Power bottom that what?
Pole.
Okay.
Yeah.
Hole and pole.
Pole and pole.
Hole and pole!
Hole and pole.
There we go.
Oh my god.
Welcome to The Outlifting Lounge, the weekly show serving queer conversation,
news, and no-nonsense fitness for gay, bi, and trans guys.
I'm Alan.
And I'm his husband, Derec.
On today's show, we'll be talking about my obsession with 3D printing,
discussing Troye Sivan’s amazing new music video, having a rant about GB
News, Ofcom, and the LGB Alliance, And then, in the fitness section
of the show, we'll be talking about abs and core muscles.
So, let's start the show.
We've had a great wee week, haven't we?
We have.
Happy birthday to you.
Thank you.
I am 21 again.
No, you're officially a year younger than me.
You're 25 then.
I would love to be 26.
Yeah.
I turned the big 4-4 this week.
The big 4-4.
The double 4s.
And, on my birthday, it was a double
celebration, because we were also six years married.
I know.
I can't believe that's six years married.
We got married in between lockdown one and lockdown two, which
it seems like six years ago, but it doesn't as well.
It also seems like a lifetime ago, because the pandemic
just seems so surreal and in the past now.
Weird.
Yeah.
A lot's happened in those six years.
A lot has happened.
We live in another country, and our dog has three legs.
He's doing really well at the minute.
So, this week, we had him out, and he was running around
with some other dogs, and he's just getting on with things.
Yeah.
It was really nice to see him interacting with other dogs, actually.
It was really cool.
Although, he decided just to lie down in all
the sand and ash, so he was absolutely bogging.
If anybody does know what bogging means, it means very, very, very dirty.
Dirty.
Bowfin.
That's another good Scottish expression that I learned when I lived there.
Bowfin.
Aye.
Bogging and bowfin.
Very descriptive.
So, Derec and I have this rule that we don't
buy each other birthday presents, Christmas presents, because if we
want something, we'll just go out and buy it.
But you decided to buy yourself a birthday present.
Yeah, just a small little trinket.
Go ahead and tell our listeners that are on the edge
of the seat right now, waiting to hear what this is.
I am a geek.
I have wanted a 3D printer forever.
For years, actually, I've talked about 3D printing and I've
learned everything about it and I don't have one.
And I've never 3D printed anything, so I
just was like, yeah, do you know what?
I'm going to buy one.
See, when Derec says that he's spoken about it for years, he hasn't fucking shut
up about it, honestly, and I keep saying to him, just go and buy it
if you want it, and then he decided to go and buy one.
Do you know how sad I am?
I have been maintaining a note in my Apple Notes titled, Things I
Want to 3D Print, probably for like a year and a half now,
and the list got so long that that's what convinced me.
It was like, yeah, yeah, there's so many things on this that I
want to 3D print that I can actually justify buying a 3D printer.
Welcome to living with ADHD.
I'd definitely put the D in the ADHD.
Yeah.
Derec?
No, I can think of some other words that begin with D.
Right, that's enough about us.
Excuse me.
What?
You bought a 3D printer for your birthday.
What did I do?
For our anniversary?
Oh, oh God, we haven't talked about that.
Yes, I've decided I'm going back to Glasgow for the week.
Oh no, we went to the Axel.
I thought that's what you were talking about.
Oh, right, okay.
Yeah, we spent a very nice day at
the Axel Hotel, pool, just chilling and relaxing.
with our friend Nik.
And it was very nice.
It's the first time in a long time that I've actually felt relaxed.
I came out of there just totally chilled.
Do you know what?
I think when people hear or realise that we live on Gran
Canaria, they think it's just all sun and sunbathing and chilling.
And it's not, we just live a normal life here like you would in the UK.
But obviously, there's the attraction of being able to sunbathe.
And we have been able to do that for ages and ages
because we've been so busy with the wee man, aka Haggis.
So it was really nice actually to get some good few hours of sunbathing.
Yeah.
And we came back home after that and we
were like, oh God, I hope Haggis is okay.
And he clearly had not left his bed.
He just slept the whole time we'd been gone.
So we worry too much about it because we have been so, we've been
guarding him and protecting him so much that I think we just over-worry.
We're good dads.
We are.
And there was some quite nice dads out of the pool yesterday as well.
So that, dads as in daddies.
So yeah, that made it be a bit of fun.
Some hot boys to look at.
We all love a bit of eye candy.
Yeah, so I booked a flight to Glasgow.
That was my point.
So you booked a flight to Glasgow?
Just one way?
Just, you should be so lucky.
I haven't been home in a year, so I'm really looking forward to that.
So I'm going to be back in Glasgow in the middle of November.
Going to be fucking freezing.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, but I'm very excited.
Good, good.
I think you need it.
There's a couple of our friends have had kids in the last few
years and yeah, you're kind of missing on them growing up because kids
just grow up so quickly, so it'll be nice for you to get
back and see them, catch up with folk, fill your cup, recharge your
batteries, all that, and then come back here and defrost.
Yeah.
It just so happens that you're going away the
same week that Grand Theft Auto 6 is released.
Just so happens you said to me, Alan, I'm going to be taking a week off
and I was like, perfect, you can watch Haggis and I can go to Glasgow.
Yeah, so my week will be spent just looking
after Haggis and playing Grand Theft Auto 6.
Actually, I'm married to a geek, aren't I?
Yeah, and you should be very happy about that because there are a lot
worse things that I could be doing when you go away for a week.
So moving on, shall we talk about some pop culture?
Yes, let's talk about Troye Sivan because we're stanning Sivan this week.
I feel the rush.
If anybody doesn't know who Troye Sivan is.
Aye, he's just a queer pop artist
that we should absolutely celebrate and support.
Because you know what, he keeps doing queer stuff that
is just amazing and he doesn't give a shit.
He's just unapologetic about it and that's what
we need more of in the world.
Exactly, you should never be apologising for who you are.
Yeah, but his latest music video, if people haven't seen it yet, we
are loving it and basically saying, you should go and watch it.
It's called She's the Best and it has a
big name star, apart from Troye Sivan, obviously.
Nicole Kidman.
Yes.
And also Drag Race Season 15 winner, Sasha Colby.
Yes.
Troye Sivan appears in the video, for a little
bit of the video, in drag as well.
Which he's done before, because he did that in the
music video for his song, One of Your Girls.
And I think he was in drag the whole way through that video.
Just a little bit of this one.
Yeah.
And I think this video is really good because
it features a lot of different versions of femininity.
So there's trans women, cis women, drag
queens, different ages, different body types.
So it's really, really good to see that he's embracing all that.
Yeah.
But it does, when you listen to the song and you watch
the video, it does feel like a celebration of women and femininity.
And he says that himself about his new album, which is of the same name.
But he says that this album felt like the truest
and most creative version of himself that he'd ever shared.
He said, at some point along the way, he realised, the
only constant in my life keeping me somewhat sane has not
been the work or the main, but the feminine.
Thank God for them.
I love that.
Yeah.
And actually, he also used similar wording when he
was talking about Nicole Kidman, because they first met
when they starred in Boy Erased, the film from 2018.
He actually said of Kidman, she's always just been
such a picture of the divine feminine to me.
So he's obviously using Nicole as a bit of a muse.
It's so good because at the minute, in the world that we're
in, you get all this ridiculous manufactured backlash, trying to define what
a woman is based on biology or based on different characteristics.
And actually, it's a very broad spectrum and
it's good to see femininity itself celebrated.
Because at the end of the day, like, I'm a
big believer that misogyny and homophobia are so closely linked
because they manifest in very, very different ways.
And I'm not trying to equate the struggles that women go
through with misogyny with what gay guys go through with homophobia.
But there is a lot of similarity in the root cause of that
and it is this kind of hatred of femininity from men who have
problems that they should probably go and see a therapist about.
And some women as well.
I know how often you hear, like, man up, don't be a pussy.
You know, that's what it's all linked to.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's really good that Troy is celebrating femininity.
So if you haven't seen the video, go and watch it.
It's really good.
Yeah.
Okay, shall we move on to some queer news?
Yes.
So it's a right bang in the bawsack, is one of our favourite phrases
from Two Doors Down, to GB News because they are being investigated by Ofcom.
Finally!
This story actually has been pretty big on social media.
People will probably have already seen it, but we have
got some real queer heroes this week from it.
So Liam Rondi, who is an online activist,
he has really been leading the charge.
Bimini, who is a drag queen who competed on Drag Race
UK, they've also been leading the charge on this and really
drumming up support for people to lodge formal complaints with Ofcom.
And also the Good Law Project once again,
because they've been super involved in this too.
So yeah, some heroes of the week there.
We're celebrating them because they are the ones that have really
led the charge against GB News with the complaints to Ofcom.
And there's been 15,000 public complaints.
Which is great, really good.
And these investigations would never have happened
had it not been for that pressure.
All those complaints and all that campaigning from those guys.
So this is a major achievement.
Ofcom were going to ignore this.
And it's pretty major.
And I think for anybody that doesn't know what the complaints were, the first
broadcast that it relates to was on the 20th of June on GB News.
And it was comments made by one of their guests known as Based and Bougie.
Now, she has gone kind of head-to-head with Liam Rondi.
She's said some horrible things about him.
She's pretty vile.
She's a horrible person.
Horrible.
She's just vile, homophobic, transphobic, and she is a rage-bater.
So she went out to, I think it was at London Pride with
a rainbow wig on and tried to basically, she presented herself in bad
faith, pretending that she was there to celebrate and to be part of
the Pride movement when she was actually just trying to catch people out.
But she ended up really just making a bit of a tit out of herself doing so.
She made lots of allegations there as well.
She says that she has lots of gay friends.
And I'm like, honey, if you had lots of gay friends, they
would not let you walk out the door looking like that.
Yeah, totally.
Did you see what she was wearing at that Pride parade?
Honey, come on.
Did you see also, was she the same one that when she was
like pushed on it, she said, lots of my friends are degenerates?
Yes.
Yeah, and then when she was picked up on it and
the presenter said, I think you meant to say gay.
She went, oh yeah, yes, yes, I meant to say lots of my friends are gay.
It's so obvious, like she is not with us, she's totally against us.
And she is also just there to be one of these Katie Hopkins-esque
people who are, they amass a following of other haters and they really
have nothing to offer other than hate and lies and bigotry.
In case you didn't hear that noise, that noise I made was, yeugh.
Let's get back to what she actually said, though.
So during the discussion on GB News, she claimed that gay men and
gay couples were more prone to child sexual assault and sexual deviancy.
Now, she did that without being able to back up her claims.
And when she was challenged on that by another guest, she said, Oh,
I have all the statistics, I'll put them out on Twitter later.
I mean, come on.
If you want to make a serious accusation and an actually
baseless accusation like that, you need to actually be able to
back it up, which she wasn't able to do.
And so that's why, finally, it's good that Ofcom have agreed to
open up an investigation into this, because it's actually really serious.
It's very serious.
I mean, you can't just go on TV and just spout things like that.
You know, it has an impact on people's lives.
Yeah.
It's not the 1980s and the 1990s, where stuff like this was routinely
said of gay people and queer people, calling us paedophiles, calling us all
these different things, and creating this environment of hatred towards us.
They're trying to bring that back again, and it's so important that
we stand up against it and not let us slide back to
that because that was an awful time for all queer people.
Gay, lesbian, bi, trans, however you identified,
it was an awful, awful time.
And that's where we're going back to, unless we stand up united against it.
And then the second broadcast was from the Alex Armstrong
Tonight Show, which was on the 5th of July.
And that investigation covers a segment
titled, Is Pride Suitable for Families?
Anyway, so during the show, Catholic commentator Caroline Farrow.
She is a campaigner who people might know of, famously
for her campaigning to stop women having bodily autonomy.
She's really anti-abortion.
She campaigns against anything to do with abortion.
So what Caroline Farrell said on GB News was that
London Pride is a very sexualised display and linked the
event to bizarre and unhealthy kinks, bestiality and paedophilia.
Disgusting.
Absolutely disgusting once again.
How fucking dare she?
Now the thing that shocks me is that this isn't the
first time that GB News have been referred to Ofcom.
70,000 complaints were submitted in February 2025 and
Ofcom didn't actually do anything about it.
Basically just let them off with a slap on the wrist,
even though there were over 70,000 complaints and that presenter at
the time basically, again, linked queer people to paedophilia.
Absolutely disgusting stuff, and Ofcom did not sanction the channel.
Who investigates Ofcom?
Exactly.
Because 70,000 complaints, I mean, come on.
I know.
It's a watchdog that is just answers to itself, essentially.
Yeah.
I have to say, though, if Liam Rondi, Bimini, Good Law Project, and
everybody else involved in this campaigning are our Heroes of the Week, our
Wankers of the Week, are absolutely going to be LGB Alliance.
Oh my God.
Because they, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to come
out in support of GB News, saying that GB News
apparently champions rights of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.
I mean, what?
Like, by comparing us to paedophiles?
Get fucked, LGB Alliance.
I'm actually speechless with this.
LGB Alliance, and they are supporting people that are
obviously being clearly and openly homophobic towards us.
Yeah.
Which LGB Alliance is...
I mean, they're fuckers anyway.
Yeah.
They're just an anti-queer hate group.
Fuck them.
They'll see you next Tuesdays.
They are.
They're cunts, I'm going to say it.
Okay, thank you.
Cunts.
So yeah, they're our wankers of the week.
Shall we stop ranting and get on to the fitness section?
Yeah, I think that's probably a good idea,
because you're just about to burst a vein.
And breathe.
Right, so for the fitness section of the show, we are going to talk
about ab workouts, because we found a post on our very favourite subreddit.
So this is from a subreddit called r/beginnerfitness,
and what they're asking is, ab workouts are the necessary?
So basically, this person is a beginner, and their weekly split looks like
two upper sessions, two lower sessions, and then they do one day running.
And basically, what they're question is, do they need to do
any specific ab exercises, because they feel that from their resistance
training days, they get enough ab work through their compound moves.
Yeah, so basically, yeah, you actually do need to work out your abs, but the
thing I love about this is that there's actually a lot more to this, because
so many people think of their core as their abs, and there are way more
muscles in your core that you need to be training than just your abs.
I think this is specifically pertinent to the queer community, and specifically sort
of for gay and bi men, because I think sometimes there is this push
on aesthetics in our community, and abs and a six-pack are kind of
praised, and they can be vanity muscles rather than functional muscles.
So that's kind of why we want to talk about this.
And I think especially guys of our age,
growing up with Adam Rickett and Peter Andre.
David Beckham as well, that was another one.
It was this whole kind of like washboard stomach thing was
pushed in the media, which probably wouldn't be anymore, because all
the young ones wouldn't know what a washboard is.
Come on, we're not of that generation.
It's probably disappeared from the zeitgeist.
At least we knew what it was, even though we never used one.
Yeah.
The kids these days wouldn't.
So I would tackle it, first of all, from the aesthetics point of view.
Do you know what?
It's really nice with all these things.
It's nice to see the results in the mirror
and to have that physique, whatever physique you desire.
So that's great.
If you want to train and you want that to be one
of the benefits that you've got, like these nice visible abs, great.
Knock yourself out.
Caveat though, doing ab exercises won't give you visible abs.
True.
Nutrition is going to be important for that.
It's how much body fat you have on your body
determines whether you can see your abs or not.
So we just want to caveat that if you do a
thousand setups a day, you're not suddenly going to have abs.
Yeah.
I mean, that's all well and good.
However, your core muscles are so much more than that.
I mean, you've got your obliques and they kind of
run down the sides of your body alongside your abdominals.
You've got the muscles around your hips.
You've got muscles in the back of your body.
They kind of all work together to create a brace around
your body, which actually helps you with lots of other things.
So it helps you in the gym to prevent your back from being injured.
It helps you in everyday life to prevent your back from being injured.
So if you're picking up something heavy, it's those like
wraparound muscles through the core of your body that really
prevent that and really help you and keep you strong.
It's funny you should say that, actually, because when we took
haggis to the vets on Friday, the vet was like, oh,
make sure that you're picking them up properly because you need
to, like, tense and make sure your back's okay.
We're like, it's okay, hen, we've got this, we work in fitness.
Yeah.
Well, we weren't like that.
We were just like, oh yeah, no, don't worry, we do.
Aye.
I was just like, this ain't my first rodeo.
Hold my poo bag.
Hold my dog, and she's like, no, he's too heavy.
Yeah, but like, I have to say, so from all the core work
that I've done, we used to be instructors for Les Mills Core, which
is a specific 45-minute core class, and the benefits of that are insane.
But I feel that because my core is quite strengthened and
well-developed, that has really benefited me over the last few months
of, like, picking Haggis up and carrying him about.
Because essentially he is, like, a massive big 25-kilogram sack
that I'm carrying at the front of my body.
He's right there.
Cover your ears, Haggis.
Not body shaming you.
It's fine.
But you know yourself as well, when you load weight to the front of
your body, if you were to carry, put a barbell on your back, it's
very, very different from when, if you were to hold a barbell in front
of your chest, because you're changing where the weight is positioned.
So when you bring that weight forward, it puts more pressure,
or it can put more pressure, on your lower back.
So that's why it's so important to not just focus
on the aesthetics or just focus on the abs.
Actually, I would argue that it needs to be holistic.
You need to be doing different exercises, planks and glute bridges, all of
this kind of stuff, to really work on all of your core muscles.
Your core is essentially the powerhouse of your body.
Strong core, strong body.
Yeah.
There's so many benefits to it.
I could evangelise all day about the benefits of a strong
core, but I won't because this podcast has a time limit.
And actually, just reminded me that we spoke about a strong core on
a previous episode about how your performance is affected by in the bedroom.
Yes.
Because Alan's shit in bed and he doesn't do that many core exercises.
No, I'm joking.
We're both shit hot in bed because we've got strong cores.
Very humble as well.
It does.
It really does help.
Like, whatever your position is in the bedroom,
whether that be top, middle, or bottom.
Or side.
Or side, or whatever.
It helps because, like, you can hold yourself in different positions.
You've got better thrust.
You want to power bottom that pole.
I mean, that helps you do it.
Power bottom that what?
Pole.
Pole?
Okay.
Yeah.
Hole and pole.
Pole and pole.
Hole and pole.
There we go.
Oh my God.
We should have a section on the podcast called Hole and Pole.
Hole and pole.
Those are our nicknames.
Yes, they are interchangeable because we're both vers.
So that's been this week's episode.
I hope you've enjoyed that little insight to our life.
We'll see you next week.
Thanks, Pole.
Thank you, Hole.
Right, so we are going to wrap up the show just now,
but as ever, I want to remind you that Alan and I
run Outlifting, which is an online fitness business for gay, bi and
trans guys who want to hit their goals and build unstoppable confidence.
So, if, for example, one of your goals is to build
a really strong, stable core, we can help you with that.
We'll build a specific training plan to suit you, a nutrition plan
that'll help you achieve that, especially if you want visible abs, and
we're here to hold your hand every step of the way.
Now, if you feel that our service could be of
benefit to you, get yourself booked in for a no-pressure,
no-obligation discovery video chat with one of us.
You'll find the link in the show notes.
Click that, book it, meet us on the call, and you
can figure out if we are the right fit for you.
And don't forget, if you haven't subscribed to the show yet, why not
hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on the conversation.
And remember, we are also on Instagram,
and our handle there is @outlift.ing.
But that is us for another week.
We will be back next week.
But for now, over and Outlifting.