified as "obese." * Muscle mass is the number to watch. More muscle speeds metabolism, lowers body fat (including visceral fat), and regulates nearly everything. And it declines with age, so building it early matters. * Focus on what you're gaining, not losing. Reframing from "I need to lose weight" to "I need to build muscle" is what actually produces fat loss — and it sticks. * Single-digit body fat is a peak-week illusion. Those shredded photos are taken right after a competition; even competitors can't maintain it. Around 20% body fat can be perfectly healthy with good muscle mass. * Health is psychological too. If a target weight or body fat is causing stress and anxiety, that's a sign it's the wrong target. * The stuff that matters doesn't photograph. Joint health, mobility, getting out of a chair at 80 — none of it shows up in a Speedo shot, and all of it matters more. Links & Notes * Submit your questions to the show! [https://coda.io/form/Ask-The-Trainer-Questions-for-Build-For-Health_dQ_Ip5RWkKF]

The Four Engines of Your Metabolism (And Why Three of Them Aren't the Gym)

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 [https://elev8fitnesspdx.com/]!  * Submit your questions to the show! [https://coda.io/form/Ask-The-Trainer-Questions-for-Build-For-Health_dQ_Ip5RWkKF]

The Sitting Disease

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! [https://coda.io/form/Ask-The-Trainer-Questions-for-Build-For-Health_dQ_Ip5RWkKF]

The Incident: How Srdjan Broke His Arm and Started Beating the Clock

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! [https://coda.io/form/Ask-The-Trainer-Questions-for-Build-For-Health_dQ_Ip5RWkKF]

ADHD in the Gym

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