You Don't Need a Calorie Surplus to Build Muscle Over 40

You don't need a calorie surplus to build muscle after 40.

The common surplus numbers are shakier than most people realize. I break down the real energy cost of muscle, what the research says about maintenance versus surplus, and how to tell whether body recomposition is the right approach for you.

I'm breaking down the real energy cost of building a pound of muscle and the 3 conditions that decide whether body recomposition works for you. You'll also hear where the anti-surplus crowd oversells the evidence, why one widely cited recomp study never reported the numbers people claim, and what happened in a study where postmenopausal women lifted for 24 weeks.

If you want to add muscle at the weight you're at right now, hit play!

Learn about:

• Why fat calories math does not apply to muscle tissue

• What the Helms 2023 maintenance vs surplus study actually found 

• What deficit research suggests about the point where lean gains stall 

• How body recomp gets overstated from studies

• Why scale weight is a weak signal during recomp and what to track instead

• 3 conditions that predict recomp success

• The 2 biggest trade-offs with body recomp

Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that reads your data, coaches you on your patterns, and keeps you consistent for adults over 40 who want to lose fat and build strength. The permanent 30% off deal closes Sunday, September 13, and it arrives in the welcome email when you join the email list:
https://witsandweights.com/email

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why you've been afraid to "bulk" (calories surplus to build muscle)
4:43 - Where the calorie surplus number came from
6:14 - Can you use fat loss math on muscle tissue?
9:08 - Comparison of 3 different calorie surpluses
10:48 - The deficit level where lean mass gains stops
13:08 - Where the anti-surplus argument overshoots
15:35 - Measuring what the scale doesn't show you
18:02 - 3 conditions that decide whether body recomp works for you
22:13 - Recomp trade-offs
24:10 - When a small surplus DOES help
25:03 - What happened when 43 postmenopausal women lifted for 24 weeks
26:55 - Bonus: the rate of loss that protects your lean mass

Episode Resources:

• MacroFactor - the nutrition tracking app mentioned in the episode, code WITSANDWEIGHTS (affiliate)

• Join the email list to get Fitness Lab 30% off permanently

• Transcript

  Why you've been afraid to "bulk" (calories surplus to build muscle)

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you want to build muscle after 40, but you've been told the only way is to eat in a surplus and gain weight and accept some body fat, this episode is going to change how you might plan out your next few months. Today I am evaluating the surplus claim. Where does it come from? You'll learn the real energy cost of building a pound of muscle, plus three conditions that decide whether you can add muscle at the weight you're currently at. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. I'm a certified nutrition coach. I've worked with a lot of lifters. I've struggled and challenged myself to build muscle and lose fat many times over the past few years, and I've been reading the research. So last episode, Monday, I did an episode on perimenopause and weight gain. And one of the things I said there, stick around because today's episode is for men and women. One of the things I said was, hey, the math still works. What tends to change is where fat is distributed and how much muscle you are losing. And for men, the same thing starts to apply with older age. After you get over 40, you're starting to lose that muscle mat and you're starting muscle mat, muscle mass, and you're starting to gain some belly fat from different reasons and in different ways than women, but still. Now, a handful of you got back to me, which was pretty much the same question that I hear all the time. Hey, I want to build muscle, but I really don't want to gain weight to do it. And I'm afraid of gaining fat. So what am I supposed to do? And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because the advice you've heard for a long time on many podcasts, and I've said versions of it myself on this show, I've done probably workshops on this, is that muscle requires a calorie surplus. So if you want to build muscle, you have to eat more and you're going to gain some fat, and then you can cut that fat off later. And that's the traditional bulk and cut model. Now, you've also heard me talk about body recomp or aggressive maintenance or lean gaining, all that stuff. If you're starting to get on the older side of life, and I say over 40, it's not like a magic number, but it is correlated with not only hormonal changes, but also slowing down and more stress and less sleep and less adherence, all of that. And then with the muscle and bone loss, mat, bone mass loss, and all of that coming together at the same time. And you've probably spent your whole life being told to eat less, maybe trying to eat less, doing the diets I'm raising my hands right now, the keto, the carnivore, it goes back to Atkins and other weird diets that I've tried. The idea of deliberately gaining weight and doing it for months on end on purpose. What? WTF? I would never do that, right? So you're thinking to yourself, it's just not an appealing thing. Like, what the heck? I've been trying all my life to lose weight. And even if I'm haven't been trying to get skinny per se, I've been trying to not be fat. So what most of you do instead is you just skip the building part and you live in this permanent, you know, maybe maintenance at most, mostly a light deficit, slightly or largely underfueled, year after year after year. And guess what? That is a big part of why nothing is changing. So our roadmap for today's episode is pretty cool. First, I want to show you where the surplus number came from. Okay, you're gonna be a little annoyed when you hear it. Then I'm gonna look at what the trials measured, including where people arguing against having a calorie surplus, who are basically on my side of this episode, are also overselling their case. Okay, right? Because I've seen people say, send me Instagram reels by some, you know, really good lifter, bodybuilder, or whatever, who obviously is jacked and experienced. So you're like, nope, you never need to be in a surplus, you just need to be a maintenance. And there's it can lead people astray because there's nuance behind that. Then we're gonna cover the three conditions that predict whether body composition works for you, okay, and what the trade-offs are when you choose it. And when I say body recomposition, body recomp, I mean at the same time, like building muscle and losing fat at the same time, not over time with cuts and bulks. Then stick around to the end because I always have a little treat for you at the end of these. Today, it's gonna be one number that you can check tonight that tells you whether your current rate of fat loss is fast enough or slow enough relative to how much muscle you risk losing. It's always a good number to have in your fat pocket.

  Where the calorie surplus number came from

  Philip Pape 4:43

  All right, so let's start with where the calorie surplus rule came from. If you go open a sports nutrition textbook and you look up how much you're supposed to eat above maintenance to build muscle, you're gonna see recommendations somewhere between 360 and 955 calories a day. And maybe newer ones have a lower minimum. That is a huge range. And those numbers got perpetuated through certifications, through bodybuilding forums, through coaches, and became part of the zeitgeist. I love words like that, the zeitgeist of our culture. Okay, now in 2019, there was a review paper by Slater and colleagues, and Eric Helms was one of the authors on it, actually. Okay, I'm gonna come back to Eric in a minute. We all love Eric. And the paper asked a pretty simple question, which is whether an energy surplus is actually required to maximize muscle growth. And their answer, which for a scientific paper is about as blunt as it gets, is those estimates have never been validated in a resistance training population. Nobody actually studied them. So the numbers that people use oftentimes in this fitness industry that I've found are often inferred, especially ones on populations that have not been studied, like peri-impostmenopausal populations, for example. And I think the inference itself can be sometimes way off, especially if the math is wrong. And I'm gonna explain that here because this is the math piece, is what change how I

  Can you use fat loss math on muscle tissue?

  Philip Pape 6:14

  think about it. All right. You know the rule that a pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories per pound. Okay, now it's not a perfect number, but it's in the neighborhood, it's in the ballpark. Fat tissue is, of course, mostly fat. Fat is energy dense. So when you reverse engineer it and you say, well, okay, a pound is a pound. So of course, building a pound of muscle, or you know, or let's say adding a pound of weight, which includes some muscle, must also take thousands of extra calories. The problem is muscle is mostly water. It's like 70 to 75% water. Only a fifth of it is actual protein. We also know muscle is more dense, but the water piece is probably more of a mover here. A pound of muscle stores way less energy than a pound of fat. And so you can't use fat math on muscle, right? Now, in the past, I've talked about this where if you do want to use math, a number like 2,500 calories per pound makes sense when you assume 50-50 fat and muscle. So I'll just throw that out there. I I have an episode about that, it came out a long time ago. But what is the cost of lean tissue? Well, estimates are that lean tissue store 700 to 850 calories per kilogram. And if you add in like metabolic overhead to assemble the tissue, you're in like 600 to 930 calories per kilogram. There is a newer model from this year from 2026 that puts the all-in cost around 3481 per kilogram. Now that's up from a preprint, it hasn't been peer reviewed, but I'm giving you the high numbers so nobody can accuse me of you know cherry picking here. So if you gain a kilogram of muscle over 12 weeks, for which for most of us over 40 years old is a really good 12 weeks, even using that high estimate, and I'm sorry I'm using kilograms for all my American folks out there, but it's that way I can connect the math to the paper. You're looking at something like an extra 41 calories a day. And on the lower estimates, it's only like five or 10, which is like a tablespoon of peanut butter. I don't think you can build a four-month weight gain phase based on such a tiny, tiny surplus. Now, stay with me, okay? It's hard. What I mean by that is hard to wait gain to gain weight and measurably know that you're doing so when the number's that small. That's what I mean. Now, this is a mechanistic argument, okay? It's the it's math related to the tissue density of energy, blah, blah, blah. Okay, it's not an outcome from a study. Math is a great abstract for real life. I'm not gonna lie about that, but we have to think about our evidence quality, let's say. So, what the math says is that a surplus is almost not even necessary. But what actually happens to your body over 12 weeks of trying to gain? Let's look at that, shall we? Ooh,

  Comparison of 3 different calorie surpluses

  Philip Pape 9:08

  hopefully I've got you hooked. Okay, so we know that the surplus number itself hasn't been tested in a population. But let's look at studies that have done some testing, shall we? Eric Helms, I love his work. He's one of the few people in this field who will publish results that either show a non a non-result, let's say, or they just don't, aren't flattering to what his own position has been. He ran a study in 2023 where he took train lifters and split them into three groups. One group aid at maintenance, one was in a small surplus of 5%, and one was in a bigger surplus of 15%. Many of you are familiar with this, are familiar with this paper because I've used it myself as a foundation for some of working with clients and helping them build muscle with the right surplus. Everybody in the study trained for three days a week for eight weeks. Now, there was no evidence of a difference in muscle thickness between the groups, and there was no difference in squat strength. The bench press had some evidence favoring the big surplus, but I think the most important finding is that the rate of body weight gain predicted the increase in skin fold thickness, which is fat. Okay, skin fold thickness measured with, I think, a caliper. That's fat. And it did not predict muscle thickness. So the faster that people gained weight, the more of what they gained was fat. Okay. Now there's a caveat, there's nuance to this. Okay. That study started with 21 people and ended with 17 people on RAND during COVID. A small study like that that essentially does not find a difference between groups is not the same as proving there isn't a difference, just to put that out

  The deficit level where lean mass gains stops

  Philip Pape 10:48

  there. But there is a bigger piece of evidence we have, a meta or meta-regression by Murphy and Kohler in 2022. And by the way, a meta-regression, sometimes I have to slow down here and define these things. It's where you pool a bunch of studies together and then you look for a relationship across a whole range of values instead of just comparing two groups against each other. So they pooled resistance training studies where people were eating in a calorie deficit. And the lean mass gains were blunted or impaired compared to the control group. The effect size was negative 0.57. So, and then strength wasn't affected at all, essentially. The I'll say headline finding is that a calorie deficit of about 500 calories a day is where the lean mass gains stopped happening. Okay, so think about that for a second, because we have kind of two directions fighting for each other. On one hand, it's saying, hey, a deficit can cost you muscle growth. Okay, fine. Some you you're often you often hear that a deficit's gonna potentially cause you muscle loss or gonna cause muscle loss. On the other hand, it means a deficit smaller than 500 calories a day. Well, the people in these studies were gaining lean mass while losing fat. What is that? That's body recomp. That's body recomp. Now, you know, to be fair, they were looking at deficits, different sized deficits. They didn't have a group that was also in a surplus. That'd be pretty cool, right? So when you when you hear someone say, talk about that paper and say, okay, here's how much growth you would lose by going from a surplus to maintenance. Well, they're extrapolating past the edge of the data. They might be right, but the paper's not going to tell you that. So this brings me to the part that I guess I'm a little uncomfortable with and why I love this show, because we can challenge our own beliefs and we can be skeptical. Because right now, the loudest people out there are pushing this one really hard, the fact that you don't need a surplus and pushing it to an extreme like they always do. Okay. In other words, I would like to make the nuanced argument on this episode today that you don't quite need a meaningful surplus to build muscle, but there's nuance behind it. But I'm not going to go to the extreme of you just can do deficits all the time and always be a maintenance and never be in a surplus. Okay. So the claim goes something like this.

  Where the anti-surplus argument overshoots

  Philip Pape 13:08

  In something like, I don't know, 90 to 95% of hypertrophy studies. I think I heard Milo Wolf or somebody mention this on a podcast. Researchers never tell people, hey, I want you to bulk and I want you to cut. They say just eat normally. Sometimes they're not even controlling for nutrition, right? And then the body weight stays the same in many cases. And then people gain muscle because they're on this training regimen. And so by definition, they must have lost fat, right? So recomp is happening, and that's great. So you're like, oh, yeah, hold on, Philip. You've been arguing that exact thing for the last few minutes. But I think there are some problems with this. Okay. The first is that in a lot of these studies, hypertrophy is measured by ultrasound at one spot in one muscle, like the front of the thigh. Body weight is measured on a scale, and they don't measure body fat distribution or body composition, right? Whole body fat mass a lot of the time isn't measured. So the fat loss part is an inferred conclusion, not a measurement. The second problem is that stable body weight, like within 1% over eight to 12 weeks, is well inside the normal fluctuations from water and glycogen and gut content and all of that. So I have a real problem with like these short-term studies trying to conclude anything. Well, I shouldn't say anything. That's taking it too far. But like on body weight. And it to be fair, many of them aren't even measuring, they don't care about the body weight necessarily as a variable. They just happen to say, hey, by the way, their weight didn't change. If I give you a specific example, okay, maybe it'll help. There's a 2024 study on single set training. Uh Herman with two N's, he was the lead author. And Brad Schoenfeld and Milo Wolf were the co-authors. And it was done in train lifters who averaged over four years of experience. And people cite this as a finding of body recomp. So I went and I looked at the paper, and body weight change and fat mass change, I didn't see those appear in the results at all. Like they're not reported, going back to my comment I just made. So whatever recomp claim people are attaching to the study is not necessarily something you reported. This is why you gotta be very careful. I know you're not all gonna read every study just like I don't read every study, but you gotta just be careful. Now, that doesn't make recomp false. Okay, when we measure it, sometimes we do find it. And I also think recomp is a really fun and marketable thing to sell because I sell it myself, because yes, it's possible and it's possible for certain people. But like some people take it too far or they build their whole business off of it. So having said that, this brings me to what I think is the practical problem with all

  Measuring what the scale doesn't show you

  Philip Pape 15:35

  of this. And speaking of, you know, conflicts of interest and disclosures, you guys know that I have an app and it's called Fitness Lab, right? And if you run a recomp phase, your body weight is supposed to stay roughly flat. Now I've talked about aggressive maintenance or slight deficits, but still your body weight's gonna stay mostly flat compared to if you're bulking or cutting. That's kind of the whole point, which means the scale is really not gonna help. It's not gonna move very much, all right? And so if you make it front and center, it's an easy reason to quit. It's very hard to see changes in body recap. It takes longer, you have to be more patient. All right, you have to look at the right things. And so when you know, working with a coach or using my app or whatever, you have to understand what you're measuring and managing is aligned with the thing, with the outcome you're trying to get. So if you look at my app fitness app, it reads your scale weight but turns it into a trend. It reads your lift progression alongside that, okay, and says, okay, you're getting stronger or not. It looks at how hard your sessions are because that's useful, right? That gives you even more information than just the numbers, especially when you connect it to things like your sleep and your other biofeedback. And then when you take all that together with check-ins and you put it all together, here's what's going on underneath the hood. That's kind of the recomp process, okay. When you're building muscle and not gaining weight, that's kind of the game when we talk about recomp and not having to be in a surplus. But I'm gonna put a star in that. And I'm sorry I'm kind of rambling today because a lot of this is unscripted. The evidence that it's working is mainly in your training log and in your biofeedback, as opposed to in the scale. So, anyway, real quick, by the way, I should pitch my app since I'm talking about it Fitness Lab. We're running a Labor Day sale right now. I don't want you to miss it because it closes September 13th. And this episode comes out pretty close to the end of that. But you have to be on my email list. Go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list, and you'll get it in your welcome email. If you're already on my list, guys, you should have seen an email with the deal. If not, just reply to one of them and let me know, hey Philip, where's the freaking 30% off deal? But if you're not on my list yet, just go to witsandweights.com slash email, and that goes through September 13th. Fitness lab can do all this for you with the body recomp stuff. But anyway, if the surplus isn't required, if recomp is real, but it's being oversold, then the useful question, of course, isn't does

  3 conditions that decide whether body recomp works for you

  Philip Pape 18:02

  it work? It is, does it work for you? And that's where you have to understand. Can it work for you? There are three conditions. And I'd say if you have two out of three, you're pretty good shape. Okay. Condition one is you have some body fat. You have some body fat to spend. That's like a nice little battery of energy on your body. This is the way I like to reframe for people who have a little extra body fat carrying around. Hey, you've got some energy to draw from. We go back to Gilbert Forbes in the 80s, and there was a concept called partitioning, which just means where the tissue comes from and where it goes. And some people still use the term, right? Nutrient partitioning, for example. So leaner people tend to give up more muscle when they're in a deficit, and they put more of their surplus toward muscle. People carrying more body fat tend to do the opposite, which for our purposes here is what we want. Because the body is more willing to pull that energy out of fat stores and put it toward muscle. Interesting. All right. So you're starting to see why surplus or not surplus isn't really the right way to frame this. Because if you have a lot of body fat and you eat at maintenance or in a slight deficit, your body may still experience that as a quote unquote surplus from the muscle mass building perspective. All your body cares about is does it have enough resources to construct that muscle tissue? Right. And your body's able to create some of a lot of those resources too, from the energy. And this is why lifting weights is so fantastic, especially when you're overweight. Now you're gonna hear specific numbers touted about body fat cutoffs, where, oh, are you lean or not? Or where does this start to happen? You're gonna hear like, okay, men above 10 or 12% body fat, or women above 18 or 20% body fat. And these are more like coaching heuristics. Okay, there isn't like a trial that establishes these body fat thresholds for recomp. And again, it would probably be very individual anyway. There's definitely not one for women. I know that. So this is like a rough sense of direction, right? It's not like a hard line, like many of this stuff. And by the way, Forbes' original data came from people who weren't lifting at all. Some of them were recovering from starvation states. So we gotta watch out who we apply this to. So anyway, condition one is that you have some body fat. Condition two is you have some training headroom. What do I mean for that? Okay, for most of you listening, that means that there is room to improve your training stimulus, which is uh I could say the vast majority of you probably. Okay. Maybe you are detrained, maybe you're coming back from a break or an injury, maybe you never really trained hard in the first place. Or this is the big one. Maybe you've been doing the same three sets of 10 with the same pink dumbbells for two years. I mentioned the pink dumbbells again, I did last time. Maybe that lady who commented on Spotify about how I I constantly mention I'm an engineer and she's so annoyed by it, will be annoyed by the pink dumbbells if I just keep mentioning them. So if your training has been coasting, right? You haven't really been using a progressive overload, then doing it is going to put your body in a massive, big new stimulus. And you don't need extra calories to respond to a stimulus if you're a noob. You weren't getting it, now you are. That is a huge stimulus where your body will respond to it almost despite how much you're eating. Almost, almost. Okay. Training is what builds muscle bar none. The food and the protein are there to support it. Speaking of protein, that is condition number three. Okay. I'll just mention it again. At least 0.7 grams per pound, that's your floor for protein. Are you getting that much protein? If not, you need to work your way up there fairly quickly with your routine. You know, track it if you need to. Use macrofactor, my code, wits and weights, all one word, and get your protein. All right. You have to be training and the protein supports it. If you're only eating protein and not training, it's not really gonna make a lick of a difference. Now, when you're in a fat loss phase or a calorie deficit, I should say, you probably want a little bit more protein than that. All right. And it's not just to hold on to lean mass, but in many cases, it's You're newer, it'll actually still help you build more lean mass even when you're in a deficit, even when you're losing weight. It's crazy. It's crazy. So combining multiple of these things that you're not already doing is a huge lever that you should get going on right now, guys.

  Recomp trade-offs

  Philip Pape 22:13

  All right, now let's talk about trade-offs. One trade-off of body recomp is that you give up speed. A calorie surplus is probably going to buy you a little bit more muscle. I don't think it buys you as much as what like our bulk and cut bodybuilding culture, social media culture implies. And again, we can go to the Helms study that says, hey, the faster you gain, the more you're probably just gonna gain fat, but it's very individualistic. Again, if you're new to training, you have a little more leg legroom. I always put a brand new person who's doing their first building phase ever, who's highly responsive to training and maybe has some fat but not too much fat. I might put them at like as much as 0.4, 0.5% body weight a week, which is still not that much. It's still not that much. If if anything, it's enough to push you to eat more. And because people tend to not eat enough and have trouble eating more, they eat just the right amount. It's the way I think about it. It's like a stretch goal. So that's one trade-off. You give up speed. The other thing is you give up using the scale as the signal. And for a lot of you, that's hard psychologically, but it could be hugely beneficial because then you learn the other things that you get to use. During a body recomp phase, you want to use your strength log, you know, your training log, your tape measurements at your waist, at your navel photos every few weeks, all those things to kind of see what's happening. Biofeedback, like you should be feeling good during body recomp. You shouldn't feel low energy or like you're in a deficit, but you're also not gaining a bunch of weight and potentially fat to go with it. It's just gonna take time and you have to be patient. Now, I'm not saying a surplus never helps, okay? Tying all this together in a bow, the you don't have to be in a surplus piece really means you probably can get enough energy into your body to support muscle growth if you're at least at maintenance. And sometimes it helps to push a little past that, but if you have a little extra fat, you may not have to because of the extra fat and your body still experiences as a quote unquote surplus. The other thing is if you start to build muscle and your body craves more energy and food, you may have to overconsume calorie-wise, and it might seem like a surplus, but

  When a small surplus DOES help

  Philip Pape 24:10

  you're not really in a surplus. Your body's metabolism's just going up. And sometimes you have to overshoot that a little bit, being a tiny surplus, just to stay at not a surplus, if that makes sense. And if I'm confusing all of you, if I'm confusing all of you, I want you to reach out. Okay. I want you to reach out, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, reply, let me know what you're dealing with, let me know what you're confused, and I'll reply in person. If you're already lean, you're already well trained, progress has stopped, you know, maybe a small surplus is the boost you need. And there's good evidence behind that. We also know that recomp takes time. Take, we said that it's slower than a dedicated build and a dedicated cut, and you have to stay motivated in other ways. I'm also not saying, hey, just eat a maintenance and you're going to sort yourself out. Of course not. You have to have your training, you have to have all the other things, the protein, et cetera. And even to stay at maintenance can be a difficult skill to build over time because you need to know, am I really a maintenance?

  What happened when 43 postmenopausal women lifted for 24 weeks

  Philip Pape 25:03

  Now, what's cool is we have plenty of studies on young trained men, but we also have some resistance training trials in post-menopausal women that show this exact pattern. And sometimes they don't use the word recomp. So it's it's kind of hard to find the studies depending on how you search for it. There's one from 2024, and they had 43 postmenopausal women over 24 weeks of resistance training, and they measured significant reductions in total fat and visceral fat alongside significant increases in muscle mass and in strength. And the heavier load groups did even better. Nobody said here, eat in a surplus. Nobody said here in a death, eat in a deficit. They just lifted and their body composition changed in the best direction in fat and muscle for both at the same time. Now, those were untrained women. So again, this is what happens when you start lifting. So I don't want you to conclude on this up from this episode you should eat less. No, I think it's somewhat the opposite. I think it's you need to start lifting, you need to eat more fuel to support your lifting, you need to increase your protein, right? But to the level that you need to be fully fueled, which still may not be a surplus, if that makes sense. It's just not in a deficit. Okay. Before we wrap up, that number I promised you at the beginning of the episode, I'll give you that in a minute, so that you can properly calibrate your uh window for body recomp. But before I do, the fitness lab deal closes this Sunday, September 13th. You have to go to witsandweights.com slash email. Join the list. You'll get it in the welcome email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. This is a permanent 30% off for life deal. Anybody who knows Fitness Lab since we launched last year, we've never had a deal like this. Usually the deal is 20% off your first payment. This one is 30% off permanently. Okay, so get in there. You get an even bigger deal if you sign up for a whole year. So that's up to you. But go to wits and weights.com slash email. All right. Here's a numeric value that you can check for yourself if you're trying to, you know,

  Bonus: the rate of loss that protects your lean mass

  Philip Pape 26:55

  build muscle, lose fat recomp. All right. There is a meta regression that pooled a bunch of resistance training studies done in calorie deficits. And they saw where lean mass gains occurred versus where they stopped. And they stopped right around a deficit of 500 calories a day. Now, I don't like just calories or percentages of calories. I like rates of loss relative to your body weight. So if you convert that to body weight, for most people, this if you if we base it on the weight in the study, the body weights in the study, you want to limit your rate of loss to roughly half a percent of your body weight a week. Now that's not nothing, like that's still meaningful, right? So if you weigh 160 pounds, stay under three quarters of a pound a week of loss to potentially not only keep your lean mass, but gain lean mass, especially if you're newer to lifting. If you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, pun intended, maybe? Yeah. Okay. So look at your last three weeks of trend weight. Okay. I know I threw you for a loop there. You can't just go by whatever you weighed yesterday. You got to have a good idea of your trend weight right now, your overall actual average weight, and just do the math. Okay. Do the math, multiply it by a half percent. And whatever that is, don't exceed that amount of weight loss per week. Now, you take that, you multiply by 3,500 calories, that's the calorie deficit. All right. In other words, the pounds that you calculate times 3,500, that's your calorie deficit. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the surplus was never the thing that built the muscle. The training does that. The food is there to support it. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Perimenopause Doesn't Cause Weight Gain (Your Metabolism Is Fine)

Perimenopause doesn't cause weight gain.

But if you ARE gaining weight over 40 (or struggling to lose weight), then what's actually going on?

Menopause changes body composition in ways the scale can hide, but it does not suspend the basic rules of energy balance. 

You'll learn:

• Medical consensus vs. social media claims about menopause weight gain 

• SWAN DEXA findings on steady scale weight and shifting fat and lean mass 

• Visceral belly fat and trunk fat increases during menopause

• Why comparing men and women helps separate aging from menopause effects 

• Why the “menopause slows metabolism by 200 to 300 calories” story is weak

• What hormone therapy (HRT) does and does not do for weight and body composition

• 4 things that genuinely changed at menopause that aren't your fault. 

If you want to stop solving the wrong problem and finally lose fat, hit play!

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Timestamps:

0:00 - What perimenopause gets blamed for
3:44 - What the medical bodies actually say
6:54 - What 1,246 DEXA scans found regarding scale weight
10:43 - Where the fat goes during the transition
12:10 - Men over the same decades
13:35 - How to use your data for fat loss instead of guessing
16:36 - The metabolism claim and its thinnest evidence
20:36 - What 28 hormone therapy trials found
23:45 - 4 things to target instead of the scale
27:57 - Bonus: how to reduce hot flashes

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• Transcript

  What perimenopause gets blamed for

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've been gaining weight since your late 30s, into your 40s, and somebody told you, well, that's just perimenopause, maybe you don't question it anymore because, hey, it explains everything. It also takes the blame off you at the same time. Today I'm evaluating that claim against the longitudinal data. And that means a study that followed more than 1,200 women through the transition using DEXA scans. You'll learn what the scale actually does across those years, what genuinely changes that, hey, it's not your fault and not under your control, and why the metabolism piece of the story is actually the weakest link. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape. And on the last episode, our big 500, I went through five beliefs that I used to hold about strength training over 40 and no longer do. Today it's sort of a sixth one, except this isn't something that I believe, but something that the entire industry has a collective delusion about, I'd say, and they keep repeating over and over, likely in the interest of selling you their quick fix program or the program that is the only one that can solve your problem. So menopause weight gain is probably the single most repeated explanation in midlife fitness right now. I see it on threads, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere. And I understand why, because it happens exactly when your weight does often tend to go up, or at least you have trouble losing weight around for many women in your early to mid-40s. Sometimes it's earlier, right? Like perimenopause, uh, that window can be quite long, can start in your mid-30s. But let's say 44, 45, 46, your genes get a little tighter, your cycle's getting a little more volatile because of the hormones. Of course, everybody's saying, oh, it's because of your hormones. And of course, that sounds reasonable, right? It sounds kind of intuitive. And you hear things like, hey, the math no longer applies because your body's changing. Whatever worked in the past doesn't work today. Your metabolism might be slowing down. Maybe you're losing muscle, maybe you're losing both. There's so many things. And I want to examine that today and kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, right? Get to the heart of the matter, like things that you can actually control that matter, and the things you can't, or maybe things that aren't even really happening. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna share a study where lifting weights cuts hot flashes by 44% and what they did. And you're gonna like it because the recommendation is pretty much what I recommend anyway, but we're gonna reinforce exactly what that is. Okay, I know I'm such a tease. Okay, so here's the roadmap for today's episode. And I'm gonna come back to them, but I always encourage taking notes. First, what does the data, the human trials, longitudinal data show about weight versus body composition across the menopause transition? All right, I'm already giving you a little bit of a hint. Second, what about the metabolism claim specifically? Uh, and I want to spend a decent amount of chunk of time there because I think that is the one that is has the thinnest evidence that people misstate. Third, what about men over the same decades? What if we compare to what happens to men? That's gonna be interesting to see because if if we if men are doing something that is also happening to women, maybe we can take away some of the variables and simplify this. Um, and then finally, I'll tell you where I think the whole argument just falls apart. And I'm gonna have a little bit of tough love. Maybe you think I'm unkind, but it's gonna be the truth. It's gonna be tough love, and I think it might be the most important part of the episode.

  What the medical bodies actually say

  Philip Pape 3:44

  Okay, let me start with a mainstream position. And I mean the real like medical bodies or organizations, not the interwebs or Reddit or whatever. Although Reddit could be pretty good, but also could be pretty terrible because it the real like medical and scientific advice does not say what you've necessarily been told it says. Okay, so if you go to Mayo Clinic's page on menopause weight gain, it says hormonal changes alone don't necessarily cause the weight gain, and that it's usually related to aging along with lifestyle and genetic factors. Then we have the menopause society. I love the menopause society personally, actually. I think if you can provide a find a provider, like an OB, that is associated with them, you'll probably have a higher quality person who really gets this stuff and tends to treat symptoms and understand things like HRT better. Anyway, the menopause society says aging is the primary driver of weight gain and that menopause plays its role in redistributing fat. The International Menopause Society published a position statement in 2012 saying that weight gain per se cannot be attributed to the menopause transition and that the steady gain of about a half a kilogram a year is due to age rather than menopause itself. So the official organizations already say roughly what I'm gonna spend 20 minutes saying. And that's important because medical consensus does have some weight. As much as the world we live in today with HHS and RFK Jr. and social media and broscience and everything else, right? And people pushing hormone treatment and the clinics and everything else, there's something to be said about scientific medical consensus based on real studies. There really is. There is a drift off of that consensus that has happened over the last roughly 15 years and it's been it's happened on social media. A lot of the loudest menopause causes weight gain messaging comes from people selling hormone therapy or a supplement or a menopause coaching program or menopause stack or whatever. I'm not saying that they are lying. I'm not saying that they don't have good intentions. Some of them are clinicians with lots of letters after their names that I might even take seriously on other topics. I'm not, I am saying that a claim which conveniently requires the thing that is being sold, it deserves a second look, a little bit of skepticism. Okay. And I like to disclose my conflicts, right? I sell an app, Fitness Lab, that tries to debunk all these mixed myths in the very essence of its messaging. So you should always apply the claim to me as well. Like, what am I trying to sell you? I have coaching, I have an app. What am I trying to sell you? Okay. The British Menopause Society is the interesting exception, by the way. Their patient fact sheet leans closer to the popular framing of this. They describe perimenopause as a kind of perfect storm for weight gain. So this is not a case where every expert body agrees in its own form of an echo chamber and that only influencers are dissenting here. I'm not going to tell you that either. All right. Even in the literature, there's always some disagreement. Okay.

  What 1,246 DEXA scans found regarding scale weight

  Philip Pape 6:54

  So let's go to the best data that we have, which I think is the Swan study, the study of women's health across the nation. You probably heard me reference this many times at this point on the podcast because it's such a good data set. They followed women through the menopausal transition for up to 18 years with DEXA scans. Now, I've talked about DEXA versus other forms of body fat measurement. And I think it's a great tool when used in a research context, especially, where they're able to control how it's used. Okay. And they tend to use higher quality or better calibrated machines and things like that too. But it is a good tech, it is a good way to measure distribution of tissue. So we're not just using, for example, scale weight. Okay, we're gonna measure fat and lean tissue. Fat and lean tissue. Lean tissue includes muscle mass. The body composition paper from Gail Greendale and her colleagues in 2019 included 1,246 women, and they lined every woman up by her final menstrual period rather than by age. And what they found is that body weight climbed steadily through perimenopause or through pre-menopause. Okay. Body weight climbed steadily through pre-menopause, through the transition to menopause and out the other side, and that slope of increase didn't accelerate in any meaningful way at menopause. It just kept going the way it had been going. Now, underneath that increasing line of body weight, two things were changing at once. Fat mass gain roughly doubled, going from a quarter kilogram a year before the transition to 0.45 kilograms a year of increase after the transition. And then lean mass, which again includes muscle, flipped around from very slightly gaining to actively losing right around two years before the final period. Now it's interesting that these women were at least even just slightly gaining weight beforehand or gaining muscle. Now, that could be because we tend to gain a little muscle mass as we gain weight, regardless. So that probably explains it. But over the three and a half years of the menopause transition, that's about 1.6 kilograms of fat gained and two tenths of a kilogram of lean mass lost. And then both of those trajectories flattened out about two years after the final period. And I went to a workshop maybe a year ago with Dr. Bill Campbell showing that graph, a very fascinating graph. Okay. So, ladies, there's definitely something happening. But we need to understand what is happening and what you can do about it. So the scale isn't going to show you that. And the reason is fat gain went up by about 200 grams a year. Lean lean loss, lean mass loss went down by 120 grams a year. So when you add the two, they net out to roughly only 80 grams a year. And that's hardly anything. So the body composition changed dramatically, kind of under the scene or behind the scenes, whereas the weight barely showed any change, which, you know, going from an individual basis from woman to woman, you might have a slight drift up or slight drift down. My point is there's a lot more going on under the hood that you don't see. Okay. And that's what makes like trusting or relying on the scale weight so much very problematic. Now, the scale, you know, I've talked many times about how it's an important, helpful tool when used in the right way, especially when you're looking at your trend. But in this context, the scale can be very, very misleading. It could make you feel like nothing is happening in the exact years when a lot is happening under the hood, and you might be doing a lot of things about it too. And then it's easy for that, you know, passenger in your brain, you know who she is, who beats up on you on a regular basis mentally, to tell you, hey, that's your problem. Okay, now the body fat distribution piece is where menopause really does its

  Where the fat goes during the transition

  Philip Pape 10:43

  thing. The Swan Regional Fat Paper, okay, so this is a kind of a substudy or subset in 2021, it found that visceral fat, good old belly fat, the fat around your organs, the dangerous fat. We don't, it's not great to have too much visceral fat. It's very inflammatory fat as well. And I mean that in the very scientific way of it creates inflammatory compounds like cytokines, et cetera, in your body, which causes a whole host of other issues. Anyway, the visceral fat started rising at the transition at over 6% a year. And android fat, which is that trunk pattern, went from 1.2% a year to 5.5% a year. This is the so you know the bigger uh belly fat and the more hip fat and things like that. There was also a study uh earlier by Pennington or out of Pennington by Jennifer Lovejoy, and it was a four-year study that used CT imaging. I like this study because of how it isolates the variable. Every woman in it gained subcutaneous abdominal fat with age. Okay, that's that's the safer, okay, fat. Only women who actually became postmenopausal gained significant visceral or belly fat. So there is a very real effect from menopause that we've seen with imaging, and that's distinct from aging. Very interesting, right? Nobody should be trying to disabuse you of that notion. That's the truth based on the evidence. And it's also not talked about in the right way, I think, in this industry.

  Men over the same decades

  Philip Pape 12:10

  Now, let me do the comparison to men, which a lot of people don't do, because this is gonna be fascinating. So if you're a man listening or a woman listening, this is gonna be fascinating. The Fells longitudinal study followed 102 men and 108 women between ages 40 and 66. Men gained weight at about 0.3 kilograms a year and women at 0.55. The fat gain was almost identical, about 0.37 kilograms a year in men and 0.41 in women. Men, of course, don't go through menopause. They don't have a big cliff with their hormones like estrogen. You know, they might have a gradual transition to testosterone, but they don't have this transition that's distinct like women do. And they gained fat across those decades anyway, anyway. So we need to start to say what's causing what here. Now that was a small cohort, right? I said 102 men, 108 women, which isn't nothing. It's not like studies I have 10 people, but it's not as good as maybe somebody with someone with 500 or 1,000. The day is a little bit older. It's hard to compare the sexes across studies because of other variables, potentially. Women did gain somewhat more total weight and women lost fat-free mass faster. So I'm not claiming the sexes are identical. I'm just saying that there is some overlap happening with age that we have to account for before saying, okay, what is left? I hope that makes sense. Now I

  How to use your data for fat loss instead of guessing

  Philip Pape 13:35

  just want to take a quick moment to talk about if you are wondering how to control the lifestyle factors that we're gonna talk about, especially your nutrition and your training, and you've been hearing the message over and over my metabolism is broken. I'm not sure what to do. I can't stay consistent. I can't see the results. That is the problem my app was built around called Fitness Lab. I'm very proud of this app. Everyone who's using it now are finding it very helpful because of not just the features, but how it keeps you going to the gym, watching what you eat, being flexible, being sustainable, actually starting to move the needle in a very confident way that integrates your whole lifestyle. It's kind of like a lifestyle app almost. Okay, it doesn't just give you numbers like here's your expenditure, here's a calorie target. It is far, far, far more than that. It's a little bit unusual, in fact. So I want to explain it today. Yes, this is part of a pitch, I'll say, but it's also why we need to think of these a different way. All right. Total energy expenditure estimates typically have enough error that when you anchor to it with your calorie deficit, for example, you tend to just start distrusting the idea of calories in, calories out, or the idea of calorie deficits, fat loss, all of that, especially when you do it in conjunction with your scale. I also have seen that having targets, just having numeric targets, can create these all or nothing past fail comparisons in your brain. And then you start to judge yourself. And then you start to feel like even in even in neutral apps, you know, like some apps that I like that don't really judge you intentionally, you still tend to judge yourself and you create this loop that is connected with dieting history and dieting culture, probably from your past, that led to these multiple cycles of cutting and gaining and cutting and gaining. So we take something like my app Fitness Lab, it uses AI. It's technology. I'm gonna admit that because AI is amazing when you can use it for good. So, what it does is it reads the rate of change in your weight, it reads the trends, it looks at your lifting, it looks at your biofeedback. If you use an iPhone and connect it to Apple Health, it can pull up to 85 metrics from sleep to nutrition to workouts, everything, to then infer, hey, what is going on with your body right now? Let's put those patterns together. And I know you want to lose fat, but here's some tough love on the reality of what's going on and how you can do that successfully. So, anyway, I wanted to just kind of take that detour because we are running a Labor Day sale right now through September 15th. And the only way to get the 30% off permanently is if you're on my email list. If you're not on the list, go to witsandweights.com slash email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. As soon as you join the list, the welcome email will give you the discount. Again, it expires at the end of September 13th. It's our Labor Day sale, 30% off permanently, but you have to be on our list. Witsandweights.com slash email. Okay, so that's what happens to fat and lean tissue during the menopause transition. Now let's

  The metabolism claim and its thinnest evidence

  Philip Pape 16:36

  talk about metabolism. Okay, metabolism, this is probably the weakest link of the whole discussion around menopause right now. The popular version says, hey, menopause slows your metabolism. And some people say, oh, it's two or three hundred calories a day. Okay. I don't believe it. I don't believe it because of the evidence, and I don't believe it because of anecdote and personal experience. All of it put together. Herman Poncer published a paper in science in 2021. And if you've read his book, Burn, like I have, I have it on my shelf. It's a great book. You know his work. And he has changed how a lot of us think about energy expenditure. He and his group pooled doubly labeled water data, very high quality way to measure metabolism. And he did it on over 6,400 people. Now, doubly labeled water is the gold standard because you drink water with tagged hydrogen and oxygen. And then they can measure how fast you clear those from your body, which tells them exactly what you burned for your metabolism. Pretty cool, right? And what they found is once you adjust for fat-free mass and fat mass, total energy expenditure is essentially flat from about age 20 to age 60. It is flat across pop the populations, across cultures, Western, tribalism, tribal cultures doesn't matter. Active, inactive, it doesn't start declining until roughly 60 years old. And then it's like 0.7% a year. So this entire window where women are told their metabolism is crashing is the same window where the best measurement we have says, no, it's not really happening. All right. It's not really happening. Now, Ponser's own group will say, you know, we had some limited resting data through midlife specifically, but still they have it all the way from 20 to 60. Then we have a 2023 paper from Carpin and colleagues that went at this directly in 120 women. Some of them were mother-daughter pairs. The adjusted resting energy expenditure did decline with age, which we expect, but the menopausal status didn't contribute anything to that decline. Not estradiol, not FSH. None of them predicted resting energy expenditure once you accounted for body composition. Now, if we look at the other side of the research, Eric Pullman published a six-year longitudinal study in 1995 showing that women who went through menopause had resting metabolic rate drop by about 103 calories a day, compared to eight calories in women who didn't, okay, who didn't go to menopause. And a lot of people cite that study, but when you look at what else happened in the same group, they lost three kilograms of fat-free mass versus only half a kilogram in the non-menopause group, and their leisure physical activity dropped by 127 calories a day, but the comparison groups went up by 64. So the metabolic rate went down because why? Because the muscle decreased and the movement decreased. That's a totally different claim than menopause is just independently lowering your metabolism. Now, Lovejoy's group also measured sleeping energy expenditure in a metabolic chamber. And the decrease was about one and a half times larger in women who became postmenopausal. And fat oxidation fell by about 32%. Now it was a small sample. It hasn't been, I don't think it's been replicated. I'd love to see it done again. But there still does seem to be something genuinely menopause specific happening with how you use fuel. And if you've heard me talk about menopause belly fat and you know substrate oxidation before, that's what I was talking about. And then I think that stands. I think that still is a thing. What doesn't hold up is taking this leap of logic from okay, my body's changing in how it uses the fuel and distributes fat to, oh, you're just gonna burn 200 fewer calories fewer per day. And hey, come come to my program. We're gonna do the reverse diet, metabolic, hormonal reset, optimized program for you. Okay.

  What 28 hormone therapy trials found

  Philip Pape 20:36

  So one claim is physiology, which is true, the other one is an excuse to sell you something. Now, we have a natural widespread experiment that has occurred for a long time in the world that we should look at, and that's called hormone therapy. If estrogen loss causes weight gain, then guess what? Replacing estrogen should prevent weight gain, shouldn't it? Right? Well, the Cochrane Review looked at 28 randomized trials, over 28,000 women, and they found no evidence that hormone therapy prevents menopausal weight gain. That's crazy. Wow. I've heard a lot of podcasters make the claim that, oh, just go on HRT and it's gonna solve your weight gain issues, issues. What it did find in the Women's Health Initiative body composition substudy, which I know women's health initiative has a huge asterisk because of how it's been interpreted and used for some nefarious purposes, like saying that there's a link, there's a cancer link that that's not there. But if we actually look at the data of 835 women, they found that hormone therapy the hormone therapy group lost quite a bit less lean mass over three years and carried less trunk fat. So guess what? I will agree that estrogen appears to affect where the fat goes and how much muscle you hold on to versus what the scale weight says. And that's exactly everything else we've been talking about. So going back to all the people claiming you you need HRT to lose weight, that's not accurate. But it could probably help with your body fat distribution, which then can help you. With other things, including potentially gaining or losing weight. But again, weight doesn't really matter. What matters is are you healthy? Do you have the energy? Do you have the fuel? Are you functional? Do you look good? Like feel good? All those things that matter, whatever matters to you. Okay. Now, I am not saying menopause is in your head either. Hopefully you couldn't get that from this episode. You know, I'm not saying nothing changed. I'm not saying you're eating more than you think and you won't admit it or you're not tracking properly and all that, you know, things that 25-year-old influences will yell at you about. I'm not saying this is a discipline pro discipline pro discipline problem, because I've seen so many of you be working so hard at this for that to be true. What I'm saying is that four things have changed and they're very specific, just to recap. Your fat moved toward your midsection, toward your organs. That is hormonal and it is measurable. Not your fault. Your muscles started to decrease faster around that final period as you get into post-menopause, not your fault. Your sleep probably got worse. And when we look at the Swan data, it shows hot flashes precede the weight gain with sleep problems affecting part of that, right? Kind of a bi-directional thing. So activity and then adherence are negatively affected by that. And your physical activity most likely dropped, which is behavioral, but it's often downstream of the other ones. Again, rather than quote unquote, your fault. What didn't change in all this is whether energy balance works, calories in calories out, that still does work. That's kind of good news buried in here. Okay. As well as lifting weights and all the other things we talk about. That is the good news because if your body's still gonna respond perfectly normally to those inputs, well, then it's in your control. You are the captain of the ship. It might take you a little long to steer the ship, a little long to turn it around, but you can do it. Okay. So

  4 things to target instead of the scale

  Philip Pape 23:45

  what is the fix? Well, there's four things. So this is where we get to okay, here's the simple fix. Simple, not always easy. Two different things. Simple, but you got to make it happen. First, the scale should no longer be your primary measurement instrument. Okay, it's it can be one of them, and it probably should be if you're trying to calculate your metabolism, right? Like we do in our app and fitness lab or in macrofact or whatever. But waist circumference and strength are probably better indicators. Those two track the things that actually change. If your weight is flat, but your waist is decreasing, that's a huge win, right? You're getting leaner. Second, progressive resistance training is the biggest lever. Okay, but it has to be progressive. As in the loads, weight on the bar, weight on the dumbbells, weight on the machine, and/or the reps are going up over time. You are getting stronger. You're not just doing the same three sets of 12 forever with the pink dumbbells. That's my uh flippant way of characterizing a lack of increasing weight. I apologize. Muscle loss is around three to eight percent per decade after 30, and the menopause transition accelerates it for a few years. Training, therefore, is the only input that can reverse all of that. And we see this in trials in postmenopausal women that are, you know, which are consistent when it comes to strength and lean mass. Okay, this is not just something I believe, this is something that works. Third, protein, protein, protein, protein. We can't talk enough about protein. I'm sorry. And if you're at the point where you're sick of it, then great, then you know what to do. Okay. I work with a minimum of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. That is what I always say all the time, and I will continue doing that. All right. A an increase above that has small additional benefits. So we always say that anything higher than that is more about preference, lifestyle, balancing your macros, things like that. Maybe even a little bit of optimization if it if it gives you a little bit more muscle potential. That's the third one, protein. Fourth is sleep. Now, I want you to think of sleep and hot flashes as a body composition intervention. Because remember, in the Swan study we talked about, that's the pathway that tends to connect menopause to weight. If you can fix the vasomotor symptoms, right, to use the technical term, and the sleep, it then helps you be more active and be more adherent. And also, by the way, tend to eat fewer calories just naturally. And all of those things then help you affect your fat loss, right? So again, a lot of this does come back to sleep, not just for recovery, but for how it downstream affects these other things. And speaking of eating, which I know where there's a lot of fear about eating for a lot of you, both fear of like what to eat, that you're gonna gain weight, that you're eating the wrong things, and all these things are just toxic for you. There was a the Monet study looked at energy intake across the menopause transition, and they found that it didn't go up. In women who became postmenopausal, it actually went down. So, this story, this narrative where menopause makes you ravenous and you eat your way through it, it's not what the data shows. Now, maybe as an individual you're eating more, and there could be other reasons for that. And if anything, guess what? Most of the women I see and coach and eat more lift heavy or those who use my app are probably under-eating relative to what their training demands. The key being that they are training. If you're a sedentary, it's probably a lot easier to overeat and have it, the body fat distribution thing work against you. All right. So it's not that you have to be in a surplus, by the way. We're gonna have an episode coming up soon about how you can build muscle without even being in a surplus. So definitely follow the show if you're not already. So before we wrap up, I wanted to share the hot flash trial and how you might be able to reduce hot flashes naturally. Okay. Quick reminder that the Fitness Lab sale runs through September 13th. Join my list at witsandweights.com slash email. And the permanent 30% off for life of Fitness Lab will be in the welcome email. If you're already on my list, you'll be inundated with several emails about this anyway. Hopefully you don't under unsubscribe so you can get that. You can then unsubscribe after you if you want. But that's through September 13th, wits and weights.com slash email.

  Bonus: how to reduce hot flashes

  Philip Pape 27:57

  All right, so let's talk about hot flashes for a second. Researchers in Sweden took 58 postmenopausal women who had seven moderate to severe hot flashes a day, and they were not exercising. Half of them started lifting three times a week for 15 weeks, and they did chest press, leg press, rows, leg curls, and pull downs, and their loads went up over time. So progressive overload. Their hot flashes dropped 44%. In the control group that didn't change anything, they didn't start exercising, their hot flashes dropped 2%. Now, they dropped, but that's hardly anything. And I'm guessing that's like a placebo effect potentially. So what do you do with that data? Well, are you lifting weights? Okay. If not, big lever right there for a million reasons. And if you are lifting weights, are you actually progressing? Are you actually progressing? If you're not training frequently enough or with enough volume or intensity, any of those things can prevent you from progressing. And if hot flashes or anything else are your concern, just lifting the right weight and getting stronger, you'd be surprised at how much that can help. And again, if you want to use my app Fitness Lab, it does that for you. It will give you a program based on your needs. It'll tell you exactly what to lift, what you lifted last time. It is bang on an amazing experience for all those who want it. You got to go to witsandweights.com/slash email to get the 30% off. Okay, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that menopause changes where the fat is distributed and how fast you lose muscle. It doesn't change whether the overall math works. So don't let anybody sell you that when you have all the control. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

5 Beliefs I Got Wrong About Strength Training Over 40 | Ep 500

Are you still following outdated advice for strength training over 40 when it comes to building muscle and losing fat?

After 500 episodes of Wits & Weights, I’m revisiting 5 pieces of strength training and nutrition advice I used to give and explaining what changed my mind.

Learn why starting at maintenance calories can still make sense, just not for “metabolic repair,” why total daily protein matters far more than perfect meal timing, and why cardio probably isn’t stealing your muscle gains.

I also break down why training effort matters more than chasing arbitrary volume, what menopause really does to body composition and metabolism, and the pattern connecting all five shifts.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy my 26-week coached program for 40+ to build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage your physique for life. Use code 500CLUB for $50 off either six-month option. Offer expires Sunday, September 6.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why I changed my fitness advice
4:32 - Why maintenance still matters before cutting
8:08 - Protein timing matters less than total
16:24 - Why cardio is not killing gains
21:17 - Training effort makes volume actually work
25:43 - Menopause metabolism myths and real changes
31:10 - The pattern behind all five shifts
36:09 - Why chronic dieting stalls fat loss

Episode resources:

• Eat More Lift Heavy: eatmoreliftheavy.com - Use code 500CLUB for $50 off either six-month option. Offer expires Sunday, September 6.

• Transcript

  Why I changed my fitness advice

  Philip Pape 0:00

  To celebrate 500 episodes of Wits and Weights of evaluating the claims in the fitness industry, I'm evaluating five things that I used to say on the show that I wouldn't say now. You're gonna see how I've changed my mind. There's a claim with almost no evidence behind it. There's one that I've overcorrected on, and there's similarities across all five. Enjoy. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Hape. I'm a certified nutrition coach, and this is episode 500 of Wits and Weights. And I thought about doing the things that shows do at episode 500, you know, tell the story of the show, thank everybody, maybe play some clips. But I really wanted to just look back and say, hey, what have I claimed before? And was I always right or not? I know I wasn't, but specifically which ones should I have thought better of, or maybe I just didn't have the information at the time. This is all about what the evidence supports when it comes to fat loss and building muscle, health, fitness, all of it, and how I've tied that to advice over the years, but also how I'm willing to change as I hope you are as well. So I'm gonna take you through five things I used to say about strength training, about the over 40 crowd like me, like you, that I no longer say. I'm going to tell you what I used to say, what changed my assessment, like what was it that I learned that was the catalyst? And then I'd tell you where I stand today on that. And then toward the end, I'm going to bust a well-known metabolism myth that probably tells you a lot more about why fat loss stalls than age or metabolism actually does. There's a myth about how metabolism slows down as you're age. So I'm going to talk about that at the end and including one thing that could solve your metabolism problem, but many of you are afraid to do it. So we'll get to that. This is not going to be sugarcoated as five things that, you know, I was mostly right, but you know, no, I'm going to be honest and tell you where I was just plain wrong and also where I've overcorrected and things like that. So I think that's good to do in a public forum with everything happening in the industry and so many wild claims all over YouTube and social media and podcasts. I want to be clear about what I mean when I say I change my mind, because you can probably interpret that in two ways. Sometimes the evidence actually changed. Like our the body of evidence, the literature and the science, we actually understand something different, meaning maybe a study had been run before that hadn't been run, and then the answer was a little different, or maybe quite different than what we had assumed. We just didn't have the data. And that's the way science is supposed to work, right? We never prove anything, we always just either support or refute hypotheses. The other version of changing my mind is hey, the evidence has been there. Maybe I was reading it the wrong way, interpreting it the wrong way. Maybe I took a shortcut, maybe I was lazy and kind of followed what many others had been parodying over the years. Sometimes that's a lot more nuanced than others. And if I respect somebody, I'm gonna tend to give them benefit of the doubt when they say something that's closer to the truth than if I don't. And maybe I didn't go back to the source myself. In the field of medicine, there's a group of researchers, Vinay Prasad and Adam Sifu, C-I-F U, and their colleagues, and they went and they counted this phenomenon. What I mean by that is they went through 10 years of the New England Journal of Medicine and they pulled all the studies that tested a practice that was common in the field that everybody was doing. And 40% of them came back and said that the established practice was no better than what it had replaced. So that's four in 10, and that's in the field of medicine. Those are, you know, it's one of the fields that have, I guess, higher quality data, you know, big studies, very expensive, very carefully done studies. And so it's a very high standard of really being skeptical when one practice replaces another, whether it's actually more beneficial, or are we just going with the trend, right? Is it just trending? Are we just like following the crowd? Is it the social media thing? Is it the crowd mentality? Nutrition and exercise science are not even held to that standard, right? Not even close to that standard because the studies in this field tend to be smaller, they tend to be shorter. A lot of them are on college students. I mean, the ones on lifting, they go for eight weeks. What can you tell from eight weeks? It's hard to get anything other than say observational type studies. It's hard to replicate things as well. So I have

  Why maintenance still matters before cutting

  Philip Pape 4:32

  no idea what the reversal rate is in this field. I don't think anybody else does, but I bet, I bet real money that it's not lower than the 40% in the field of medicine. So we need to be skeptical, we need to be open to change, and really that's kind of the point of episode 500 here and why I did the show in the first place. And so, for those of you who've been along for the ride, this is what it's all about. So we're gonna start with the first of the five things that I've changed my mind about, and that is restoring calories first. What do I mean? All right, for years I told people that if you've been under-eating for a decade, two decades, your whole life, you know, you've been dieting all the time, you need weeks and weeks at maintenance calories before you do a cut because your metabolism has to recover first, has to come back up. If it was ever up in that range in the first place, given all these years of dieting. Like the machinery of your body has to be working again before you have, you know, you could do something like fat loss, which is stressful, right? And there's a lot of names for this in this industry. Some of them are farther extreme, like fixing your metabolism and repairing your metabolism, but even lighter terms like restoring, recovery, et cetera. I've definitely used those terms. And then when you actually look at the data, nobody's ever taken two groups and put one group into a deficit and given the other one time to be at maintenance first and then compared what happened. The closest anyone's come to this is the famous Matador trial, which gets often cited, often misinterpreted. They alternated two-week blocks of dieting with two week blocks of maintenance. So two on, two off. And the group that did that, that kind of interval dieting, I call it, I don't know if they called it there in the study, performed better, had a better outcome than straight continuous dieting. But those are breaks in the middle of a diet, as opposed to having a prep phase or recovery phase before a diet. And it was in men with obesity who are not lifting weights and on and on and on, right? We got to be careful how we compare studies when it comes to which population's been studied. So, what I like to say now is that I do start people, clients, members, whoever I recommend it all the time, that you do start at maintenance without going into a deficit, but I do it for different reasons than recovery per se. I actually like recovery as a transitional thing between dieting and not dieting and doing it as quickly as possible. But when you're gonna go into a fat loss phase, the reason I like a preparatory period is for a couple of reasons. The first one is you may not even know what your maintenance calories are until you've held something fairly steady for long enough, right? You eat the roughly the same amount of calories every day, you weigh yourself every day. Even if you're not eating the same every day, you're measuring both. And that kind of tells you how many calories you're actually burning, right? It reverse engineers into that, but that takes like three to four weeks. Also, doing a deficit when you've already been dieting for a long time and you're already in that mindset mode of restriction and deprivation, you're probably not gonna sustain it anyway, right? It's just gonna feel like more of the same. So we need that kind of break from that perspective. Some of it is psychological for sure, some of it is physiological. And so it's it's kind of a measurement argument and a sustainability argument, let alone the fact that some of you need time to build skills. Some of you need time to build the skills of lifting weights, for example, of tracking your food, of drinking enough water, of having a certain step count. They don't have to be perfect. You don't have to bring them all the way up to like your final state just you know, just to diet, but you need

  Protein timing matters less than total

  Philip Pape 8:08

  to get them into some level of stability. So I think measurement, sustainability, and skill building are really important reasons to do that as opposed to metabolic repair, right? Or fixing your metabolism. That's the first of the five that I've definitely changed my mind on, but I haven't changed my methodology. It's just the reason why has definitely changed. All right, number two is protein timing. So this is meal timing related to how much protein you get in. And this is one where I would say the evidence has actually shifted to more clarity since the time I've been in this business. And at the same time, we tend to cling to old recommendations without updating. And so there's this overlap where you're like recommending things that are a little bit unnecessary or out of date for longer than you need to. So, for you know, the years that I've been coaching, so since about 2020, what is that, six, seven years now, I've always talked about the how your body can only, not can only use, but is optimal when you get about 20 to 30 grams of protein per sitting minimum to hit the leucine threshold, right? Which we can get from higher quality forms of protein. And we want to space out our protein to get, you know, the total protein that we need for the day, as well as enough protein in each meal, which for a lot of people works out to at a minimum three, if not four or five feedings. Again, it depends on how many calories you have as well, how much protein you actually eat, you need, hit that leucine threshold. Like a lot of people have talked about it. They've had studies over the years, like go back to over a decade ago, 2013, Areta and colleagues, they gave people the same total protein with different meal patterns. And it looked like four servings of 20 grams each was better than eight servings of 10 and two servings of 40. So it looked like, okay, the moderate feeding, that's where we need to be, and that's the whole like protein distribution model. And it's a reasonable conclusion if that's what we're looking at for the evidence. But when you look at what those studies looked at, they were measuring a window of four hours, maybe six hours. And then we extrapolated that kind of four-hour measurement, and we said, okay, this applies to the entire day. And we tend to do that, right? We tend to extrapolate or take something as a microcosm of a macrocosm, and that's not accurate. So then we go all the way to 2023, Jorn Trommelin, and Luke Van Loon and the group over at Maastricht, who are probably about the best in the world at like the tracer research. They had 36 guys who were resistance training, and then either they didn't eat anything or they had 25 grams of protein or they had 100 grams. So this is the famous 100 grams of protein study that has been talked about ad nauseum. And then they used intrinsically labeled protein, meaning that they tracked the amino acids all the way back from the cow so they could follow where everything went in terms of the consumption. And instead of stopping the measurements of four hours, they kept going all the way to 12 hours. The 100 gram dose of protein still show that you could build muscle even after 11 hours. So that's what a half day, a half of a full day period. Muscle protein synthesis was 20% higher than the 25 gram dose in the first four hours. It's about what you'd expect. But then it was about 40% higher from hours four to 12. So the difference increased the longer that they measured, and very little of it got burned off, right? Burned off or wasted or whatever people like to say. So this like artificial sealing of 20, 30, 40 grams was pretty much just that. We could probably eat a lot more protein in a single bolus, they call it, or a single city, and still get all the benefits of muscle protein synthesis, which gives you a lot more flexibility. Now, I want to be careful, right? Because there's people that go to the other extreme and they take this study and they're like, you have to eat, you know, all 180 grams of your protein in one city. That's that's the way to go. One meal a day, one protein bolus a day, right? Yeah. This is the kind of stuff that happens in this industry. And we we have to really surf the nuance in the middle and look at it more as how you don't have to be dogmatic rather than being dogmatic in a new way. So I think that the thing that this does from a practical standpoint, it gives you more flexibility. So the distribution question is really more about what do you need? How do you perform? How do you respond to it, and what's sustainable and practical for your day-to-day. Now we look at research by Stuart Phillips and Daniel Moore, and they've been mapping this in older adults for a bunch of years. And it seems like older adults are a little bit less responsive to a given dose of protein. They call that anabolic resistance. And the dose response studies identified a per meal requirement for older adults at around 0.4 grams per kilogram versus about 0.25 grams per for young adults. So that's like 60% more protein per meal to get the same signal. Now, why this is annoying is that hey, you can't use more than 30 grams rule. Okay, that's not a thing anymore. But the idea that you should probably get a decent amount of protein at each meal and probably more than a younger person would need still could be helpful. We'd still still see a small benefit for muscle protein synthesis, especially in the older groups. Now, still, having said all that, your total daily protein gets you the vast majority of the benefit. So that's that's kind of where I've landed today, is right the total daily protein, you know, I don't know what percent of the benefit, is it 90%, is it 95%, is it 99% of the benefit? But it's more than enough that if you just worry about that and get to that goalpost first and not worry about the timing, it's gonna do a lot for you. Where the timing then comes in is a little bit of optimization beyond that. You're trying to build a little bit more muscle, but more practically, it's the idea that who wants to eat 120 grams of protein in one sitting and you can go ahead and spread it out and it makes it more practical to actually get the protein. So I kind of given you two things in one here. One is total protein is the most important. Number two is the amount of that total protein, as long as you're around 0.7 ish grams per pound or more, you're again getting the vast majority of the benefits. So if you're nowhere near that, why don't you just step it up until you get there? Then once you get there, it's up to you to see does it make sense for me to go higher? Well, it depends on the calories, depends on how much you like protein. It depends on what types of food you eat, right? Depends on where the carbs and fats sit and depends on how you respond. So since we're talking about protein, I did want to mention one of the tools we have in our program, which is called Eat More Lift Heavy, is a protein day builder. It's it's actually early on, week four of the program. This is a 26-week program for those over 40 who want to build muscle, lose fat, and do it in a sustainable way and build all the skills that we talk about on the show. Uh, but in week four, it's called protein day builder. And all it does is it takes the foods that you already like to eat, your preferences and your targets, and it just builds a day for you. So it is really a quick meal planning tool. It's a little more optimized than using AI because it's narrowed in on specific to protein based on your preferences and based on the evidence. So it's not really a meal plan, it's more of here's some suggestions. And then we often recommend running that tool later on, once you've been tracking your data and see where you are, to continue to optimize. But at the end of the day, total protein matter is what matters the most. Distribution is more from a practical purpose. And if you need more help, if you want to check out our program, go to eatmoriftheavy.com. We've got lots of cool tools in there. And because this is episode 500, we've got a code for you. It's 500 club and it takes $50 off the six-month option. It expires this Sunday. So if you've been thinking about should I join or not, this is a little incentive to do so. But go learn about it. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. Okay, let's talk about number three. And I'm actually like on the fence here with how much I should apologize for being wrong on this one. Okay. And this is cardio. Cardio. Now I know it's a big ball of wax that we can get into with cardio. But I did spend years telling people early on, you know, cardio's a threat to your muscle. You don't need cardio, the interference effect, like all you need to do is lift and walk, and almost nobody actually needs cardio except for like maybe endurance. I or endurance athletes, I really did have that kind of position early on. And part of it, let's be honest, is marketing. Hey, who doesn't want to not have to do cardio

  Why cardio is not killing gains

  Philip Pape 17:16

  and still get all the results? And I wouldn't use those exact words all the time, but the message was like, keep it minimal, keep it low intensity, don't let it interfere with your lifting. You're here to build muscle, and sometimes cardio can work against that. And a lot of that came from the interference effect. The paper that a lot of people were citing was from Wilson and colleagues in 2012. What it actually found when you go back and read the even that paper, which was often cited, was that the interference showed up in regards to power output and not hypertrophy. In other words, it wasn't even, we shouldn't have even been scared about losing muscle in the first place based on what that research was studying. And then we fast forward what, like 10 years, Schumann and colleagues in 2022, they looked at 43 studies with about a thousand participants, and they found that the effect of concurrent training, so that's lifting and cardio at the same time, on maximal strength was basically zilch, zero nada. The effect on muscle growth was also basically zero. And the only measure that declined in any meaningful way was explosive power. And it really only happened when people did cardio and lifting in the same session. So it only, it's actually reinforcing the fact that there's not much of an interference effect like we used to think. Now, if you're older, if you're like me, 45 or 50, 55, and you're not a sprinter, you're not an Olympic weight lifter, if I had warned you about cardio for this reason, I'm sorry because it was such a small effect, if not negligible. And the effect was on something you weren't even worried about anyway, the explosive power piece of it. So I guess if I had to regret any of these, this would be the one I regret the most because I probably led some people astray early on. But hopefully I made up for it by getting you into lifting weights. We'll see how the long term turns out if you're still listening to the show. Meanwhile, we have this whole field of research into cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness. And that is a really, really good predictor of longevity, of whether you've got not only lifespan, but health span, you know, functionality 20 years later, once you get into the older years of your life. And again, the data here, which a lot of it's observational, a lot of it isn't randomized controlled trials, very hard to do in this area, but it pretty consistently shows that the lowest mortality exists in people who lift and do cardio. In fact, it gets improved with either, yes, even just cardio and you're not lifting or just lifting and not cardio, but it gets improved a lot with both. So my message today is that cardio is not much of a tax on your training unless you're doing it to excess, like anything, right? Or unless it takes away from the time and recovery available to do these things, as opposed to some sub-physiological process going on that's like causing you to waste away your muscles. So, what I like for those of us, especially who are over 40, 50, 60, is you prioritize your lifting, you get your steps in, and then the next priority is fun cardio if you like pickleball or swimming or hiking or whatever. And then if you want to, add in some short sprint work, right? Some short sprint work on a bike or potentially flat ground. We've talked about this a lot in the past. I call it anabolic sprinting, but it basically doesn't take much out of your recovery, doesn't take much time, it doesn't really affect your lifting in any way. It's very quick and it can give you a little extra boost to your day, help with your cardiovascular fitness, help with your VO2 max a little bit. It's fun and it contributes to lifting or contributes to your adaptations in a positive way, right? So that's my thought on cardio today. Now, it one little caveat on cardio, because it comes up a lot these days, is the constraint versus additive theory of expenditure. Herman Ponser's work, it suggests that your body compensates for some of the activity that you add in, but it requires a lot of activity to get to the point where your body serves to compensate. And that goes back to my earlier comment about an excess of cardio and movement could be an issue for a lot of you. And some of you may be doing too much, but usually it's for because of practical purposes. It takes away from time available to lift, or you're tired, or you end up eating more, things like that. All right, number four that I've changed my mind on is effort versus volume when it comes to lifting weight. For a long time, I treated volume, that's sets per week, and frequency, that is how many times you do, you hit the target group each week, and effort, okay, and that is proximity to failure, as three separate dials, three separate variables that were all roughly equivalent or at least highly individualized. So you get your sets in, hard sets per muscle group per week, you spread them across the week, you train hard, hard-ish,

  Training effort makes volume actually work

  Philip Pape 22:09

  right? You train hard, and then progressive overload takes care of the rest as you keep adding weight or reps or sets or whatever. And now I like to say that that's actually wrong in a very specific way, which is that effort is what makes the other two actually matter. You can have suboptimal volume and suboptimal frequency, but train really hard and get a decent result. But if you're not training real hard, it doesn't matter what volume and frequency you have, you're not going to get a decent result. Does that make sense? And that really comes down to the mechanical tension piece of what drives muscle growth. We're not talking about strength here that has its own elements. To it. You will get to hear the episode with Andy Baker on that in a couple Fridays from today. But here's what I see all the time. Okay. And it's almost somebody who's like doing everything right. They understand the fitness lifestyle. They listen to podcasts. They're going to the gym already. And they might do like 20 sets a week for a body part across four or five sessions, and they're very consistent. They don't miss their workouts. Things haven't changed. They're following a program. Okay. But then, then you see them lift. So they might send me a video and you can tell they're not training very hard. Their sets will stop like five, six, seven reps shy of what they can actually do. This is very common. You see that the bar speed hasn't changed at all. They're going really fast. Oftentimes they're counting the reps as opposed to actually training hard closer to failure, even if it gets more reps than what's programmed for them. And that's not really getting you the sets you think it's getting you for the week, is it? Like if you're doing 20 sets a week, but they're not hard sets, you're not really getting hard sets. The goal is to get 20 hard sets. So training with effort is really important. Now, the research into volume, okay. There's a big study by Pellandon Steele and Knuckles. You guys know Greg Knuckles. I love Greg. And their whole group that came out, I think last year, I think 2025, there were 67 studies analyzed with 2,000 people. And they show that more volume does help you, but with diminishing returns. Okay, makes sense. Like a lot of things have what we call a dose response relationship in this sense. But, but every set in every one of those studies, because of the guidance and the oversight, was taken somewhere in the vicinity of failure. It's hard, or maybe they just haven't done the studies of people that do a bunch of easy sets compared to a bunch of hard sets. The flip side of this, okay, is that you don't have to go to complete failure either, right? That's the flexibility piece of it. Refalo and colleagues, they've done some good research here where getting closer to failure does improve hypertrophy. But again, dose response, the effect starts a plateau. It's very small. The curve flattens, right? Like a lot of this stuff. Same thing with protein, same thing with sets, everything. And then they had a trial that compared training to failure against stopping one to two reps shy, and it found similar growth. I think they were looking at the quads in that study and they found similar growth. And we've seen this time and again where you don't have to go to complete failure. So again, I think the answer here is we've got some flexibility, but also in this case, training hard is important, right? So we have this wide zone of okay, we can train all the way to complete failure or some reps shy of failure. So the working theory for why all this is true that I want to come back to is mechanical tension, that the hard reps at the end of a set are where the tension gets high enough to really, really matter to start recruiting more and more of those muscle fibers. And we still don't quite know how it works, right? Like we don't still quite don't understand why. And there's other things that happen, like metabolic stress and whatnot, where we think, you know, metabolites may still have some effect, but mechanical tension seems to be the thing. The problem is a lot of this research is in young men, in college students and males, their short studies, et cetera. The key is you have to train hard, but you have flexibility in terms of how many reps shy of failure. All right. Number five is all about menopause, peri- and post-menopause. And this is the hot trending topic right now. This is the one that I have probably the least comfort with. Yeah, I'm a man, that's obvious. It's not just that. I mean, there's plenty of women I know who don't have a clue when it comes to menopause, and I'm not blaming them. It's the industry has not studied it very often in terms of populations. And then healthcare has been atrocious when it comes to women's health. So, I mean, that's you know, two reasons why we don't know a lot about it. I have people in my life who I love who have various issues like endometriosis and fertility issues and stuff. And it's like knocking your head

  Menopause metabolism myths and real changes

  Philip Pape 26:35

  against a wall, trying to get good health care and good, you know, people who will understand this stuff. But there are some big myths, I guess, that I kind of subscribed to until I knew better. One of that is that menopause slows your metabolism. And that is why you gain weight during metabolism or at least have struggle losing weight, right? And that's why you lose muscle. And it's all because of your hormones. And interestingly, this traces back to a paper by Eric Pullman in 1995 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found a big drop in resting metabolic rate across the menopause transition. And so this paper got cited everywhere, right? But that study was made up. That study was fabricated. The data was fabricated, and the paper was retracted in 2003. Now, how many times have we seen stuff like this happen? We see stuff like that. This happened in the nutrition world. We saw it happen with autism and vaccines, like all of these things where it totally sets the tone for not only science, but popular culture and discussion for decades to come, oftentimes very hard to claw it back. And this guy apparently went to prison in 2006. He was the first American academic to go to prison for research fraud. And then people still talk about, oh, during the menopause transition, your metabolism drops. But then we have again Herman Ponser's group that published in Science in 2021 with the doubly labeled water. They had 6,400 people across 29 countries and found energy expenditure adjusted for body size, and I believe adjusted for lean mass, put a little asterisk on that. From age 20 to 60 did not change with no special bump during menopause. That is fascinating. Like I know it's hard to believe. It's hard to believe because there's other reasons that your expenditure changes, but it's not that your metabolism just dropped for some unknown reason having to do with age or menopause. Now, many of us, we like to be contrarian or contrarian of contrarians and we'll correct in the other direction. I think I did that for a while, where I said, okay, well, then menopause doesn't do anything. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about perimenopause, ladies. Like, let's mansplain our way out of this, right? Now I say that jokingly because I never tried to do anything that that that we call mansplaining, but I'm sure I do. And then we we start to blame you, right? We start to say, well, no, it's it's your habits, it's what you're doing, it's the sleep and the stress and the moving less and the eating less protein and all of that. And I think that's an overcorrection too, to say it's all lifestyle because something is actually happening. You know, part of what made me realize this was Dr. Bill Campbell's research, because he's actually looking at this population. But we also have the Swan study that looked at over 1,200 women. They looked at DEXA scans over 18 years, the same women. So this is a longitudinal study. And the rate of fat gain roughly doubled during the menopause transition, and lean mass went down, starting about two years before their last period, and to about two years past it. Their total body weight went up steadily with age the whole time. And that didn't have to do anything with menopause, but the body composition changes seem to be associated with menopause. So fat, muscle seem to change in a significant way with that female clock related to hormones and menopause. Not age, right? But the actual hormones. So I'd say like both of my positions were incorrect, if not just incomplete. The truth is that your metabolism doesn't fall off a cliff, but your body composition can definitely shift with the transition. We know that body fat distribution moves toward your visceral fat in your abdomen. So belly fat, when we talk about menopause belly, that's a real thing. And all of that is happening at the same time as sleep problems, but the sleep problems are often because of the symptoms of peri and postmenopause, hot flashes, night sweats, et cetera, and stress. Your joints are getting a little bit more fragile, sore, whatever. Like that happens to men and women, right? Your joints get a little more less pliable. Plus, you, if you haven't been lifting weights, they they may be more sore and prone to injury. And then it's harder to train and to eat the way you want to. So there's like bi-directional issues going on. You've got a real physiological change and a real behavioral change stacked on top of each other. And so why do we need to separate them? We shouldn't separate them. So what I like to say now is that look, menopause isn't the reason it's not working or you can't lose weight or you're struggling, but it's also not nothing. It is a headwind, it is a challenge. You, if you still lift, if you still eat enough protein, if you still get your steps, you're gonna be in a far better position than another woman in the same situation. But what you're doing is you have more going against you. And the results may come on slower and they may come on with more challenges. Okay. And the things that are hardest to fix later in life, especially your bone mass and the visceral fat, are also the two that get a lot worse. But that's an argument for starting right now instead of waiting. That's an argument for starting right now and taking control of that situation. So that's five things that I've beliefs, I guess, that I've shifted on or changed my mind about. And when you look at them all, I put them all next to each other as I said, okay, we've got a pattern here. In every one of them, I was giving too much weight to something insignificant, like a small variable, and I wasn't giving enough value to a big one. So, for example, I was overvaluing meal timing for protein and undervaluing total protein. I was overvaluing the interference effect from cardio, which is a real effect, but it's small and may not even be relevant. But I was undervaluing cardiovascular fitness, daily steps, the other benefits

  The pattern behind all five shifts

  Philip Pape 32:02

  of fitting cardio into your life. I was overvaluing whether you reach failure, you know, in favor of the other things like frequency and volume. And I was undervaluing whether you reached close to failure. And then with menopause, I was overvaluing metabolism, which barely changes, but undervaluing body composition and bone, which is where the real change happens that cascade into other things, which yes, may include your metabolism, your ability to eat enough, you know, your hunger, your appetite, your sleep, your stress, your lifting, all of it. And so it's hard to catch these things in the moment as you absorb the research. And sometimes we like to go to the easy thing to try to change in our habits. And we like to feel productive and like we're working and we're feeling diligent, right? Meaning, okay, I can hit my 30 grams of protein, but skip all my cardio. And it's easy to measure and it's satisfying. It feels like you're doing the work, but maybe you are missing out. Maybe the big variable is something vague and a little bit uncomfortable. Like, am I actually eating enough food despite my fears of gaining fat? Because now I'm lifting weights and I need to eat more. Are my sets actually hard or am I just phoning it in when I go to the gym? But I feel good because I'm going to the gym. So we'll put this all together. What changed my mind about these things? It wasn't really a single study, right? It wasn't a single, I hope not, because in fact, we shouldn't be swayed so much by a single study. But it's it's two things. The first is staying curious. I love curiosity, I love learning, being willing to be wrong, having that growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, going back to firsthand accounts instead of just trusting what everybody else says about it or trusting what's on social media. And because in most of those instances, the information is there, but maybe twisted a little bit, and you got to kind of untwist it. The second thing is, of course, working with actual people, coaching people, helping people through the podcast, calls our clients, our members, all of that. And that is a massive data point of evidence in the hierarchy of evidence. Anecdote and working with direct people with real human beings is a piece of your evidence, just as your own knowledge of yourself is a piece of your body of evidence, right? It doesn't get a lot more weight than other things necessarily, but it's part of it. When you work with somebody over months or even years, you find out pretty fast that a plan that isn't optimal, but they follow it consistently and they're excited to do it and they're having fun usually results in plenty of growth and success and lots of learning every time. Every time, not sometimes every time, right? Versus some perfect plan or some cookie cutter plan or whatever that you can't follow. That's really important. A lot of what I used to teach as optimization was precision for its own sake. And I think precision for its own sake comes at the cost of sustainability, adherence. And that's what determines whether you're successful most of the time. So, what survives 500 episodes and all of this mind-changing? What survives is principles. Principles don't change. Now, what we learn about those principles through the application of science, coaching, learning, experimentation can change, of course, because that's not the truth changing. That's our knowledge of the truth changing. But eat enough protein, lift hard, progress, recover, move. I'm not gonna say that's it all there is because there's a lot of detail underneath, but that's what it is. That's really what it's about. Anyway, I'll probably be wrong about five more things in the next hundred episodes. So we'll see. Before we wrap up, I'm going to share something about your metabolism that I think is gonna help. Before I do, reminder to celebrate episode 500, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. We've got a discount for you at 500 club is the code, 500 club. You get $50 off the six-month option at either tier of Eat More Lift Heavy. When it expires this Sunday, 500 Club, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. I did this to mark and celebrate 500 episodes. If you start shortly after listening to this episode, if you join our program, it's actually timed perfectly for the first up to seven weeks where you build those skills we talked about earlier. Then you go through fat loss all the way through the holidays and early January, where you get to actually test out the system and see how sustainable it is. And then you're not starting over on New Year's like everybody else. So you can find out all of that at eatmoreliftheavy.com. Use code 500CLUB for $50 off the six months. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. All right, so if your metabolism feels slower than it used to, you remember before we mentioned that energy expenditure stays roughly flat when it counting for body size from age 20 to 60. But most of you who are over 40, something is very different than when you were 20. One of those is probably body composition, meaning you have less muscle. But I bet, here's the one I want you to look at. I want you to add up how many of the last 10 years you spent trying to diet. Go back and see. Whether it was cutting carbs, keto, carnivore, calorie counting, weight watchers, optavial, whatever. Try to figure out like how many months of those years, right? Just like take the number of months

  Why chronic dieting stalls fat loss

  Philip Pape 37:01

  times the number of total months, or how many diets you did, I guess. If you've had more than three or four diets, you're probably eating far under what you could be and under-recovered, and your metabolism is adapted. And there is an aspect to trying to eat more so that you can recover, but you can do it fairly quickly. You can do it fairly quickly, but you're probably afraid to. You're probably afraid that you're gonna gain a bunch of fat. Now, if you're not lifting weights, if you're sitting on the couch all day, if you're not moving, you are gonna gain fat. But if you're listening to the show, I hope you're doing this while you lift weights, you're moving, you're going to make use of those calories. And then you can recover to your true maintenance. Then you don't have to guess at what it's gonna take to go in a fat loss phase or not. You're not gonna artificially increase your metabolism. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you're gonna recover to your true maintenance and feel great and be able to lift more in the gym and be able to lose fat for the first time in a long time because you have that confidence of where you are. You're tracking, you're doing the things. So that's kind of what I want to leave you with. The power is in your control. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the goal is never to be right the first time when it comes to science and the evidence. It's to be curious, it's to be skeptical, it's to keep evaluating and put your effort into the things that actually move the needle for you. I'm Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The 4 Essential Skills of Body Recomposition After 40 | Ep 499

Why do weight loss and body recomp results often fade even after you have success?

The real win is learning skills that still work when life changes or support (like a coaching program) goes away.

We walk through 4 practical skills that make fat loss maintenance and muscle building feel simpler, calmer, and more repeatable:

• Why short-term results can regress even with good effort

• What the 3.9-year weight regain finding from research suggests about the best approach

• How cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) research supports skill-based change over static plans

• Reading your own trend data instead of reacting to daily noise

• Writing if-then triggers so emotions do not take over

• Getting back to normal after vacations and weekends without overcorrecting

• Troubleshooting stalls in the right order

• Having an exit condition that can prevent weeks of spinning your wheels 

If you want to manage your own body composition for the next 20 years instead of just the next 12 weeks, hit play!

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, my 26-week coached program for 40+ to build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage your physique for life:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

• Use code 500CLUB at checkout for $50 off either six-month option through Sunday, September 6

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why your results unravel 1 year later
3:10 - 4 body recomp skills and how I rank them
7:00 - Are coaching programs built to keep you dependent?
9:40 - The real question behind "should I hire a coach?"
11:55 - Where the research argues AGAINST me
15:31 - Research on depression and CBT applied to fitness
18:40 - Designing a program that ends "on purpose"
21:23 - Reading your own data and acting on it
24:25 - Setting an "if/then" trigger before you need it
28:12 - Getting back to normal after a disruption
31:36 - Troubleshooting a stall in the right order
35:58 - Timing your next phase around the holidays
37:05 - Bonus: 2-minute sentence that saves you 6 weeks

Episode Resources:

• Try Fitness Lab - my AI coaching app, now with full meal coaching and 20% off exclusive to podcast listeners

• Join the email list and reply directly if you want help writing your own if-then trigger

• Transcript

  Why your results unravel 1 year later

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've tried body recomp before, that is building muscle and losing fat at the same time. Maybe you joined a program and you got success, but then a year, two, three years later, the results kind of regressed. This episode is for you because today I'm going to show you the four skills you need for body recomposition for the rest of your life. Also, why does the research say the weight comes back about four years after you're done with a coached program? And then what separates people who succeed and maintain those results past four years from those who don't? Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. I'm a certified nutrition coach, and the last two episodes were really about how to figure out parts of the body composition process. On episode 497, I talked about not using calculators to set your calories to learn how to measure your own expenditure instead for calories and macros. So if you missed that, check it out. On episode 498, I gave you sort of the gates and the inputs for deciding when to cut, build, maintain. And many of these assume that, hey, you are collecting, tracking, measuring your data. You know how to act on it, you have the confidence to do so, and you don't really need anyone helping you out, which we all know can be a big struggle in this world today, because there's either too much advice, and it's so confusing out there, and you don't know where to go. There's bad advice, or there's you're kind of living in your own head trying to do this and not quite knowing what to do. So this is why I have a lot of coaches and mentors myself, because we can't do it alone necessarily. So the question is though, can you? Can you build the skills that you need to be better and better and better at this? Of course, that's true with anything regarding personal improvement. And it really, really matters, probably more than usual for those of you who are older, you know, over 40, over 50. And if you've been at this for a while, your body is changing quite a bit during this phase of life, but you're still struggling to manage, you know, a diet, like how do you eat to manage your body composition? Maybe you don't even know what I'm talking about, and you're just trying to lose weight, and you're gonna have a big revelation today. And you don't buy like a 30-year lifestyle improvement and fat loss and body composition program, right? Or you don't necessarily have like a personal coach for decades. Most people can afford that. So we need to build those skills. It's a very important skill. It's right up there with like relationships and your career, right? Light health and fitness is the biggest investment you can make in yourself because it's gonna reduce significant cost later in life and make your health spend much more fruitful. I want you to stick around to the end because I always have a little treat at the end of our episodes. I'm gonna give you a sentence that you can write down before your next phase starts that will save you six weeks of a stall. Okay. So one sentence, just stick around for that. I know I'm such a tease. So

  4 body recomp skills and how I rank them

  Philip Pape 3:10

  here is our map for today. Okay, and you might want to write these down because I'm gonna come back to them at the end. These are uh four skills. The first one is whether you can read your own trends, your own data. The second is whether you can set a, I'll say, a trigger before you need it, i.e. being proactive. The third is whether you can get back to normal after life disrupts you. And the fourth is whether you can troubleshoot an issue or a stall and do it in the right order of priority. Okay. So those four skills are what you need if you are going to do this successfully for the long haul. Body now, I put it in the phrase of body recomp, but really I just mean in general building muscle, losing fat, trying to be fitter, have better energy, look better, all of it together. Okay. And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about the evidence for each one and really connect it to some of the things I enjoy, like psychology and human behavior, because that's ultimately what moves the needle, not just information. So before we get to those, I want to look at a study on depression. Okay, yes, on depression. It has nothing to do with fitness, but it's the best evidence that I've found for any of this. This is cool. This is why I like multidisciplinary research, okay, because we can learn from other areas. It's not all about fitness. I also want to look at what the number 3.9 years means. We're gonna come back to that. For anyone who has finished a program, like an online program or working with a coach, there's a magic number of 3.9 years. We're gonna talk about that as well. Okay. Again, I'm such a tease, right? So let me describe a scenario and you tell me if it's you, okay? You've done this four, five, six, seven, maybe more times than that. And you had, let's say, a macro coach back in 2019. Maybe you had an online program. Everything went online in 2020 for obvious reasons. So 2020, 2021. We launched our show in 2021. You did a challenge. A lot of you do challenges all the time, online or with the gym. You've probably used one, two, three, or more apps at some point for different things, for food, for training, for habits, whatever. And I think when when people talk about this stuff, they say it in the sense of, okay, you did those things that they didn't work, but in many cases, they did work. Like in the short term, a lot of these things work for you, right? You lost weight on most of them, or maybe you built a little muscle. Maybe you weren't lazy, you weren't, you weren't non-compliant, you were sticking to it and showing up. A lot of you like things like challenges for that reason. It's kind of this burst of group-centered motivation, but then they end. It's kind of like when I go to a training session or workshop. It could even be for your career, right? And you get all pumped up and you get all the materials and you go through all the exercises, you do all the brainstorming and networking, and then it's done. And then you go home, and the next week it's like the binder goes on the shelf and you don't think about it again. That's often what happens. Okay, so same thing with a lot of these programs, which is a challenge for us as coaches and me with this podcast like, how do I keep you motivated for the long haul? How do we make this sustainable so you're not just going off of bursts of motivation, even with even with our own programs? So now what you see online, and I've said this myself, is that hey, these programs are designed to keep you dependent. Okay, that's a little bit of a cynicism in the business model, right? The business model's retention, long-term revenue. So, of course, nobody has any incentive to teach you to leave the program. Now, I want to be careful with that argument because it's a very satisfying argument, but I don't think it's completely fair or honest because most coaches I know are not sitting there like Mr. Burns on, you know, on Simpsons. Ooh, how are

  Are coaching programs built to keep you dependent?

  Philip Pape 7:00

  we going to keep you confused and sticking with my program forever? Right. Now, there's a lot, there is a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of, you know, 20-year-olds out there that are using cold DMs and junk like that. But there's a lot of great people in the industry that I've met. And they're just answering the question that sits right in front of their face, right? And for many coaches, that's just clients wanting to know what they need to do. What do they need to eat this week? Right. Well, how do I need to train? Like what the heck is gonna make me successful? Why am I not losing weight, et cetera? And I think a coach can be doing the first one really well, like the first answering those questions, but not necessarily teaching you the why or the method behind it or the science or the process behind it. Now, many of you might say, hey, I don't even need to know that, just tell me what to do. And that's fine. You're kind of ensuring your own dependence on coaches. And I would say that there's nothing right or wrong with that. Like many of us want to have teachers, coaches in our lives, maybe for a long, long, long time. I mean, we generally outsource all our medical decisions to the medical professionals. And yet we know that when we take control of our health and start to research things and do it in an evidence-based way, sometimes we come across insights that we didn't get from those folks. And it's really good to understand. Plus, you have different phases in your life and you're changing constantly. So if you have to pay someone or you have to like depend on another person to give you the answer all the time, you're constantly gonna be bugging them every time you do this. Now you might say, okay, AI can be helpful there. Well, that's a whole other can of worms. We have our own AI app, it's called Fitness Lab, and we're actually coming out with a new release, it might be out already, that gets better and better and better for this kind of stuff. And it kind of serves that same purpose, but it's still an app, you're still gonna pay for it. So I do like to be kind of on that edge of both sides. Like, on one hand, I love helping people, and if you want to pay me for that service, I'm here to help. On the other hand, I want you to be very competent and skillful in what you do. Cause at the end of the day, that's what being a positive, I guess, human community is all about. Okay, so I want to change the question here. What I mean. What I mean by that, it isn't whether you should have a coach. Okay, that's about the money and preferences and how much like you have like having a coach and someone in your corner. There's not a universal right or wrong answer to that. Everybody's different. The question is whether you could without a coach. I think it's a really good question. And I say coach as like a euphemism for any sort of external support. That could be an app, that could be a group, it could be free, it could be paid, doesn't matter. But if that thing vanished tomorrow, if the app shut down, if life

  The real question behind "should I hire a coach?"

  Philip Pape 9:40

  got difficult or expensive, and that was the first thing to go, because it's just not a priority for you right now. Could you still keep doing the thing and doing it competently? And you know, it's funny, I had a former client, Heather, she knows who she is, who was with me for a long time. And she took the most advantage of that process to learn to the point where, you know, when she left me, I didn't feel like I felt sad in one way, but at the other hand, I was proud. She went on to be a coach herself. And then she reaches out for mentorship on that. So that's awesome, right? Like we want to be able to pay it forward. But notice these are two different questions. I know people who could DIY everything, they're just super disciplined, they hustle, and and yet they pay for coaching anyway, because having a second set of eyes is worth it to them, and it helps them level up even more. And that's a great reason. I also know people who've been with a coach for three, four, five years who couldn't tell you, don't have a clue why they're being told what to eat, how to train, whatever. We even had a very experienced power powerlifter, award-winning, you know, competitive power lifter, who started working with me because of that reason. Like her coach didn't explain it. She felt kind of stuck, like not knowing why and very dependent, and reached out to me and said, Look, I want to understand why. So would you rather be able to take what you learned and apply it for yourself going forward or not, is the question. And I, you know, in full disclosure, if you've just found this podcast, you know, I pitch my stuff all the time on the show because this is free content I give to you guys. I love doing it, but we also have to support our business. And I sell a program. I have a direct financial interest in you deciding that you want coaching. So everything I say for the next 20 minutes, yeah, run it through that filter, to be honest. And you don't challenge me on it, right? I'm gonna try to make it easy on you by telling you where the research doesn't go my way. I hope I do that more often than not. There are a few. And why don't we start there? How do you like that? Okay. In any okay, I never I never did debate in in high school or college, but I understand that one of the best tactics in debate is to acknowledge the other side's argument so that you can potentially dismantle it. And maybe you can't, I don't know, but that's that's what I understand. So I want to start with the research that is strongest against what I say sometimes. It's

  Where the research argues AGAINST me

  Philip Pape 11:55

  the strongest evidence where ongoing contact with a coach works and it doesn't just work in a vague, you know, low-grade sort of way. It works very statistically measurably. What I mean by that is there's a trial called Tours, T-O-U-R-S, and it was by Perry and colleagues. It was on rural women with an average starting loss, uh weight loss of about 10 kilograms. The group that got continued phone or in-person contact for a year regained 1.2 kilograms, while the group that got educational materials without the coaching regained 3.7 kilograms. Now it's interesting, they both regained, but the group with the support didn't regain as much. Same people, the same starting weight loss, but that's like a 3x difference. There was another trial called the stop regain trial, found the same pattern. There's another one called Look Ahead, a lot of these acronyms, I don't know. A-H-E-A-D. And that's the big one where they looked at five over 5,000 adults, 45 to 76, and they found ongoing monthly contact kept them, you know, sustaining their results. So meaningfully less uh weight regain or maintenance of their weight for eight years. Now, eight years is a long time to keep the weight off. Now, I'm not all about weight, you know, I'm about body composition, but still it's a good proxy for how this might matter. So we can't look at that in a vacuum. There's the other half. Let's look at the other half. Okay, in 2021, there was a big synthesis of the evidence in the BMJ journal. 155 trials of more than 150,000 people that looked at what happens after these programs end. Well, at the end of a program, people were 2.8 kilograms lighter than the control group. That's good, right? But once the program stopped, they regained faster than the control group did. And the model predicted their body weight was back at baseline 3.9 years after the treatment ended. So that's the 3.9 years I was teasing about early on. I think I said four years in the teaser, but you get it. Then there's something I think matters even more here. There's a trial called weight loss maintenance, and they did brief monthly counseling out to 30 months. And then they kept going with some people out to 60 months. That's five years. So they doubled the contact from 30 to 60. And then that extension from 30 to 60 months produced no significant additional benefit. The weight regain was steepest in year one, slower in year two, and it was flat by year three, no matter which group you were in. So if we look at the results together, they okay, are these disagreeing with each other, right? It sounds like the support helps while the support is there. And then when it stops, whatever it helps with tends to stop too. And then if you add more and more of it past a point, though, you don't get any extra benefit. So it's kind of a time-based analysis that we have to do here, which is important because a lot of stuff we look at over too short of a length of time in these studies. So, what does this mean? Is you know, how long do I need a coach? Is maybe not the right variable. Six months versus two years versus forever. That is not what's separating the people who keep their results from the people who don't, because we just learned that past a certain point it doesn't matter. And there's not a study that would like settle this. There's no trial that compares a finite skills-focused program against an open-ended one on long-term outcomes. We just don't have that. But where we can look is outside of fitness.

  Research on depression and CBT applied to fitness

  Philip Pape 15:31

  So this brings me to what I mentioned earlier. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, for depression, is probably the closest well-studied thing we have to what we're talking about because it's deliberately time-limited. And the whole point of it is to teach somebody skills to use when it's done. They're teaching skills. It's fascinating. So we look at a study by Holland, H-O-L-L-O-N, and colleagues back in 2005. They took people who would respond or who had responded to cognitive therapy and they took away the therapy. Sounds mean, I know. And then they took people who had responded to medication and they took away their medication. Ooh, okay. So there was a relapse in, or they measured the relapse and in the withdrawn therapy group, so the CBT that was taken away, it was 30.8% relapse. The relapse in the withdrawn medication group was 76.2%. So, like, what is that more than double? So the people who came off therapy, actually, this is another finding. The people who came up therapy, that 30.8%, they did no worse than people who were kept on medication, which was 47%. So even people who stayed on medication, their relapse was 47%, which is actually higher than the group that had the therapy, but then came off the therapy. Does that make sense? So they did better after stopping therapy than the other group did after stopping medication, and better than the group that never stopped taking medication. Okay. Powerful stuff. Now, that is depression. That is not fat loss. I'm not going to pretend it transfers. All of this stuff is these different disciplines, but it does show that some that it's possible that something that ends, like a training program or a nutrition program or some sort of coaching or therapy or whatever, can still work after it ends. As long as what you got from it was a skill or skills and not just a like a static plan or schedule or set of things to do. Like they were telling you what to do, but not teaching you how to do it. That's the difference. You need to learn how to do it. And I think of medication as like they're not teaching you to do anything, they're just giving you a drug, right? It's just doing it's doing something for you, let's say. So that's more or less my argument today. It was never really about how long, at least, not the way that we argue about it online all the time. It's really whether you learned anything during the time you were in a program that you can still use afterward, and that you can prove that to yourself, which is what we're gonna get to in the next 10 minutes of the episode. Now, I know some of you are listening to this show and you're saying, this is a kind of a cool argument, right? But you're about to sell me your coaching program. Uh, and isn't that a little convenient? And that is totally fair. So instead of pitching you, what I want to tell you is about how we designed our program, just so you understand how it ties to this research and why I think it's important that service providers, that business owners, that coaches think about these things thoughtfully when they design how they're going to deliver the

  Designing a program that ends "on purpose"

  Philip Pape 18:40

  service. So I've got a lot of coaches who listen to this program, but even if you're not a coach, you are looking for coaches probably. And you've got to look for these things whether you hire me or not. So our program is called Eat More Lift Heavy. You can check out the details without buying anything, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. It goes for 26 weeks. Now that is a half a year. That's a decent commitment. And then it technically ends. Okay. And I I have that in air quotes that you can't see because, as with all things, process personal improvement never ends. But my design for getting you the skills that you need at a minimum definitely ends. Okay. So by week 25, no, in week 25, we have what's called a graduation readiness checklist. It is a scored self-assessment. Yeah, you do have to use quit do tick quizzes in my program. I'm sorry, you have to do some work where you rate yourself across these skills and it tells you which ones you're still weak on. It's just a self-assessment, it does it immediately. You don't have to wait for somebody to review it or anything. It's all, it's something I coded, it's software, which means part of what that tool does is tell you maybe you're not ready in these couple areas, but you're ready in all these other areas. And it's based on your own self-assessment. So it's not like trying to, you know, deceive you. Like if you say you're good on everything, it's probably gonna pair it back. Hey, you're good on everything. So that's right near the end. Now, if we go back, reverse engineer this back in week 20 of the 26 weeks, we have something about teaching yourself where what you have to do, it's kind of fun, is explain what you've learned in your own words. We give you specific questions and prompts. And we've had members and students post about this. And it's fascinating because you see them really struggling to get this out. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean like you have to think about it. And can you explain how you know what your data is telling you? How do you know how to deal with a weight loss plateau, right? Like those kinds of things. Like, how do you know this system is going to work for you? And then we kind of review that with you to make sure you really do know. So I think that's awesome. And as I mentioned, like it's 26 weeks that the idea is to give you skills. And we're we're talking about that process today, in a sense, and like the philosophy behind why that's important. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't then want a community or coach on top of that or for longer, or indefinitely if you wanted to, to give you that second pair of eyes, right? But that's different than needing someone to tell you what to do. That's the distinction I'm trying to make today. So if I were to pitch you, I'd say, hey, we're coming up on episode 500 in the next episode. So we have a little code for you. It's 500 club, gets you $50 off the six-month options. No pressure either way. If it's a line for you, great. If not, keep listening to the podcast. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All

  Reading your own data and acting on it

  Philip Pape 21:23

  right. I want to get into the four skills of body recomp. And I'm going to tell you how much I weight each one or how much I trust each one. Okay. All right. So skill number one is reading your own data, your own trends, and acting on it. Now, this is the highest evidence skill on the list. We know that frequent self weighing, when you read it back as a trend, as opposed to a daily taking the daily snapshots of your weight and freaking out. So when you take it as a smoothed average or a trend over time, we see this over and over in randomized human trials that there is a huge Advantage to this. So Steinberg is one of the studies that found daily weighers lost meaningfully more over six months than people who weighed less often. There's a maintenance study by Goki LaRose and colleagues. I'm probably butchering the name, where over a maintenance period, the daily weighers were still slightly losing weight, 0.18 kilograms in my notes. And the weekly weights gained 0.37 pounds. So opposite directions, meaning they were losing weight if they were weighing every day. They weren't, they were gaining weight if they were doing it once a week. And I guess the caveat to all of this here is that people who weigh daily, by definition, are probably more engaged with the process. And people who are engaged with the process in this way tend to get better results anyway. Now that's not to take away from the results. That only reinforces it in my mind. And research researchers try to separate those. It's hard to do, but even without separating them, you could draw some good proxy type conclusions, I guess is the way to put it. So the skill here is not that hard to develop. It's that you can engage in the process with a regular and frequent form of measurement that is low friction, low friction. So like weighing it, weighing yourself every day isn't that hard. I mean, you get on the scale and there it is. You have a Bluetooth scale, even easier. Beam it over to your phone and it can connect in Apple and Google Health to everything, right? That that's super easy. I mean, if you can't do that for five seconds, I don't know what to say. But even like food tracking, right? We recommend Macro Factor because it's the fastest app and it takes a lot less friction than other apps, for example. And then when you're doing that every day, it it it itself, by definition, is start is holding you a bit more accountable to the process because you're engaged. And once you do that, what's awesome is you have the amazing side effect of multiple weeks and months of data where you can now turn that into a trend and see what's actually happening. Are you actually gaining or losing body fat? Not as you wait up or down randomly here or there. That's useless. Are you actually getting enough protein and fiber and all the micronutrients? What is your trend against, you know, your food patterns? Are you actually eating the way you want on the weekends or when you're on vacation or whatever? Right. And the list goes on and on and on. Having that data is just super powerful.

  Setting an "if/then" trigger before you need it

  Philip Pape 24:25

  Skill number two, skill number two is setting a trigger, a trigger point, okay, a trigger, like an action before you need it. So being proactive. A lot of people don't have this. And what it means is you decide in advance what engineers say or computer programmers, if-then statements, if-then, like an if-then form. What will you do when something happens? If this happens, I will do this. That's what I mean by a trigger. And I don't mean like getting triggered, right? I mean an inflection point, like a catalyst. Oh man, I get I'm not good with my words today, but you get what I'm saying. An if-then decision point. Now we look at research by Gollitzer and Sheeran. They took a meta-analysis of 94 tests with more than 8,000 people, and they found a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually did the thing they meant to do. Meaning, among people who actually planned in advance and had if-then strategies ready to go, that alone had a huge effect on whether people stuck to their behavior change, to their habits, to whatever the thing that they're trying to do. That's pretty significant. Now, when we look at eating specifically, the effect shrinks a little bit in the research. There's a meta-analysis by Adrians, it's two A's in there. I do not know how to pronounce that. That found point a 0.51 effect for adding a food that you want more of. So, in other words, planning ahead to include more foods you want, and only a 0.29 effect for cutting a food that you want less of. That is amazing. Did you hear what I just said? In other words, it's far better to have a strategy that plans to eat what you want, i.e., more protein, than to cut out what you don't, i.e., skip the cookies. How consistent is that with what we talk about on the show all the time? Additive nutrition, adding things in, thinking and planning ahead to have what you want to have, not to cut out what you want to cut out. Very different mindset, very different impact on the human brain. When researchers measure objective behavior over longer periods instead of just self-reporting, it seems to be even more of an effect. So it works really, really well. Now, what does that look like? Well, before let's say a fat loss phase starts, I mean, honestly, I wouldn't even wait for a fat loss phase. You just do this now. Okay. But let's let's take fat loss as an example, and you know when you want to end the fat loss phase, let's say at a certain number, certain number of weeks, or whatever. If your trend weight hasn't moved in, let's say three weeks and your adherence is above 80%, if that, then go to maintenance for two weeks. That isn't a good example of a very specific if-then statement. Okay. If my weight has stalled basically for three weeks, but my adherence is really good, I'm gonna go to maintenance for two weeks, like a diet break. And when I see people on social media oftentimes talking about, hey, I've been losing weight pretty steadily, or I just started to hit a wall after losing some weight. I really want to lose more. What do I do? My first inclination, not knowing any other context, is hey, maybe you just need a break. Maybe you do. I don't know all the details, but that's like where my brain goes first without knowing the context. But if you have a specific strategy, that's very helpful. And you write it down before it happens. You put it in your plan. Now, if that sounds like too much work, I'm sorry. It's gonna cost you a lot more if you don't have that in your plan later on, in frustration, not knowing what to do, going the wrong direction, giving up. Because a lot of people wait till things are bad and then they're in a bad mood and then they're hungry or hangry. That's the worst time possible time to be making a call about this stuff, right? Because that's your emotional. So that's skill number two, setting the trigger before you need it. So the if-then strategies, and I'm keeping these fairly high level, guys, because each of these can go into its own podcast episode and you can go into all sorts of details about it. Um, but these are the skills that we teach, at least in our program. Skill number

  Getting back to normal after a disruption

  Philip Pape 28:12

  three is getting back to normal after a disruption. This is really powerful. So I was inclined to put this on the top, but again, I'm ranking them by the order of how much evidence I could find in the actual recent literature. Okay. The problem isn't that you're going on vacation for a week or two, all right? Almost nobody, almost nobody's problem is the vacation. Let me explain why. Here's a study that I really love because I think it addresses a myth that everybody repeats. Yanofsky and colleagues, published in the New England Journal in 2000, followed 90, 195, about 195 adults through the holidays. Now, there's this claim that you see online that people gain five or 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The actual average gain is a half a kilo, a kilogram. So that's roughly a pound. Fewer than one in 10 actually gained more than five pounds. So it's actually quite tiny. And I think the more important thing is that they just didn't lose the weight afterward. So year after year after year, that is how people end up 10 pounds heavier by the time they're say 45 or 50 years old. Not from one bad holiday stretch, but from an accumulation of years after years of slowly drifting. Now, the the cause, there are multiple causes of this, but one big root cause is overcorrection. That's why I'm talking about this skill. Again, the skill we're talking about is getting back to normal after disruption. So you have a weekend where you go out to eat and you're just out of control. Happens all of us, right? You're with friends, they get the drinks, the appetizers, the dinner, the dessert. Or yeah, no, let's just go with that scenario. And then you're like, oh, I blew it, I'm guilty. Like, I can't believe I did that again. It was fun, but I overeat yet again. What do I do? Slash my calories on Monday. And now you're trying to be kind of hungry, you know, knowing that hunger implies you're in a deficit. And then you're starving by Wednesday, and then you're in a big hole by Friday, and the hunger actually leads to the binging on Saturday, actually. And that pattern, which is a very familiar pattern to a lot of us, it has a formal name in the addiction literature. It's called the abstinence violation effect. The abstinence violation effect. And it's that you're reacting to this lapse itself, this abstinence doing the damage rather than the lapse itself. And this is has some similarities to the flexible versus rigid restraint work as well. The research that finds that people who diet flexibly hold onto their weight loss better than people who diet rigidly. And the conclusion for this, as far as skill building goes, is when you come back from a day, a weekend, a vacation where you've maybe not behaved the way you wanted to behave. Maybe you binge, maybe you overate, whatever, doesn't matter. The easiest thing to do is go straight back to your normal targets, as opposed to overcorrecting and trying to offset or make up for that with even lower or tighter or more restrictive targets. You know, everybody does that with training just fine. They come back to the training and they might reset a little bit, which is actually going even lighter than your previous targets. They don't say, Oh, I just was off for a week of training. I need to go up by even more than I would have gone up now. Nobody does that. And yet you do that with the food for some reason. You come back and you're like, well, I'm gonna cut calories like 500 more calories to make up for it. That's the equivalent of doing that. Okay, so don't do that. All right,

  Troubleshooting a stall in the right order

  Philip Pape 31:36

  skill number four is troubleshooting a stall and doing it in the right order of priority. So this one probably has the least evidence that I could find, let's say. Um, but it comes from anecdotal coaching people and from what I've seen go wrong all the time. I do believe there's plenty of evidence in different areas of behavior change and self-motivation theory and habit formation and all that that still supports this, but it's hard to say that we've studied it exactly. But the order that I use is adherence is at the top, then recovery, then stress, then your overall program, your lifestyle program, whatever your nutrition training, et cetera, then patience. And this is what we teach in Eat More Lift Heavy. Just those five things in order to go through them as like a checklist anytime you stall to see where the problem is. So we start with adherence. And this has evidence behind it. Okay. Lichtman and colleagues published a study in the New England Journal in 1992 on people who were convinced they were resistant to diets, they were weight loss resistant, and they measured them. And basically, these folks underreported what they were eating by about 47%, and they over-reported their activity by about 51%, and their metabolic rate came back to normal within about 5% of predicted. Their metabolism was fine. Uh, and they were not lying, by the way. They're the the the view they had of their own intake was just not correct, but they genuinely believed it. And that is why adherence tends to be the first thing to go. It's also why you should be suspicious of yourself, not as a character flaw, I'm not judging you, but as a natural human trait. It's very hard to see your own behaviors accurately, your own, you know, calorie intake, your own training, whatever. That's why we go back to skill number one, which is tracking and measuring. So you have objective data that no matter how much your brain's trying to fight it, it's staring you in the face. It's cold, hard logic. Okay. So adherence is first. Like, are you actually doing the thing consistently? And by having skill number one in place, you'll know it. Now you see. Then we have recovery, then stress, because those are pretty easy to check. I mean, you pretty much know what's going on in your life and whether your recovery is poor, your energy, or I mean, that's that's energy, that's hunger, that's digestion, that's soreness, you know, and then stress I put as its own thing. Oh, sleep, right? Of course. All of that's kind of in that bucket. You can combine them if you want. Super common issues here. Then it's your program. A lot of people put that first, right? They say, Oh, I need to change my program, I need to change my plan. Don't do that, don't do that. Check these other things first and then see if it isn't the structure of the program that maybe isn't good for you. And then I put patience last because what you might find is all these other things are fine. I'm just not being patient. Right. So now maybe you could put that at the top if you're for certain people, but sometimes the answer is that eight weeks isn't long enough for what you're trying to do and you need to do three more weeks. I'm sorry, that could just be the reality of it. But if you have all these skills in place and you go through that order of troubleshooting, you're gonna be in a much better place than the average person who just does the changes the wrong things and they change it as a knee-jerk reaction. So I want to recap the four skills just real quickly. Okay. Number one, that you can read your own data, your own trend of data because you've been actually tracking and measuring, and then say what you can conclude from that data. That's a very, very important skill, the most important skill on this list, probably that leads to the rest. Number two, you've got your if-then strategies or your triggers written down in advance before you need them. Okay, you don't have to have 50 of these. You can have just one to start and then another and another, build on it. Number three, you know how to come back from a disruption, just getting back to normal instead of overcorrecting or punishing yourself. And number four, when things do stall, you think of adherence first, then recovery, then stress, then the program, and finally, are you being patient enough? And just go in that order. All right. So that's it. Those four are pretty much the whole thing. Now you're like, well, that's that's a big that's like changing my whole life. And you know, I'll be honest, most of you are solid on maybe the first one and the second one. If that, maybe you're shaky on the other two, but that means you have two specific skills to work on. So figure out the one that's the one for you to work on. Now, before we wrap up, I have the thing I told you earlier that you can write down in two minutes to save you six weeks. Before I

  Timing your next phase around the holidays

  Philip Pape 35:58

  do, I want to say one more thing about timing here because we are coming up on episode 500. If you've been thinking about eatmore lift heavy, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. We have a code 500CLUB. Expires this Sunday, September 6th, and it's not coming back. You'll get 50 bucks off to celebrate episode 500 on the six month options for eatmore lift heavy, either the base version or dialed in. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to know what the heck I'm talking about. Now, if you start the week of, say, September 7th, it's pretty good timing because the first six or seven weeks, we get this some of these skills set up. Then you do a fat loss, if that's your goal. For many of you it's not, but for many of you it is, which would start around the end of October and go all the way through January. So you're basically going through the holidays, testing yourself, getting those skills in place, doing it successfully, not going off the rails like a lot of people. And now you're not quote unquote starting over on New Year's like everyone else, right? In fact, you're gonna be in a good position to get ready for either direction leading into the summer. So you look and feel your best. All right. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. And by the way, the next episode is 500. So I've got a specific topic plan for that that I

  Bonus: 2-minute sentence that saves you 6 weeks

  Philip Pape 37:05

  think you're gonna really enjoy. Basically, it's five beliefs that I no longer believe you're gonna find that interesting. All right, so here's something you can write down in the next two minutes to save you six weeks at some point this year before your next phase starts. So for many of you, that is a fat loss phase. It could be a muscle building phase, it could be a maintenance phase or body recomp. I want you to decide the exit condition ahead of time and write it down as an if-then statement. So we talked about this already as one of the skills, but now I'm having you do the homework for yourself right now. Something like if my trend weight hasn't moved in three weeks and I've been hitting my targets at least 80% of the days, go to maintenance for two weeks. Okay. Now again, that is that is you deciding your exit condition if things aren't going the way you want. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the actual final true exit of the fat loss phase. I want you to write this down because the alternative is you're gonna choose this at the wrong time when you're driven by emotions. And we know there's great research on this, I mentioned before, and we don't want to try to be disciplined. We don't want to try to be disciplined. We want to let our future selves give ourselves some, you know, grace, some help, some support by saying, hey, will you, you, you've got this. When this happens, I've already got a plan for you, buddy, out in the future. Okay, so go ahead and do that. If you're wondering exactly how to do that, just reach out. The best way to reach out is go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list and just reply to my email and we'll get into a conversation about it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the question was never never whether you have a coach, it's whether you can do it without one. Those are two different things with two different answers. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Cut, Maintain, or Build and Still Lose Fat WITHOUT Losing Muscle | Ep 498

You can lose fat without losing muscle, but only with the right approach.

Most of us decide what to do (often out of fear) and then go collect the data that agrees with our bias. I have done it too, and so have my clients!

I'm breaking down why most people choose a cut, maintenance, or a muscle-building phase incorrectly for body recomp over 40. We share the specific situations where your preference doesn't matter (your body is telling you otherwise!), plus a simple question that prevents you from starting a deficit you can't finish. 

You'll learn about:

• Confirmation bias that pushes us toward cutting even when the evidence does not support it 

• 3 stop signs that override goal preference

• Why sleep can change fat loss vs. muscle loss outcomes even when calories stay the same

• Why gym strength is a misleading signal for phase decisions and often lags behind what is happening physiologically

• The idea that many “phase change” problems are really adherence problems

• Practical ways to check consistency using your data

• My key inputs for smarter phase selection: leanness, expenditure trend, menopause bone density context, and runway constraints

• A question to ask yourself for planning around holidays, travel, deadlines, and other disruptions 

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, my 26-week coached program for 40+ to build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage your physique for life:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

• Use code 500CLUB at checkout for $50 off either six-month option through Sunday, September 6

Timestamps:

0:00 - Cut to lose fat, build to gain muscle, plus your calendar
3:45 - Why you already decided (how the brain works)
6:43 - Scenario 1: biofeedback in the crapper during a deficit
10:41 - Scenario 2: high stress stacked on a deficit
11:25 - Scenario 3: why your lifts can be misleaing
13:40 - The body recomp decision chain
15:14 - Most phase questions are something else in disguise
17:49 - Your current leanness
19:50 - Your expenditure history
20:22 - Bone density
22:28 - How much of your weight loss comes off as lean tissue
23:54 - The hidden constraint
28:06 - Bonus: 10-second runway question

• Transcript

  Cut to lose fat, build to gain muscle, plus your calendar

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you're trying to figure out whether you should cut, that is, fat loss, maintain your weight, or build muscle right now, I bet you already know what you want the answer to be. And that's often part of the problem. Today I'm going to show you why most people make this decision backward. Three situations where it doesn't really matter what you want, it matters what your body is telling you, and the cost of picking the wrong direction. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and on Monday, I walked you through the seven weeks that come before a fat loss phase and how to get to your maintenance calories that you can actually trust instead of using, say, a calculator. And the very next question every single time is what we're covering today, which is okay, I've got the data now. So what phase am I supposed to be in? You can cut, that is a calorie deficit to lose weight, to lose fat. You can maintain your weight or your results, or you can build muscle. And these are three options. A lot of you are picking these by feel, by gut, by vibe. There's that's not always wrong, but sometimes it is. And that's kind of like from where I sit, what I see a lot of people doing in this very reactionary way. But I like to think ahead and do things that make sense. And I hope you do too. And you want the result. I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a runway question. It's going to take about 10 seconds that tells you whether you should even start a deficit right now. I think it's a good culmination of today's episode. But in the meantime, we are going to get into why your lifts are one of the worst signals to use for this, even though a lot of people use them, including me for years, and what a roughly decade of research on bone density says about deficits related to menopause. And of course, all the mechanistic details about cutting, maintaining, and building your weight and what to choose and when. So most people follow like the first piece of advice they hear on this when you Google, when you use AI, go on social media, is hey, I want to lose fat, and so I've got to go into a cut, right? If I want to go into build muscle, I have to go into a surplus, even if it is a lean gain or not much of a surplus. And you might be tired of this, you might be busy, you might be stressed out, and you might want to sit at maintenance for a while. And so what do you have to do there? Well, I have to get myself in a place where I'm not gaining or losing. And then there's the calendar that sits on top of that, I'll say, where, you know, a lot of us don't think in terms of the holidays or and thinks think in terms of the months that are better or worse for us. And a lot of us want to cut in January because that's like you coasted through the holidays, you gained some weight, and that's the New Year's resolution. And then, of course, you want to look great for summer and so on. It sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive. Oftentimes the way that people do this though tends to be wrong. And it's not because the categories are wrong for the goal, right? Cut, maintain, build. It's the order that you're doing them in is not efficient. That's the way I'm gonna put it. So somebody comes to me and she says, Hey, I think I should probably cut. I need to lose weight, I need to lose fat. And then she gives me all the reasons, right? Hey, my weight's been flat for a while, my genes are feeling tight, you know, I'm feeling a little bloated. I got to lose that next five, 10 pounds. Maybe I'm in menopause and it's the hormones. Maybe I have a wedding to go to in October, right? Every one of those reasons is fine. It's perfectly fine. And

  Why you already decided (how the brain works)

  Philip Pape 3:45

  yet I would say not one of those reasons are why she decided she should cut. She probably said, Look, I need to lose weight, and then went on and piled on all the evidence as to why. And that's a completely normal thing to do. It's it's something we all do. It's also the reason we get stuck, especially those of you who are perennial weight lossers. What do I mean? All you think about is cutting, cutting, cutting. You never think about anything else and how that's going to help you, even with a cut, like building muscle, for example. Now, I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna make you a little bit uncomfortable. That most of you are not picking the phase you want to be in based on your mood. I'm not saying that. Okay. You're picking it out of fear and then dressing it up as data. And the fear is always, hey, if I eat too much, I'm gonna get fat. Let's be honest. That is the fear. So then you kind of find your way in this serpentine path to a calorie deficit, no matter what the numbers or evidence say you should do, no matter what the biofeedback says, no matter what all this other stuff says, whether or not you're collecting the right data or not, which is a different problem. And that's because a deficit feels like, okay, that's the safe thing I need to do. That's what I need to do to get thin, skinny, lean, whatever terms you want to use. And then once you've done that, it's what do we call that? Confirmation bias. You're confirming the decision you already made. And I've done this myself so many times. And I have to avoid gut reacting when a client or member or somebody new who reaches out to me says, like, this is what I want to do. I have to avoid giving them an answer to what they want to do because what they want to do maybe maybe not what they need to do. Does that make sense? Now, inside our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, we have a bunch of tools. And one of the tools I created, I'm very proud of these tools because it takes the coaching philosophy and the evidence and the decision chain and puts it into a tool that you can use. And there's a design choice that inspired this episode. So, with this tool called the phase transition tool, we ask you a bunch of questions like what is your current phase? How long have you been in it? What's your weight trend? What's your body composition? How are your lifts? How's your biofeedback? Hormonal context? How's your adherence? How's your stress? Right? A lot of the same things. Like if you got on a call with me, I'd probably ask you all these questions to kind of figure out where things are. But then the last question I ask is, what do you actually want to do next? And I say it last on purpose, because if you say it first, then it biases all the rest, doesn't it? And you would answer all those other questions to support the conclusion you already reached instead of, and I'm not saying everyone does this. Like some of you are hyperconscious of this, but many of you are like, well, I gotta lose weight. So now how am I gonna answer these questions to support that? So that's like the fatal flaw that in our human psychology is this confirmation bias. So just sit with that a little bit and think about if that's something you might be doing. Now,

  Scenario 1: biofeedback in the crapper during a deficit

  Philip Pape 6:43

  I want to talk about three situations where what you want, like if you said I want to lose weight, actually doesn't matter. And this is empowering. This is not defeating, this is going to be empowering because this is gonna unlock you making a better choice for yourself and then dealing with what it takes to get there, including overcoming some of these fears. And the nice thing about these three situations is if any one of these is true right now in your life, then the question of what phase to go into actually comes off the table altogether until you fix this thing. And a lot of you aren't gonna like to hear this, but let's let's do it. Okay. The first one is that your biofeedback is in the crapper and you are in a calorie deficit. Okay, listen to me here. So by biofeedback, I mean sleep, energy, hunger, mood, recovery, digestion, libido, all of that. Does that make sense? Like bio, as in body biology, feedback. What is your body telling you? And I like to break it out into these little categories because, first of all, that's what the evidence shows is helpful. And secondly, it makes it more objective. Like you can really hone in on those specific things. So if any or most or all of those things are genuinely really, really low or poor for you right now, and I don't mean kind of like, eh, this is my normal, like we all live this way. It's it's we have stressful lives and we're busy and all that. I mean really poor relative to you. And at the same time, you are in a calorie deficit. Now keep in mind, based on our last episode, you might be in a deficit and not quite realizing it, but let's just say you're in a deficit, then the answer isn't to go to a different phase. It is to take a structured break at maintenance for roughly two to four weeks before you do anything else. Now you might say, wait, isn't that going to a new phase? Well, I think of maintenance, I think of the phase of maintenance as more of a longer-term maintenance that you're really setting yourself up for for months and months. This is the diet break version of maintenance. This is coming out of a diet-backed maintenance. And there is real evidence for this one, especially on the sleep side. They have taken people and put them on the same calorie deficit two different times with the same food, but one with eight and a half hours in bed and one with five and a half. I've cited this one many times. Both times they lost about three kilograms, so same scale weight loss. But those who had really short or deprived sleep, only 0.6 kilos of that came off as fat. Whereas in the people had more sleep, it was 1.4 kilograms of the three. So more than double the fat loss came from the same deficit because of the better sleep. And of course, the lean mass went the other way, like something like 2.4 kilos lost on the sleep deprived versus 1.5. So, and I'm sorry I'm doing um metric, that's what the study's in. But if you think about that for a second, that's powerful. Same calories, same number on the scale. And sleep alone is what decided how much came off as body fat versus muscle. And we just had someone in our coaching call, our monthly coaching call yesterday, who had this exact thing where she really just needs to address sleep. Her sleep has declined quite a bit from something like seven or eight hours to like barely five or six. And we see everything starting to tank with nothing else changing. And it's it's tanking not because your metabolism just drops, but you're also probably losing some muscle and gaining some fat, et cetera. Now, that that's a small study, but there's a lot of other research that supports that. We know how important sleep is. The magnitude is big enough. We know that if you're sleeping like five and a half or less hours and you're about to start a cut, then the question isn't should you start a cut? It's you shouldn't start a cut. You should fix the sleep problem first. So that's the first one is is your biofeedback low and you're in a deficit? You need a break. The second one is if you have very high stress

  Scenario 2: high stress stacked on a deficit

  Philip Pape 10:41

  plus a deficit now. It sounds like stress is a not is part of biofeedback, and it is, but I have to separate this out in and of itself because stress is like the the worst element of stacking going on against you when you are in a deficit, and then you stack it on top of like a genuine life crisis, a job loss, a sick parent, a divorce, financial issues, all of those things. It tends to produce the worst version of both things. And so here you also need a diet break to come back to. So I wanted to call that out separately. And then the third one is that your lifts in the gym are dropping significantly and you're already lean.

  Scenario 3: why your lifts can be misleaing

  Philip Pape 11:25

  Now, this is an interesting one, but we see it a lot. Uh, I want you to be careful because it gets misused, and I've probably contributed to that. I'll be honest, a lot of coaches will tell you to, hey, watch your lifts as the early warning sign whether your deficit is too aggressive. Like, are you plateauing? Are you regressing? And the problem is here that, like when we look at research, there's Murphy and Kohler had a meta-analysis where they looked at trials of people lifting in a calorie deficit. And they found that the deficit reliably halted or impaired lean mass gains, and the threshold started at around 500 calorie a day deficit. But strength gains were basically comparable between the deficit and the control groups, which may be backward from what you'd expect. You know, I know better, I've looked into this research. Now I I frame it the right way for people. I have for the last few years, but your body defends your strength while your ability to actually add muscle has stopped. And that has to do with the neuromuscular adaptations versus the actual lean mass of muscle, two different adaptations. And what that means practically is by the time, but by the time your lifts are visibly decreasing or falling off or regressing, you are actually seeing the lagging effect of things happen, you know, weeks later. So you don't just go by how your lifts are doing to pick what phase you should be in. And the the convert converse or the opposite of that is don't don't get lulled into a false sense that everything is fine because let's say your bench press is stable. You get what I'm saying? So sometimes we have to have more nuance when we're picking our phases, and those three things are really important to think about. Now, you're thinking, okay, this is useful, but you know, I still don't quite know how to make this decision for myself. And because there are so many inputs, and that's exactly why I built the tool I was describing earlier, because I've seen this exact point of friction as a huge like brick wall for a lot of you, where you understand you have to do all the things, like I have to lift weights, I have to eat my protein, I have to get good sleep and stress, but you don't quite know when and why to transition phases,

  The body recomp decision chain

  Philip Pape 13:40

  okay? Besides just, oh, I hit my goal, now I'm ready for the next phase. So in week 14 of our program, so that's eat more lift heavy, and I'll just give you the website so you can check it out, eatmore liftheavy.com. You could scroll to the bottom and see all 26 weeks. Week 14 is is we teach you about phase transition planning. And that's where we have this phase transition tool that takes your weight trend, how long you've been in the phase, what is your body composition, biofeedback, adherence, goal, all in that order. And then, like I said, the last question is well, what do you want to do? Just so we have that as well. And then it gives you a recommendation with reasoning attached to it. And the reasoning is the point because I want you to learn the framework. Why, why am I thinking I need to do this or that relative to what the actual data says? And it when what you want conflicts with what the data says, that's a really powerful thing. That, you know, and by the way, the tool tells you that too, because it says, What do you want to do? And you say, I want to lose fat. And the tool's like, I don't know about that. Uh, I don't know about that because here's the other things happen up happening to you right now. So I'm I'm I know I'm always making little pitches for our programming because I'm very excited how much it helps people. And today's episode is all about phase transitions and how to choose how to get it in and out and when to go to each one. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to check that out. And to celebrate episode 500 coming up, we have a code 500Club that will get you $50 off the six month commitment to either of our programs in there. So go to eatmore liftheavy.com.

  Most phase questions are something else in disguise

  Philip Pape 15:14

  So most phase change questions are actually adherence questions that many of you misdiagnose as phase questions. Okay, sit with that just for a minute. It is probably the most useful thing in this whole episode, and it's also a thing that people skip all the time. If you are hitting your targets three days a week or fewer and you're not consistent, changing the phase isn't gonna fix that. You could go from a deficit to maintenance to surplus, back again, and just get the same result, which basically nothing, or even get worse because you never actually did those phases properly. You think you did, oh, I was in a deficit. Yeah, but you weren't doing all the other things that supported the deficit, right? And so adherence really comes to the top, and it's not a matter of your character or your discipline. It's usually how it's usually a function of having the targets that make the most sense for you and are achievable for you right now. Like what's the lowest bar in your life right now to move the needle? Meaning your protein number doesn't have to be a gram per pound. It could be 0.7. Or guess what? If you're eating almost no protein, maybe you need to go to 0.5 and then go to 0.7, right? Maybe it's it's a problem in your life. Like the plan you're trying to follow doesn't account for, okay, I travel regularly for business. Okay, I'm, you know, taking care of my sick mom. Like all of those things. Okay, I have weekends where I always get out, I always go out to restaurants. So none of those things, those skills, those competencies and capabilities are fixed by just changing the phase. So that's what I'm saying. You're like trying to slap a band-aid on this. Oh, now I need to go to maintenance. Oh, now I need to go into phallus, now I need to go building muscle. And that's not the thing that matters. Okay. And what you can do is pull up your last, say, four weeks of data. And if you don't have data, that's the problem, right? And I want you to look at the number of days where you hitch your protein target and the number of days where you're in a reasonable range on calories. And I said reasonable, I didn't say perfect. If the number is like below 20 out of 30, or 28 days, I guess is four weeks, then you're probably not consistent enough. You got to fix that and then come back to the question of what should you do based on the data, which is again why we spend six or seven weeks at the beginning of our program helping you build those skills first. Is this all? I hope this is all making sense and I'm not kind of rambling too much on this. So you've gotten past these roadblocks, your adherence is solid, and now we can pick the phase.

  Your current leanness

  Philip Pape 17:49

  So the first input is where are you with your leanness and your body fat right now? I'm not the exact number, it's very hard to get that. I don't care about your exact body fat percentage. You kind of know how much body fat you have based on how you look and feel and your waist and all that. But, you know, I told you in the last episode that calculators aren't very helpful. And I'm not going to turn around and tell you go and get your body fat from a bathroom scale or from an inbody today, either. Okay. Just do you have significant amounts of fat to lose? Do you have a moderate amount or are you fairly lean? Or do you honestly not know? And if you don't know, there's ways to start to figure that out. Now, why this matters, it's because it's one of the most quantitative, so numbers-based relationships we have in this in this field, in this industry. If we look at Forbes's work originally and then Kevin Hall, who modeled it, and what we know is that the proportion of what you lose that comes from lean tissue does correlate with how much fat you're carrying when you start. So the leaner you are, the bigger the risk is of losing some muscle mass. If you're carrying more fat, you can run a more aggressive deficit and lose proportionally less lean tissue while you do it. Those of you who are quite overweight, I've seen some almost magical results when you start lifting weights and you don't even have to go into a diet almost. Like it's like your body starts to release its own stored fat. But if you do go into a diet, it also doesn't experience it the same as someone who's leaner. Meaning you, if you keep the deficit reasonable, and even if it's somewhat aggressive, your body may not feel like it's in a deficit because you have all that fat to draw from. And so that's like the positive of being overweight in that your starting point is going to help you there. So the same, say 500 calorie deficit, it's gonna be a different intervention depending on you know your leanness and it's gonna feel different, et cetera. So it's very individualistic. So that's the first one is your body fat. The second input is your expenditure trend. So what is your metabolism doing? I covered

  Your expenditure history

  Philip Pape 19:50

  that on Monday. I'm not gonna reteach all of that, but you're basically looking at, hey, is it going up? Is it flat, or is it falling over the past, say, four to six weeks based on my real logged data, not based on a calculator, not based on a wearable, but based on actual food intake and weight change over time. If you miss that, go back to episode 497, the one right before this one. That is a good foundation for what we're talking about today. The third input is that if you are in perioprost menopause,

  Bone density

  Philip Pape 20:22

  I want to address your bone density real quick here. Um, this is more important than you think. There's a year-long randomized trial from Villarreal and colleagues. They took non-obese middle-aged adults and they had one group lose weight by cutting calories, and another group lose a comparable amount of weight through exercise. The calorie restriction group lost 10% of their body weight, and they lost some bone mass along the way, around 2% at the spine, roughly the same at the hip, that like the total hip. And then the exercise group lost a similar amount of weight, but they didn't have bone loss at any site. So, again, we see where there's one variable that can make a big difference in your body composition, which in this case is exercise. Now we can extend that to say what types of exercise. And then we look at, okay, lifting weights is probably the most important type, but even just moving in general and being active really helps because you're using your body. That makes sense, right? And then there was a follow-up that looked at post-menopausal women and said, hey, what happens to the bone when the weight comes back and it looks like the bone didn't come back? Again, this is, you know, without the exercise, right? So I would love to have seen a study where then they had the same group incorporate exercise and see what happens, but then that adds another variable. So it gets even more actionable than that. Listen up, because there's another year long trial from Shah and colleagues in older adults where diet only weight loss reduced only what 2.6% of total hip bone density, whereas diet plus exercise reduced it by only 1.1%. So just having exercise. Training in there cut bone loss by more than half. And the exercise only group that didn't do a diet, guess what happened to them? Well, their bone mass went up. The only thing that predicted who held on to their bone mass in their hip was their strength, their one rep max. So isn't that fascinating, right? Lifting isn't just protecting muscle while you cut, it's also protecting your bone density. And I think that's very, very important,

  How much of your weight loss comes off as lean tissue

  Philip Pape 22:28

  depending on who you are, your history, your risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, et cetera. It's why I bring it up as a special case. Now, it's the same story on lean mass. There's a big systematic review from Weinheimer that looked at what amount of your weight loss comes off as fat-free mass, like muscle or lean mass. And in groups that do just the dieting by itself, okay, calorie deficit by itself, something like 81% of them lost at least 15% of their weight is fat-free mass. But when you add in exercise, that drops to only 39% of them lost more than 15%. I know it's a weird way to put it, right? Because instead of just talking about the amount lost on average, it's the amount of people that lost a certain amount. But either way, it's a huge benefit adding in the exercise. So, what that adds up to that I want you to take away is that for example, a woman in her 50s, if you choose to go in a deficit at the wrong time in the wrong way, and you don't have the skills in place, and especially if you're not lifting or moving, it can massively reduce your bone density. That is very hard to get back. And same thing goes for muscle. I mean, you're going to be losing muscle, mass, and bone anyway. That's the fear we talk about all the time. It happens to human beings as we age, but it doesn't have to happen, at least nowhere near that extent. And for many of you, you could absolutely build new muscle, that is for sure. So there's a big cost to this. Okay. Even though you want to lose

  The hidden constraint

  Philip Pape 23:54

  fat, there's a big, big cost to this, which I think makes this decision very important. Now, the fourth input, the fourth and final input is your runway. And this is more like what I'd call a constraint, meaning it doesn't tell you what, like it doesn't tell you what phase you should do. It tells you what phases are available to you. And this comes down to how fast you are losing weight, for example. So you want to hold on to your lean mass. And when we see like the athlete literature, for example, we know that somewhere around a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of body weight a week is a good target or upper limit for most people to be pretty sure you're gonna hold on to all your lean mass as long as you are lifting weights. And sometimes you actually see a gain of lean mass if you keep the deficit small enough while losing fat. So we call that body recomp. Whereas people that go faster and faster, they often either only hold on lean mass or lose the lean mass, if that makes sense. So do the do the math on yourself. If you want to lose 15 pounds and you're around 160 pounds, you then need somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 weeks of relatively uninterrupted fat loss to do it properly, right? At that rate. So if you've got six weeks from now and stuff is gonna happen that will make that very difficult, your life is gonna blow up in some way, or there's some events on the calendar or some change, then that option's not really available to you and you have to think differently. Maybe you need a maintenance phase in there and you just need to interrupt the fat loss. Maybe you shouldn't do fat loss at all. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, there we go. All right, now I'm not saying that you shouldn't do a deficit. Obviously, I'm not. Cutting, fat loss, it's all part of the process. You just have to know that you are ready for it and you're doing the right things. I'm also not saying you shouldn't be in a surplus, right? Like for women who are over 40, for for anybody who's over 40, really, who lift weights, a real surplus to build muscle is, well, I should say a lean surplus is is often the right call. A big surplus may not be, depending on whether you've done this before and how responsive you are to building muscle. But it's pretty easy to set things up to be in that slight surplus that's more than enough to build muscle and strength and even get some body reconp for the ride, as long as you are lifting, you're eating protein, you're doing all the right things. So I know I threw a lot at you. I would just go back if you have to re-listen to the four inputs I just talked about, will really help, will really hold up for you when you're thinking about what you want to do. All right, before I let you go, I promised you that what I call runway question. It's like a 10-second question of whether you should even start a deficit. Do you have the runway? It kind of ties to what we just talked about. But before I do, if you're listening to this in late August when the episode comes out and you're thinking that, you know, I'm gonna sort all this out by January, I want to give you the math on that. Okay. Let's say you started the week of September 7th, weeks one through seven. You just try to build your skills. You don't try to go into a deficit. You do the tracking, do all the stuff we talked about on episode 497. And then now you're at roughly October 25, and now you start your fat loss phase between October 26th, which is my birthday, by the way, and it runs to about say early January. You've got Thanksgiving in there, you've got Christmas in there, where you know, you take maintenance breaks or you figure out how to fit those in. And then January first is like week 17. So now you're four months in, you're past the stretch where most people would quit something like this if you've done it at the right rate, and then you can decide what's next. Well, you know what? We can walk you through that exact process to so that you don't stumble, so that you are supported all the way through. We do this in Eatmore Lift Heavy. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. To celebrate the 500th episode, I've got a code for you. 500 club, all one word, takes $50 off the six month option. You can join Eat More Lift Heavy or get personalized coaching with the dialed in level of Eat More Lift Heavy. But I'll go let you check that out at eatmore liftheavy.com. All right. So here's the question. Before you start any

  Bonus: 10-second runway question

  Philip Pape 28:06

  phase at all, any phase, answer one question. How many uninterrupted weeks do you have between right now and the next disruption? Okay, so how long are you gonna be at relative peace in your life before something like a vacation, a surgery, a big stretch at work or deadline, the holidays, all of that? If it's less than eight weeks, probably not a good time to start a deficit because you don't have the runway to lose meaningful fat before you have to take some sort of break and you're gonna get frustrated and you're gonna feel like it's not giving you the results. I would work on the skills on building your baseline, on going for something like body recomp at maintenance, or even in a slight surplus, if that's the case. And then you can slow roll into that part of your life in a much more fueled state. Okay. And then, you know, weeks, if if your stretch of peace in your life is eight to 16 weeks, so that's like two to four months, hey, great. That's probably a good window to run a conservative deficit, but always plan in the disruptions now while you're thinking about it. So you don't have to improvise and react when it happens. Now, if you have well over 16 weeks, you know, four, five, six months, you've got room for pretty much anything you want to do. All right. But again, you still want to plan ahead for the disruptions that may come up. So the mistake isn't, hey, I picked the wrong phase. It's I picked I picked a phase, but then I hit a wall and I couldn't finish it because something happened in my life. And that's the kind of thing we want to plan around. All right, I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that the phase you want and the phase you need are often two different questions. And only one of them can be answered by your data. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Stop Letting a Calculator Set Your Macros and Calories for Fat Loss | Ep 497

Your app or online calculator is likely wrong about calories for fat loss.

It can be off by a few hundred calories, and your wearable is even worse. 

We challenge typical advice by showing how inaccurate maintenance calorie estimates can derail your fat loss before it even starts. 

I share my 7-week runway that uses consistent tracking to measure your real energy needs so you can execute a calorie deficit with confidence instead of guesswork. 

• Why calculator-based maintenance calories can be off by hundreds

• How activity multipliers and wearable calorie burn estimates amplify the error

• Why self-logged intake commonly gets underreported

• The intake-balance method to back-calculate true energy expenditure

• A 7-week pre-fat loss structure

• Protein and carb adjustments that support recovery and better training 

• What to do if expenditure trends up, stays flat, or trends down

If you want your next fat loss phase to be the first one you don't have to "guess" your way through, hit play!

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, my 26-week coached program for 40+ to build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage your physique for life:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

• Use code 500CLUB at checkout for $50 off either six-month option through Sunday, September 6

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why your fat loss calories are wrong before you start
4:32 - 9 weeks of effort with nothing to show for it
6:50 - What a calculator knows about you vs. what it doesn't
8:38 - Why your wearable or watch is terrible at estimating calories
10:01 - What food logging research says about calorie intake
12:24 - Measuring your expenditure from your own body
14:47 - Working through the fear of eating more
17:10 - Weeks 1 and 2, logging without changing anything
20:56 - Weeks 3 and 4, bringing your intake up
22:21 - Weeks 5 through 7, holding it steady
23:29 - Reading your expenditure trend at week 7
29:22 - Bonus: 2-week logging protocol and the weekend gap

Episode Resources:

• Try MacroFactor - the app I use for expenditure tracking. Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for two weeks free

• Try Fitness Lab - my AI coaching app, now with full meal coaching and 20% off exclusive to podcast listeners

• Transcript

  Why your fat loss calories are wrong before you start

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you're about to start a fat loss phase, and the first thing you did was plug your numbers into a calculator and then subtracted, let's say, 500 calories, this episode is for you. Today I'm going to show you why that very number right from the beginning might not even be correct before you start to change your intake. I'm going to explain the roughly seven weeks that I would execute before you actually start a calorie deficit so that it's super successful. And of course, we'll dig into the research of having a phase before fat loss for metabolic recovery. Is it a legitimate thing or does the evidence suggest otherwise? Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today we're going to evaluate something that maybe feels obvious and lots of us don't question it, which is that if you want to lose fat, you have to eat less, go into a calorie deficit, maybe you train harder, and you gotta dial it in. And I wanna be fair, I wanna be honest as always, because it isn't wrong. Like there are so many of you that reach out and say, hey, I've I've really figured this out. I'm able to, you know, go into that deficit, I'm able to lose fat. I just have to eat like an adult and listen to my body. And that works for a lot of people, but it doesn't work for a lot of people as well. And so where's the reality here? A sustained calorie deficit, of course, drives fat loss. That's energy balance. I'm not going to tell you calories don't matter. So what I'm looking at today is how you set up for success with a calorie deficit. Because you see, it is not about, hey, calories in, calories out, just do it. It's how do I actually impose that situation where I'm burning enough calories and I'm also eating few enough calories to make this work where I can actually do it. And one of the biggest miscalculations is the metabolism side of the number, the calories out part of the number. Almost everyone who tries this takes a calculator or uses their watch or an app or tries to calculate it from calories burned, or they're using my FitnessPal and just kind of guessing at it, or use I think I already said an online calculator, but anyway, when you take a number like that, that's just an estimate based on the population, it can be off by at least two or three hundred calories, sometimes 400 calories. And now you're trying to do a 500 calorie deficit. Well, do the math. You might get into a deficit, it might not be as big as you want. Maybe you're not even in a deficit and you start gaining weight. You're like, WTF, what the heck is going on? I just can't lose weight or I'm weight loss resistant. And most people make it harder on their themselves because then they start to change a bunch of other things, not realizing that their numbers are a little bit off. And now it's month three, the scale has hit a plateau or starts going up, and you have no idea what to change, where the root cause actually is. It's kind of like when I post on my Threads account and I say, hey, perimenopause doesn't cause weight gain. You may gain weight during perimenopause, but that's correlational. The root cause is buried deeper. It does have to do with things like behaviors, but those behaviors may become harder because of perimenopause. And at the end of the day, not knowing how that affects your metabolism is probably what's holding you back, you know, among other things. So I want you to pay attention because we're gonna solve that for you today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna show you the two-week logging protocol that will help you figure out your expenditure, whether you use MacroFactor or not. You guys know I love MacroFactor because it'll do it for you. And if you want to support the podcast, download MacroFactor and use my code Wits and Waits all one word. But there is a way that you can do this yourself. So, in between, we are going to talk about how incorrect the maintenance number often is. So, maintenance calories when you're trying to figure that out. I'm gonna walk you through seven weeks, week by week, and how you can structure this leading up to a successful fat lace. I fat loss phase. I'd rather you take seven weeks and then execute your fat loss phase as fast as possible, efficiently and successfully, than take, say, zero or one or two weeks, and then you start a fat loss phase that doesn't even end. Does that make sense? And then at the end, I'll show you which parts of this have some research behind them, which parts of it kind of conflict with some of my advice so that you understand why I'm giving the advice I do. Hint, hint, it's based on real-world experience and also human psychology. All right, so I'm gonna start with a scenario because I think a lot of you will recognize this.

  9 weeks of effort with nothing to show for it

  Philip Pape 4:32

  Somebody might come to me in her early 50s, maybe she's been lifting a couple of years, maybe she's frustrated because she, let's say in January, had a New Year's resolution to lose weight, lose fat, started a new training program. I don't even know if it's effective or not. Depends on if a like a friend recommended it, something on YouTube she found, or maybe she has been, you know, listening to the show. And then at the same time, she's cutting calories. And the starting calories are based on what she thinks is her maintenance calories, based on an online calculator. And then she subtracts, let's say, 500 calories to lose a pound a week. And then let's say nine weeks later, she is down four pounds. But already I know, hey, you know, two, three, maybe all four of those pounds probably came off in the first week or two of mostly water weight, which a lot of people get excited when they lose weight really quickly on something like keto or carnivore, where they're cutting carbs, they're cutting food, and you lose weight really quickly, but it's not really body fat. And then you plateau and you're like, okay, now what do I have to change to keep losing weight? Which is the wrong question. Because are you even in a plateau to begin with? And how did you determine your calories besides all the other things you're doing, right? Sleep stress, training, et cetera. So you don't want to be changing all these things and then still fail to lose the weight or lose the fat. And now you're just like beating your head on the wall. There could be other things as well, right? Maybe the program you're running has more volume than you can recover from on what you're eating. Maybe you're trying to train fasted. Maybe the calories that you started with were never really in a deficit, et cetera, et cetera. And so what this all comes down to is you are doing what you think you're supposed to do. You've been listening to podcasts, you go online. Heck, we even have a calculator online that gives you some potential estimates. Even if you use something like MacroFactor, the first number it calculates for you is based on an estimate. Estimate, and then you're disciplined, and then you're consistent, and then, you know, effort, effort, effort, working, working hard, and then somehow it's not giving you the result. And that's not a discipline problem, right? It's about the experimental design. That's what I like to call experimental design because our body is always changing. The things we do are always changing, life is always changing. It's always an experiment. We're always trying to figure things out and improve, and nothing is gonna be fixed in place. And so, those of you who are just using a calculator and then you're running ahead with MyFitnessPal and you're not having success, this is probably why.

  What a calculator knows about you vs. what it doesn't

  Philip Pape 6:50

  So let's talk about the maintenance calories. Okay, maintenance calories are the amount of calories you burn every day that if you ate that amount of food, your weight shouldn't go up or down. Now, that's that's a simplified version of it, okay, but it's good enough. And when you look at a calculator, they use an equation like online. Probably Mifflin St. Jor is a really famous one, really good one that most calculators and apps are doing under the hood. That's the one that we use. You put in your height, your weight, your age, your sex, and you get an estimate of resting metabolic rate, and then it multiplies by an activity factor that you pick from like a drop-down, and then it gives you your uh total daily energy expenditure, your total metabolism for the day. So, now how accurate is this? Well, at the group level, at the population level, it's fine. That's how they got the equation. If you run Mifflin St. Jor as an equation on, let's say a hundred people, or a hundred women specifically, the average error is gonna be close to zero. So it is a good equation. The problem is, as an individual, you can't rely on being perfectly in the middle of that curve, like the perfect average, right? There's actually a study of, I think there's 125 adult women, and they had different body sizes where they compared the predicted resting metabolic rate or RMR against the measured using indirect calorimetry, which is like when they put your a mask on your face in a lab to calculate your metabolism. And the Mifflin St. Jor was within 10% for 71% of the women. Now, if you flip that around, that means roughly one in three of the women was off by more than 10%, right? And that's before you multiply by the activity factor to get your total metabolism, which

  Why your wearable or watch is terrible at estimating calories

  Philip Pape 8:38

  actually multiplies the error. Now, some of you are thinking, okay, that's why I wear a watch, because then I can measure my activity. Well, I wish. I wish it was that easy. I wish we can just calculate our total calories in some super direct, measurable way outside of a lab. Well, there's a review, a systematic review by Fuller and colleagues from 2020, uh, and it's huge, right? They looked at 158 studies across nine brands of wearables and concluded, and I'm paraphrasing here, that for energy expenditure, no brand is anywhere close to accurate. Okay. It's not that some are far better than others, it's that none of them are accurate. And the errors go from like 21% under to 15% over. And I've seen bigger numbers than that, but even that is more than enough to be kind of useless, right? It's kind of useless, other than maybe as a trend or relative activity measure, you know, like your rings and things like that on your on your Apple Watch. What bothers me as an engineer is that they found no data on whether these wearables are even consistent with themselves, right? Like internal consistency. So even that makes me wonder if you could rely on the trend, let's say. If I knew that my watch was always 300 calories high, then I could adjust it. But when it could be 300 calories high one day and 300 calories low the other day, again, pretty useless. So that's one side of the equation.

  What food logging research says about calorie intake

  Philip Pape 10:01

  The other is what you are eating. So there's a classic study by Lichtman in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took people who were convinced that they could not lose weight on very little food. And they self-reported that they were eating 1,028 calories a day, so just over a thousand calories. Then they measured them with doubly labeled water, which is the gold standard, just like Herman Ponser and his work. And the actual intake was over 2,000 calories. And their metabolisms were completely normal, right? Now, this is what something we've seen time and again, and especially back when you go to the 90s, before people even knew what macros were, it kind of makes sense, but it's but it somewhat holds up even to this day, even as much information as we have on social media about fitness and and nutrition. If we look at as recent as 2019, a review from Burroughs that looked at 59 studies and 6,300 adults, they found that records self-logging of food underestimated by 11 to 41%, and underreporting occurred more often in women. Okay, now that is just a huge amount of error. And it's also normal. So, in other words, whenever you feel like an influencer or somebody on social media is gaslighting you because they're like, Are you sure you're tracking accurately? I would say none of us can track accurately. However, if you're using an app that can do this better, it takes away the human piece and does help you track more accurately, which is the difference between now and what we had in the 90s, right? Back then it was like paper databases and stuff, if people even use that, like bodybuilders. So if your expenditure estimate is off by a couple hundred calories because of the calculators, and your intake of food, your what you're thinking you're eating, because you're not using a good measurement process, like let's say macrofactor, is off by up to 40%, then, and on top of that, you've spent years and years and years under eating and dieting, then your starting point is probably genuinely lower than you think, more often, like it mostly errors on that side, which is why you feel like you can't lose weight or why you think your metabolism is higher than it actually is, because of all these sources of error. So then if you start with a higher metabolism than reality and then you subtract and you're like thinking you're in a deficit, but you're not, well, there you go, right?

  Measuring your expenditure from your own body

  Philip Pape 12:24

  Does that make sense? There you go. Now, there's a way out of this, and I think it's pretty elegant. Instead of predicting your expenditure from an equation, you just measure it from your own body. Because if you know roughly what you ate across several weeks and you know how your weight trended across those same weeks, you can work backward to what you burned. Your body's like a black box, we say in engineering, right? The inputs are the food, the output is the energy loss, what's left is your body weight. So your body is the calorimeter. That's called the intake balance method. And we've validated that method against doubly labeled water, including a 2015 study by Sangvi and colleagues that tracked 140 people over two years, if you want to look at the research. And guess what? This is what good tracking apps do for us. I'm a big fan of letting letting you know an algorithm take care of this for me than trying to do it manually through a spreadsheet where there's gonna be all sorts of error because of how you're calculating it there. So, of course, again, that's why I use macro factor. I'm an affiliate of macro factor, my clients use it. So weigh that accordingly. But if you want to support the podcast, go download macrofactor and use my code all one word, wits and weights, you'll get two weeks free. But I'm gonna be straight with you here. If you use MacroFactor, it starts with an equation. But then once you start logging your food and weight, ideally every day, it's gonna take about uh usually for most people, three, maybe four weeks before the estimate of your expenditure settles down to reality. So don't just freak out on day one. Oh my gosh, my metabolism's higher or lower than I thought. Most people freak out because it's lower than they thought. Now it might be that low, but we don't know for about three weeks. Okay. So the method is pretty well validated, but the actual like result of that method takes several weeks because it needs real data. That's just the reality of it. Okay, it's it's not, it's because of the noise of the data. Your weight can swing one, two, three, four pounds a day up and down from water, glycogen, sodium, inflammation, et cetera. Also, your cycle. We know that women can often run a pound or two higher during menstruation, for example, and that's from water, not fat. If you start taking creatine, you might have water weight. There's a lot of reasons, right? If you're in perimenopause, your cycles are unpredictable, the noise goes even more volatile, and you might need a little bit longer to see the expenditure settle down. So you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, Philip, I get it. But I still don't trust myself to eat more

  Working through the fear of eating more

  Philip Pape 14:47

  without gaining fat because you hear me talk all oftentimes about needing to eat more to recover. Yes, you need to eat in a slight surplus, potentially build muscle, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about just eating more protein and eating more food in general so that you're up at your metabolism. I had uh somebody email me this week and she's like, Yeah, I'm just afraid of gaining too much. I really want to build muscle, but I've been going up like one or two hundred calories. And she's not using macrofactor. And I said, look, you're just delaying the recovery, and that's why you can't gain muscle and you feel not great because you're still technically dieting. So in Eat More Lift Heavy, which is the program that I run, it's a 26-week program where we teach you the skills to do this. And in week three, which is pretty early in the program, we just we discuss the fear of eating more. We address that with you. We help you work through that, which is really, really important early on. And rather than just saying, hey, join us, here's your maintenance calories, here's some Mac, here's a meal plan, go start losing weight. We know that doesn't work for people. We know, we know if you've spent the last 10, 20 years and you've been trying different programs and diets and coaches and you haven't had success, that's probably why, right? That's probably why. And then you're under-eating, but not diet, but not losing fat. It's just a vicious cycle. And then you don't really teach and learn to eat the the right foods for you and to feel fueled and powerful and strong and lift weights the right way and all of it. So in Eat More Lift Heavy, go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out. We actually explain all 26 weeks of the program. And it's for serious people only, because if you're looking for a quick fix, this is not it. The first seven weeks are what I'm describing today before you actually start a fat loss phase. We get tracking set up, we get your training going, we start building the skills, we help you bring you up to your measured, correct, fully recovered maintenance calories so that by week seven, now you're ready to rock and roll and step on the gas pedal and actually lose fat and then keep it off with the sustainable habits. So eatmore liftheavy.com. And here's the cool thing. As we're leading up to episode 500 to celebrate, we have a short-term promo code to get $50 off if you choose the six month program. It's $500 club. That's the code, $500 club. I'll include it in the show notes to get $50 off. We almost never do promos. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. If you sign up for six months, $50 off with $500 Club.

  Weeks 1 and 2, logging without changing anything

  Philip Pape 17:10

  So let's go over those seven weeks one at a time here. I want to explain the logic so that you know why. Okay. Weeks one and two are where you start logging things to get awareness and you don't change anything. And I mean, really don't change anything. Now you might end up changing things subconsciously, not realizing it, and that's fine. That's pretty cool. That's in fact part of the process we love to see. But you're not consciously dramatically changing your calories, dramatically changing your training, your steps. Now, if you're not training to begin with, that's the one exception we might make in that we're going to introduce a program to you that is effective. And within the first few weeks, you're gonna figure out, okay, where am I training? How do I do this? Let me get going. That's okay, okay, because everybody needs to be lifting weights. But this is the hardest part for a lot of people because you come in and you're like, yeah, I gotta lose weight, I gotta lose that last 10 pounds, or I gotta lose the next 50 or whatever. And we're telling you, don't change anything. We just take baby steps and start tracking and becoming aware of your behaviors. How many of you actually done that? Okay, so there's like four rules if you're gonna do this on your own. All right. Rule number one is that you do wanna start to track your food in a precise way. That means weighing your food on a food scale. That means using the scanner or the AI photo-based login, whatever makes sense, right? Macro Factor has that, Fitness Lab, my own app, has that. And we've actually just upgraded that app to full meal coaching, which it never had before. It may or may not be out by the time this episode comes out. But anyway, you need to be tracking your food so that you know how much protein you're getting, how many calories are you eating, what do your macros look like, what do your micros look like. Okay. Number two is kind of related to this. Don't go crazy about it. Like, yes, I want you to track everything, but if you feel like it's taking too much time or it feels too obsessive, or like you're trying to be more detailed than you need to be, reach out, right? In our program, we we deal with these issues all the time. We have conversations on the calls in the community about how to take out the friction of logging and how to make it super, super easy. Because many of you have used MyFitness Panel. You're like, yeah, I just hate tracking. I'm like, well, there's a reason you hate tracking. Let's just not throw it out like baby with the bathwater. There's a way to make it so frictionless, you're you're doing it for maybe two minutes a day. I mean, two minutes a day. Come on. If you can't do that, I don't know what to say. Uh, rule number three is you're gonna weigh yourself every morning and but then you're gonna ignore the number because what you care about is the three-week trend. So again, if you're using MacroFactor and you put it in there, you just do it every day, but then there's a trend. And then rule number four is you log every day the same way. Like, who cares if it's Saturday and you're going out for drinks and appetizers, you're going to a party or having birthday cake, whatever. Just log it. Like a lot of people are fearful of being honest in these apps, like MyFitnessPal, because they've judged you or they've given you warnings or they like get on you for missing things. Whereas Macrofactor doesn't do that, or if you're doing it on your own, like in a in a notebook, let's say, you're hopefully not judging yourself for it. So just log every day, full days, don't leave anything out because that's the only way you're gonna get the right data. Now, quickly on the day and daily weigh-ins, I want to mention that there's plenty of research, including a systematic review from Zheng in 2015, of 17 studies where more frequent self-weighing was associated with better outcomes and no evidence of physiological harm. And I don't have the research with me, but I know there was a study that compared seven to five days actually, and found that seven days seem to be associated with better outcomes and maintenance of results as well. If you have a history of disordered eating, take all of this with a grain of salt. We're talking about if you're in a mentally healthy state, there's no reason not to start tracking in a detailed way. It's there's no evidence showing that it's gonna make you obsessive or disordered at all. Okay. So that's the first couple weeks. Then the next couple weeks,

  Weeks 3 and 4, bringing your intake up

  Philip Pape 20:56

  weeks three and four, is where you start to tweak things. Ideally, your food, you're going to for most people, especially a lot of women, you're gonna end up bringing your food up, your intake up to your measure of maintenance. You may be really low in carbs because of a fear of carbs and keto and all this. You may have to bring those carbs up. You probably have to bring your protein up as well. Fat usually comes along for the ride. And by weeks three and four, you're because you've been tracking, you know roughly where to target for that to have a quicker recovery. If you've been dieting for a long time, this number may be higher than what you've ever been eating in a long time. And then you get a little bit afraid you're gonna gain weight, but you're not going to. You may, you're definitely gonna gain a few pounds of water weight. And if you start taking creatine, even more water weight, but it's not body fat. It's not body fat. And of course, as you're doing this, the protein's gonna stay high. I always say the the minimum we're gonna aim for is 0.7 grams per pound. Again, if you use macrofactor, it it sets your targets for you based on the evidence. So for a lot of you, it's gonna be between like 120 and 140 grams a day. And then, you know, everyone's gonna have individual challenges. Like for some of you, it'll be eating more carbs. And you're afraid of, oh my gosh, you associate carbs with, you know, pizza and donuts or sugar or gaining weight. When I say carbs, I mean fruits, vegetables, starches, grains, things like potatoes, oats, right? Anything you can tolerate that you enjoy that meets your energy needs. And then weeks five, six, seven are

  Weeks 5 through 7, holding it steady

  Philip Pape 22:21

  where you kind of hold those new habits in place. So notice we're doing we're taking kind of a step change approach. First couple of weeks we don't change much, we start logging. Second couple of weeks we change a little bit, and then we hold again. And that's where you can see your true expenditure and your weight trend and where you really, really are. And for a lot of you, three weeks feels like a long time, like you're doing nothing. Again, in E More Lift Heavy, we we are working on skills every week anyway. So you're kind of building on top of that. And there are little things that are changing, things like step count, things like sleep, all very important. But we want to get the noise out of the system so that by the end of week seven, you have something that I bet most of you have never had, which is six weeks of really good, clean data on a very stable set of conditions on how your body works and your habits. I mean, that's pretty powerful. You know your maintenance calories, you know your protein intake, you know your eating habits, you know your calorie habits, your weight trend, like all that stuff in a much more accurate way. And now you're in a position to run a true calorie deficit and then learn from it. All right, so now we are week seven.

  Reading your expenditure trend at week 7

  Philip Pape 23:29

  What do you do? Well, there's three possibilities. So this is pretty cool because you may have seven weeks ago thought, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, or I need to lose fat. Maybe, maybe not. Let's see. The first possibility is your expenditure trend is rising. You raised your intake, your body responded by burning more calories, becoming less efficient, which is what we want. We want to become a gas guzzler. And this is more common, dear listener, than you think, might think, especially most people who listen to the show, especially if you came in underfueled. Maybe your steps went up and you didn't even think about it. Maybe you're a little bit warmer and you're fidgeting more. Practically, though, what it means is you have more runway. It's not that your metabolism is artificially higher, it's that you're recovered and your body is operating on all cylinders, and now you've got a good, healthy place from which to run a fat loss phase in a successful way. And it may be at lower calories than you thought originally, and that's okay. The second possibility is your metabolism, your expenditure is fairly flat. And so things have sort of stabilized. You're at maintenance. It's boring, but that's what you kind of want. It's very useful. You know where your maintenance calories are. Now you can take a modest cut from those maintenance calories. All right, and then you can interpret everything against that stable baseline. The third possibility is hey, maybe your trend is falling. You've been eating more, but it's still falling. Now, usually that means that your logging got better and drifted upward as you got comfortable. And now it's saying, okay, you're actually eating more than we thought. So you must be burning less. But it could be your activity has declined. It could be that you're just not at maintenance left. It's rarely anything to be scared about. And for oftentimes it means maybe we should continue with recovery before we go into a fat loss phase. So all of this gives you really good data so you don't make the wrong decision, right? So you don't get depleted and frustrated and hitting a wall really quickly. Now, notice what all three of these have in common, which is in every case, you know what to do next and you know why. You know what to do next and you know why. This is, you know, coaching 101 converted into a step-by-step system to do this, which is what we want. That is the return on investment for those seven weeks. Not that you're losing fat, that comes later. It's that you know what to do now and you can now lose fat successfully and do anything else in the future you ever want to do. Now, there is a separate question of whether you should even do a deficit at all. And that depends on a lot of things, including your schedule. Do you have vacations coming up? Are you having a surgery? Are we around the holidays? What time of year it is, all this other stuff. We're gonna actually talk about that in our next episode 498. Today we're just talking about that pre-fat loss phase. Now, I want to talk about some things that I'm not claiming here, even though a lot of people in the industry do claim these about this, you know, recovery phase or pre-fat loss phase. I'm not saying that you're gonna be able to lose more fat by doing this. I'm saying that you'll be able to know how to lose the fat that you want to lose in the right way. Energy balance and thermodynamics still apply. It's not like an accelerator, so to speak, but it does address a lot of the things that cause people to fail or stop or plateau. The second thing is, I'm not saying you can't change your training and eating at the same time. In fact, many people many of the times we have to encourage that because you're not lifting right to begin with, and we want you lifting the right way. And sometimes they synergistically help each other. I'm also not saying, and this is really important, that your metabolism is damaged or broken, that it needs to be fixed. None of that. None of that. Please stop accepting that narrative from the fitness industry. Most people's expenditure across the population are pretty similar, and it's things like your movement and your eating and your lifting and all of and your sleep, et cetera, that affect the day-to-day number. And I guess one more thing I'm not saying is that those online calculators are useless. In fact, we have our own at wits of weights.com slash calculators, and they're great as a starting point, but they could be way off, and that's why we actually have to track our intake and our weight over time to get the real number. All right, before I let you go, I promised you the two-week logging protocol. And I'm gonna show you that in a second. Before I do, if this episode appealed to you, if you think it's interesting, you're like, I really want to try that because I've never been able to lose fat successfully, and I want to figure myself out. I want to understand my body better. I want to understand my hunger signals and how to actually lose fat. And I like this engineering approach. You know, there's so much intuitive woo stuff out there that this seems to make a lot of sense. Go to eatmoriftheavy.com and check out what we do. It's a 26-week program. It's one of the ways you can support the show as well, but more importantly, support yourself in gaining this confidence and going through a systemic process. We have the base program, which is where you get your training program, you get a launch plan, you get the monthly calls, there's the community, there's all of this. It's not like set and forget. It is a, we're gonna hold your hand week by week and help you build these skills. But then on top of that, we have something called dialed in, which is where you get a one-on-one personalized coach. Her name is Carol. She is awesome. She's a women's and hormones expert. She's also a nutrition expert. She loves recipes and meal plans and all that side of things as well. So she will build you a custom nutrition blueprint that has everything. It has suggested foods based on what you like. It has meal timing, has everything. It's not a meal plan, it's a super flexible blueprint for your nutrition that then you can iterate on together. She reviews her data every week. She does form checks. She's gonna do a monthly video review. So totally up to you of what you need. Go to eMoreLiftheavy.com. And because we're celebrating the fifth 500th episode of Wits and Weights very soon, which it still gets to me a little bit. I'm so excited. I can't believe we're there yet. We're there already, and you've been along for the ride. We have a code, it's 500 club. It takes $50 off the six month options for either tier of eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's 500 club. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com

  Bonus: 2-week logging protocol and the weekend gap

  Philip Pape 29:22

  and use 500 club at checkout. All right, here is the two-week logging protocol. For two weeks, for 14 days, I want you to log every single day. Again, I prefer you use MacroFactor because it takes your intake and your weight trend and works backward to calculate your real expenditure. And you don't have to be obsessive about how you track. You can use photos. It has an AI-based photo logger, you can use barcodes, you can use common database foods, et cetera. And then you log every day exactly the same way. Doesn't matter if it's Saturday or Sunday or whatever. But then what I want you to do is I want you to take the average of your weekdays and I want you to take the average of your weekend. And I want you to compare the two. Okay, for the vast majority of people who have a normal nine to five, like Monday through Friday type job or schedule, I want you to notice the difference between the weekend and the weekdays. Now you're like, oh, I already know the difference. No, I really, really want you to notice the calories, the protein, the nutrients, the alcohol, everything, because that could be your biggest lever. How do I either adjust the weekend to be more in line with the week and that alone gets me the deficit I need? Or do I adjust my targets so that the weekend is accounted for and gives me the freedom and flexibility I already want or need? And then I can go a little bit more dialed in during the week. And that is a very powerful strategy. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, you cannot fix what you never measure. And a short seven weeks of measuring is gonna save you at least a year, if not the rest of your life, of guessing. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Testosterone, GLP-1s, and Fat Loss Over 40 (Jay Campbell) | Ep 496

Over 40 and suddenly struggling to lose fat or build muscle? It must be your hormones... right?

Not so fast.

Jumping straight to TRT, HRT, peptides, or GLP-1s could be solving the wrong problem.

Jay Campbell, author of The Testosterone Optimization Therapy Bible and co-founder of BioLongevity Labs, breaks down where hormones actually fit into fat loss, muscle building, metabolism, and longevity.

We cover why testosterone boosters usually disappoint, what free versus total testosterone can tell you, common mistakes with TRT, estrogen management, and why lifestyle still matters even when using therapeutic tools.

Jay also shares his perspective on strength training over 40, building muscle for longevity, cardio and visceral fat, and the rapidly evolving world of GLP-1 medications and peptides.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence. 

Timestamps:

0:00 – Are hormones blocking your progress
2:22 – How much hormones really matter
9:35 – Testosterone boosters and marketing hype
12:58 – Lifestyle versus therapeutic hormone tools
17:45 – Jay’s long-term TRT experience
24:11 – Estrogen mistakes during testosterone therapy
31:36 – Hidden signs of hormone deficiency
41:40 – Muscle, cardio, and longevity
52:59 – GLP-1s and what comes next

Episode resources:

• Website & Resources: jaycampbell.com/free-info 

• Book: LIVING LEANER LONGER STRONGER: The Blueprint for Optimal Health & Longevity

• Biolongevity Peptides & Supplements (Use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for 15% off)

• Facebook: @JayCampbell333

• Instagram: @jaycampbell1971

• Twitter: @JayCampbell333 

• Transcript

  Are hormones blocking your progress

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you're over 40 and the fat loss has stalled, someone has probably said, eh, maybe it's your hormones. Take a testosterone booster or get on TRT or HRT and now get a GLP1 and watch the weight just fall right off. My guest today has been on testosterone therapy for over 25 years. He wrote what many consider the definitive book on it. And he'll be the first to tell you that most of what's being sold to you in that area is a scam. We discussed today when hormones do and don't matter for you after 40, when they might be distracting you from the real problem, and the one thing you need to be doing right now to optimize your hormones, whether naturally or alongside HRT, if your goal is to lose fat and build muscle. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we are examining a belief that is everywhere right now that if you're older, if you're over 40, if you can't lose fat or build muscle, your hormones are of course the problem, and fixing them is the solution. Testosterone clinics, creams, pellets, peptides, GLP1s, all the stuff we're talking about today, all over social media. And the premise is that a syringe or a supplement will solve all your problems when nothing else seems to work. My guest today is DJ Campbell. He's been on testosterone therapy himself for more than 25 years. He's the author of the testosterone optimization therapy Bible, and he co-founded BioLongevity Labs. He is right in the thick of this industry. He knows better than anyone where the real value is based on the evidence versus where the marketing maybe is overhyping or cherry-picking the science. By the end of this episode, you'll know the latest on testosterone, where hormone therapy and peptides fit into, of course, your lifestyle and your health, and the most appropriate use of GLP1s, while avoiding some of the downsides around muscle mass, aggressive deficits, and even performance. Jay, welcome to the show.

  Jay Campbell 2:04

  Philip, thank you so much for having me, man. That was an awesome it was a little different than a normal bio, but I'll receive that and blessed to have you to have me speaking with you today. So I know this is going to be an epic interview.

  Philip Pape 2:14

  Absolutely. And a lot of the listeners probably know who you are. And we'll get into like your background and where you're able to speak from credibility to some of these topics. Sure.

  How much hormones really matter

  Philip Pape 2:22

  And that'll just come up. So I really want to start with kind of the big question where people who listen to this show, for example, they know the value of lifting weights, they know the value of life's getting your sleep, you know, taking care of your body, eating right. But how likely is it that hormones on the list of things that are important are the reason that somebody is struggling to hit their goals, whether it's fat loss, building muscle, or performance?

  Jay Campbell 2:47

  So it's a complex, it's a great question and a complex answer because I really think it also depends on like where the person is in the world. You know, DNA does play a role, but in the modernized, you know, areas of the world right now, which would obviously be the West, clearly almost every coastal population center, urbanized city in the United States, the environmental contamination is unavoidable. Like, you know, like I say, you know, from the water that we drink in plastic bottles. I mean, this is the best water on earth, right? This is Icelandic water. It's this is the best water you can get like in a bottle in the world, because it comes from an actual deep mineral springs, still in Iceland. It's one of the only places in the world that's not contaminated. But between the water, the air, the food, the blue light, you know, the EMF, I mean, it's very, very difficult for people today, and really in their younger, you know, like now, even in their late 20s, early 30s, mid-30s, and beyond, to not have, you know, some sort of hormonal dysregulation. And, you know, I think the medical system, if we want to call it that, you know, the allopathic, you know, sick care, illness management system, it's not trained to help people understand hormonal deficiencies. They're not even like looking for that, right? Like most of the doctors, even a young guy or let's say an aging person, say 40 or older, goes and they're complaining of, you know, brain fog, you know, dregulated mood, lack of energy, belly fat, et cetera. They literally want to give them, you know, a PD5 inhibitor like Viagra or Cialis, or they want to give them a SSRI, right, to alleviate their brain fog and their poor mood. And they'll never even look for the underlying condition, which is obviously usually sometimes a hormone, not not usually, almost all the time now at this point, some form of hormone deficiency. So I want to say that I would say between 70 and 80% of people who are doing everything else right, if they have a hormone deficiency, it's going to be a huge obstacle for them to get to where they ultimately desire to go, which would obviously be leader, more tone, more muscular.

  Philip Pape 4:49

  Yeah. So that's interesting. What about the flip side of that? People that aren't doing all the things right. Yeah. You know what I mean? How likely is it that hormones are the causal factor? You know what I mean? 99.9%.

  Jay Campbell 5:02

  Because the issue is there, if so if you're fat, and I mean fat, right? And the BMI is, you know, not the greatest gauge for muscular people, obviously. But if you're, you know, 29 or 30 or higher BMI as a middle-aged man or woman, the likelihood that you have a hormone deficiency is very high, right? Because the insulin resistance, the belly fat, the inflammation, the cytokines, all the stuff that's going on in that belly fat or that fat that's over your internal organs is literally causing a hormonal dysregulation. So it's crazy. It's, you know, the kick, the chicken or the egg scenario, right? Yeah, yeah.

  Philip Pape 5:37

  I'm glad you did. I'm glad you said that though, because like that, people expect the other answer. And like you said, it goes both ways, right? It influences your hormones. It's like you got cytokines. Well, you know, build muscle. Now you have myokines kind of setting and things like that. So I want to unpack a couple of things you mentioned about the hormones in the environment. You mentioned environmental contamination. And, you know, that's that's an interesting area, right? Because unless you're very careful with how it's framed and like the evidence, you could go, I there's there's a lot of quackery in that world, you know. But I've heard you talk about this, and like I think about women's health, for example, and all the cases of infertility and endometriosis and all this stuff that's all of a sudden blowing up and then low testosterone in men, and you know, and some of that is testing and things, I get it. But and what's the other thing? Older folks that go to the doctor, not even younger guys. I mean, I know plenty of older folks in my own family, older guys in their 60s and 70s, you know they need to get their testosterone checked, and the doctor never mentions it. No, it's like, what the hell? So it's important.

  Jay Campbell 6:31

  No more, they don't understand how to treat it anyway, right? And again, most men who do go in their 30s or 40s, and they only because it's at the behest of their wife, because they can't get an erection or they can't hold an erection, or they just have no desire, right? Like a lot of women think their husband's cheating on them because they have no interest in him, but it's really because they just have a dis you know dysregulation of their hormones. But in truth, if you go to a doctor and the doctor's not qualified, which is again 80 to 90 percent of GPs, right? Actually insurance doctors, they're literally going to, if you ask them to do it, they're going to test your total and not your free. And then they're gonna be like, oh, you're 350 or you're 400, you're you know, 290, you're fine. Yeah, you're in rate. They literally don't understand the difference between free and total anyway, because they never learned that stuff. So they're never gonna tell you, oh, you have a testosterone deficiency because now the onus is on them on treating you and they don't know how to do it.

  Philip Pape 7:25

  And now, now let me, you know, here's another thing, right? So let's the whole, if you had to pick a whole like a pie of all the things that have affected testosterone in the modern generation, right? You mentioned environmental. There's also a general decline in testosterone. Although I've heard I've I've heard more analysis of this that maybe that's a statistical thing and not a real thing. Or in other words, the population has lower testosterone, but it's correlated with higher body fat. And so you would expect it, right? Is that what it is?

  Jay Campbell 7:52

  Yeah, that's literally what they say. And if you look at this, you know, what they call the standard mean deviation of like the levels, the ranges at the top and the bottom, that is definitely happening. It's it's it's flattening and people are getting fatter. So you can 100% say that, but there are studies out there, and I've published them, you know, in my book, The Landmark One, was the Hebrew, and they took, you know, 68 or 70,000, I think it was 68,000 guys on all seven continents, and they studied them from like 1972. It was a meta-analysis, and then it was released. I think the data was released in 2014, but it was a 40-year thing, and they were able to show that testosterone levels were down about 80% and fertility levels were down statistically, like you couldn't even account for it. So obviously that you know, they deduced that it's just the environmental contamination. And again, when I say environmental contamination, I mean it's just modernization, right? Like this is the results of everything that we are building, all the plastics, the phylates, the pesticides, you know, the things that are almost unavoidable, you know. And that's why, like when I talk about this stuff, like I always say the biggest tool in the tool belt for everyone, man and woman, is always going to be therapeutic testosterone. However, you definitely have to change your lifestyle first, right? Like we have to make sure that we account for all the things that are affecting us. I mean, dude, think about all the men that are wearing nylon boxers, you know, lowering their sperm count, suppressing their, you know, the spacing in their testicles with these, you know, horrible, you know, again, polyester, whatever they are, nylon, you know, threads that, you know, essentially suppress hormone production. So there's so many different things that we have to account for. And so it's really, really difficult, you know, if you interview smart doctors that are really, you know, I would say awesome in prescribing hormones these

  Testosterone boosters and marketing hype

  Jay Campbell 9:35

  days, and thankfully there are enough of them out there that will tell you that it's very difficult to be, especially in like a New York City or LA or Miami, to do everything naturally right and still not have an issue, right? So that's to me can be the biggest thing. And that's why I always say at the end of the day, if you're doing all the things right and you still have a dysregulation, you know, it's best to look into therapeutic hormones because again, it will move the needle bigger and faster than anything else will.

  Philip Pape 10:00

  Yeah, for sure. So I definitely want to hit on these pieces then. So when we talk about therapy, you know, and I also am a big fan of therapeutic options, as you mentioned. So I want to get out of the way, like the non-therapeutic things that a lot of people go to because it's cheap, easy, you know, quick. I just want to try it out. And I'm thinking there's both like testosterone boosters, like it says it on the package and also herbal stuff, Ashwagandha, yeah, all that stuff that some of it's great for other reasons, potentially, but talk to us about that.

  Jay Campbell 10:29

  Well, yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up because this is so old for me, right? So, I mean, in my first book that I wrote, which was really pub, really written in 2014 but published in 2015, was the first one it was the definitive TRT manual. And as you know, a lot of people, a lot of people have come to me and said this. I was the one that never said this, but they're like, you know that Jeff Bezos read that book because it was, you know, number one in men's health in 2016 for like six months. And then in 2017, he went from pipsqueak to the guy walking around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, you know, you read that book, Jay. So many people have said that to me. But look, me analyzed in that book a whole chapter on natural testosterone boosters. And then we also obviously went deeper in the 2018 book, which was obviously the one you quoted, the TOT Bible. And the reality is that all the statistics and meta-analysis are on boosters, you know, call them, you know, aphrodisiacs. You you mentioned Astral Gonda, you know, there's Tribulus, there's what is there's the stuff that Huberman sells, there's there's all these different things that, like, when you take that Greek, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but you take them and then you measure, you will see an elevation in a lot of different things. The thing is, it's always transient. And so I always tell people like, none of these things are going to keep you optimized or get you on the path to being optimized. And that's the thing. And so, you know, I always make the joke about it now, is what is it? It's nugenics, right? Or it's it's Frank Thomas and Doug Flutie on those commercials, right? And they're, you know, they're showing them with their shirts off and their 50s and 60s, and it's like, oh, if I take this booster, I'm all jacked. And it's so many people still believe that, you know, and you know, whether it's due to needle phobia, you know, or the fear of you know, that there's so much demonization, as you know, in the public about taking therapeutic testosterone and how you make you could become addicted, or you know, there's the Lyle Alzado nonsense.

  Philip Pape 12:13

  I mean, there's just so much stuff attached to GLP1s are no problem with very little research, but T I know so it's I mean, but it's a stigma, right?

  Jay Campbell 12:21

  It's been there for decades, and there's still so many people that are attached to the stigma. And because of that, and let's not forget also the lack of education in the physician community and or lack of enough doctors, you know, again, for insurance providing doctors that can prescribe testosterone, and you have what you have, which is again, people being fleeced, you know, and that's the truth about all of these things. And again, like you said, you know, Astrogonda, great for cortisol suppression. I take it at night before I go to bed. Is it going to increase my testosterone to make me feel optimized? Absolutely not. And there are some

  Lifestyle versus therapeutic hormone tools

  Jay Campbell 12:58

  tons of other things that we already mentioned, you know, and again, these are all covered in my book. But at this point today, outside of like taking HMG or HCG or and clomophene or even clomophene itself, which will re you know increase FSH and LH, which is obviously follicle stimulating hormone and glutenizing hormone, there's nothing that is going to actually optimize your hormones other than the real McCoy. It's just there's nothing out there.

  Philip Pape 13:22

  Yeah. So let's play the stack game, the lifestyle stack and then the therapeutic stack on that, because man, I've worked with clients who like they lose all this body fat as they're on TRT, and then they're all of a sudden too high on the because that has gone up naturally as well. So, like, how much of low T symptoms, I guess, and actual low T can be influenced by, for example, I think fat loss is the big one, but there's also under or overtraining, poor sleep, stress, all the other things in life, like where would you put the biggest levers?

  Jay Campbell 13:53

  So for sure, you know, if you're going to do this naturally, uh and again, this is the chicken and egg syndrome, right? Because an obese man struggles with energy, right? So if you're going to give them a protocol, you know, maybe you throw in a microdose of a you know retitrutide or terzapatide and you give them therapeutic testosterone, and obviously you have your training dialed in and their cardio dialed in and their eating dialed in and all those things. It's better, you know, for an obese man to be on, you know, again, a combination of those things, essentially, if they're doing all the other things, than it would be to just attempt to have the obese man do all the things without testosterone and Bretta or TERS because again, their metabolism is so slow because they have the obesity and you know, the insulin resistance, et cetera. So I like when they are you know heavier and dealing with these issues, I like working.

  Philip Pape 14:41

  Can I challenge that a little bit? Just a tiny bit. I want to see what you think about this. You said because the metabolism is so slow. I mean, there are a lot of overweight men who have a rather high expenditure, but I think isn't the issue more the appetite and the hunger and just the inability to to change that lifestyle to do what they need to do.

  Jay Campbell 14:58

  I think it's multifactoral. I think I think I think we have to deal with a the reason they're like that is because clearly they're not eating well. Right. And if they're eating boxed foodstuffs in engineered food all the time, then without a doubt, what you just said is true. They have some sort of an addiction to eating like shit. You know, like Sal says on on Mind Pump, you know, it's discussed with me, the hyperpalatability of food from all the chemicals, you know, a lot of these people are addicted to the chemical sensation. Yeah, you know, they're not really addicted to the actually overconsumption of the food, it's just the addiction from the brain. So that's why I like if you're again, and and everybody's different, but if you're morbidly obese and you have no energy, you know, testosterone being lipolytic, being dopaminergic signaling, you know, spiking, all those things, it helps motivate a person to get on the path to do all the things. And and I'm not saying that a person can't do it without them, but and and and let's be honest, Phil, five years ago we didn't have this anyway, right? So like they had to do it, but nowadays it's just if you understand, and again, there aren't a lot of doctors that understand this, there's not even a lot of trainers that understand this, or even functional health coaches understand it. But if you do understand how to microdose and use therapeutic hormones, it's going to be a better, you know, call it adjuvant as long as they're doing all the other things. And more times. As you know, the other things are always most important. And I always say this when I talk to people peptides or testosterone are not magic bullets. You cannot, under any circumstances, do anything with any of those things if you don't have your lifestyle dialed in. And so many people think that they're just cheat codes and that they're easy buttons and you know, exercising a pill or a bottle or something like that, and that all you have to do is that. I mean, some my chiropractor today was a Justin Mean, he was saying some woman came into him, and he's not like us, but you know, he knows a little bit, and she was like, Oh, she was telling me about this redotrutide. And he's like, What can you tell me about that? You know, and I'm like, Well, yeah, bro, redotrutide is a pre-figured, yeah, and you know, it's been around in the research community and really now everybody's community for three years, but it's still not approved, and blah, blah. And he's like, Well, she told me that, and then it was just instant, you know, you could tell the doctor told her, you know, builds muscle, you don't have to lift weights. So this is what people are being told. You know, this is the nonsense. Because again, at the end of the day, dude, like the doctors are attempting, as I always say this, they're attempting to make money. And if a pharma rep comes into them and says, start them here and go higher, that's how everybody in the pharmac, you know, the pharma command circle makes money. You know, the pharmaceutical giant makes money, the actual pharmaceutical rep makes money, the doctor makes money, the patient is the one, you know, that gets experimented on because they're the ones that usually have the receptors blown out because the dosage is starting too high and then it goes too high. It's like I always say in the pharma world, titrate high go higher.

  Jay’s long-term TRT experience

  Jay Campbell 17:45

  You know, in the research world where you're doing it right, it's start low go slow, right? So it's like you just have to have an under and uh what I would call an education or an understanding and an awareness of like how to use these as tools because that's all they are. That's what testosterone is, that's what peptides are, GLPs, they're just tools, they're not magic buttons and I think or magic bullets. And I think so many people think they are because they don't get the correct education when they're initiating.

  Philip Pape 18:09

  Yeah, I can't argue with anything you said because I definitely see the use of this suite of tools from folks who, even if they're not obese, even if it's just like they're really struggling to get to that next part that they want to be at and they have a deficiency and they're lifting all the time. It's frustrating, man, when you're doing all that stuff, especially, you know, you get older and maybe the testosterone continues to drop more and more. And exactly what you're doing is now you actually going back in. It sucks. So you now you've been on testosterone for quite a long time now. Like I'm just curious about your personal experience there. What did it, you know, what did it change for you versus not? But also, were there any not myths, but like things that are overhyped, I guess, that bit that people think about testosterone?

  Jay Campbell 18:50

  Yeah, so I've been on therapeutic testosterone since I was one month from turning 30. So this goes back to 1999 because I'm 55 today. Um, so I've been on it, what, 26 years, basically going on 27 years, and I've used every delivery system. You know, when I first started, it was injectable. And then after that, I was like, oh, you know, I have to inject myself. Because back then, dude, we didn't have 31, 32 gauge insulin needles, you know, they were used, they had testosterone in like cottonseed oil. You know what I mean? So a lot of people, if you had any kind of like hyperallergic or, you know, a histologic response to it, you you'd have an injection response to it. But and you know, back then they were probably injecting with like 24, 25 gauge needles. So, you know, it creates our scar tissue. But then after that, you know, I was using cream and I was, you know, putting it on my forearms, putting it on my inner thighs. And then obviously, you know, as time progressed, we found out about transcrotal testosterone. You put it at the base of your scrotum, you know, 200 milligrams per gram, compounded cream. So I've used them all. You know, outside of that, obviously I've written prolifically about all the different delivery systems. Outside of small needle, you know, insulin syringe injection, where whether it's either I am or sub Q or transcrotal, all the other delivery systems are fraught with issues or will not raise a man or even a woman's testosterone into optimal levels. You know, there's guys now out there, you know, promoting this, I forget what it's called. It's an oral, you know, lozenge. There's even the testo, which is the nasal stuff, which is, by the way, horrific, which causes headaches and sinus infections and sinus cavity issues. And my God, it goes on and on. But there's lots of delivery systems for testosterone. Almost all of them are highly inefficient, other than, like I said, small insulin gauge syringe injections. And that's again, I am or sub Q. You can obviously inject into the belly. I want to talk about that in a second. And then transcrotal. And for women, same thing, injection or cream on the inter labial lips or the hood of the clitoris. Because again, that tissue is the same permeate, how would I say it, permanent skin permeability that a man's penis has. It's exact same a bit, a bit. So but base of the scrotum or at the hood of the clitoris or interlabial lips is the same. So those are your only two tried and two delivery systems that work for people. I know there's other stuff out there now, and there's even, you know, that oral lozenge is now FDA approved, but everyone that I've spoken to about it, including Docs, say, yeah, you can get a man of like 200 to 400, right? So it's like the FDA loves it, right? Because you don't actually optimize them, but you can show movement, you know, on the chart. So great. But then you also find out that it's like 450 bucks a month with insurance, right? Versus a bottle of you know, 200 milligram 10cc testosterone, 75 bucks, you know, from good RX. So you really just have to understand the ins and outs. But to your original question, if you do this right, and what I mean by doing it right is again, microdosing, starting low, going slow, not expecting it to make you the incredible Hulk or to you know a professional bodybuilder or any of that. Because again, I always like to say to be that size, you have to take a lot of stuff, right? Not just testosterone, but you know, most likely some other stuff anabolics, growth hormone, insulin, you know, eat a lot of food. There's lots. Peptides you can talk about too. But the reality is if you're just using therapeutic testosterone, you start very, very low. You attempt to do as many shots, or if you're using the cream, it's daily administration, but it's as many to mimic the body's natural production, right? So I always settled on in my life and still to this way to this day, three shots a week. So it's like every other day. There are lots of people that inject every morning. You know, I know lots of guys and women that do that. They think it's like, you know, part of their morning ritual. They like injecting with a 31 or 32 gauge needle. You know, like for a woman, it's like two milligrams, you know, and for a guy, it can be like 15 to 25 milligrams or something like that. Or some guys to probably do 30, you know, to get around 200. But again, everybody's dosing is different. As far as the side effects profile, if I go way back to remember it, because I don't have any sides anymore from any of this. I've been on it for so long. You know, the the little things that most people know about, you know, you can get bumps, you can get like little zits, you know, or rashes like on your upper back or your upper shoulders. I think that that has a lot to do sometimes with diet, you know, how much insulin, what your insulin sensitivity is. Like when you're eating a lot more carbs and you're eating, let's say, less restrained, I've always noticed, and again, this is my opinion, but I've always noticed that you can get more acne. I think people call it back. But again, I wanted to talk to you about like testosterone in the belly. I think one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is if you have a lot of belly fat, you know, so you, you know, you've got insulin resistance in your belly where your belly fat is, and you inject testosterone into it, which a lot of people do, it causes another inflammatory reaction because the visceral fat in you know senses the testosterone and is like, what the hell is this? It's another chemical you're injecting into it. Not to mention it's not just testosterone, it could be, again, grapeseed oil or MCT oil or whatever. So a lot of times guys get, you know, what they assume to be estrogen-related side effects, you know, mood imbalance, water retention, you know, irritability because the belly fat and the testosterone don't mix. And none of those are high estrogen symptoms. Those are all literally due to inflammatory response by your body. Yeah. So I mean, I talk about this a lot, but again, a lot of doctors mistake this because so many

  Estrogen mistakes during testosterone therapy

  Jay Campbell 24:11

  men who are fat, you know, when I say fat, I mean literally they're carrying like a spare tire, right? So lots of guys are, you know, big training in the gym, but they got a belly because they're drinking too much alcohol, eating too much processed food and sugar. So when they inject the testosterone into the belly, they get that inflammatory response. And then that response by their doctor is like, oh, your estrogen is, you know, high. I got to give you an AI or I got to suppress your estrogen. And dude, as you know, you just shook your head. So I do know you.

  Philip Pape 24:36

  Without even testing it, right?

  Jay Campbell 24:37

  You never under any circumstances suppress a man's estrogen because when you suppress a man's estrogen, that's when the side effects and the symptomology starts. Because as I like to say, man, and this is like really well understood in the medical world, but not in the TRT, you know, and testosterone using world, estrogen, estradiol is a pleiotropic hormone that's responsible for brain health, bone mineral density, skin health, sexual function, heart health. I mean, I could go on and on and on. So when you suppress estradiol, you are creating all sorts of very bad cellular processes and cellular cascades that you don't want. So, you know, there's thankfully some really good doctors out there that have looked at guys who have been on therapeutic testosterone for decades, you know, let's just say 15 years plus, who've been on AIs and dude, they have the bone mineral density of birds, like literally birds. Like their skeleton cannot hold, or let's just say they cannot deal with axial stress because you know, their bone mineral density has been destroyed. So again, it's I think the most important thing is for anybody that's using therapeutic testosterone, if your doctor is putting you on an AI, fike, immediately seek out another doctor, because there's never a reason to use an AI. And the other thing to mention about that, which is important, is there's no level of estradiol that is too high. And what I mean by that is in the absence of symptoms and side effects, if you start therapeutic testosterone and your estradiol goes to 120, 150, I've even seen it at people like 180, and you don't have any symptoms or side effects. Theoretically, Philip, you are more protected from a vascular or cerebral event than anybody who has like an estradiol walking around of like a 50, 60, or 70. And so many doctors see an estradiol in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and instantly freak out and say, Oh my God, we got to lower your estradiol, because it's not in that magical, you know, standard mean abbreviation, which is insane. And again, again, this is what this is what blows me away. The very truth of the ranges, right? And you've got Lab Corp, you've got what's the other one? Quest collab, and then there's a couple other ones now. And if you ask the governing bodies, which is the andrology deal and then the endocrinology society, what how did you guys come up with these ranges? They literally said, I'm not joking, this is a fact that oh, we just took an average man in the 50s and we measured it, and that's what we gave it to. So imagine that doctors are trying to give people or keep men, especially, in that 22 to 40 magic range from the 50s for men who aren't even on therapeutic hormones. It's absolutely insanity. So I always tell people if you're gonna go on therapeutic testosterone, do nothing else and allow your estradiol to fall to its natural level. Because again, we're all biochemically unique, as you know. So your range, it's gonna raise or it's gonna go to wherever it's gonna go, and then it's gonna level off. And if you don't have any symptoms or side effects, and again, very few guys do, again, you might have mood alteration when you first start, you might have a little water retention. The fatter you are, the more water retention you're gonna have. Because remember, aromatase, the enzyme that cleaves you know, testosterone into estrogen, is found in fat tissue. So the fatter you are, the more aromatase you're gonna have. So that's all very normal. But again, you have a medical community that doesn't really understand this very well. And so all the time they instantly panic. They either withdraw their testosterone dose or they put them on a higher dose of an AI, and that's the absolute wrong thing to do. And, you know, to your question earlier about levels, that's also getting weird because the best doctors know that they don't even care, right? Like some guy might have 1500, some guy might have 950, you know, some guy might have 1100, 1200. In the absence of symptoms and side effects, the testosterone level doesn't matter as much. It's just like, you know, one of the doctors who used to mentor me was like, Do you feel good? And do you have any symptoms or side effects? If you don't, everything is fine. I will give you a guidance range. I think free testosterone for optimized men has to be somewhere between 40 and 45.

  Philip Pape 28:47

  Which unit is that?

  Jay Campbell 28:48

  Because I know there's a couple that's picoliters per picograms per deciliter. And so, like, you know, most guys that I've consulted with, and there's been thousands, you know, when I see a guy who feels great, they're 42 or higher, right? I've walked around for a decade probably at 50, right? And that's just kind of where I'm at. And I'm again, I don't take that much. I take probably 140 to 160 milligrams a week. And very honest, dude, like with our new stuff, you know, the biolongevity labs, the FLGR, and the clotho, you know, clotho literally improves hormone production. So there's been times since I started clotho where I've only taken two shots a week. And so I'm only getting like 100 milligrams a week, and I feel no different. I've tested since I've been on clotho, done labs twice since I've been on clotho, and never once have I been below 50 on a free testosterone level. And trust me, there have been many weeks in the last like nine months where I've only taken two shots because I've just been traveling and you know, you just forget and stuff like that happens. So as I'm getting older, my testosterone dose is going down. Yeah, but I haven't shown from a clinical lab or you know, biomarker indication that my levels are going down. But my because of because the replacement is sufficient, you're saying. Yeah, well, or you know, it's also I think the clotho is, you know, improving hormone production. I mean, all the science shows that it does that. And so I didn't really figure that out until like last couple of months because I got my labs done again, and I'm like, you know what? I haven't even been taking three shots a week, and I'm still, you know, 50 free and like 1150 total. And I'm my my doses are a lot lower. So it has to be that. Now, obviously, I'm just giving you an opinion, but that's what I think, you know, after talking with some other people, because some other people similar to me have noticed similar things.

  Philip Pape 30:29

  Yeah, it's funny. As you were you were saying that I was looking up my last check, it was like 2021, 67 free, 600 total, which shows you that the like the the numbers can be very different.

  Jay Campbell 30:39

  100%. Yeah. And that and listen, it's very important for men that are watching this to know that your total, it's not a meaningless number, like I used to say, but it's not as meaningful because again, total is bound and not accessible, right? And free is bioavailable and available to be used by the body. So if you have a high total level and you have a, let's just call it an in as a suboptimal SHPG, which is sexomorm binding globulin, then that means that you really don't have a lot of free testosterone accessible. And again, you see this in a lot of skinny fat guys, guys who don't lift weights. They're gonna have like a 50 plus or 60 plus SHPG, and they'll be like 525, you know, total, and their doctor won't measure their free, and they'll be like, Oh, you're great, and they have the worst testosterone deficiency. These are, dude, these are guys that have like a seven or eight free testosterone. You see that all the time. Docs always miss that. They always miss that.

  Philip Pape 31:34

  And what about the weekly bound?

  Hidden signs of hormone deficiency

  Philip Pape 31:36

  I've heard of that too, right? In between, does that matter, or is free is good enough to tell you?

  Jay Campbell 31:40

  Free. I mean, it does, but for all you really have to understand is you're free. And and and and again, if you have a free, and again, that picograms per deciliter magic number, and you're below 25, you absolutely have a testosterone deficiency. Now, most doctors won't tell you that because they're gonna tell you that like 15 to 25 is normal, but there wants to be normal in today's.

  Philip Pape 32:00

  No, we don't want to be normal, man. Not listening to this show. So so I always I always have this question about the symptom thing, and it keeps coming up. It it's it's one thing if you have obvious symptoms, okay, right? But what if you don't know that you have symptoms? And what I mean by that is there, I mean, we live in a world today, like you said, in the modern world where people are probably walking around far suboptimal, yes, but it's normal to them because that's all they've known. And so, how do you know? How do you know?

  Jay Campbell 32:26

  I love the question because, dude, so many people literally do walk around in a default state of suffering. Yeah, so the truth is how you know is if you the number one symptom of obviously uh a hormone deficiency in both men and women is brain fog, right? So I think the best way to say it is like if you feel like you have to take a nap at 130 to three o'clock every single day, regardless of what you eat, you know, a lot of people will debate me on this and they'll be like, oh, but that's just because they had a big carb lunch or something like that, right? And it's just serotonin release. It's like, no, if you actually feel like you have to take a nap between one and three, or you know, say two and four, then it's likely that you have, you know, suboptimal dopamine levels. And this is always due to a deficiency in hormones. So that's a number one symptom. And, you know, to your point, a lot of other guys, they when you talk about this with them, and I know like this in my own family and people in my inner circle who aren't doing what we're doing and aren't familiar with all this, they'll be like, if you even talk about this with them, they freak out and they're like, bro, everything works down there so good. Like it's always this like manhood thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No way, bro. And it's like I always want to tell people, like, look, man, a therapeutic hormone deficiency has, or I mean, sorry, hormone deficiency has absolutely zero to do with sex drive and sexual function. That's the last thing normally to go. So if you're gonna rank number one is brain fog, number two is a depressive or lethargic attitude, and then number three is energy, right? And again, I always say this to anybody nowadays if you have a belly and you're not hormonally optimized, you can just automatically consider yourself deficient. Because remember, all that visceral fat in the belly and that insulin resistance due to that visceral fat is, as you and I already discussed, is causing a cytokine storm all the time, right there. And guess what? It shuts down sexual function, it shuts down gonatic and spermatogenesis. So there's just no way that you have optimal hormones if you have a giant belly. And the same thing for women, and by the way, you spoke about endrometeosis. By the way, dude, do you know that there's actually a peptide now that's treating that? Have you heard about that yet?

  Philip Pape 34:34

  Wow, maybe, because yeah, tell me about it.

  Jay Campbell 34:36

  Well, I mean, we can get into it in a second. I I'm not like an expert on that, but I've been, you know, we're but we're contemplating selling it. But here's the here's what I can tell about this. Most women, and this is sad, by the way, but most women who have hysterectomies, endometriosis, fibroids, bro, it's all visceral fat buildup and insulin resistance from having too much belly fat. Now remember, women don't normally carry belly fat, they carry it in their hips, their glutes, but they do carry it in the vulva region. You've seen women where they have that big burst, right? Like right below where their shorts are. That's because they've got tons of visceral, hard, resistant body fat in that area. And that's what actually causes all of these tumors, these fibroids, the again, the endometriosis. Nobody's talking about this in medicine because they just don't understand the inflammatory pathways in the ways they should. There's some people. But honestly, if you get a woman to lose that hard visceral fat, and it's not easy, it's absolutely not easy. You know, they got a cardio, insulin-controlled living, hopefully a GLP, you know, a two or stage or three stage, and then obviously hormone optimization, and you get them moving, they can get rid of a lot of that fat. But almost all these people never are told this. And they're literally said, Hey, you got to have surgery. We got to remove all this, we got to remove all this tissue. And then they just cut it all out of them. And all of it, dude, I mean, I don't want to say all of it, but most of it is just very hard visceral body fat that has been in there because again, they were just, you know, overweight, you know, after their second child, they never lost the weight, you know, they call it the baby fat or whatever, and it just builds up, and that's what's causing all those things down there. So, yeah, it is very interesting. But it's, I'm telling you, if you see a woman like that or you see a man with a belly, if they're not hormonally optimized or working towards it, the likelihood that they are is extremely high.

  Philip Pape 36:26

  Yeah, I want to get back to visceral fat because that's fat, that's a fascinating area to target. Endo 205, I think is what it's called. I looked it up. And it's interesting with endometriosis, that's a whole separate topic. I know there's also a genetic component because there are young women who can have it too. So there's probably different factors. But going back to your comment about belly fat injections, do you then recommend not injecting it there to avoid those symptoms, or is that just I don't, I do.

  Jay Campbell 36:48

  I that's a great question. So that's a big failure for most physicians. Because remember, at the end of the day, most people are injecting into their belly because they don't feel it. So, you know, the better solution is going to be the upper deltoid, the back of the arm, the upper gluteal fat pad, right? And the you know, buttocks region. And for people that can handle quad injections, those are great. I cannot handle a quad injection. I have my whole life.

  Philip Pape 37:11

  That's how I inject my that's another thing I take. So it's funny you mentioned that.

  Jay Campbell 37:14

  Dude, you're gonna laugh because my entire life, like even peptide injections, like if I inject my quad, I have complete debilitating DOMS for literally 36%. Yeah, and it all happens within six hours. Now, I have never understood, I've heard from many other guys that say the same thing. I think my legs are so muscular and so vascular and so lean that it just causes some sort of weird, like inflammatory reaction.

  Philip Pape 37:37

  Yes, I just keep that extra layer of fat. It does.

  Jay Campbell 37:40

  I mean, honestly, dude, it's crazy. I mean, you know, I was gonna basketball player before, and so my legs were always just really, really muscular. But I mean I've injected, you're gonna laugh at this. I've injected into skin, I'm pulling it right now, the lax skin, like right around my kneecap, and thinking, you know, that's not muscular, you know, it's nothing. And dude, the same happens to me. Like six hours later, I'm like, God, I wish I wouldn't have done that. So I just have this weird effect in my legs, but anywhere else in my body, I don't feel anything late. Right. So I mean, we're all different. Again, we're all options. It sounds like you have options at least. I know we totally do, but you know, that's that is to me. I'm glad you asked that. I don't think any person who is, let's say, 20% or higher body fat and specifically storing it in the belly section should be injecting there. You should be injecting in areas that are more intermuscular so that you don't have that inflammatory response.

  Philip Pape 38:29

  Now you mentioned the symptoms and you said lowest is sexual function. And I think there was like if you look at these consensus statements and these position statements and stuff. I I some somewhere I came across, maybe it was in your work about women and the use of testosterone being linked to the if you have low sexual desire. Like only if you have that should you take it. Otherwise, don't take it. Have you heard that? I I mean, I don't think so.

  Jay Campbell 38:53

  I mean, let me let me just say this.

  Philip Pape 38:54

  It sounds ridiculous, especially after you just said it's a good idea.

  Jay Campbell 38:56

  Well, I will put it this way women respond to hormones much better than men do.

  Philip Pape 39:01

  Yeah.

  Jay Campbell 39:01

  And you know, again, one of the mentors who taught me a lot about this stuff used to say that giving a woman hormones is like giving a dry plant water. So you just have to give them the per the correct amount, right? And again, I always say this to people like if you understand biology and sexual differentiation, there's no difference between a man and a woman other than the amount of testosterone that they were exposed in in utero. That's it, right? So if you give a woman who's now a you know an X X chromosome and you give her a bunch of testosterone at 30, you'll turn her into a dude. And that's exactly what happens, right? So it's like, let's just be very clear. You know, a woman's clitoris becomes a penis. I mean, I don't understand why people don't understand this. It's very, very simple stuff. But if you give a woman a very low surgically precise dose of testosterone, they're not going to have any sexual dysfunction. And this is always going in your 30s, 40s, 50s. I mean, my wife is 54 and she takes two, I want to say four milligram shots of testosterone a week. Same type that I use, but it's in a 15 milligrams per cc, you know, versus mine is 200 milligrams per cc. And dude, she is just as sexually, you know, as efficient as she was in her 20s before she even knew me. Our sex life is amazing. So it's like there's no reason that women have to suffer, you know, sexually from a form of performance decline in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, but they just have to be hormonally optimized. And as you know, the WHI destroyed the hormone awareness and say, just call it understanding of physicians in America about females. And there's just so many women that are not being treated. I mean, dude, I I mean, you know, I have a huge breast cancer and all that. Yeah, dude, I have a huge private membership group now, and most of them are women. There's like 520 women in the group out of like 870 people, so it's more women than men now. And a lot of them came from Mind Pump. And, you know, these people, dude, when I hear their stories, it's sickening. Like the doctors won't let them because they miss the window. I mean, I have heard because of the WHI, it blows me away. But I've never seen a woman in my entire life who was 50 or older, who started therapy correctly. There's lots that don't start correctly, who has not said it was the greatest thing that ever happened to them. That that, you know, that they got their sexual function back, they were able to get, you know, wet and moist and you know, all the things that women want, you know, come back when you hormonally optimize them, but way too many are not. And by the way, I need to say this too like a lot of the doctors that do work with women don't give them testosterone. No, they give them literally estradiol and progesterone and dry them out. It's like the most insane thing. It's like, especially women that have had

  Muscle, cardio, and longevity

  Jay Campbell 41:40

  their, you know, been castrated, they've had their ovaries removed, right? So they can't produce testosterone now. And now you're just giving them progesterone and estradiol, you're making it worse. They don't even understand basic biological cascades. It's absolutely insane. So many women say my doctor won't give me testosterone. It's like, how is that possible? You know, but they just don't understand. They're afraid, like you said, cancer, the WHI, there's just so much misinformation.

  Philip Pape 42:04

  So let's kind of pivot a little bit here because we talked a little bit about training, lifting, talked a little bit about visceral fat. So I kind of want to attack it from both angles. One angle is okay, so powerful is muscle, building muscle, the training stimulus itself for building muscle and just carrying around that extra body, you know, lean mass. And then conversely, where does cardio come in here? And I want to target specifically some of the recent research on like certain types of sprinting for like peri-impostmenopausal women showing that it can reduce visceral fat. So maybe tackle both of those in this context.

  Jay Campbell 42:38

  Yeah. So first off, I have a new book. The book is called Living Leaner, Longer, Stronger. And it's definitely my seminal work. It was actually written by a ghostwriter. What you know, my team has been involved in it to make sure that it has my edge and everything in it. But it's written for the mainstream, bro. And I've never written a book for the mainstream previously, right? So anybody who ever, you know, has written read any of my books knows they're very advanced, right? So this book is written for the mainstream to talk about what you just mentioned, which is like building muscle, right? So I can definitely say this this statistically provable fact, the leaner you are, the longer you will live. That is undeniable. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh, well, what does that mean? And it means like, well, you got to build muscle. You can't be leaned if you don't have muscle. And then people will be like, well, that's not true, Jay, because in the blue zones, you know, with all these Japanese, they're not muscular. That's not true. Because if you would measure their trunk body fat and their, you know, again, call it composition, you would find out that they were very low body fat. So again, this is very simple stuff, right? The more muscle and the leaner you are, the less inflammation you have. Inflammation is what leads to all of the degradation of cells. Cell degradation leads to inflammation. Inflammation is what causes the diseases of aging. It's very, very simple stuff, but people, you know, overthink it. But building muscle is the number one longevity thing that anyone can do. There's no other biohack, no peptide. No GLP, no FLGR, none of these things. You have to be able to train at an intensity that A builds muscle and B does not overtax your skeletal, you know, frame. Right. So I think a lot of people you were talking about earlier, a lot of people, sadly, who do train don't train productively, right? Go to the gym four days a week, five days a week, some are going six, and they're doing Instagram or TikTok influencer training protocols. They're over-training, they're doing too many reps, too many sets, they're never actually, you know, taxing their muscles and what going to what I call positive muscle fiber. So without saying that, you know, if you understand how to productively train, and that's obviously to recruit, you know, muscle fibers to fail, you know, at a level that, you know, actually, you know, basically creates stimulus and builds muscle over time, um, there's nothing better. There's literally nothing better than that. Right. So I think that people, if there's if there's a take-home, it's like people as they age have to understand the coordination, the neurological aspect of training. And if you don't, because you're never an athlete, and I realize a lot of people were not, then you have to hire a coach who can get the rest. And bro, you know this.

  Philip Pape 45:16

  It's a skill, it's a skill, it's the most important skill you have.

  Jay Campbell 45:19

  But way too many people watch videos, especially in today's day and age, and then think that they know they have any clue what they're doing, and they don't. And you know, you and I know this. Like, I'm one year away from never going to a gym again. I'm building an amazing gym in my house that just the house that I just bought down here in Florida, it's gonna cost me a fortune, but it's like my custom thing, and I'm gonna just go in there, walk 20 yards from wherever I live, you know, and go into my gym. But like, I for decades I've been going to gyms all around the world and I watch, and it's sad, it's absolutely insane. And again, as you know, you can't intervene, right?

  Philip Pape 45:57

  No, no, no, you can't no, no, that's bad etiquette. You can't go teach unsolicited. Yeah, exactly. You never intervene. I mean, I see personal trainers screwing their clients up all the time, and I'm like, man, if I could just show you for five seconds, no, no, no, 100%.

  Jay Campbell 46:09

  And you know, the axiom, you know, the teacher appears when the student is ready, right? Like that's they gotta be ready, right? So you never intervene, but it's amazing to see people going to gyms. And bro, by the way, it's worse now. Younger people today are doing the most insane things. Like, I mean, it blows my mind how bad it's getting because again, the proliferation of videos. People are watching well, you know, fit people with great genetics, younger, who are doing their crazy and still building muscle, and thinking, oh, I can do this too.

  Philip Pape 46:39

  And so you're saying that it's not that they're watching videos for form, they're watching videos on programming and exercise selection and everything that's ridiculous, too. Exactly. Right. Because I was gonna say, like, what you know, when I first learned to lift, and that wasn't too many years ago, you know, I read starting strength like three times. I watched the videos, and I still had to go to a coach, you know, for one hour to fix all the things that I couldn't quite get.

  Jay Campbell 47:02

  Because it really is a skill, you gotta like you know, people like us learned from mentors, we learned from strength coaches or masters, and so many people today literally learn from TikTok and YouTube, bro. And that's not a way to learn. If again, like I said, if you're not an athlete and you have not practiced with skillful mentors or coaches who taught you the, you know, the format, the training, the actual neurological, the you know, biomechanics. You can't just start watching videos and doing it. It doesn't work that way.

  Philip Pape 47:30

  Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's funny because on this show we talk a lot about the principles like you mentioned, well, mechanical tension and other principles. And you can only do that to a certain extent, right? Because it's abstract, it's theoretical. You've got to get in there. And even when you try to describe it, it's not good enough. So it's a skill you have to put your hands on, just like gardening. You can't become a good gardener, you can't become a good musician, whatever, without doing it.

  Jay Campbell 47:51

  What is rept is kept, right?

  Philip Pape 47:54

  There you go. So yeah. So, all right, so muscle is a whole thing. That's three other episodes we can get into on that connection to this. But real quick on the sprinting thing. So in the visceral fat, yeah, there there seems to be. I know Bill Campbell actually reviewed one of the studies recently that looked at women and sprinting, and they compared it to, I think, steady state cardio and also more of a hit protocol, something like that. I might be making nonsense up and found kind of an interesting drop in visceral fat when measured through, I don't know if it's DEXA or MRI or something from sprinting. Have you heard this? I have.

  Jay Campbell 48:25

  So here's my take. So everything, so intensity of cardio is always going to be relevant to fuel source, right? So if a person is, you know, fasting and they're doing high intensity cardio with no muscle glycogen, bad, you know, if they're a keto or carnivore bro and they keep their, you know, car their muscle glycogen levels low all the time because they think that you know, carbs are the devil or the bad guy or whatever, you know, and they're doing you know, high-intensity sprinting or any kind of high intensity, also bad, because I always tell people like we have to train or lift or eat relative to our energetic demand, right? So for us, mostly bodybuilders, gotta have carbs, right? Like I know people debate that there's keto bodybuilders or carnivore bodybuilders and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is, is like our bodies are designed to handle carbs, fats, and proteins. Give them the carbs when their body is preferably gonna preferably or preferentially gonna refuel from a glycogen standpoint. So I think that all forms of cardio have merit, and I think they're all you know, especially productive. I think the older a person is, the less likely high-intensity ballistic movement is beneficial because the risk to injury is much greater. And the reason that is, again, is a guy who's 55, who used to do all sorts of HIT in his 30s and his early 40s, you don't really have the synovial fluid in the joint caps when you're in your 50s that you had in your early 40s and your late 30s. So if you're gonna do high intensity, which I still think is awesome and productive, you got to do it in the right place. You know, when you're for sure protected, you know, the floor is sand, the floor is rubberized. You know what I'm saying?

  Philip Pape 50:08

  Like I should have clarified, by the way, the study was on bikes. There you go. So yeah, so so I'm sprinting on bikes with like two.

  Jay Campbell 50:17

  Yeah. And by the way, that's what I do, right? So I have literally a life cycle over here, and then I also have one of these. Yeah, you make a good point though about injury and and all that. Yeah, so I mean, but dude, I see this all the time. It's important. Like a lot of people in their late 40s and 50s, early to mid-50s, like my age now, are still keeping up with the Joneses, they're still doing that they did in their 30s and 40s that they got away with because they could, that they're they can't now. And what I mean is, you know, sprinting outside, you know, on asphalt, you know, doing stuff like that, going upstairs, you know, at stadiums and stuff like that, you know. And and again, these are great movements for anybody who's younger and can handle that kind of wear and tear and that impact on their body. But dude, I'm telling you, running the stairs at 52, it just takes one we wobble, and your back is compressed and you've got a vertebral compression issue, or you have worse, you know, a laminectomy in your future with a disk. So you have to be very cautious. And that's why, like what you just said is perfect. Like, you know, moderate intensity to steady state with HIT mixed in, you know, on something that is not ballistic. A bike, an ergometer, you know, obviously a treadmill with a 40 degree incline is amazing, but you just you just again, and clearly I'm talking about people in their you know, 50s and older, right? I think you got to start really thinking at 44 or 45 about giving up heavy deadlifting, heavy squatting, you know, axial plate loaded stuff. You can't do that kind of stuff, even if you're strong enough to do it, because again, it just takes one you know flicker and you're out of the gym for six to eight months, and that's what you don't want.

  Philip Pape 51:56

  My community would be a little mixed on that, Jay. I'll be honest. Because there are there are a lot of guys in their 70s.

  Jay Campbell 52:02

  I know they're media that gotta keep lifting heavy. But dude, until you put yourself in the hospital and can't train for eight to nine months, yeah. I listen, I it's true, it's a starter and a heavy deadlifter guy. And I stopped at 45 and I I met a chiropractor, I can't remember his name now because he was in Southern California. This is going back about 10 or 12 years ago, but he's showing me videos of really strong people and what happened, you know, when they were squatting three plates and like what's happening to their lower spine and all this. And look, I know that people want to keep doing this, and mentally they feel amazing, but I'm just telling you, just know the, you know, be cautious because understand that the wear and tear that you're putting on your spine or the wear and tear that you're putting in your neck or you know, other places can be very, very destructive over time.

  Philip Pape 52:45

  Yeah, and combined with your earlier comment about skill and form and everything, like the more you get into that regime, the more important that is. If you are going to do stuff like that, you just have to be so dialed in and doing it right.

  GLP-1s and what comes next

  Jay Campbell 53:02

  It's just the amount that you're doing. And I see way too many people attempting to do too much and they're putting their body at risk. And that's all I'm saying. I mean, all those moves are productive and amazing for anatomical alignment and you know, just again, axial loading and all that stuff. But like, there's definitely a risk, especially with what you just said, especially if your form's not good.

  Philip Pape 53:23

  Yep. All right, let's wrap it up with a very tiny topic called GLP1s, which you you touched on a little bit here and there with the microdosing. Sure. And, you know, you've got the the single, the dual, and the triple agonist now, the semaglitite and the schizepatite, and now the depends on how you want to pronounce it, retagitite or riditride, goes both ways. And the question is like, who should be even taking them? You mentioned morbidly obese or obese people using it as a tool. That makes total sense, right? Yeah. We had Jamie Sellzer on here, who was also a mind pump, like you were, and he was like, I think the only guest they've ever had on the show. Um, and he went from like 700 pounds to 300 pounds on GLP1 while lifting and walking and doing all the right things. So, just like what's your philosophy on it in general? We, you know, we don't bash any of that here. These are all great tools. And then where do you think things are going with all of this?

  Jay Campbell 54:10

  Yeah, so it's a definitely great question and a great subject. The tools are amazing, but they're literally in two years, Philip, they'll be useless or they'll be forgotten because that's how great they'll be overtaken, you're saying. Yeah, there is stuff in the pipeline right now. And by the way, this is in my chapter, I think it's chapter seven of the book that I released in February of this year called Metabolic Awakening with GLP peptides. But the truth is is that we have a chapter in that book that's called the pipeline. And dude, the stuff that's coming, like you can't, you you really can't comprehend it. I mean, I tell people this all the time like in two years, there will be stage five molecules that will do everything. Like you, it will increase brown fat. I mean, look, dude, we already have a tool right now from BLL, FLGR242, that absolutely builds mass, floods your system with myokines, inhibits myostatin. And in the same process, it's also lipolytic, right? So it's burning fat. So if you're a man and you take five milligrams to 10 milligrams a week and you train and you eat right, you're gonna put on somewhere between six and eight skeletal pounds of mass. And I don't give a shit who you are genetic, natty, on TRT, it doesn't matter. Women can even do better because as you realize, women have less myostatin inhibition naturally, right? So you give them a little of this and you push them over the edge. So imagine that tool, you know, embedded in a four or five stage agonist, GLP, which, like I said, will activate brown fat. So you're gonna have tools that will make genetic mutants, you know, in the bodybuilding.

  Philip Pape 55:38

  So you can sit on the couch and just become a bodybuilding. Although there's a lot, I'm joking, but you still have to train. Yeah, yeah.

  Jay Campbell 55:43

  But let's just put it this way there will not be, nobody will have to suffer like they do now in bodybuilding competitions, you know, to diet, you know, to hardcore, you know, do all that stuff they do at the end. So like if you're a genetic mutant and you understand how, and again, not you, but your coach understands how to manipulate these tools and and utilize these tools to get you to go from let's say, you know, let's say you're 290 on stage, and you when you start your you know, your your shred, you're 320. And I mean, you know, before that, that was grueling work, and it's not anymore. And and I can honestly tell you that it will not be any work in two years. Like literally, if you're a genetic mutant, you will do these things. Yeah, you're sure you'll still train and be, you know, as hard as you can, but you won't be, you know, dieting down and sacrificing and you know, eating nothing but tilapia and broccoli. You know what I mean? So focus more on the lifting side. Yeah, I mean, I mean, the truth is that you know, obesity should be eradicated. Yeah, and what I mean by that is only and and and I don't think it will, but it should be, right? Because the tools are there. I mean, listen, retitrutide can eradicate obesity right now, but they won't make them affordable. So it's up to you know, educators like us, other physicians and clinical, you know, educators, to teach people that they're tools and that they need to be used appropriately. And obviously, microdosing them with all the things, you know, again, all the things that we are all talking about here with training and cardio and you know, eating correctly and getting enough sleep and mitigating email. All those things are most important always. They're the biggest tools and the biggest levers. But the rest of these newer things, when used correctly, especially as they get better, are going to be the ultimate, you know, game changer. I mean, they really will be cheat codes, dude. 100%.

  Philip Pape 57:31

  Man, we'll see where it all goes. And so I guess for those listening, there are there's a lot of tools out there. We want to send them your way and say hello and check out your stuff. We'll we'll definitely point to some of their books, but where's like the main place we should send people?

  Jay Campbell 57:44

  For sure, man. So for free information, jcampbell.com. There's so much. I think we're now in the top four sites in the world for you know information related to peptides, bioregulators, small molecules, and it's all free, of course. If they want to buy any of the amazing products that we talked about today, we don't sell any GLPs because we don't play that game on biolongevity. But you know, we have FLGR, we have Clotho, we do have a product that's a small molecule that's similar to GLPs coming. It's called Lepto3GR. And it will be a what we call a super retitrutide, but it doesn't compete in the GLP specific peptide pathway or patent chain, but it will be a small molecule that will help people actually burn fat, build muscle, obviously combined if with all the other things that we talked about today, or the other tools like therapeutic testosterone, et cetera. So that would be at biolongevitylabs.com. If you want me to make you an affiliate, I'm happy to do that. You know, we'll create an affiliate code for you and they'll give them 15% off. We're always running sales. You know, the peptide world is very commoditized right now. So, you know, if you have a great product, you got to obviously incentivize people to purchase. And then we have a landing page for podcasts. It's jcampbell.com forward slash free dash info. And at that place, you can get every single book I've ever written as a downloadable PDF for free. And eventually Living Leader Long or Stronger will be there too.

  Philip Pape 58:57

  That's awesome. All right. So we'll we'll put all those in the show notes. I'm not gonna repeat them all here and get folks a discount too to buy a longevity labs. Man, it's been a pleasure. I mean, we just barely scratched the surface. I know we did, so folks check out Jay and look, just Google him. You'll see you'll find him. He's been on Mind Pump and so many other shows. Thanks for coming on, Jay. It's been a pleasure.

  Jay Campbell 59:16

  Well, I appreciate you having me and I'm really am grateful for this call. It was awesome.

  Philip Pape 59:19

  Awesome.

Menopause Strength Training and the Bone Density Myth | Ep 495

Heavy lifting does build bone density. That part is true. But the rule going around that women must strength training with 5 sets of 5 at 85% of your max (1RM) plus box jumps or you lose your bone density, is a much bigger claim than the evidence supports.

We dismantle this claim and explain what the best studies can and cannot prove. We also share a simpler approach that still allows you to train hard, lower fracture risk, and keeps you consistent through perimenopause and postmenopause. 

If you want to protect your bones without training in a way that makes you hate strength training or quit altogether, hit play!

Get the FREE Strength Training for Hormone Health guide, a free breakdown of how to lift in a way that supports your hormones through the menopause transition and beyond:
https://witsandweights.com/free

You'll learn:

• How the LIFTMOR trial was designed and what it found on spine and hip bone density, as well as heavy vs. moderate strength training over 40

• 3 problems with drawing conclusions from the LIFTMOR trial

• Why heavy lifting is not inherently unsafe for older women with low bone mass 

• How social media “telephone” turns nuanced evidence into rigid rules 

• DEXA body fat and lean mass scan precision error and why small changes may not be detectable

• Heavy vs. moderate loading for bone mineral density 

• What we know so far from perimenopause data

• Menopause transition bone loss rates and the hidden "big win" with strength training for women over 40

• 4 practical tips to do instead

• A 30-second test to estimate whether your sets are heavy enough

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, menopause and perimenopause fitness, body recomposition, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The bone density rule keeping too many women out of the gym
3:48 - Inside the LIFTMOR trial (strength training and bone density)
7:45 - Where bone and hormones are connected
9:05 - 3 gaps between the LIFTMORE trial and its interpretation
14:46 - Research on perimenopausal women over 40
16:29 - How the menopause transition affects bone loss
18:38 - 4 steps to maintain or build bone density
21:45 - Where jumping fits into your strength training protocol
25:16 - Finding your load range without attempting a 1 rep max attempt
26:20 - Bonus: 30-second test for whether you're lifting heavy enough

Episode Resources:

• FREE 1RM and Strength Calculator (with Strength Standards):
  https://www.witsandweights.com/strength-calculator

• Related episode: Are the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, and Row Actually Unsafe After 40?

• Transcript

  The bone density rule keeping too many women out of the gym

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've been told that you have to lift very heavy, you have to jump off of boxes, or you're just gonna lose your bone density. And that message has been scaring you out of the gym. This episode is for you. Today you'll hear what heavy lifting actually does to bone density, how that compares to what happens during the menopause transition, independent of that, and why the aspect related to jumping is probably the weakest link in the argument we have from the evidence. Also, I'm going to share one thing that protects you from a fracture far more than just bone density. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and this is one of those episodes where I have to be very careful because the fitness advice I'm about to question is mostly coming from people I respect. And it's even some things that I've stated or claimed that I'm gonna walk back a little bit on, which is really part of the process of skepticism and curiosity. The science underneath it is genuinely good science. I'm not gonna tell you that lifting doesn't do anything for your bones. Absolutely not. It totally does. What I want to do is show you the gap between what some of the evidence says and some of the evidence that's used often in the fitness industry on podcasts, social media, et cetera, and then how it evolved on social media versus what the reality is so that we can ground ourselves in reality. And I care about this because some of what is circulating out there is scaring women. I hear it constantly. Someone in perimenopause, maybe early post-menopause, hears she needs to be squatting 85% of her one rep max. And then she needs to be doing box jumps twice a week, or she's gonna lose her bone density. And it creates this all or nothing thinking. Well, I can't do that, so I guess I'm out. And then maybe she doesn't do anything. Maybe you're just thinking, well, it doesn't matter. I, you know, let me go walk, let me do cardio, let me just lift lightly, whatever, and don't worry about it. And I myself have talked about the value to bone density of lifting at a high percentage of your 1RM. Now, usually when I do that, it's in a nuanced approach of it's just part of your lifting, right? It's not like you have to do just that. I also don't really talk about jumping too much, even though I have mentioned how some experts I've talked to, some of the science suggests that jumping is helpful to, you know, restore, especially if you have osteoporosis to reverse it or to add new bone density. And there's some evidence that says, oh, maybe you can't create new bone density from lifting alone, et cetera. So we're gonna cover that today based on a rereading of the science. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a 30-second test that you can use where you could gauge whether the weight you've been putting on the bar, the dumbbells or machines or whatever is anywhere near the range that the research talks about. Okay. So that's gonna help you ground in reality for yourself. Am I lifting the way I want to lift for my goals? Along the way, you're gonna hear about the lift more trial that I've mentioned a few times before and that we're revisiting, sort of what it concludes versus what it doesn't, even though people misinterpret it. And there's three specific places where I think the findings get stretched on social media. We're gonna talk about the menopause transition, how that affects bone density, and we can compare it to this other stuff. And then what I would suggest that you do about it from a practical standpoint, which is simpler and a lot less intimidating than you might think. So here we go.

  Inside the LIFTMOR trial (strength training and bone density)

  Philip Pape 3:48

  Let's start with the Liftmore trial. That's kind of the foundation of a lot of the claims. Some of it, some of them good, some of them not so much. It's called Liftmore, L-I-F-T-M-O-R. Watson and colleagues out of Belinda Beck's group in Australia. They published this in 2018. Dr. Beck is the real deal. I think she has spent her, you know, entire career on studying bone and exercise. And it's a very well-designed trial. They took 101 postmenopausal women with low bone mass, the average age around 65, and they looked at them for eight months. The training group did two supervised sessions a week: deadlift, overhead press, back squat, above 80% of their one rep max for five sets of five. Okay. Plus, they did jumping chin-ups with a drop landing. And so the results of that group are their lumbar spine bone density went up 2.9% in the training group, but it dropped 1.2% in the control group. So the femoral neck, that's the top of your thigh bone where the hip fractures occur, it went up 0.3% in the training group and down 2% in the control group. And then we have safety data that they measured, which is pretty cool. Across more than 2,600 training sessions with women who had osteopenia and osteoporosis, there was only one adverse event. It was a minor back spasm. There weren't any fractures. The leg extensor strength went up 37%, back extensor strength 36%, they got taller. Okay, isn't that wild? These women are in their 60s with thinning bones, they're deadlifting heavy, and they got taller and they didn't get injured. Okay, so that's good to know. When someone tells you, hey, lifting is heavy is dangerous for older women with low bone density, that's BS. So that's really good information to know. Now, what happened next? Well, the the protocol from this research got turned into a licensed trademarked program that is sold to clinics. And Dr. Beck is a director and shareholder in the company that runs it, and they disclose that in the paper. I don't have a problem with that. It's the translational science, the methodology is sound. I don't think there's anything shady with that. Just because people are involved or there's funding from certain sources in and of itself isn't a reason to discount things. But a lot of the you must train this exact way messaging is coming from people who sell, sell it that way. And you have to know it. You have to be able to question it. All right. So does it make sense? Well, it doesn't make the science wrong, but it makes the certainty of it suspicious, right? You just have to have to, if somebody's saying it has to be this way, I always question it. And then that same information was used for other kind of nonsense or silly stuff, like the weighted vests, right? Hey, you need to carry a specific percentage of body weight. It's gonna help your bones. The popular version that goes back to some trial from 2000, I think, is the foundation for a lot of the weighted vest stuff, right? But it's not a mountain of evidence that it gets presented at. There's currently no good evidence that walking around in a weighted vest raises your bone density, period. So that's the origin of this information. A really, really good trial. There's the commercial program built from that trial. And then a lot of, you know, the game of telephone on social media and people believing that, okay, on the other extreme here, anything short of five by five at 85% isn't effective in some way. So hopefully I've never made that claim, right? We always put it in the context of your lifestyle, a varied program, progressive overload, strength versus hypertrophy, all of that stuff. Now, before I get into where the translation of the data went off that we need to kind of pull back on, I want to mention something that connects to this conversation.

  Where bone and hormones are connected

  Philip Pape 7:45

  When you think of bone and bone density, it's downstream of hormones. So there's a story here where what's happening to your skeleton and perimenopause is happening because estrogen is decreasing and estrogen is estrogen was kind of holding back the cells that break bone down, if you will, just to kind of layman's term the thing. Training is, of course, a huge lever you have relative to that system, your body. It's not the only lever, of course, but I don't think a lot of women get a clearer picture of how training and hormones fit together. So a few years ago, I actually put up put together a guide called Strength Training for Hormone Health. It still holds up. I still think it's really helpful for those looking to lift in a way that's supportive of hormones, what it does and doesn't do, how to think about training if you're on hormone therapy or considering it, how to structure things through the transition, et cetera. Very practical, very simple. Go to wits and weights.com slash free or click the link in the show notes to get the strength training for hormone health guide. I just wanted to mention that before we continue, in case you're looking for some more resources to do this. And it's not, you know, all about percentages of one rep max. Okay. So we have the trial, we have the messaging on social media.

  3 gaps between the LIFTMORE trial and its interpretation

  Philip Pape 9:05

  Let's look at where the gaps are. Okay, there's three things I mentioned, I think, in the intro where I have a problem with it. And the first one is the comparison group. So in Liftmore, the control group, they were not doing moderate lifting. They were giving, given basically a home exercise program that was extremely light. It was hand weights that topped out at like three kilograms. So you could say, well, then what the what the study showed is that heavy supervised training beats what amounts to almost nothing. I mean, let's be honest, hand weights is almost nothing. It's just walking around with a little bit, a few pounds, kind of like a weighted vest, actually. But of course, it's going to beat that. Pretty much any half-ass lifting program is going to beat you know the hand weights or the nothing. So it can't tell you, oh, heavy training beats moderate training, because they didn't compare to that. So if that that probably makes sense, right? They didn't compare to moderate training or hypertrophy training or whatever. It was just compared to almost nothing. And you guys remember Dr. Lauren Calenzo Semple from Mass. She was on the show a while back. And the point that she makes, I love the way she put it, she doesn't attack the trials, she just talks about what they can and can't tell us. If you compare five by five against two-pound dumbbells, what are you gonna learn? You're gonna learn that the two-pound dumbbells don't work too well. I guess that's helpful, but should be no surprise to you, dear listener, who listens to wits and weights. So that's the first one. The second one is the measurement. So this is where my engineering brain comes in. They use DEXA. So DEXA has a precision error. I get that it's the gold standard for research. And they have an error measure called the least significant change. It's like the threshold below which your scan can't detect the real change from noise, so signal from noise. So in a typical clinical practice, that's like two to four percent at the spine, and apparently it's three to six percent at the hip. Now, if you look at the result from the femoral neck I mentioned earlier, of plus 0.3%, the authors themselves describe it as like a maintenance effect, which is actually a win in this case versus losing bone density. Now, if you personally trained for eight months and then you went and you got scanned, the report's not going to tell you the difference between that and like nothing happened because of this error, because of the resolution of the measurement. And that affects the conclusions we make out of this. Because we're arguing very loudly about differences that the bone density scan might not be accurate enough to measure. So, especially at the individual level, like across 100 women in a trial, sure. And we did see that the control group had the drop of, I think I'm saying it right, I think it was 2%, right? I just want you to know that the measurement should be questioned when you look at these trials and also when you do it for yourself. Like people reach out to me all the time about body fat and fat-free mass and all that. And I usually just say, hey, just use the Navy formula and look at the trend over time. Like don't overcomplicate it, don't rely on DEXs and in bodies and all that because of the error. The third gap I'll say is that the research on load, on the weight that you lift, I think isn't in full agreement. At least not to the extent where we can just make a confident conclusion. Like it's not settled. And and I and you see this when you look at the best of the best, like Eric Helms, when he reviews the state of the literature, he'll even say, Well, this one says this, this one says this. So where are we? So Kissler, Fischbacher, and colleagues, so that's the Beck group that we already talked about with Lyftmore, they published a meta-analysis in 2021 and they found that high-intensity exercise was a better stimulus for the lumbar spine than low or moderate exercise. But there was no advantage at the femoral neck. And they said this. Then Wang and colleagues in 2023, this was a network meta-analysis that combined 19 trials with 919 women. They ranked moderate intensity, so that's like 65 to 80% of one rep max, as the highest performing for both the spine and the femoral neck. So they rated it as better than heavy lifting, believe it or not. And then a 2025 review said, no, no, no, wait, heavier lifting is actually more effective, but they use a different cutoff for what counts as heavy. So if we're not even using the same percent RM, that's gonna cause a problem because we're just bucketizing as like heavy and moderate, but the numbers we're doing it aren't normalized. That's a problem, right? There was just this year, 2026, meta-analysis of 18 trials, and it found that high intensity training. So again, we've talking intensity meaning weight, like load, was clearly better for leg strength. I mean, I don't I don't have any con I don't have any problems with that conclusion. It seems to make sense, but it found no significant difference between heavier and lighter training for bone density at the sites that they measured. So here we have four meta-analysis, which is pretty high quality in the hierarchy of evidence that don't necessarily agree with each other. What they do agree on is that resistance training is more beneficial than not. So I don't know how helpful that is. I guess what I'd have you take from that is that both moderate and heavy loading work. The claim that heavy loading is required or that moderate loading is a waste of your time, that's definitely not supported. And you have to be careful with that. Okay, so that's the nuance. Now, one last thing is what population was studied?

  Research on perimenopausal women over 40

  Philip Pape 14:46

  Because this was done in women who are on average 65 years old, at least five years past menopause. Well, if you're 45 or 49, if you're in perimenopause, that's not you. But there is a trial on that population. It's called Stop EM, stop-EM. Whitman and colleagues, it was published this year out of Canada. 40 women ages 45 to 60, and half of them perimenopausal. So for nine months, twice a week, they trained five by five at 80 to 85% of their max. And they used progressive drop landings. And this was compared to people not doing this. And they had huge gains in strength, 12 to 30 percent across the lifts. And then they held on to their lean mass while the control group lost some lean mass. Not surprising, right, to all of us here who know the value of lifting weights. But then for bone density, the difference between the groups at the lumbar spine was two hundredths of a gram per square centimeter. And the range of uncertainty around that was almost zero. So, given that this was a feasibility trial, it was designed to test whether you could even just recruit and run the protocol. It wasn't actually designed to detect a bone difference, and there was no moderate load comparison group. So I think the honest conclusion is that we don't have enough data for perimenopausal women for the bone side of things. We do for muscle. I mean, we're starting to get more and more. And it again, it's not to say that lifting isn't tremendously beneficial. We know that. It's more about the heavy versus the light and also the jumping piece. However, we do have the swan

  How the menopause transition affects bone loss

  Philip Pape 16:29

  study. Now, the swan study has followed women through the menopause transition for decades, and it gives us a pretty good picture of what's happening to your bone and when it happens. So bone loss starts roughly a year before your final period and then accelerates really quickly for about three years. During that window, the average woman is losing around 2.5% per year at the lumbar spine and just under 2% per year at the femoral neck. And then it starts to slow down. That loss starts to slow down. So over the full menopause transition, that's roughly 10% loss of bone density. So that's pretty decent. That's pretty big. The very best exercise trials we have are showing us one to three percent increase versus that 10%. So if you think about the ratio, the question is can exercise rebuild what is lost during menopause? This would seem to suggest not. Now, I'm not trying to depress you or scare you. We're trying to pick this apart, nuance and all. So if you're going in starting to exercise or lift, expecting you're going to rebuild like all your bone density, and you don't, you might be disappointed. But if you significantly attenuate that loss, that's actually a big win. And that's kind of what we see is like, are we maintaining our bone density or avoiding as much of a loss? And in some cases, we are restoring and building bone density. So it's very highly individual. And I'm not saying that it doesn't restore or build bone density. In fact, we do see that at the individual level quite a bit, but anecdotally, it's hard to say from the literature one way or the other at the moment. So I would rather you pretty much hold steady rather than lose 2% a year. Wouldn't you? Peak bone mass actually happens in your 20s. So while you're pretty young, so really for the rest of your life, you're just managing against the loss. Muscle is a bit different. Muscle you can keep adding at any age. So I think we're confusing the two a little bit. Bone plays by a little bit different rules. So what do you actually

  4 steps to maintain or build bone density

  Philip Pape 18:38

  do about this? I'm gonna give you four things to consider. The first one is, of course, to lift weights progressively at a load that is genuinely hard for you and just keep doing that for years. Somewhere in the range of 70 to 85% of your one rep max, two to three times a week on compound movements is a great foundation. All the other stuff you want to have in there for hypertrophy, because you love it, because you want the variation, because you want to do different rep ranges, that is great. I would just say if you have a squat pattern, hinge pattern, pressing, maybe some rowing in there, pulling, right? Not necessarily rowing, but some type of pull. So just having those different rep ranges, especially on the heavier side for a portion of your lifting is gonna be tremendous. And the real thing I want you to pay attention here, it's not the percentage so much, it's the doing it for years consistently part. I would rather you have a moderate program that you can run consistently and train hard with, even if it's not quote unquote heavy. That's gonna pay off tremendously versus something you wouldn't run. I'm not giving you permission to go easy, it's going to be hard. And in fact, many find that the higher rep ranges are pretty mentally challenging anyway, and actually find lower rep ranges kind of enjoyable despite being heavy. It's it's the difference between heavy but fewer reps and not as heavy but many more reps, and they're just different variables to play with. So progressive overload over a long time horizon is the way to go. Number two is to think about adding in balance and single leg work. And this one, I'm a little bit, I'll say I have a little bit less expertise in, and honestly, the evidence or the research is not, I'm not gonna say it's not as solid, but you're not gonna hear this as much in the strength community. I think it gets skipped a lot, but it could be very important. And there's folks like Megan Dahlman who are really into this and do a great job. I should have her on the show again, I think. But, you know, we care about bone density because of fractures, and fractures, at least outside the spine, come from falling down. Well, if you don't fall very often or at all, you overwhelmingly don't get fractures. So we know that exercise reduces the rate of falls significantly, I think by as much as a quarter from some studies. And, you know, balance training, functional training, if you want to call it, combined combining balance with resistance training. I don't like the term functional training because I think lifting weights is functional. Balance also comes from lifting weights. However, the unilateral or the single leg work can increase your balance even further. And so go ahead and do like the split squats or do the single arm whatever's deadlifts, RDL, et cetera. Incorporate them and see if it doesn't help even further with the balance. Okay, number three is impact. So I think the jury is still out on this. I think the jumping part of this, even though I mean I've had I've had folks on who are super smart talking about bone density and osteopenia osteoporosis, saying, you know, we probably need to have some jumping

  Where jumping fits into your strength training protocol

  Philip Pape 21:45

  in there along with our lifting. But, you know, if you if you've died, if you have diagnosed osteoporosis, or if you've had a previous like fidd fragility fracture, they call it, especially in your spine, or if you have a balance problems or history of Falls, or you're dealing with pelvic floor symptoms and leaking, or you know, you've never ever done jumping, you're probably okay. And you always have to think of it as like, how do you ease into things? How do you progress? Think of it as progressive overload, think of it as a skill. You look at something like the UK, they have this Royal Osteoporosis Society and they have a guidance statement that recommends lower impact instead of moderate impact for most people as a general rule, with higher impact only after someone has assessed you individually. And so I'm not, as far as a coach goes, like I don't program jumping stuff. And, you know, I worry about like people doing stupid things and getting injured. I mean, I I used to do CrossFit. So trust me, I know more than anyone. And it's not about being cautious, it's more of just if you want to add impact, I want you to go to ladder it up, ladder it up. You know, start with heel drops, then do skipping, then do two-footed hops, and just kind of build from there. Like don't start on a box necessarily. That's my thought on that. And as a side tangent to that, there are some interest, there's some interesting research about vibration plate machines being helpful as providing the same kind of stimulus as jumping and impact. So interesting. Maybe I should do an episode on that in the future. We'll see. Number four is I want you to get the boring things locked down. Okay. Get the boring things locked down. And that would be your food, you know, your protein, your micronutrients. Yeah, calcium, vitamin D, all of that is helpful for bone. The biggest lever is still going to be your movement and your lifting. But higher protein intake should help with your spine bone density. We don't know that it's overly beneficial for other aspects, but high protein is beneficial for many, many other things. Magic matters enormously for muscle, it matter, which itself helps your spine and bone and balance and not falling, et cetera. So it's all connected, right? It's I just like to separate what affects bone directly versus what affects it systematically, or by virtue of you being stronger or having more muscle. If you have actual osteoporosis, please be talking to this with your doctor anyway. I know there's all sorts of medications, there's biophosphates, there's like different types of exercise, different drugs now, all sorts of things happening, peptides, everything else. I have no idea. It's it's it's crazy. So that's in the medical world. I'm kind of staying out of that. I'm dealing more with the lifestyle piece. So, just in case you took the wrong message from this, I am not saying heavy lifting doesn't build bone. It does. I it also is essential, I would say. I think the strength and muscle benefits in many of these trials are probably a lot larger and more certain in our claims than the bone benefits. But you have tremendous bone benefits from lifting and possibly from jumping as well. Okay. I'm not saying bone density doesn't matter either, of course. It matters tremendously, but it may not be the only thing that determines things like fracture and break, you know, breaking your hip. Like I said, being strong, being balanced. Those are also tremendously important. So it's not just about the bone density, it's all the other stuff around it. And I'm also not saying you have to lift five by five, 85%, and use drop landings, and that's your program, right? Like you've got a lot of flexibility

  Finding your load range without attempting a 1 rep max attempt

  Philip Pape 25:16

  here. All right, before we wrap up, I'm gonna give you a 30-second test that you can start this week. But before that, I did tell you about the 70 to 85% load of your one rep max. And I wanted to address that real quick because you're probably thinking, okay, I have no idea what that is. Like, I don't know what my one rep max is. How do I do this without getting crushed under a barbell or something? And that's totally fair. And you don't have to necessarily, you can start from a calculator to get in the range. And I actually have a calculator on my website. If you go to witsandweights.com slash calculators, I'll include the direct link in the show notes. There's a strength calculator. You put in the weight, a weight that you've actually lifted and how many reps you got, and it's going to estimate your one rep max based on the most useful formulas that are out there. But it also gives you load ranges off of that. It also gives you the strength standards. So you can see where like your squat, your deadlift, your press sit for your age and body weight, which can be helpful. I'm not saying it's be all end all. There's a huge variation, but it's nice to kind of get you in the ballpark. So go to wits and weights.com slash calculators, totally free to check that out. Okay. Here's a 30-second test that tells you, am

  Bonus: 30-second test for whether you're lifting heavy enough

  Philip Pape 26:20

  I lifting heavy enough to matter for my bones? Assuming that we want to be in a high percentage of one rep max, which as I've stated, is somewhat supported by the evidence, but be careful not to overweight it. So pick your main lift. Take the weight that you normally use and do one set and stop about two reps shy of failure and count how many reps you did. If you did more than 12 reps, you are below 70% of your max. That's it. So if you're two reps shy of failure and you've done more than 12 reps, you're probably less than 70% of your max. If you're around eight to 12, you're like 70 to 80%, which is kind of the range we're going for. And five to eight reps puts you around 85%. So that's why I like the four to six range. And that's probably why the eight to 12 range is so common as well. Maybe. I don't know. There's a whole history with bodybuilding and everything regarding that. It's just an estimate and it varies person to person. But, you know, if you if you could do 15 reps, you're probably not training heavy. That's my point. So you can figure this out. You can use our calculator also to help you figure out and get after it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your bones don't require you to go all out with the heaviest load every time in the gym. You just have to be consistent, train hard, have a good mix of rep ranges and loads, stay on your feet, move around, stay active, and you'll be good. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How Long Body Recomposition Takes If You're Skinny Fat | Ep 494

How long does body recomposition really take? Cutting calories to lose weight can make a skinny fat physique worse by stripping away the little muscle you have while giving you misleading “progress” signals. 

Learn the realistic week-by-week timeline for noticeable changes, plus the simple tracking methods that prove your plan is working. 

If the scale hasn't budged in 3 weeks and you're about to call it off, hit play. And shout out to listener Dhiren A. on Spotify for today's topic!

Get 20% off your first custom blend at True Nutrition with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. Build your own protein from 20+ bases and 28 flavors, third-party lab tested and first-party verified, now shipping to over 150 countries:
https://truenutrition.com/witsandweights

You'll learn:

• Skinny fat explained as normal weight obesity and why BMI can miss the problem 

• Why the default advice to lose weight can backfire

• The Forbes curve and how your starting leanness changes how much body fat you lose

• Realistic muscle gain rates over 10 to 12 weeks

• Why DEXA and scales struggle to detect small lean mass changes 

• 4 priorities for body recomposition (including protein)

• How to track progress instead of chasing day-to-day noise 

• A simple muscle-building signal hidden in your training log

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Support the show by visiting today's sponsor:

• Get 20% off your first custom blend at True Nutrition with code WITSANDWEIGHTS.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why "just lose weight" backfires when you're skinny fat
6:43 - The Forbes curve (dieting, leanness, and body fat)
10:19 - How to build your own customized protein powder
13:03 - What happens in weeks 1 through 10
16:15 - What a good month of muscle gain looks like
17:35 - Does body fat measurement work?
19:57 - The problem that isn't your training
20:23 - 3 changes that make the timeline work
24:13 - How long until you see physical changes, and until others do
28:13 - The muscle-building evidence in your own training log

Episode Resources:

• Free Body Fat Calculator - Navy formula estimate from a tape measure, plus a few other numbers: https://www.witsandweights.com/calculators

• Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, and More)

• Transcript

  Why "just lose weight" backfires when you're skinny fat

  Philip Pape 0:00

  No matter what your body looks or feels like, it seems like everybody keeps telling you the answer is to lose weight. But I want you to hear this before you start the next diet. Today I'm going to show you why cutting calories is often the thing that will make things worse that lead to skinny fat, looking soft, having worse body composition, less strength, and a body that you are less happy with, how long it actually takes to see the changes that you are really going for, and why the tools you're using to measure progress probably can't detect things like muscle growth. Today is all about the realistic timeline for body recomposition, especially if you're skinny fat, but even if you're not. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today's episode is straight from a listener. I love questions from listeners, and this is from Dearren A, who left a comment on Spotify in our episode about how fast you lose muscle. And they wrote, Great podcast as always. Please can you share a podcast on how long it takes to notice changes to your body and more into skinny fat to building muscle? So, Dearren, thank you. That's it's a great question because it's actually two different problems inside the question that we want to address today. One is about the timeline. How long does it take to notice changes in your body? The other is more of a measurement problem. How would you know if it were working, if going from skinny fat to building muscle? And honestly, this applies to everyone wherever you are on this journey because it all applies in kind of both directions. But a lot of people only ask about the timeline one because they're impatient. Let's be honest, we're impatient. We're always thinking lose weight. And today we're really going to talk about body recomposition, what skinny fat is. And it does have a real clinical name. I know some people are triggered by the term skinny fat for whatever reason, but it's not a bad term when you think about what it describes. It's, hey, you've lost weight and you're like thin in a shirt, but you have, you know, a muffin top or some extra belly fat or whatever. And whatever phrases trigger people, I don't know. I'm born in 1980. Forgive me. All right. Now we're also going to talk about the what the research says about how fast you can add muscle if you are, especially if you're starting from that place of skinny fat. Why I'll say the advice you hear from most podcasters or coaches often makes it worse. We're going to clarify the different pieces of advice and which one might make sense for you. And then how we measure muscle growth because things like DEXA and your bathroom scale, whatever, may not be able to do that in the way you want. And there's simple things you can do to address that and have more confidence of what you're doing is working. Because one of the most common questions we get in our program is definitely, how do I know I'm building enough muscle? Am I going to the right rate of gain? Et cetera. It's not just about the fat, it's also about the muscle. If you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you a number that you can take from your training log that tells you whether you're building muscle as well. Okay. So I love process-oriented metrics that are leading metrics as well as those lagging metrics that help us measure things after the fact because I'm an engineer. Okay. So let's define the thing first. We love definitions and skinny fat is like a bro term, a gym term, whatever. There is a clinical version called normal weight obesity. So if you don't like the term skinny fat, you could call it normal weight obesity. And that means that your BMI is in the quote unquote normal range. So that's 18.5 to 24.9, but your body fat percentage is high and your lean mass is low. Now, a lot of my buddies and friends and the ladies out there listening to the show have the opposite problem because you've been lifting weights and building muscle. Your opposite problem is your BMA, your BMI is high, but you actually have a lower body fat percentage and higher lean mass. That's a different issue, and that's not a bad problem to have. That's just doctors and the medical system needing to catch up with the importance of body comp versus BMI. But for those of you who do have a low BMI, but really have more body fat than you'd like, and you know you're probably not happy how you look and your physique and you don't have much muscle mass and all that, this is a very common, you know, place to be for the vast majority of people. There is data that shows if we take the cutoff for men at about 33% body fat, or women, sorry, women for 33% body fat, roughly one in three American women with a normal BMI qualified as skinny fat. In other words, they had above 33% body fat, which for men would be like 25% body fat. So if you have above that percentage body fat, but your BMI is still normal, then you could say maybe you're skinny fat, right? And it's not a cosmetic thing. It's not a cosmetic thing. It is really a health thing. Metabolic syndrome shows up in about 17% of the normal weight obesity group compared to less than 5% in folks who have a normal BMI but also low body fat. So that's four times the metabolic risk from having that extra body fat, even though your scale weight is normal. Now, that is a huge wake-up call for you guys. Please take this is like the essence of what the show is about, is that it's not about your weight, it's about your body composition. So if you've been walking around feeling, you know, something's off, even though the doctor says I'm fine because my BMI is good, you're not imagining it. You're probably understanding that there are other things going on with your body and your health that you want to address. And that's totally cool. We want to be healthier. Now, when we look at the research, a lot of this was built by epidemiologists. And it's designed to identify, for example, who's going to get diabetes. They almost never get into strength training programs or even changing your diet. Like it's very rare, especially for a skinny fat person. A lot of these studies that look at people that are normal weight obesity are looking at prediabetes instead. So it's interesting because the fitness industry loves to throw around skinny fat like it's this unique condition and it has a unique solution and a method, and we're gonna cure your skinny fat. Whereas it's just like the vast majority of people are skinny fat. Okay. And when you go to a doctor, or even if you go to a personal trainer, you go to a friend, and you say, look, I don't like how I look. Like, let's say you confide in them, I'm not happy with how I look. What do they say? Lose weight, cut the calories, move more, watch the scale, eat better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The universal stuff that just is worthless, useless. For the person who is skinny fat, which again is the fast majority of us, then the advice is often gonna make it worse. So there's something called the Forbes curve. Curve.

  The Forbes curve (dieting, leanness, and body fat)

  Philip Pape 6:43

  Forbes curve. The Forbes curve, it comes from research that Gilbert Forbes did several decades ago, and it's been refined over the time, over that time. And what it describes is the relationship between how much fat you're carrying on your body when you start losing weight and what fraction of that weight comes off as fat versus lean tissue. And so the rule of thumb you hear oftentimes is like 75%, 25% lean tissue. But it's not linear, it's like a sliding scale. Somebody who has a lot of fat can lose weight and have almost all of it come off as fat. In fact, they might lose a little muscle, but it's just the extra muscle they gained because they gained a lot of weight, if you know what I mean, not necessarily just muscle from strength training. So they can they can lose like 90% of their tissue as fat, but as you get leaner, the fraction tends to shift, where a relatively lean person losing weight might give up even more of their weight as lean tissue. Now, this is if you're not lifting weights. So this could be people on GLP1s, for example, who are not lifting weights. Again, not calling you out if you take GLP1s and you do lift weights, different category. So, what this means for the skinny fat person is okay, you have a normal BMI. So you don't really have that much fat to give up in absolute terms. Your percentage body fat is higher than you want it to be, but in absolute terms of pounds, it's not very high. It's because you also have very, very low muscle. You're just small all over the place. And so when you go into a calorie deficit and you don't have that much fat on you at this level, your body might actually burn more muscle. I hate to say burn, but you might lose more muscle mass than you even might think. Because your body's gonna preferentially go to the tissue that you are already short on because muscle tissue is more expensive, but you don't have much of it. And now you're gonna be even lighter and smaller, but even worse body fat percentage. So the skinny fat problem gets even worse. You get even softer and weaker and smaller and worse looking. Okay. And let's I'm just calling it out. I'm stating it like it is. And I see this constantly. This is maybe the single most common person who reaches out because it's the majority of us. That's exactly who I was for all those years until I started lifting weights and eating more in the right way and having more protein, all the things that I'm trying to share with you and ask you to do along with me. So if you've been dieting many times, which is likely the case, and if you're not carrying the extra, so some of you listening are just overweight. I get it. Okay. But you've probably been in situations where you did lose a bunch of weight, or heck, maybe you took a GLP one now and you've lost a bunch of weight really fast. But then you look worse than you did. And I don't even want to go into like Ozempic face and all that stuff, but I imagine that some of that is related to the fact that people are losing a bunch of muscle mass as well, right? Which we're not gonna hammer home that point. We're just talking about why cutting calories over and over again is setting you back further and making things harder, making the underlying problem worse, even though the scale looks like a success. And that's why the scale is worthless in so many of these scenarios. So you're not missing weight loss. You probably know how to lose weight. You've probably done it many times. What you're missing is muscle. And we know that lifting in protein supports muscle. So it's always great to come back to that, isn't it? Like just to reinforce it. Even if you listen to the show to be like, all right, Phillips reminding me yet again, got to get in the gym, have that routine, gotta eat well, track my food, eat my protein, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And I mean, eating protein right alone is gonna be a huge game changer, as we've talked about many times. And that's a very smooth segue into today's

  How to build your own customized protein powder

  Philip Pape 10:19

  sponsor, True Nutrition. Because if protein is such a big lever, then you wanna be able to have protein from sources that you'll actually consume to get enough of it. True Nutrition, I love these guys. I've been using them for years for other products, like their highly branched cyclic dextrin for carbs. True Nutrition makes protein powder that you can customize. So cool. I've got bags of this stuff now because I love it. I love how it tastes. It's the exact ingredients you want, the flavor you want, the sweetener or no sweetener, because the protein you buy on Amazon or somewhere else, it's this one size fits all. It usually doesn't taste the best and it doesn't have exactly what you want. True Nutrition lets you customize it all the way in just four steps. Just takes a couple minutes. It's a lot of fun. You pick your base of protein, they have like 20 plus options: whey, plant, dairy-free. All third-party lab tested, first party verified at their own facility. You pick your flavor out of 28 flavors. You can sweeten it with stevia or monk fruit. It's not sugar, it's not artificial sweeteners. It's stevia or monk fruit. You choose the intensity of the sweetener, light, regular, heavy, and then you add what they call boosts. So things like fiber and probiotics and even colostrum. And you know, I can't say I would choose all of these, but you might choose them, and that's the whole point. Let you customize it the way you want. Also, how often you want it shipped, and you can save the mix and you can refill the same mix or you can have multiple custom proteins. So, my mix is a whey, egg, and casein blend. I like cookies and cream, sweetened vestivia. I add a little bit of psyllium husk for fiber and a little multivitamin, mainly for the B vitamins, built in. So that's three different protein sources with some extra boosts, really cool, and it has a great taste. It is not chalky, it's actually really smooth. I was commenting to my wife the other day how it's more like a milk product. It's so smooth. There's not this thick, clumpy chalkiness. It's delicious. Doesn't have GMOs, doesn't have fillers, doesn't have additives, doesn't have gluten. If those are important to you, even a better reason to try to true nutrition. And then now they ship worldwide to over 150 countries. And I know a lot of my listeners, you guys are from all over the world. Thank you. Check out True Nutrition, go to true nutrition.com slash wits and weights to support the show. Use code wits and weights for 20% off your first custom protein blend. That's true nutrition.com slash wits and weights. You spell it out. Use code wits and weights, 20% off your first custom blend. You can build your own mix, get 20% off. Link is also in the show notes. All right, let's get back to it because now we are going to dive into the specifics to Dieran's question. Let's say you

  What happens in weeks 1 through 10

  Philip Pape 13:03

  do everything right starting Monday. You live three days a week, you eat enough protein, you stop dieting and eat more to fuel your body right, do this the right way. Well, what happens over the next 12 weeks, week by week, in your actual body? This is the timeline. And what happens? Okay, weeks one through six. Your strength is going to climb and it's going to climb very quickly, especially if you're new to this. You might add 20, 30 pounds to a lift, and that's going to feel amazing. That's a real thing. That's strength. It's not necessarily muscle. That's your nervous system getting trained. That's motor unit recruitment going up from your muscle fibers. That's firing rates of your muscles going up. That's your antagonist muscles learning to stop fighting the movements. You become efficient. Your brain gets better at using the muscle you already have. So you had all this sleeping muscle that is now woken up and reactivated like a big monster that's benefiting you and making you super strong. It is real strength. It is real strength, but it's not necessarily size yet. So now the size question. When we say size, by the way, men and women, interpret that how you will. For men, they're going to want to think of size as getting big and bulky. For women, they want to think of it as tone and lean. Guess what? The answer is yes. It does that to both. And it's actually a gender-specific thing when you look at the results. So there's no risk of getting bulky for women. There's only a risk of looking better and feeling better and getting stronger. So there's a study from Damas and colleagues. I'm probably butchering the name, 2016. It's one of the few studies that looked in the early weeks of a strength training program, right? And in just instead of just measuring start and after. So they took untrained people and then they trained them and they measured thigh muscle cross-sectional area at weeks three and weeks, week three and 10. At week three, the muscle was up 2.7%. And then at week 10, it was up 10.4%. Now it sounds like it sounds kind of like a ramp up, like you almost might imagine a line, right? But they also took biopsies and when they looked at the muscle fibers, the fiber cross-sectional area had only increased at week 10. So at week three, there was no fiber growth. Instead, what the scan, the body scan, was picking up, was swelling, edema from the muscle damage of being new to training. So what's interesting is the first three weeks, the gain in strength is real, but you're probably not gaining muscle. But the size gain looks real, but it's mostly water. So everything you perceive, let's say in the wind, in the in the wind window, I keep saying window, mirror in that window of time is not really representative of what's happening yet. Like you shouldn't just trust, trust it based on how you look. That's pretty wild. That's pretty wild because people are so in a hurry and so anxious for feedback on like, is this working? But in those first three or four weeks is exactly the point where you can't trust it at all. You can't trust it at all. You can trust that your strength is going up because your numbers on the bar are going up, which is the thing it wants you to lean into here. So then real muscle starts to accumulate from about week three or four onward. And the question is, okay, how fast does muscle accumulate? So I

  What a good month of muscle gain looks like

  Philip Pape 16:15

  want to give you actual numbers. We do have resistance training trials in post-menopausal women, which is actually a lot very relevant to a lot of you who listen to this show when there's almost no other research on this group. And it was 10 to 12 weeks of lifting. Lean mass went up about 1.2 to 1.4 kilograms. So in pounds, that's like two and a half to three pounds of muscle over three months. So it's a little bit under a pound of muscle per month. So that's what a good month of strength training and muscle growth looks like. And you don't gain five pounds of muscle, it's just under a pound of muscle. And this is what I often tell clients, you know, in our program who are worried that they're not gaining muscle fast enough. You can only gain muscle so quickly, even if you totally optimize and eat all your food and train as hard as possible. You know, especially if you're a woman of certain size, you're only going to gain like maybe a pound a month. Not only. I mean, that's incredible compared to the alternative, which is not gaining muscle and in fact losing muscle for the rest of your life. So it's it's really flipping that around. I wish we could take credit for the muscle mass you are not losing. Because let's say you were going to lose a half pound of muscle otherwise. Well, technically the the flip, the switch is one and a half pounds of gain, not one. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. So if

  Does body fat measurement work?

  Philip Pape 17:35

  you took a DEXA scan, this is like the gold standard, you know, you pay, I don't know, 100 bucks, 200 bucks nowadays, and you scan your body for body fat and bone density and all of that. It is the most often one used in research. And even despite that, DEXA has what's called a measurement error. So for lean mass on a DEXA, it's about a kilogram of error, even if you scan on the same exact day. So if you're scanning on different days, which is what you actually do, it's as high as two kilograms. That's four and a half pounds of error. So the error bar on what we would consider the gold standard best body composition tool we have is somewhere between two and a half, or I'll say two and four and a half pounds. And if a month of genuine everything is going right, muscle growth is under a pound, what does that tell you? That tells you that scanning on a DEXA is not going to see it. It's not that it might not see it, you just cannot. The signal is multiple times smaller than the noise. It's kind of like trying to weigh an envelope on your bathroom scale, because you know, I'm not talking about a food scale that can weigh in grams, but a bathroom scale where it reads in like at the smallest half pound increments, well, maybe tenths in some cases, but look, an envelope weighs an ounce. That's one sixteenth of a pound. So you wouldn't see your conclusion is the envelope weighs zero based on the bathroom scale, right? Raw, right tool, wrong job, the tool doesn't tell you that that's the wrong job. It just says, here's your report out, like the DEXA, here's the report out. And it might be beneficial for things like bone density. It's definitely beneficial over a longer period, potentially. Depends on what you're trying to measure. If you're just trying to measure a couple pounds of lean mass change, it really isn't going to help you much. It can change by water, glycogen, sodium, where you are in your cycle, all the same things that affect body weight, even if you go in with the same conditions. So I guess what I'm trying to get at here for Dearan and for you, dear listener, is when you diet for three or four weeks and you do everything right and you step on the scale and nothing has moved, you haven't learned anything. You have not learned anything because you cannot measure what has changed at that point. But if you do assume that you've learned something, in other words, if the weight is higher or lower and you make a conclusion based on that, now you're going to make a decision based on that that could be wrong. So it's not that you're failing to do the thing that gets you muscle or fat loss or whatever. It's

  The problem that isn't your training

  Philip Pape 19:57

  you're failing to detect the result of doing the thing. And these are two different problems. Which is the one that's in your control? Which is the one that's in your control? Okay. The thing that's in your control is the process, the leading indicators, not the detection of the outcome, at least to a certain extent. So what do you do? So I'm gonna give you four things. These aren't exotic. As always on the show, these are actually pretty simple. The

  3 changes that make the timeline work

  Philip Pape 20:23

  question is, are you gonna do them? Number one is to stop dieting. Eat at maintenance. Or if you know you're trying to go for body recomp, maybe a tiny deficit, maybe a tiny surplus, depending on which side you're biasing. Are you biasing the fat loss side or the muscle gaining side? I like to bias the muscle gaining side and eat in a tiny, tiny surplus and then still lose body fat because you're really, really close to maintenance. But your call. The point is to stay relatively close to maintenance. There's good evidence for this because we we've seen studies where they compared slow to fast weight loss in groups that lift weights. And those that go slower, even if they are in a slight deficit, sometimes increase their lean body mass, or at the very least, they lose less body mass. So that's kind of what we're aiming for here is not just to not lose it, but to potentially gain it, which is why I sometimes bias toward a little bit of a surplus, especially for a skinny, fat person whose whole issue is a lack of muscle. So even if you are dead set on a deficit, keep it extremely, extremely tiny, close to maintenance, if just not staying at maintenance, and really just focus on the building part of it to add what you can't, what you're here to add, which is muscle. Okay, number two is of course protein. We had that huge meta-analysis from Morton and colleagues, 49 studies that found that the benefit of protein for gaining lean mass with resistance training plateaus around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. That's 0.7 grams per pound. So a 160 pound person, call it 110 to 120 grams of protein a day minimum, that's the number. Now, going way above it isn't gonna do much for you unless it helps more with such. Or your lifestyle preferences. If you're in a bigger deficit, it could help, but protein's important. Number three, progressive overload, lifting weights. Now, this is an important one because the primary metric is not the scale or the mirror, it's your training log. Weight on the bar, reps completed. Right? There's really just a few ways to progress. There's the load and there's the reps. Now, you could progress on things like rep quality, I suppose, but that's like a secondary factor. What we just covered earlier today in this episode is that your strength is going to move first, and it moves a month or two before your size, your muscle size moves or increases. So your earliest reliable signal is is my strength going up? So when the log for your load or weight on the bar, weight on the dumbbells or machines or whatever and/or reps is going up, then you must be getting stronger, which is eventually going to translate to more muscle mass. Now you might be saying, okay, I want to look better. I don't care about my squat. Fair. I hear you. But guess what? The squat is a major movement pattern involving so many muscle groups that you want to look better. And looking better is a result of getting stronger. You don't get one without the other. Number four, and this is the timing piece of it, is I want you to be patient and set your window of assessment at about 12 weeks, which is three months. Not three weeks for sure, not four, not five, not six, twelve weeks. And I want you to use three ways to measure this, none of which is the body scale. So the first measurement is your log, your training log. The second measurement is your waist. Now you could also measure somewhere else that matters to you, like your biceps, but you could do it once every week, once every two weeks, same time of day, same conditions. And then photos. Same lighting, same clothes, all that jazz. And I know nobody wants to take photos. Take them anyway. Take them for yourself. In our program, we ask you to take photos, but we don't ask you to share them unless you're comfortable. Because at the end of the day, we just want you to have the data. But then if you have it and we're working through some challenges or some questions you have about muscle definition, we can take a look and say, okay, here's what's happening. Just from an objective standpoint. Not trying to judge anybody. We're just trying to look at the objective result. And you could just take them and put them away and just keep them on your phone, put them in the hidden folder, whatever. Okay.

  How long until you see physical changes, and until others do

  Philip Pape 24:13

  But then in three months, you'll be glad you have them because you can compare. Now, our Spotify listener, Darren, their actual question was how long until you notice the changes? So my honest answer is the subtle changes that you'll actually see yourself if you're looking at month-to-month photos as opposed to the mirror, because the mirror screws up with your head big time, it's probably eight to 12 weeks. So two to three months out. Now, change that other people notice might even be longer, like four to six months. And it depends, men, women, how you dress, what time of year, like if you're going to the beach and taking your clothes off, most of your clothes off, let's say maybe it's a nude beach, I don't know. Or if you're a man and you know, men tend to have more prominent like traps and delts and back where you might see that in a shirt, for example. But a genuinely different looking body. If especially if you're starting from skinny fat, like a genuinely transformed body is probably a one to two year project, if you're honest with yourself. If you're starting this from square one at skinny fat, which is really not that time that long in the scheme of things. I mean, scheme of your life, you've probably been dieting for years. What's one to two years? I mean, I started lifting weights properly back in 2020. It is 2026. I feel like I still have a long way to go, but I'm happy about that because I enjoy the process and I've seen massive improvement. And I saw massive improvement in that first year, too. And yeah, it took about a year or two to be like, wow, okay, something is really different now, right? And and I think that's fine. That that's being a human being, that's our body. We're trying to shift things. Let's be patient about it. That's not a discouraging answer. That that's you know what you're signing up for, and you don't quit early. You got to do the hard thing and get the result. So I'm not saying skinny fat requires a special method or program. I said that earlier, I kind of made fun of it even. Of course, it doesn't. It's the same lifting, same protein, same eating enough food, falling the thing. What's different, I think, is your expectation and how you measure it, right? But if if someone's selling you a skinny fat protocol, that just doesn't exist. Just stay away from those guys. I'm also not saying don't lose fat. Like if you're carrying enough fat that it makes sense to go into a deficit, then go into a deficit. But if you're skinny fat, you probably need to build muscle. I'm also not saying the scale's useless. It's it's probably a very helpful tool, especially when we're looking at staying at maintenance and eating the right amount of food for our body. And look, if you start building muscle, you're gonna have to eat more. I actually would rather you be logging and understanding your metabolism based on the scale and based on your food with a tool like macrofactor, so that you can actually increase the food over time and stay in the range that you need to be, which is a great problem to have. Now, one final, I guess, positive thought is if you truly are skinny fat and you're untrained and you're listening to this episode, maybe you just found the show, you're probably in the single best position right now from which to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. The only other, I guess, envious position I'll say is someone who has a lot of weight to lose. And they probably wouldn't argue if you if you're carrying a lot of extra body fat, you're probably not gonna argue that that's an envious position because you have certain health risks, right? But it also means you can, if you're at that demographic, you can, like overweight, obese, can go into a deficit and your body won't feel like it's in a deficit. So that's also not a bad place to be. So I like to reframe things positively where I can, and those are a couple of places where we can do that. So before we wrap up, I mentioned earlier that there is something you can get from your training log that's gonna help you understand whether you're building muscle. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if you're sitting there, you're like, okay, I get it. I need a way to see this happening over the next 12 weeks. We do have a free body fat calculator. So I almost never mention these, but if you go to wits and weights.com slash calculators, we have a few free calculators on there. One of them it is body fat. And you just take a tape measurement, it takes like a minute and uses the Navy formula, but it gives you some other cool numbers. I'm not gonna reveal what those are, just go check it out. We're always updating these tools, but it's gonna be a helpful number to say, okay, this is roughly where I might be starting from, and then go use the trend over time to see how your body is changing. Witsandweights.com slash calculators. I'll include a link directly to that specific calculator in the show notes. All right, so here is that number from your training log that I mentioned earlier.

  The muscle-building evidence in your own training log

  Philip Pape 28:13

  It's called tonnage. Some people call it volume load, but I like tonnage. It takes about a minute to calculate. Many apps do this for you. So check if they're sometimes they just call it volume as well, but pick a lift. It doesn't matter which one, just pick something that you do every single week in your current program. And then for each set, you're gonna multiply the weight by the reps and then add up your sets. So that's our tonnage. That's all it is. That's why some people call it volume, but to me, volume is the number of sets where obviously your load might be different. So I know some people don't like that lack of precision if you have an engineering brain like me. But tonnage is sets times reps times weight. So you're kind of multiplying all that. So if you had, let's say, three sets of eight of a hundred pounds, then that's a hundred times eight, that's 800 pounds per set times three sets. So that's 2400 pounds, right? So 800 pounds a set times three, 2400 pounds. That's your tonnage on the lift. And what's cool about it is if your weight goes up, it goes up. If you add a rep, it goes up. Even if you add sets, it goes up. Now, if you're adding sets, if you're on a set-based progression, it's gonna go way up. And in fact, that's the premise behind a wave-based program. Um, like we have one called Ironclad. If you tracked your tonnage, you would actually see this massive ramp up over three weeks and then it drops way back down because that's the point. But let's say you're doing a normal single or double progression, you're going up in weight, and or you're going up in reps. Tonnage will basically combine the two because you're multiplying it all together. And so some people get confused because they they increase weight one week, but then the next three weeks they increase reps, and they're just not quite sure if it's all working out. Because then what you might do is you might reset the weight. Once you hit the top of the rep range, you might let's say reset the weight, but then go higher reps, it gets confusing. You know what I'm saying? Like if things aren't just going up in a line, it gets confusing to do the math. So the tonnage can kind of take that confusion out of it, assuming the sets are the same. Assuming the sets are the same. So if you're a math nerd like me, if you're an engineer, if you like numbers, if you like to take some of the confusion out of progression, it's just an extra way to track that. And again, a lot of apps do that for you. So if anything, just go in your current app that you use, whether it's Boost Camp or Macrofactor workouts or something else. And they may have something like that. They also have other tools in these apps that look at actual volume per muscle group. But again, that's just sets. This is tonnage. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, when you are starting from skinny fat, you don't have a weight problem, you have a muscle problem. And muscle takes a bit longer to build. So you gotta be patient and put in the work. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Reverse Dieting Is a Dead End for Metabolism Recovery | Ep 493

Reverse dieting gets sold as a slow, safe way to “fix” your metabolism after fat loss, but the evidence and the real-world experience rarely match the promise. Reverse dieting came out of coaching, not research. Add 50 calories a week, bring your metabolism back up, stay lean while you do it. 

We break down why most people cannot execute it, why it often delays recovery, and how to transition out of a cut with faster metabolic and hormonal rebound while keeping your head straight about the scale. 

If you're coming out of a fat loss phase (or years of dieting) and want metabolism recovery in days instead of months, hit play!

Try MacroFactor with code WITSANDWEIGHTS for an extended free trial, the food logging app that calculates your expenditure dynamically so you know your maintenance calories the week your cut ends.

You'll learn:

• Where reverse dieting came from and why it sounds so reasonable 

• Why adherence collapses even in disciplined physique competitors 

• What the limited research shows on reverse dieting vs. maintenance vs. “eat normally” 

• What the Minnesota Starvation Experiment reveals about delayed rebound 

• Why staying in a deficit slows metabolic rate and hormone recovery 

• A practical post-cut plan

• The scale math behind rapid post-diet weight gain (and why it's rarely body fat)

Timestamps:

0:00 - The reverse dieting promise
4:33 - Where reverse dieting came from
7:42 - Problem 1, can you even do this?
10:20 - The one randomized trial we have
13:15 - Finding your real maintenance calories
16:26 - What happened when compliance was guaranteed
19:55 - What your metabolic rate responds to
20:58 - What happened to the women's cycles
22:31 - Who this research applies to
25:33 - 5 steps for the week your cut ends
32:23 - Scale math after a cut

Episode Resources:

• Why Your Body Fights Fat Loss (The Truth About Setpoint Theory)

• Transcript

  The reverse dieting promise

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you just finished a fat loss phase, or maybe you've been dieting a long time, you've probably heard that you need to reverse diet. Add 50 or 100 calories a week, creep it back up, increase your metabolism, protect it, and stay lean while you do it. Today, I'm gonna show you why almost nobody can pull that off. It's not even a real thing, including for the most disciplined dieters. And those who manage to do it in some way often end up with repercussions like just being less recovered for even longer. And finally, I'm gonna share what to do when your cut ends for the fastest recovery and the best result. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and reverse dieting is the topic de jour. It is one of those ideas that took over the fitness world, but was never really tested properly. Or I should say that the evidence has never showed that it works in the way that we think it does. It actually came out of physique coaching, not really out of the science, which, you know, a lot of things come from bro science, a lot of things come from experience and lifters over the years. But this one kind of came right out of the coaching world. And the promise is really beautiful. And this is probably why coaches love it. You finish a cut, or maybe you've been dieting many years, you've done the yo-yo thing, and you're being marketed to, hey, we've got a great program to finally help you fix your metabolism or to finally help you lose the weight the right way or whatever. But maybe you finished a cut and you're a little bit leaner, you're a little bit hungry, your training isn't as optimal. And what do you need to do? You need to recover, right? Or maybe you've been dieting for a long time, you've been in that dieting culture, and you're told, hey, the reason your metabolism is so low is because you've never reverse dieted. You've got to recover. And so what we need to do is add calories back slowly over time in a way that your body doesn't notice it as much, that your metabolism comes up slowly and gets to where it needs to be, and that you don't gain too much fat back. And so, yeah, your metabolism is gonna climb, your hormones are gonna come back, you're gonna get that recovery that you need, or what some people call metabolic restoration, or even fixing your metabolism, which is a complete misnomer, of course, because you can't break or damage it. And then you keep all your results, you keep your physique, or at the very least, you're gonna be in a better place to have a higher metabolism and lose fat from more calories. Probably sounds familiar, right? So I've had a lot of people, especially uh, especially women, especially people over 40, tell me, hey, I was told to do this, or I had a coach that walked me through this, and it didn't really work like I thought it would work. Where I took six weeks in this reverse dieting phase, maybe I added 50 calories a week. You know, the actual jump depends on the coach. And I'm still hungry, I'm still afraid of food, I'm still watching the scale, I still feel like things are very sensitive there. I still don't have the body I want, I still don't look the way I want or feel the way I want. Don't the energy the way I want. Maybe I tried another fat loss phase and I tried another diet. It didn't seem any different than last time. Felt like I was cutting, restricting, et cetera, et cetera. All right. And then it's this just fragile experience and fragile outcome that you don't feel well equipped to do fat loss the right way. And you may even feel less confident, right? And the problem is not you, as always, with these situations. The problem is the approach, the protocol, the principle. And I want to walk you through the data on that today. Hence the title of the episode that reverse dieting is a dead end for metabolism recovery. Because I want you to recover your metabolism. I want you to be optimal. I want you to get the result in, I'll say as more efficient as a way as possible, but that's not it. If you stay around to the end, I'm gonna share a little trick about what happens after a cut and the math behind it and whether or not you're gaining fat so that I can help you come out of that phase properly. Uh, but we need to lead to that point before I could say, okay, here's what you do. So what we're doing today is talking about reverse dieting. Where did it come from? Why does it sound so reasonable? I'm gonna talk about the two biggest problems with it. They're two separate problems. One is can you even execute this? And the other is, does it do anything if you do? And a lot of this research is on very lean physique competitors, which chances are, dear listener, you are probably almost certainly not one of those. You might be, but you know, I'm talking to everybody here. And then, of course, what to do the week that your cut ends. What do we actually do about

  Where reverse dieting came from

  Philip Pape 4:33

  this? So let's start with the origin of reverse dieting. It came out of bodybuilding coaching roughly in the 2013 to 17 windows. So we're only talking about a little more than 10 years. And, you know, it spread the way the good fitness idea spread, which is it sounded great. And somebody wrote a guide about it, probably an Instagram carousel or something, and some famous person, you know, I think Elaine Norton put out a full reverse dieting guide back then, you know, and he he's he's walked back at least some of the promises of reverse dieting. He may still call it. In fact, a lot of so coaches coaches still use the word reverse dieting, and they don't always mean that. So that's part of the confusion here. And from there, it moved out of the physique circles into general fat loss coaching, and then of course, into the midlife women's fitness, which is just so hot right now, where it got stuck onto the metabolic damage and the heal your metabolism type of conversation and culture. And I wanna be, I wanna be nuanced here as always. I don't want to accuse anyone of lying. I don't want to call people out who don't deserve it, but this is a great way to sell coaching, a great way to sell metabolic repair protocol. How often do you see metabolic repair protocols or detox protocols? I put them all in the same category. They really sell a promise that seems like they're the only ones who can solve it. And it's gonna be some unique method or some unique approach. And if you do it, it's gonna set you up for success in the future. And oftentimes we don't want to do the hard thing that it really takes to be successful, so we go for these and they seem great, and they're just not gonna work for you. And the reason it sounds so reasonable is because part of the story is true. Dieting does suppress your metabolic rate, it does suppress your hormones. Absolutely true. The rest of it is where it gets fishy, and we're gonna get into that. So, in the study that I'm going to rely on the most today, natural physique competitors going through contest prepped, they dropped their free T3. That's your active thyroid hormone, so T3. And it dropped far enough that eight of the 19 athletes were below the normal reference range before they got on stage. All right. So they got significantly hormonally suppressed. So the logic goes like this: going down slowly with your diet, with your calories, with your weight causes the adaptation. So going up slowly should reverse the adaptation in the same way that it's symmetrical. And, you know, if you got an engineering brain like I do, symmetry is very satisfying. It's very intuitive. You know, you lower the input in steps, you raise the input in steps, the system tracks back to where it started. But it's wrong. It's wrong. A lot of things in reality and real world systems are asymmetric. Asymmetric. We talked about this before with set point theory and how there's actually a floor. How, hey, it's pretty easy to gain weight and it's often harder to lose it, right? That's kind of the idea. It's asymmetric. But it took me a while to understand this, and I used to talk about reverse dieting very, very early in my coaching career before I quickly realized it wasn't the thing that works practically, let alone supported by the science. So

  Problem 1, can you even do this?

  Philip Pape 7:42

  let's talk about the first problem that almost no one can actually do a reverse diet. Well, what do I mean? All right. Eric Trexler, who I have enormous respect for down at Duke, he's been on the podcast before. Um he was originally behind Stronger by Science and Macro Factor, which you guys know I love as an app. He is one of the sharpest people that write about this stuff and wrote a great article that created a lot of controversy on both directions, as these tend to do when they upset the apple cart. And he wrote recently that he's aware of exactly three studies that have ever attempted a to track a real reverse diet with lean dieters after a fat loss phase. So, in two of those three, the reverse diet just didn't work. It was so bad that the studies stopped being an intervention at all. The compliance was so poor that the researchers gave up on the protocol and they just switched to observing what the athletes actually did. So go ahead, do your best. That was the that was those two studies. Okay, now these are physique competitors. These are people who are pretty disciplined compared to the average person. They weigh their food, they've run the protocol multiple times, they have coaches. If they can't execute a slow reverse diet under research supervision, then who is this being designed for? Now, if you look at the newest study, the third of the studies I mentioned, Butel and colleagues published just this year, 2026, there were 19 natural drug-tested competitors in Australia. So we're eight men, 11 women, ages 18 to 45, and they tracked them from the back half of their prep all the way through to 12 weeks after their show, after their physique show. And their original plan was we're gonna do a controlled reverse diet, but it couldn't be done. What did they actually eat? Well, in the final weeks before competing, they were down around 1580 to 1,720 calories a day. Two weeks after the show, they were at nearly 2,950 calories a day. So notice that that's not a reverse diet, right? You can go from like 1,500 to 1700 all the way up to almost 3,000 calories within two weeks after the show. So that's basically a jump of over 1,200 calories a day immediately almost. And then 12 weeks out, they settled, they settled out a little bit lower, around 2560 calories, which is still way more than the roughly 1,900 they were eating at baseline before the prep even started. And that is often what happens when a diet ends. It's not because we are weak people that can't control ourselves, it's because our body, our biology, causes this to occur. Now, I know what you're thinking, okay, these are

  The one randomized trial we have

  Philip Pape 10:20

  competitors at, you know, super low 5% body fat for men, maybe 15%, 10 to 15 for women. I'm a normal person. I did a normal cut. Does this apply to me? Well, hold that thought. I'm gonna deal with that in a few minutes. But first, the one randomized trial that we have is Dr. Bill Campbell's group at the University of South Florida. They ran this with Trexler, and I love the design of this, which I'm not surprised by two, you know, stalwarts in the industry who know how to do this stuff. Resistance-trained adults, 87% of them were women, average age was 36, and everybody dieted down until they'd lost 5% of their body weight. Then I think it was 15 weeks in, or I'm sorry, they did this for 15 weeks, the dieting, across three different groups. So group one reverse dieted, so they had gradual weekly increases. Group two went straight to a calculated maintenance intake, and then group three went back to just eating normally, they didn't even have a target. So what happened over 15 weeks? Well, the reverse dieting group, in terms of regain, weight regain, they regained 3.77% of their weight, so 3.7. The maintenance group 2.7, and the hey, just eat whatever you want group 1.3. Now they weren't statistically different from each other. So I don't want you to take these to be like massive differences. The group that didn't have the protocol, that last group, they actually rated their adherence as easier over the last six weeks. And, you know, part of that actually makes sense in my head when I think about it. If you're just kind of doing whatever you want, it's easy to adhere to just doing whatever you want. Okay. Now, this study was presented at a conference. I don't think it's a full peer-reviewed paper yet. So take that caveat for what it's worth. But I think the key here is there was no clear winner in terms of the reverse dieting group. If anything, if you take the difference in percentages, they trended the worst if you count weight regain as a bad thing. And I don't want to necessarily say that that is in and of itself what we're trying to measure, because you do expect weight regain when you're going to increase your calories because of the fluid and the carbs. And it might not be the worst thing that your weight jumped faster and larger initially, given that it's not body fat, but it's associated with recovery. In other words, the reverse dieting group or the just eat normally group would have trended up toward that eventually anyway, potentially. We don't know, because it's a function of how quickly you go. Now, what's interesting is reverse dieting by going slowly, why did they gain more weight? Well, again, there was not a statistically significant difference between these. So I don't want to give too much pun intended weight to the weight regain piece. I just wanted to mention that. The point is reverse dieting didn't stick out as anything magical or beneficial in any way. So if you've tried to reverse diet and found this doesn't really feel great, I feel like I'm still dieting. That's one of the most common

  Finding your real maintenance calories

  Philip Pape 13:15

  things that I see happen. Like with just trying this with people, especially early in my coaching career, I tried this and they were like, man, something's off. You know, I still don't feel great. Like I feel like I'm dieting, but I'm also gaining weight. It's kind of the worst of all the worlds. So, you know, when we talk about what do we do about this, the fix I'm gonna give you depends on knowing what your maintenance calories are. Because part of the issues with part of the reason people reverse diet as well in the past is they have no clue what your maintenance is. And they're like, this is the only way to find it, right? Well, no, your maintenance, it's not a calculated number. It's not fixed, we know that, but it's also not a total mystery. Okay. It does change a lot, though. It changes as your weight changes, as your training changes, your activity, you know, it changes through the dieting and out of dieting, all of that. And so a lot of the reason people do this slow reverse is they're trying to be conservative. They don't know where that ceiling is, so they want to creep it up, which is going to extend the recovery. We're gonna talk about that in a second. But I just wanted to mention what I use for this with clients and use myself, the secret is out of the bag. I use MacroFactor for this as a food logging app. Still to date, I am shocked by this. It's the only app I know that calculates your expenditure dynamically and in a reasonably sophisticated way. I I there might be some apps that try to do that, but they don't seem to be very good yet. So, Macro Factor, you can use my code wits and weights, all one word, and get a free week, two, two-week trial. Try it out. Let me know what you think. Again, wits and weights, all one word, go check out macrofactor. I'll include a link in the show notes. But the reason it works so well for recovery dieting instead of trying to reverse diet and guess your way up is it's looking at your weight trend, it's looking at your log calorie intake, and it back calculates here's what you must be burning. It doesn't need activity, it doesn't need anything else. If it knows how much your weight is changing and how much you're eating, that is sufficient to know how much you're burning. So then when you come out of a cut, you know exactly what your maintenance calories are right there at that moment, and you could just jump to those calories or a little bit higher. I always recommend a little bit higher to kind of speed up that recovery a little bit. And that's really, really useful in this situation. Because one of the biggest fears of reverse dieting is what if I overshoot? What if I gain too much fat? And this answers the question using your data. It's why we do this type of tracking in our programs as well. Okay, so macrofactor, go check it out, go download it. If you're not using it, use my code Wits and Waits All1Word as a code. Please support the podcast. You don't have to use the code, you can just download it. But if you do, you'll get an extra week free trial and you'll support the podcast. All right, so problem one is hey, almost nobody can actually do a successful reverse diet, even just from an adherence perspective. But then that leaves the obvious question. What about people who can? What if you're the exception? What if you're the special snowflake who can do this? Or what if you've just white knuckled your way through a reverse diet? What actually happens? Well, we have an answer. We have an answer. And it comes from a situation where it's really depressing, uh, but the compliance was essentially guaranteed. And I'll say this study gets misdescribed a lot and misused a lot, but I'm gonna throw it

  What happened when compliance was guaranteed

  Philip Pape 16:26

  out there. And that is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment from 1944 into 1945. The participants were actually what we call conscientious objectors, right? They were objecting to the war, the draft, and they were living on an army base, and every calorie they ate was controlled and provided by the research staff. So they were intentionally dieted down to about five to six percent body fat, and they were not lifting weights. And I think this matters. I'm gonna come back to that. That matters tremendously. They weren't lifting weights, but you know, they couldn't cheat or anything. They they had to do what they had to do because they were forced to. I mean, I think they volunteered as conscious as project. But anyway, we're not gonna get into that piece of it. Okay, then after the diet, after the starvation essentially, came the refeeding phase. And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this part, but it's interesting. The researchers split them into four groups with different rates of calorie reintroduction over 12 weeks. Not sure if you knew that, but we have some good data on this. So the slowest group started at 1930 calories a day, worked up to 3,000 over 12 weeks. And they were basically weight stable for the first six weeks. They gained like 1.2 grams of body mass a day. And that is a reverse diet. It's a textbooked reverse diet executed flawlessly, you know, gradual increase. They had no choice, they did it. We know they did a reverse diet. The fastest group started at 2944 calories and worked up to just over 4,000 calories. So during their controlled phase, or I should say during the control phase of all four groups, the weight gain tracked to the calorie surplus exactly the way you'd expect. You know, energy balance. Like we we know that that works, calories in, calories out. The slowest group gained the least, fine, but then the 12 weeks ended and the floodgates opened, and they had eight weeks of unrestricted eating. So at the start of that window, the slow group was five kilograms lighter than the fast groups. And then after eight weeks of free eating, that gap had shrunk significantly to less than half a kilogram. So, despite 12 weeks of what we can call perfect discipline, it basically just bought them eight extra weeks before they have a rebound. So they didn't avoid the rebound weight gain, they just postponed the rebound weight gain. Okay, and that's a very important thing to understand. Because on the metabolic side, and this is where it gets kind of interesting for the reverse dieting piece, in the buttol study I mentioned earlier, the researchers ran a model looking at whether athletes who increased their intake more after the show recovered their metabolic rate faster. So if they ate even more sooner than a reverse diet. And guess what they did? Every extra 100 calories a day during recovery was associated with 16 to 18 more calories a day of metabolic rate recovery. Interesting, right? So the typical post-show increase of 500 to 1000 calories a day correlated to somewhere around 80 to 160 calories a day of metabolic recovery. So more food, faster recovery, which is the opposite direction from the premise of reverse dieting, which is intended to restore and recover your metabolism, right? Now, there were 19 people in the study. Okay, it's an exploratory analysis. I get it. I'm not gonna build a religion on this or anything. But the three separate studies, post-competition and physique competitors, all line up. They're all, they all line. It's not a surprise. And then you throw in the Minnesota starvation diet, and

  What your metabolic rate responds to

  Philip Pape 19:55

  we see that those who re-reintroduce calories and regain weight the most conservatively also have the slowest hormonal metabolic recovery. So that is a piece I want you to take away from this episode. Your metabolic rate is responding to two things whether you're in a deficit right now and how much tissue you're carrying, like actual body mass, but also muscle mass within that body mass. And that's mostly it. How much you weigh and how much tissue you have, and also whether you're in a deficit. So if you reverse diet and only add, say, 50 calories or 100 calories, and that's not nearly enough to get out of the deficit and you're still in a deficit, you're just in a smaller deficit and you're just extending the diet. You're just going with a smaller diet. Does that make sense? So you're not actually at maintenance yet. That's the that's the thing we got to get through our heads, right? The person who quote unquote succeeds at reverse dieting, they might stay lean, if that's a word we want to use, or at least lower body weight, but their meta metabolism also stays suppressed. And honestly,

  What happened to the women's cycles

  Philip Pape 20:58

  these are two sides of the same coin, two sides of the same coin. Now, this shows up on the hormone side too, which is important for all of us, especially when hormones become more and more important as we age, especially for women peri postmenopause, right? In that study, the same study of the seven naturally cycling women, four had already lost their period before the show. And then six of the seven had lost it two weeks after. So amenorrhea, we call it. By 12 weeks, four had it back, but two still didn't. What did bring the their periods back was guess what? Eating substantially more food and putting body fat back on, not creeping up with a reverse diet, right? And that is, you know, somehow the people who say reverse dieting protects your hormones tend to point to this study and they've actually got it, it actually works against them. You know, and one last thing on Trexler, just for cool little side stories. He co wrote, I think what he states, and maybe the first peer reviewed paper to ever use the term reverse dieting. You guys can look that up and see if he's right or wrong on. That. But anyway, he wanted reverse dieting to work. Like he really hoped that it was a strategy that did work. He calls himself the banana guy. So back in like, you know, 12 years ago, whatever, when he was building physique competitor, he was sitting there after a show eating a bunch of bananas and a half jar of peanut butter, well past the point of fullness. And his conclusion now, after studying this for a decade, is that reverse dieting is a dead end. And that's, you know, following the evidence. His idea changed over time.

  Who this research applies to

  Philip Pape 22:31

  All right. So now I want to give you a caveat and then I want to help you fix this. I kind of already alluded to the recovery diet piece of this to do the fix, like to obviously increase calories quickly is the real goal here. But the people in the research that I just mentioned, pretty much all of those physique competitors and the Minnesota starvation diet, the people were very lean or shredded or whatever word you want to use, 5 to 6% body fat, semi-starvation. The Minnesota starvation diet, they didn't have any resistance training. Whereas in Butel's research, they were stage lean. So of course they were training. If you cut down from, let's say, 32% body fat to 27-7% body fat over 12 weeks while lifting, say three days a week and eating your protein, you know, you're not in that demographic, right? You're not in that 5% body weight, body fat demographic. Not even close. I mean, I've had really, really lean clients and they still, unless they were planning to do a physique show, get down to for men, maybe 10%. 10% is extremely lean. I don't know what this thing about single double single digit is, as if it's some aspirational thing that many, many men can and should get to. Not even close. Most men getting to 15%, they're gonna see abs, they're gonna see plenty of muscle definition, they're gonna look great. 10% is really, really lean. So 5% is crazy. Now, for women, you add like 8 to 10% to that. Now, there aren't any trials on post-diet, calorie restoration, perimenopausal, or post-menopausal women. What a surprise, shocker. Anyone who tells you research says X about reverse dieting for menopausal women is just making it up. So, what is transferable here? Like what can we actually apply to everybody? Well, I think the feasibility problem is what transfers here, and it actually is worse for the general population. In other words, if you've got 20 or 30 years of dieting history and a very fear-driven or nervous kind of mindset or system that where you've learned that food restriction is the answer, even if, even if you know it's not intellectually now, but you've kind of been conditioned to that, like we all have, then a six-month reverse diet is not gonna happen. It's gonna, that's gonna be so tough because you're basically forcing yourself to diet for that many months. It's not a reverse diet, it's still a diet, like we said earlier. You're still in you're still in a deficit and yet you're not getting a result, let's say. So psychologically, it's just brutal. Also, the direction of reverse dieting, when you think of recovery, recovery is associated with eating more and putting tissue back on. So the idea of gaining weight is is a problem for a lot of you, even though it shouldn't be when you understand what's being gained and why, and the correlation between that weight gain or weight regain and going back to full maintenance and recovery. Now, the good news is you tend to be in a much smaller hole than a physique competitor. In other words, you haven't dieted to a crazy ridiculous amount. So the amount that you've experienced in terms of adaptation is probably nowhere near what they have, which is a good thing. That's a positive thing, and in that recovery can take as little as

  5 steps for the week your cut ends

  Philip Pape 25:33

  just a few days to maybe a couple weeks, right? It's not, it shouldn't take months though. It should not take months. So here's what you do when you end your cut. Okay, five things. Here's the steps. Number one, go to maintenance as quickly as you can in as little as two weeks or less. Okay, so if you're using Macrofactor, like I mentioned before, use my code Wits and Weights, please use it. Log your food, log your weights, see how easy this actually becomes to say, okay, I'm done with my diet. I know when I started my diet, I was burning 2200 calories. At the end of my diet, I'm burning 1700 and I'm eating 1200, so I'm gonna jump up to 1700. Like that's it. That's that's what you're gonna do. Now, if the jump is too big on that first day where you feel distended or like gonna have gas or something like that, it's totally okay to stretch it out for a week or two. But that's not a reverse diet. That's just titrating up that amount that you know you have to jump to get to full recovery. All right. So that's it. And we're not telling you to jump all the way to the 2200 that you started with either. That's why you need to track this stuff. We're not saying jump to your original maintenance, we're saying jump to your current maintenance. So that's number one. Number two is I would put most of those new calories into carbs. Why? Because your protein should already be high at like 0.71 gram per pound of body weight. You should not have gotten into a diet in the first place if you couldn't reliably and consistently eat enough protein, right? Of course not. Now, if I'm talking to you and you you found this show after a bunch of unintended weight loss or crash dieting or GLP1-driven weight loss, and you weren't doing that, fine. Now's your opportunity to come out, increase the protein and the carbs. But if you did have the if you do have the protein up high enough, the change is mainly the carbs. Fats will drift up a little bit, but mainly the carbs, which is what you want. Carbs are gonna refill your glycogen, support your training. It's gonna help your thyroid, help your stress, help your energy, all of that stuff. Carbs are beautiful in this case. And in fact, that's what we do when we take diet breaks and refeeds. We increase carbs. So it makes sense. Number three, don't let your training drop. And the reason I say this is because in the Butual study, the training load fell below the baseline after their physique show. Now, that could be because of physique competitors. They really, really train all out really hard. They're motivated by the show, and then afterward they kind of slack off a little bit. But I would say for you, it's kind of the opposite. When the weight's coming back, you're gonna feel better and you're gonna get PRs and you're gonna feel like you can make progress again. So I probably don't have to tell you this because it's gonna feel like you want to train more. It should feel better, but but your training intensity should actually go up. Number four, I want you to decide your sealing ahead of time. Now, what I mean by that is for the scale, I want you to decide: are you going into maintenance, are you going to aggressive maintenance, or are you going into a surplus? And understand that there's gonna be at least two to three pounds of immediate weight gain from water and fluid that has nothing to do with body fat. But then there might be another pound or two beyond that, not from overshooting, but really just from this extra recovery, maybe some muscle mass, some muscle mass coming back, kind of a variety of things. And there's a little bit of noise there, and you have to accept that. And it's totally cool because what you're getting for it is a much healthier body and physiology. And then number five is I would recommend staying at maintenance for like two to three months before you think about another deficit, or maybe one month, maybe two to two weeks to a month if you're gonna go in a building phase. Like for a building phase, it's not that big a deal. I just want you to stabilize first so you don't like way overshoot in the surplus. But if you're gonna go on another diet because you have a, you're actually just taking a break, a recovery break, I like those types of breaks to be like two or three months long. If it's a week or two, then that's just kind of a normal interruption diet break. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a full recovery break. Okay. Now, I am not saying that gradually raising calories is quote unquote wrong, because eating from going or going from a deficit up to maintenance, as I mentioned before, you can titrate it up over a few weeks if you want, but you're targeting an actual number that's your recovery number, not just like dripping it up slowly randomly and guessing over time. Right. I hope you understand the difference. I'm not saying that diet breaks don't work either. That's a totally different thing. A diet break happens during a cut, whereas reverse dieting happens after a cut. I just want to make sure you understand there they're two different things. But even with a diet break, you need to know your metabolism so that you can break up to that immediately. You're not, you don't want to reverse diet into a diet break because that would totally take forever and wouldn't even work, right? And then, of course, I'm not saying, hey, you you just have to live with fat gain or fat regain. Of course not. You do have to put some weight back on. You're going to because of, you know, water and glycogen and maybe a little bit of fat that your body needs to have on its frame. You're probably gonna look better though. In fact, when I tell people they have a beach event or photo shoot and then we're leaning out for that, we want to stop that cut a few weeks ahead of time and go right back to maintenance and refill that water and glycogen and kind of fills up the muscles. You actually have those muscles pop a little bit more. So the conclusion of this episode is that reverse dieting as it's sold doesn't do anything at advertises, it doesn't protect your metabolism, and it gives you a big price. Months potentially of further restriction, months more of food fear, the fear of gaining weight, even though gaining weight is exactly what you probably need to do in the right way. You delay your rebound, you delay the recovery, you delay the hormonal recovery, all the things it promises do it, it oftentimes does the opposite. Now, before we wrap up, I I'm gonna give you a little trick about the scale math, or I should say some numbers around the scale math. So you really, really understand what I've been hammering on quite a bit lately, which is the weight gain that happens after a cut. I wanna address that because it's so important. But that post-cut transition, it's where I see more people lose the skills and the progress they made than any other point in the process. Notice I said skills and progress. I'm not talking about your weight or your body. Okay, I'm talking about the actual process and the skills. During the diet, people tend to be locked in, but after it, the transition is really, really important to sustain your results. That that transition is why we have in our program, which is called Eat More Lift Heavy, it's 26 weeks long. That's why we have a third phase that helps you actually come out and make sure you can sustain your results. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. You can check it out. If you scroll down at the bottom of that page, there is a, I forget what it's called, but it's like the program at a glance, the whole 26 weeks, and you can see each week what we cover. And if you're doing a fat loss phase in the middle there in phase two, phase three is gonna help you come out of that and also learn to manage those skills for yourself. So if you want to see how it works, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you haven't heard episode 491 about set point theory, I would listen to that one next, by the way. If you're not following the show, episode 491. All right, so the week that you stop dieting, the week that you stop

  Scale math after a cut

  Philip Pape 32:23

  dieting, the scale is going to jump. And I'm just gonna say as much as three to six pounds. Men, women, any eight, size, you know, if you're a 100-pound woman, it's probably on the lower end. If you're a 300 pound man, it's probably on the higher end. But I want you to be prepared for it. I want you to know what that is. I want you to be confident that this is totally cool. Your body stores 400 to 500 grams of glycogen when you are well fed. Every gram of glycogen holds three grams of water. So if you refill that alone, you're gonna add three to four pounds. Then you're gonna have more food sitting in your gut because you're eating more. You're probably gonna have a little sodium that draws in even more fluid, and we get to our five to six pounds within a week or two of ending a diet. Could very well happen to you. In fact, if it's not happening, if you're not gaining weight at all, I would question if you're actually recovered. That's the cool thing about it, is we can look at this and reframe it as a positive thing. Now, let's give you some more math. A pound of body fat takes 3,500 extra calories. So, five pounds of fat gain. In other words, if you gain five pounds after you're finished a diet and you're worried that it's fat, that would mean if it's actually body fat, it would take 17,500 calories above your maintenance in those seven days, which is 2,500 calories a day over your maintenance. Not over what you were in your diet, but literally over your maintenance. Do you think you did that? No. That's the logic I like to leave people with. That's just so astounding in like fighting against the emotions in your brain about this. A pound of body fat, 3,500 extra calories. So if you gain five pounds in a week, you would have to have consumed 2,500 calories a day more than your maintenance. And if you didn't actually do that, well, guess what? It's not body fat. So then you don't have to react to it, you don't have to cut back down, you don't have to go back into that diet, be all fearful about it. Just wait about two weeks to three weeks, see what the trend's showing you. Guess what? You can always drift one direction or another. Go get macrofactor to help you do this. Use my code WITS and WAIS all one word, including the link in the show notes. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember that your metabolism recovers when you leave that deficit and when you put that tissue back on your body, not when you slowly reverse diet. I'm Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Tissue Capacity and Training Through Pain for Lifters Over 40 (Dr. Tom Walters) | Ep 492

Can resting an achy joint actually make it weaker? What should you do when pain flares during strength training? 

Dr. Tom Walters, board-certified orthopedic physical therapist and founder of Rehab Science, joins me to challenge the idea that pain always means you should stop moving.

Learn why there are no inherently bad movements, only loads and positions your body may not be prepared to handle yet. We cover heavy, slow resistance training for tendinopathy, why mild discomfort can be acceptable during rehab, and how your 24-hour response helps guide your next workout.

We also break down low back pain, mid-set flare-ups, range-of-motion modifications, explosive training, bone density, mobility, and strength training over 40.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why rest can backfire
2:09 – No bad movements, only dosage
8:28 – Tendons become the tissue bottleneck
10:38 – Heavy slow loading for tendinopathy
19:55 – Low back pain patterns explained
25:20 – Returning to lifts without fear
29:20 – What to do mid-set
35:31 – Power training for lifelong resilience
46:29 – Rehab science resources and takeaways

Episode resources:

• Tom’s book – Rehab Science: How to Overcome Pain and Heal from Injury

• Website: rehabscience.com 

• Instagram: @rehabscience 

• YouTube: @RehabScience 

• Transcript

  Why rest can backfire

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Many lifters tend to take a break when something hurts. You rest the joint, you stop doing a particular lift, you wait for the pain to go away before doing it again. The problem is the pain doesn't go away. Or it comes back the next time you squat or press, or three months later you're weaker, stiffer, even more afraid of the movement than before. My guest today is an expert in injury and rehab science and is going to explain why too much rest might be one of the worst things you can do for an achy joint, what to do when something flares up mid-workout, and how to build the kind of joint tissue that is more resilient to breaking down in the first place. If you've ever stopped doing a particular lift or lifting altogether because something didn't feel right and then you never got back to it, this one is for you. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and the premise that we're challenging today is that when something hurts in the gym, you rest it until it stops hurting, or maybe avoid the movement forever. It's what a lot of people do, and it feels sometimes like the safe thing, but that approach might be making the problem worse. My guest today is Dr. Tom Walters, a board-certified orthopedic physical therapist and the founder of rehab science. He spent nearly two decades treating everyone from weekend lifters to circus LA performers, taught kinesiology and pain science at the university level for nearly a decade, and reaches over 10 million people a month with his rehab content. He's also the author of an incredible book. You guys should definitely check it out. We'll link to the show notes. It's called Rehab Science, How to Overcome Pain and Heal from Injury. Today, Tom is going to walk us through what happens in your tissue, your connective tissue, your joints, based on how you rest or move it, how to decide whether to keep training or to back off when something hurts, how to think about tissue capacity as a longevity strategy. Plus, we'll get into things like self-management of pain, injury,

  No bad movements, only dosage

  Philip Pape 2:09

  how to heal up and get back to doing what you love to do. Tom, it's a pleasure to have you on Wits and Weights. Welcome to the show.

  Dr. Tom Walters 2:15

  Thanks for having me, Phil. I'm excited to be here. All the topics that you mentioned there are such important ones. So I'm really excited. It's going to be the things that I've seen over the years of people thinking about tissue capacity and what do you do when you have pain? How do you work through it? Like such important questions that come up. So I'm excited to chat about all this.

  Philip Pape 2:34

  Yeah, I'm excited too because we're getting old, you know, creaky bones, creaky joints, us 45-year-olds. And I'm kind of joking, my audience knows I didn't even get started lifting until I was 40. And it's been the best thing for me, even though I've had surgeries and pain. And a lot of folks I talk to, they say when things hurt, you know, the fear goes up. Should I switch things? Should I avoid a lift? Should I stop lifting for two weeks? Should I take a bunch of ibuprofen? Whatever. And there's something you wrote in your book that it's less about the position and the movement. Like there are no bad movements. It's more about the volume of the position and movement. I think that's a good place to start, unless you think otherwise.

  Dr. Tom Walters 3:13

  Yeah, no, that's a great one. You know, this is something that's kind of changed over the years. I mean, when I came out of physical therapy school in 2007, I was much more at that time, we were much more inclined to tell people when they had a pain, we would look for some kind of problem with their biomechanics or their structure or their posture. And we kind of blamed all pain on that. And it's not to say that those things aren't relevant in some cases, but I think what we've come to realize over the years is that pain is much more complex. And we kind of we talk about it more now as looking at sensitivities that people can develop rather than sort of demonizing particular exercises or movements. Because in most cases, it's not that a particular posture or a movement is bad if it produces symptoms. It's usually just kind of the volume, like you said, like the volume. Like people may be, if you look at postural stresses, they're really low load stresses. But if you sit all day and you hold your body in one position, even if you stand in perfect posture, like right, we used to, you'd see those images of like this is perfect military posture and this is bad posture. No matter what posture you're in, if you hold it for long periods of time, it will probably become uncomfortable. And so you see examples of these things across the movement kind of spectrum. Like you can look at people who look like they have what would be considered sort of dysfunctional or bad movement who don't have any symptoms. They have no problems. And this kind of gets us into this tissue capacity type discussion where what's kind of like the training state or the capacity your tissue has. And in a lot of cases, people end up developing pain when their tissues don't have the capacity to meet the demands they're putting on it. And so again, it's not really that something's necessarily bad, a particular movement or exercise is bad. It's in a lot of cases that the person is doing too much of it or they've ramped up the intensity too quickly. And for whatever, you know, whatever variable it is, they've kind of surpassed their tissue capacity. And, you know, pain is an important experience. Like your nervous system is essentially telling you, like, hey, wake up. There's something potentially dangerous happening here. You need to adjust.

  Philip Pape 5:14

  Yeah. You talk about the duration in one position, but you also talk about adaptation, the stress on your body, and the ability to meet those demands. And that's a lot of what we talk about with just strength training in general, right? In that your body is resilient. And so, hey, this guy that's deadlifting 800 and has not had an issue, but he has a rounded back. Why is that okay or not okay? Right. You know, you get the criticisms on absolute terms or on specific anthropometry or biometrics, as opposed to what you said is everybody can adapt to certain things. I just listened to another podcast someone forwarded me, and he's like, I want you to listen to this. The eight unsafe exercises that you should never do again. But two of them were deadlift and back squat. And they're trying to make some various cockamakimi arguments that I think ultimately came down to poor form and you know, the typical arguments about why people fail these movements. But what is the verdict on like, is there a bad movement or not? And why not?

  Dr. Tom Walters 6:07

  Yeah, there's not a bad movement. There's just movements you aren't prepared for. You know what I mean? So if you look at deadlifting, right? Like a lot of people have back complaints that are initiated by deadlifts. Like you hear this a lot, like people get worried about I'm gonna have a disc bulge or a disc hernation, it's gonna hurt their lumbar spine, their low back in some way. And you know, anytime you put external load on your system, which is what you're doing in strength training, you do have to be more considerate of, you know, I think there is an argument in those things, and I even talk about this in the book, that form, there's form is more relevant when you add external load to your system. Like if you're a total newbie to deadlifting, you probably want to start with as close as you can be to kind of a neutral spine and learning to really hip hinge well. And, you know, you probably when you're brand new to a movement like that and you don't have the tissue capacity developed, going in and doing the rounded spine like some of these elite lifters can do probably doesn't make sense for you. Like if you're looking to just minimize injury risk, I think there are things that you can think about from a form standpoint. So it's not like saying form never matters, but to say that there are exercises people should never do is completely inappropriate to me. It just people get injured when they don't have the capacity to tolerate that stress. Your body, just like you said, the musculoskeletal system has this amazing ability to adapt. It just takes time, right? Your cardiovascular system adapts much more quickly than your musculoskeletal system. So it takes a while for connective tissues to thicken, for muscles to hypertrophy, for bone density to increase. These things don't happen in like a week. Like, you know what I mean? Like you, it takes, even if you look at the hypertrophy research and in the muscle research, it's like that stuff isn't starting to occur until like four to six weeks of consistent lifting. And I think you need to think about, you need to be have respect for your current training state and your tissue capacity. And you need to think about, right, when we think about strength training, we talk about progressive overload all the time. Like you we think about progressive overload in terms of building in terms of strength and performance, but you also kind of need to think about progressive overload in terms of reducing injury risk. So you've got to be intelligent about how you design your program. I was moving my daughter's bed the other day. Like it was basically a deadlift. Like I need to, you need to do that in life sometimes. So to skip it because someone's made you believe it's bad only increases it increases your injury risk when you actually have to use that movement pattern under a load.

  Philip Pape 8:24

  Yeah, but you you mentioned something really helpful, really useful about respect

  Tendons become the tissue bottleneck

  Philip Pape 8:28

  for your current training state. And it got me thinking, it's not just about strength or muscle mass. You mentioned tissue capacity and connected tissue. There's the cardiovascular system, there's your nervous system, there's bone density. So now it gets me thinking, is one of those the bottleneck more than others? And should we be thinking of training in a different way, particularly when we're new? But then also for us intermediate and advanced lifters that are now strong enough to hurt ourselves. But is there a bottleneck? Is there a way to think about training that's beyond just like strength and muscle?

  Dr. Tom Walters 8:57

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think from a tissue standpoint, that's an interesting question. Most people end up having connective tissue injuries, you know. So that's like your tendon, ligament, fascia, that kind of stuff. You know, I think when you look at people when it comes to strength training, in a lot of cases your muscles can handle it or you just get fatigued, you know? It seems like when people end up developing a kind of pathology, if you want to call it, some pain issue or an injury, it ends up being in their connective tissues, especially tendons. You know, like tendons are probably the number one tissue problem I treat in physical therapy, whether it's a lifter who's developed a tendonopathy or it's some sort of like aerobic endurance athlete who's putting really high volume loading, like a runner who has Achilles tendinopathy or patellar tendinopathy. It really, I think if you look at it from a tissue standpoint, from what I've seen over the years, probably the connective tissues are the bottleneck. Muscles have such a good blood supply, they heal really well. You know, maybe you're less likely to hurt them because you'll kind of get fatigued and you just can't do anymore. But those connective tissue injuries, especially tendons, are where most people end up having issues, lifters or like I say, runners and endurance athletes, they all kind of that's the number one thing I kind of see in the clinic.

  Philip Pape 10:12

  So let's start, let's let's take that example. So a tendon tendinopathy, something is starting to aggravate you. And let's say you do been doing a lot of bicep curls, you know, with a barbell or a lot of squats, and you know, people I noticed have issues with how they position their arms and and such, you know, extension of the wrist and whatnot. Obviously, everything is kinetically linked, right, and systemic. When people start to have that pain, okay, what's the next thing they should think about?

  Heavy slow loading for tendinopathy

  Philip Pape 10:38

  Is there an aspect of rest? Is there an aspect of just changing the intensity or the volume but continuing to do it? And is there an aspect of like load? Because there's lots of different theories floating around, a lot of armchair theories of like, no, you got to use pin firing where you like really go low load but high rep to kind of re or break up the scar tissue and like re-develop it. Right. So, what are your thoughts on that?

  Dr. Tom Walters 11:03

  Yeah, I haven't heard of that one. Pin firing. Okay. Yeah. If you look at the evidence, it's pretty clear cut. Like when it comes to tendon disorders, the thing that has the most evidence is heavy, slow loading. So it's heavy, slow resistance training. And there are different paradigms for this. It used to be, so look, if if somebody has a tendonopathy, I am not someone you we want to be careful with how much we kind of promote rest when we talk about people. But there is a point of that sometimes, like a day or two of just letting a tendon calm down that can be really useful. So I don't, I'm sure you've experienced this. I've had a lot of tendonopathy. Sometimes loading it right away just doesn't feel great. And if I just give it a day or two, it kind of simmers down and then you can start loading it again. And really, like I say, if you look at the research, tendons adapt when we load them intelligently. And so what we will look at now, like I said, there are kind of different paradigms for this one. In the research over the years, it used to be that we would go from we would use different types of contractions to kind of build these programs to load tendons. So we'd start with isometric contractions, which are contractions where the joint's not moving. Like if you're thinking about that bicep tendon, you might think about kind of doing a bicep curl, but just holding it your elbow at 90 degrees and just holding it there. And so sometimes those are really useful. Isometrics are kind of interesting in that they have this hypoalgesic effect where in some people they'll reduce tendon pain. So if somebody had an Achilles tendon issue, the beginning isometric phase was you'd have them do a calf raise on both legs and then they'd at the top position, they'd shift over to the painful side and they'd hold it there. And so in the research, they'd have people do four to five reps of this and hold for around 40, 45 seconds. And that in some people would really help reduce their pain. And so you would do that in the beginning. Then you'd go to eccentrics, which are contractions where the muscle fibers are lengthening. So if you think about that bicep example again, you might position your arm up in the kind of top position of the bicep curl, pass the weight to your arm, and then slowly lower it. You're doing the lowering phase back down. If it's the calf raise, you'd go to the top positions, you'd go up on two legs, shift over the painful leg, and then lower on the painful side. So, but then the research has kind of shifted. So that was the way we thought about it for a long time. We'd go isometric, eccentric, and then we'd do full range of motion under load. Now the research has kind of shifted to where it looks like just doing full range emotion with heavy, slow contractions is just as good as the isometrics and eccentrics. And I think it's something with patients that I experiment with. Everybody's a little different in what they respond to. But you know, the key with these types of things, and then, you know, the way we have people think about it, and this might be surprising people, is that with tendons, you it's okay to have kind of mild discomfort while you're loading the tendon. I actually think if the person feels no discomfort, the load is not strong enough. And if they have discomfort above, say, a three or four out of 10, then it's probably too much. And so you're kind of finding this sweet spot to encourage tendon adaptation. And then we'll have people track it for 24 hours. So if their pain, their baseline pain is worse 24 hours later, then it probably meant you'd had too heavy of a load or you did too many sets and reps, the volume was too high. So, you know, rehab always has kind of a trial and error. Each person's a little bit of an experiment. You know, nobody, people don't all fit the same exact formula. But I would say, you know, when you look at the research, it's pretty clear cut. We have a lot of studies in certain tendons, Achilles tendon and patellar tendon, are where a lot of this started where we really see that heavy, slow contractions have the best evidence.

  Philip Pape 14:16

  And of course, trial and error is the feedback loop that we should all be going through when it comes to anything with our body, right? Like we talk about that with food. We talk about the biofeedback. So heavy and slow, let's just define real quick. When we say heavy, is it like a certain percentage of our one RM, like over 80% load? Or is it, you know, a rep range you're going for? And then slow, are we talking adding in a pause? Are we just like a couple seconds up and down on the eccentric and concentric?

  Dr. Tom Walters 15:25

  Yeah, that's great. Really, the heavy part is based on symptoms. So you really are gauging it based on their symptoms. So you're trying to find a load that keeps the person in that sweet spot of their symptoms. So it's really in that kind of three to four out of ten, like mild pain. So the load is really specific to the person's tissue sensitivity. Okay. So you've got heavy and then slow. So this is a great one. This is kind of actually newer in the research. Like we would have just slow is, I mean, that's pretty subjective. Like back before, back in the day, I would have just had people, I would have said, you know, two seconds on the concentric, three to four seconds on the eccentric, kind of like normal strength training in a way. But there's been some kind of cool new studies where they've been using metronomes to have people complete the contraction. And I think if I remember right, it's set to 60 beats per minute. So it's kind of like if you're doing like a calf raise, for instance, you'd kind of go like one, two, and then one, two. And so it's like, I want to say it's a, I'm trying to remember the exact time frame, but it's interesting. These studies where they have people follow the metronome, they seem to get better results following. And and what's interesting about it is they don't think it's necessarily what's happening that it's changing something dramatically, the tissue. It's about the kind of sensory input from having to pay attention that because a lot of these disorders in the physical body that we think about as just purely the physical body, they actually change things in your sensory motor cortex and your brain. You know, when people have pain, it changes how they perceive their body and it changes the motor output of how they recruit their muscles. And so it looks like some of this metronome type feedback and following at a certain tempo actually can be helpful from a central nervous system standpoint, maybe more than what it's actually doing to the local tissues. So and you can get free metronome apps, you know, you can download them. And if people want to find these studies, they can just look up Achilles Teninopathy metronome study and they can find the exact kind of protocol they used in those. But it's a great, you know, if you don't have a tool like that, just try to go slow. Maybe think about kind of two to three seconds in each phase. Just deliberately make it slow, intentionally focus on full range motion and and that quality of movement.

  Philip Pape 17:34

  So this is important because people have always asked me, what do I listen to when I lift? And I say, I don't listen to anything because I want to be mindful of the movement and you're hitting on that. And also you do talk about like the neuromuscular connections and mental health and everything. So I like what you're saying, but I also think it's important in general as people train to do it that way, not for time under tension, but really for the mindfulness of it. And also just guys listening, you know, if you've had flare-ups or certain joint issues, you might find pauses are beneficial versus using the stretch reflex. What's your thought on that one? Like like let's say a squat or like a bicep curl, like doing a pause, a long pause in the stretch position, I mean, versus using the stretch reflex.

  Dr. Tom Walters 18:13

  Yeah, this is where like the nuance of loading is actually really cool. You know, I think in rehab it has a lot of relevance because a pause is essentially isometric loading. And we've already seen early days isometric loading was really helpful for especially tendon disorders. And so I think it can be really nice. Like, you know, because I didn't mention it before, but modifying range of motion is another one that can be helpful sometimes. Like if people have a spot where their pain really kicks up, they could use that heavier load, maybe stop just shy of where the pain really kicks on. And maybe at that spot they do an isometric. And I think, you know, I had a rotator cuff tendinopathy that on my right shoulder. I was a gymnast in high school. And so sometimes if I do a bunch of handstands, it will kind of flare up again. But I was finding that when that was happening, when I would strengthen my shoulder extra rotators, I was using a band or a cable machine, and it was my right shoulder. If I went out, I couldn't get through full range of motion. When I'd get out to the end, it would really kick up the pain. And what I found with that is that I could kind of take it out to that point. And when I couldn't go farther with my right arm, I'd use my left, my other arm to kind of pull on the cable so that I could go a little bit farther, and then it'd hold an isometric there and then do so. I'd do a pause. So I was doing a pause at that spot, maybe one to two seconds, whatever it was. And then I would do a really slow eccentric back. And it was amazing how much I really think that expedited my recovery versus if I just only did what my injured arm could do through that available range of motion, getting out to that hold spot, I felt like was because it really is just about the right dosage of stress. And so you're really trying to load the tendon in the spot where that sensitivity is occurring. And I think those kind of pause or isometric holds can be really helpful for that.

  Philip Pape 19:46

  Yeah. And thank you for expanding the principle here to more of, you know, finding a way to do it in your training and perhaps assisting the other limb, perhaps using a shortened range of motion. You know, I I used a lot of pin presses when I was recovering from shoulder surgery until I developed full range. What's the pin press? Oh, oh, just just putting spotter arms or pins to shorten the range of a bench.

  Dr. Tom Walters 20:07

  Got it, got it. Yeah.

  Philip Pape 20:08

  Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so this is really good stuff. But I do like the idea of a pause isometric at the pain spot. So I want to migrate a little bit down the body here because I was thinking about the low back when you were talking about tendinopathy. And I think one of the common sources of discomfort for so many people is the low back pain. And it comes in different ways. Like sedentary people have a ton of low back pain when they have desk jobs. You just see it almost inevitably to a T. And I know a lot of those folks, they start lifting or deadlifting and the pain goes away. I know I've had situations where I've really hit my RDLs hard or something, and you know, the back starts to throb. But then, like you suggested, maybe resting forever, it doesn't really go away

  Low back pain patterns explained

  Philip Pape 20:46

  necessarily until you do something about it. So the low back specifically or disc bulges, MRIs, like all that whole thing, but just the general pain that people have. What what are your thoughts on where to start diagnosing that for themselves?

  Dr. Tom Walters 20:59

  Low back pain, you know, it it's such a, it's probably the most experienced human pain that exists. You know, it's like 80% of people are going to have low back pain at some point in their lifetime. If you just survey the population at any point in time, about 25% of people have some type of low back pain. So it's such a big kind of complex issue. And especially when you look at the people who have chronic symptoms that have gone on for longer than three to six months, where there's some sort of mismatch in what their nervous system is telling them and what you actually can identify in their physical body. And so a lot of factors come into. So I think at a base level, for anyone with pain, especially if you have spine pain, you want to just think about your whole kind of health ecosystem. And when it comes to spine pain, it's so important to think about things that people might not even associate with physical therapy right off the bat, like your sleep hygiene, like how much you're sleeping. It's when our musculoskeletal system heals. It's when remodeling happens. So sleep is a huge part. So many patients I have with spine pain have a lot of stress in their lives. So I just think there's something about the spine and us kind of holding stress subconsciously, and whether it's the neck or the low back. And I think trying as best you can to kind of manage stress levels is a huge part. And then movement, you know, movement's probably the other, and it can just be walking. Like it's amazing how much walking, how therapeutic that is for the low back. You can overcomplicate and do all these corrective and therapeutic exercises, but sometimes just walking and just moving a little more is the best antidote to low back pain. And so I think, you know, when you start getting into how people should think about approaching back pain outside of kind of those variables, when you're thinking about it maybe a little more specific to rehab, you know, I think one of the easiest forms. Frameworks people can look at is sort of paying attention to most people with low back pain will either be provoked by positions of spinal flexion, so rounding their back, or by spinal extension. And so we'll start to break people down into flexion versus extension sensitivities. And a lot of people honestly are more the flexion sensitivity, especially if they're lifters and they've been deadlifting or whatever and they have a flare-up of back pain because you're in a flexion position when you bend over to deadlift, right? So even if you try to maintain spine neutral, we have bone pin studies where they put pins in the bones of the low back. Even if you try your best to keep your low back neutral, it flexes. It's just natural biomechanics. As your hip flexes, your pelvis goes into anterior pelvic tilt, your lumbar spine is going to flex a little bit. And so that is a flexion position. And you know, if somebody has an injury in a position like that, then they would most likely fall into this flexion sensitivity where if they come into the clinic and I have them bend over, I do different flex, or they have to sit for long periods at work, that might that's gonna have a tendency to kind of flare up their symptoms. And so, but then you have people on the opposite side where if they arch their back, they get more symptoms. Maybe they have something like stenosis, or maybe they notice when they sleep on their stomach, they lay in their stomach, it triggers their back pain. And so in the beginning of rehab, sometimes at just a base level, because I think whenever we have a pain, we want to try and figure out what's the tissue causing this. That's most people what they want to do. Like, is this a disc? Is it a muscle? Is it a tendon? What is it? And I think sometimes we can kind of let that go. I know it's hard for people, but don't worry so much about the tissue because it doesn't really change a lot about what you do to get better. You're really, really what's important is to kind of pay attention to your symptom behavior and look to see like what are the positions or movements that provoke my symptoms? And are there other movements or positions that relieve my symptoms? And just, you know, you don't want to go around all day like being hyper-vigilant and just thinking about your pain and your symptoms all the time, but just starting to notice what is that symptom pattern like. And then in the beginning, when pain is acute, a lot of what we do in rehab is, you know, so say somebody had a flexion sensitivity. A lot of what we do in the beginning is give them extension exercises because extension exercises usually kind of relieve symptoms. And so it might be temporarily removing or modifying some of the flexion movement just until the system calms down and desensitizes. Maybe you give them extension kind of movements or exercises to help speed that process up. And then you gradually reintroduce the movements or positions that triggered symptoms previously. So you're not avoiding them altogether because what'll happen to people when they just rest, and that's their only intervention, is that they will usually feel better when they rest. But as soon as they try to go load the system or challenge it in that way that created their pain, it'll just come back again. So that isn't helpful for life. You've got to make the system more resilient and get that long-term kind of desensitization. So usually then what we're doing is we're gradually introducing the movements and positions that triggered their symptoms in kind of a systematic way.

  Philip Pape 25:45

  So then you said, okay, you need to get back in and not avoid it and kind of work through it. So let's talk about that. I think you've you've talked about like the three or four out of ten. If it's kind of no worse than that, then maybe you're in a good spot. How do you like get back into it without the fear and making sure you're doing it right?

  Dr. Tom Walters 26:03

  Yeah. As soon as you move more quickly, if you look at the full force is mass times acceleration. So if you accelerate quickly, you're adding more force to your system.

  Returning to lifts without fear

  Dr. Tom Walters 26:11

  So yeah, I think when people are getting back into it, there's a lot of things you can modify. So for like deadlifting as an example, usually it's as people get deeper into the deadlift where they'll experience symptoms. So right away in the beginning, of course, you're probably dropping load. Usually it's not a good idea to go back to whatever load you were at before you started having pain or got injured. So usually you're dropping load, and then you're having people focus on just part of that range of motion. So you're looking at what's, you know, what's the range of motion that you can complete and stay in sort of that mild discomfort. And then knowing that you still have to track the person for hours, you know, probably 24 hours after that to see how they respond. Because when people are warmed up, you don't always get a good indication of how they're going to respond. So, you know, I think that can be a good way. A lot of times for strength exercises, focusing on the isometric or the eccentric can be a good way to get back into something, you know, like like you mentioned, like a deadlift has that concentric phase at the beginning. So maybe you could, you know, maybe you're able to devise a system where you are taking some of the concentric out and just starting with the eccentric. It could be that people who are looking to go back to deadlifts start with like a Jefferson type curl or something like where it's really unloaded. They could just use a dumbbell, one dumbbell, and kind of start just working on that movement, but starting up at the top position. So they're just working on the eccentric. More like an RDL or something. Yeah, exactly. Fast with their partner, like figure out a way to kind of start training that movement again. So I think a lot of it is reducing load, shortening range of motion, maybe only doing the eccentric phase at the beginning and maybe adding in that isometric or pause at certain parts in the range of motion, uh slowing it down. But yeah, I think, you know, I hurt my back deadlifting years ago, and it was because I went back to the weight that I just can was what I had done before, and I hadn't deadlifted a long time, I hadn't been deadlifting. And it just was a tissue capacity issue. I mean, I literally just had, but for a month I could barely get up off the toilet, sit down. Like it was bad. I mean, it was really painful. And I think if I hadn't had my background, that could have been really fear-inducing. You know, I could have been really worried about is this gonna get better? Luckily, I didn't have any neurological symptoms that could have made it even scarier, but it was very painful. I mean, it was really down low in the back, in the connective tissues. It wasn't even really in my muscles, it was down in like the thoracolumbar fascia where all these back muscles, their fascia comes down and connects into the pelvis. And man, it hurts so bad. Like you made me realize how often I'm rotating my pelvis in daily life and you know, took about a month to recover. But it and it really was as it desensitized, it's not like I was completely resting and not moving. I was still going through the movement pattern, some in just daily life tasks, some intentionally, but not really loaded a ton at that time because but I was basing it on my symptoms. And I think that's so much of hopefully what people will hear when they think about if you're going through pain or an injury, a lot of what guides you and how much you load your system, because most rehab conditions are do really revolve a lot around a lot kind of loading the system and resistance training is really listening to letting your symptoms be the guide. You know, you want to, for most conditions, I think kind of thinking about am I in kind of a mild discomfort level, it's tolerable, and I don't have some big flare up afterwards. It's kind of a good rule of thumb and letting your symptoms kind of dictate how much load you're putting on the system.

  Philip Pape 29:39

  I think the older we get seeing how populations train who really want to train and do it well, you're gonna get injured. You're gonna get pain. Sometimes you just have an off day. What about during the set itself when pain starts to flare up? So it might be your knees on the squat, or again, it could be the back on the deadlift. Because I've had situations where, you know, you might call it a tweak or you might call it a like, what's going on there? Let me be more careful on the next rep or the next set, and it's fine, but then in other cases it gets worse. So how do you figure out what's going on there like during a set or during the exercise?

  What to do mid-set

  Dr. Tom Walters 30:11

  Man, if there was only an answer that worked in all scenarios, it depends. It depends. I think a lot of it is knowing your body, honestly, like knowing your body. And most of us, you know, all of us just probably are gonna have some pain issues or injuries along the way. And once you've had something, you're probably a little more likely to have that symptom again. And I think maybe what's helpful for people to know is okay, one, you've got to really pay attention to your body. But two, most of these pain issues are not true tissue injuries, they're not something to really be fearful of. They're just a they're just kind of a maybe just think of it as like an irritation. You know what I mean? Maybe there's some inflammation there, whatever it is. It's like you couldn't go, if you went and did an MRI, you probably wouldn't see anything there. Like there's not like to have an actual physical tissue injury, usually you've got to have really high force on the system. You know, it's like the soccer player who's running and cutting, or, you know, somebody, you know, there there has to be higher force on the system. So most of the things that most lifters are running into are more of like are are kind of these less worrisome kind of irritations. So I think sometimes it's helpful for people to know that because most of us want to connect pain to I hurt something in my body. And so we get into this kind of hurt versus harm discussion where it's like, okay, it hurts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I've harmed some structure. And so I think maybe that gives people a little bit of maybe that takes the stress level down a couple of pegs. So you can like that does give you some leeway to kind of experiment with it and see, okay, if I try this, I'm gonna try loading it a little bit more and see how it responds. If it flares up, then I just know, okay, that was just too much. And I'm gonna give it a little bit of a chance to calm down. Maybe I find some other movements that strengthen similar groups but don't provoke the symptoms as much. Or like I did, maybe you go and you work kind of in the kinetic chain, but you do a different movement pattern to kind of take some stress off of that region. But I think you're just it give it opens up the door, I think, to where you can kind of experiment a little bit with your pain system and those tissues and figure out how can I work around this. But I it just each person, there's just so much kind of nuance and experimentation that goes into figuring out what their body will tolerate. And I think it really comes down to like in the exercise, like I was talking about before, you're monitoring symptoms, but you have to be careful with that because a lot of soft tissue pain things get better when you're warm. So I think you've got to think about what are my symptoms during this, during the workout, knowing if it's a soft tissue issue, it probably feels better when I'm warmed up. And then let's track it for the next 24 hours afterward. And then just paying attention to that and designing your recovery program around those, how your body responds.

  Philip Pape 32:54

  The injury rate from lifting is the lowest of any sport we know, right? So, like soccer and running are probably number one and two or two and one. And there's a lot of things that you can experiment with. Chris Duffin was on the show, inventor of the you know, kabuki transformer bar and a whole bunch of other things. And he started training barefoot, saying that look, his his feet, you know, the feet are the core of like your whole body in some ways. And that helped him strengthen his feet musculature, which then translated to everything else feeling better. So you just never know, right?

  Dr. Tom Walters 33:22

  There's so many things you can modify, so many little biomechanical, like most of these pain issues are related to a stress you're putting on your body. And so a lot of what we look at now and actually in treating pain with people is just altering the stress slightly. Like, and those are all perfect examples of that. Like switching your shoe type, going barefoot, like changing your hand position. Like I, when I do pull-ups, I do all different types of hand position. I mean, I had this bicep tendinopathy that I got from rock climbing. I went rock climbing the buddy. I didn't ever rock climb, so I didn't really have that tissue capacity. But then when I came back to the gym, it was provoked by death uh by bench press and dips, which is very common for long head biceps when the shoulder goes into extension, it's loaded. And so it took me a while. It's all the main kind of foundational movement patterns. I will just sprinkle in kind of accessory lifts if something is kind of bothering me. I'm not doing those on a super consistent basis. And so, you know, with that biceps tendonopathy, I figured, okay, I'm going to modify these movements a little bit, change the range of motion, add in some rotator cuff strengthening. And then I remember down the road, I it was once in a while, I it would get triggered. And I realized it was, I found that if I did a flat bench press and seated rows on the same day, it would kind of tend to trigger it. But it took me months to figure that out. But they both put the shoulder back in extension and put stress on that bicep tendon. And so in that example, I ended up switching my workout a little bit so that I didn't do I wasn't doing seated rows.

  Philip Pape 34:46

  So much volume on the same day.

  Dr. Tom Walters 34:47

  It took me forever to figure that out. It's just a volume thing, right? And I could build that capacity up. But for me, it was just like, oh, this is easier. I'll just put, I'll just switch and put the seated row on a different day from my flat bench press. And the pain stopped happening. So I think there's so much of like what you talked about of like, don't be totally distracted during your workouts. Like, pay attention to what you're doing, like be thoughtful about how you design your programs. And if something keeps hurting, then it probably means that you are loading it in a way that it's not able to kind of recover and and heal. And so it doesn't probably mean that anything's broken or damaged, but it's just you're maintaining a sensitivity that you can fix if you just start paying attention to all the variables and experiment with tweaking things.

  Philip Pape 35:27

  It's true. It's true. And if if if you came from it from the lens of just traditional strength training rather than injury, and you realize just for a mid-back movement, you have like 20 variations of the cable row that bodybuilders have come up with. There's a reason for that. And if you like look at somebody's triated back as they move back or do it yourself, you can feel like the different muscles being used just slightly different. So I think that's great. I do want to quickly ask about explosive movements, because you did allude to it briefly. And again, personal examples is fine, because I'm doing it too. Like just today introduced a push press into my routine, which I hadn't done in years. And I had rotator cuff surgery on December. Now I can imagine some people saying, oh my God, that sounds dangerous. But for me, it was a way to like get some athleticism back, overload my shoulder a little bit in the overhead position, not do the static position, which actually is more irritating for me. So I feel like it's a good decision for me, but I'm curious about what you think in general about explosive movements.

  Power training for lifelong resilience

  Dr. Tom Walters 36:22

  Yeah, I mean, I like to get people back to explosive movements, especially because, well, if they need to do that in life for sure, then it makes sense, right? But like most of us, even just if you're not an athlete or something, there often is a need for explosive movement. So I think for most soft tissue, especially like most of these muscle tendon injuries, even ligament to some degree, people are probably gonna encounter things where they have to move rapidly in life, where there is that acceleration component, like something happens with your kid and you got to chase them really quick, or you something falls and you've got to catch it quickly. Like there's gonna be situations where you need to generate force rapidly, or one that comes up a lot older people's falls. Like people trip and we see lots of older people, you know. So this comes up a lot in older individuals where it's it's one thing to develop slow strength, but you also need to be able to develop force rapidly and have that power capability. And so I like, I like in the later stages of rehab, once people have kind of gotten through, you know, that heavy, slow kind of resistance training phase to bring in some more explosive movements. And in a lot of cases, I'm probably doing that more often in the lower body, but I think what you highlighted there, like that's something you enjoy and you found that the bottom position is actually more provocative. And, you know, it just it come, I think it boils down a lot to the person's goals, what they want to get back to, if that thing's important to them. But I think if you're looking at just from a tissue capacity standpoint, being able to do explosive movements is sort of the upper end of tissue capacity. And so if you really want to protect your system, that's gonna be one of the best things. Yeah, well, if you look at like tendons again, think about all the people. I've had so many friends ruptured their Achilles tendons recently, and they're all people who have become a little more sedentary, they've gained a little bit of weight, and then it's the whole weekend warrior thing. They go out and they one guy tore it in soccer, another person in basketball. You know, our tendons are meant to be like springs. And springs, you train a spring by putting force on tissue in kind of an explosive, rapid way, right? It's not the heavy, slow resistance training is good for building strength and making tissues more resilient, and it can be really helpful in rehab when you're looking to build capacity and bring pain down. But at a certain point, if you really want to prevent injury for those types of tissues, you probably need to introduce more explosive movement. So you're retraining that kind of that tendon's ability to store and release energy.

  Philip Pape 38:43

  And you've got people in their 50s, 60s, 70s who are listening, and I know some of them who are very athletic, not because they're athletes, but they just want to have fun. They want to go for their long bike rides, they want to go for hikes, whatever. And so they incorporate some of these things. There's also the bone density piece. Correct me if I'm wrong. I I believe the only way to like reverse osteoporosis is to you have to have explosive, like jumping type movements. Like to preserve bone density, you just need to be strong and lift heavy. But is that correct?

  Dr. Tom Walters 39:12

  I still don't know if the research will say that it totally reverses it, but for sure the things that have the best evidence for at least maintaining or slowing any kind of bone loss are strength training and impact. Like a lot of it in the research is jumping. You know, it's like jumping from a certain height. It's like the landing of it.

  Philip Pape 39:27

  So jumping off a box instead of off the box.

  Dr. Tom Walters 39:31

  Exactly. Yep. That landing. Yeah, those are the two that get cited in a lot of these studies for maintaining bone density.

  Philip Pape 39:37

  Okay. And then the last thing here is, you know, there's a lot of confusion about mobility work, you know, and again, but uh, you know, when it comes to the the idea of mobility and flexibility, now I did an episode recently about the some of the recent evidence showing that, you know, the length and position that you were talking about earlier is high most correlated and the stretch reflex with improved flexibility. And it's even it's equivalent to or even slightly superior to like flexibility work, whether that's yoga or what have you. So, as a rehab expert, what is your thoughts on that?

  Dr. Tom Walters 40:09

  So, look, if I look at people who have from a rehab standpoint, there is a place for flexibility and mobility sometimes, but it's not as much of my emphasis as the resistance training. So it really boils down to does the person demonstrate a mobility impairment that affects them in daily life? If you look at most healthy people, they tend to have the mobility they need to accomplish most of their daily tasks. So giving them a bunch of like flexibility exercises and mobility exercises probably doesn't make sense unless they truly have some restriction that limits them from doing something. And this is, I was a gymnast, I used to go do the splits. Like I was a kickboxer and gymnast, like I spent a lot of time static stretching. So, but I don't do that much of it anymore because it's not really relevant to what I'm doing in life and I can accomplish all the tasks of my daily life with the current, with my current mobility and flexibility. And so, and just for people listening, usually flexibility is usually thinking about kind of muscle tendon unit and how long, how much it can stretch. Kind of like if you think about like a sit-and-reach test for your hamstrings. But and mobility, that term has become such a marketing term over the last few years. But the way it was originally taught, mobility tended to relate more to joints. Like, so how much range of motion could you move your joint through? And there was active and passive mobility. If people come into the clinic, sometimes we'll move their like if they had shoulder surgery and they can't do active range of motion yet, we'll move their shoulder for them. And that would be like passive mobility. And then when you move on your own, it's active mobility. And so, you know, if somebody has in rehab, especially like after surgery, a lot of people have mobility restrictions. And it's one of the first things we work on in physical therapy because people can develop contractures and deficits if you don't prioritize mobility in the beginning. And so, but then once mobility starts to look normal, then it really is this shift to neuromuscular control and strength training. And that's really how most every physical therapy program ends, is with a focus on those. So kind of that active control and building up tissue capacity through strength training.

  Philip Pape 42:04

  The framing of if you're kind of in a deficit, which if you've had surgery, you're that you're in a deficit from your like full normal baseline. That's a great place for it. And and I I could imagine somebody who's, let's say, on the older side who's just been sedentary their whole life, even if they're not injured, but now they want to get into lifting weights, they might even have some sort of deficit. But it's not that big. Like even though they're older, they're not injured either. And so let's not let's give people the benefit of the doubt that they can start loading their tissue if they can just uh sit down and get off a box. But let's say they can't sit all the way down to a box. Well, they can sit down to like a higher band and then eventually a box, right? Exactly. Um I think that's a good good way to put it and ultimately it makes it easier on people too, because then it's like, okay, you don't have to do 12 things and you're fitness every time. You just have to basically lift and move and throw in a few things that are good for your joints and your lungevity. All right. Last question is just kind of hypothetical. So if somebody's listening that's let's say they're my age, 45 or 50 years old, and they want to make sure they're still lifting, moving, athletic, whatever, when they're 80, like what's the one thing? I know it's hard to simplify, but like what's one rule they should really prioritize today?

  Dr. Tom Walters 43:13

  I think it really does boil down to resistance training, consistent resistance training, you know, through full range of motion, because you're getting so many benefits. You know, we're just talking about mobility a second ago. If you have a strength training program and you are making sure to go through full range of motion, you are achieving mobility at the same time. So, and I think that's kind of similar to the studies you were talking about where they look at static stretching versus, you know, a mobile like a resistance training exercise under load. Like if we compared static hamstring stretching, where you just sit and hold it versus doing dead like RDLs or something, you know, you can achieve increases in flexibility and mobility with the resistance training. And I think to me, you're kind of killing two birds with one stone there. You're getting stronger, you're making your tissue more resilient, you're maintaining muscle mass, which we know is so right, like sarcopenia with people losing muscle mass as they age, you're helping to prevent loss of bone density. Strength training has so many benefits. It makes the discs in your spine stronger, your ligaments get thicker. There's just so many benefits to it. And I think as we get older, if you look at people like I've worked in nursing homes a few different times throughout my career, a lot of times what happens to people is they start losing their functional independence. And so when they start losing their ability to transfer, for instance, like they can't transfer, they can't get up from sitting to standing and back down, they start losing some of that capability, or you know, they're having issues with their gait, their walking cycle. A lot of those issues come on gradually. Like people just aren't thinking about it and it kind of creeps up on them. And the cool thing about the muscular system is if you care about it, you can make changes at any point in your life. You know what I mean? You could live. Literally start, you could have been sedentary until you're 75 and start a strength training program, and you will get stronger and become more functional. But I think it's hard for people sometimes when something is such a slow, long process, it's hard for people to think about how significant these daily inputs that we put into it. And I think it's easy for me and probably easier for you because I like exercising. So it's like one of my main mental health strides. And I just love being able to do pull-ups and jump and do things like that. But I know a lot of people who that is like they dread it. It's homework to them. They don't want to. But I think if you're someone who comes from that side of things, the resistance training, like having a resistance training program, it could just be two to three days a week where you're trying to get all the major muscle groups. It doesn't have to be really fancy. A lot of times it can be body weight type stuff. Just having that built into your weekly routine is going to help offset so many of these kind of longevity issues that people are discussing and functional limitations that people experience as they get older. And besides the physical body, all the brain health benefits, the nervous system benefits. There's just, I think if you had to pick one thing, that would be it. I mean, mobility and flexibility kind of exercise programs, sure, those can be great and feel good. And I know a lot of people like them for their mental health, but that would be a secondary, that would be farther down the list to me from the strength training. And if you do string training correctly, right, you can get a cardiovascular stimulus too, right? You could do like circuit training. Like some of those are like the hardest workouts ever. You go join a class and they move you through stations, you're getting stronger, you're working mobility, and you have a cardiovascular component to it. So, you know, that would maybe be the one other thing is thinking about the person's aerobic capacity and their cardiovascular system. So that would be the thing I'd prioritize the most from a kind of longevity if you had to pick one thing as you age.

  Philip Pape 46:24

  The physique stuff, which is where a lot of, you know, 20-year-olds start thinking about this stuff. I didn't, you know, I kind of missed the boat on that. I didn't like exercise, actually, Tom, until I was about 40 and then discovered like low and slow strength training and the benefits that came from that, along with the ability to eat more food, which is always fun. But so having said all that, people, you gotta you gotta lift weights, and hopefully that's why you're listening to this podcast. I wanna have you guys look up Tom and reach out to him. Before we do, I'm gonna plug his book for him because I have it and I love it and it's really good. Rehab science. Uh we'll put a link in the show notes. He's got a bunch of follow-on series that cover different parts of the body if you're struggling in one area looking for tons of illustrations and background and progression schemes and all the stuff we talked about today. Other than that, Tom, where should we send people to find you?

  Dr. Tom Walters 47:10

  Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks again. I'm at rehab science mostly on Instagram and YouTube. And, you know, kind of like you alluded to, all the things that I show on my accounts are, you know, the rehab

  Rehab science resources and takeaways

  Dr. Tom Walters 47:20

  kind of movements and exercises that tend to help people with different common conditions. So if people are looking for something like you, usually I'll cover three or four exercises, something like that, both on Instagram and YouTube. If people have any questions, they listen to this and they're wondering about more detail on a particular thing, they can DM me on Instagram and I'll try to help either send them a YouTube video link or point them in the right direction. It's like logically, I think people can understand that your physical musculoskeletal system is this system of muscles and tendons, and but it's very mechanical. You know, pain gets more complex with the nervous system, but your physical, your musculoskeletal system is a very mechanical system. And I think it's I think people can connect the dots on that. Like if I strength train and my tissues get stronger, they can handle more force before they fail. It makes sense then that you're less likely to be injured if you're stronger.

  Philip Pape 48:06

  It's fantastic. Yeah. The the whole and the whole brain side is is amazing. We think of like mechanal transduction and how our like what we do physically translates to chemical and electrical things in our body. And it's all so connected. In an amazing way. Wits and weights, thank you for coming on the show, Tom. It's been a pleasure. I wish I could talk for hours to this great stuff. We'll send folks to Instagram, rehab science, link to the book. And yeah, thanks for coming on.

  Dr. Tom Walters 48:29

  Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.

Why Your Body Fights Fat Loss (The Truth About Setpoint Theory) | Ep 491

Your metabolism isn't the problem. It's not making fat loss harder. On a normal diet, your metabolism slows far less than you've been told. Your body does "defend" itself, though setpoint theory may not be the reason why.

I'm breaking down the real reason your weight comes back and the 3 fixes that work. You'll also hear why the researcher behind the Biggest Loser study changed his mind, what happens to your hunger a full year after the diet ends, and what reverse dieting is doing to your recovery (it's not what you think).

Hit play if you want to lose the fat once and keep it off for good.

Download the free 14-Day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide mentioned in the episode: https://witsandweights.com/fatloss

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, metabolism recovery, fat loss over 40, body recomposition, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The reality about setpoint theory
4:10 - Has the Biggest Loser data been misinterpreted?
7:18 - The "floor" your body defends hardest
8:54 - The real cause of real fat loss resistance
12:21 - Building a diet you can stick with
14:19 - 3 fixes to remove the fat loss friction
17:36 - The truth about reverse dieting and recovery
22:31 - Bonus: 2-question check before your next fat loss phase

Episode Resources:

• 14-Day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide (free) 

• The Slower Cut That Beats a Fast One (Fat Loss Over 40)

• Transcript

  The reality about setpoint theory

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Picture this scenario. You've cut your calories, the scale starts to move for a few weeks, and then your body starts to push back. You're hungrier, maybe you're a little colder, maybe your workouts feel flatter, and your fat loss slows to a crawl, maybe it stops altogether. Now, the story you've often heard is that your metabolism is broken, or you've hit some fixed set point that your body will defend, maybe to the death. Today I'm going to show you what your body is actually doing when it fights fat loss, why most of that fight is not where you think it is, and why the popular fix that people reach for to protect their metabolism doesn't do what they think. Stick around because once you see where the real resistance is coming from, you can plan around it instead of feeling like your own body is betraying you. Welcome to Wit and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and the situation for this episode is all about set point theory and metabolism when it comes to your body fighting fat loss. So you've dieted before, maybe more than once, probably way more than once, and every time you get a few weeks or even a couple months in, it stops working the way it did at the start. And maybe somewhere along the way, you heard on a podcast or read in a book this idea that your body has a set point, a weight that it wants to be, and it defends that weight, kind of like a control system or like a thermostat defends the temperature you set it to. You go below that, and then the furnace kicks on, your metabolism drops, the hunger goes up, your body drags you back, kicking and screaming to where it started. It's like it has to end up there, is the way I like to put it. And there is some science behind that idea. That's why it's talked about, that's why it has spread so far in the industry. But I think the version that is talked about is oversimplified in a way that leads people to do the wrong things. This is one of my most largest frustrations in this industry is the perversion or cherry picking of science in a way that leads to people going the opposite direction than they need to. So today we're going to separate what your body is genuinely doing to defend itself, which is real and predictable, from the fitness industry, fit fluencer version on social media that is, you know, leading you to maybe buy the wrong programs, buy their stuff, do the supplements, go the wrong direction, try to lose fat in an unsustainable way. Then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a two-question check you can run before you start your fat loss to tell you whether you're set up to keep the weight off or it's going to bounce back so you can get ahead of it. Takes 30 seconds and it's all about sustainability. So you're going to like that. So I'm going to set up today's episode for you. First, we're going to talk about why your body defends its weight and what that means. Is that actually happening? Then the part that I think gets misunderstood, which is where is the resistance come? Where do we end up with these plateaus? Why does our metabolism, our body, fight back? It's actually mainly not in your metabolism. And that's kind of the teaser. So stick around for that. And then what do you do about it? What is the practical steps that you have to take? And what are people talking about that's really popular that I definitely want you to avoid? So I know a lot of teasers in there. I'm sorry, it's just to I want to make sure you are listening closely because this is gonna help. I want to start with the popular advice. That's where there's always a grain of truth, but not necessarily the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So the story goes like this: your body has a set point. When you lose weight, your metabolism slows down to defend it. Sometimes it does so dramatically, you know, many, many calories. And then it stays slowed, maybe forever, which is why you regain the weight and then some. You'll hear people point to the biggest loser study as proof of this.

  Has the Biggest Loser data been misinterpreted?

  Philip Pape 4:10

  Researchers followed contestants for six years. Their resting metabolism was still hundreds of calories a day below where you would predict, even after they regain most of the weight. So the takeaway is hey, dieting could wreck your metabolism permanently. Your body has a set point, and you can't win the game in the long term. Okay, well, we can't look at things in a vacuum, can we? We have to have some nuance. So when you lose a meaningful amount of weight, your body does expend less energy than a person who naturally weighs what you now weigh. So when you lose weight, your metabolism goes down. That is real. Researchers call it adaptive thermogenesis, and it's been measured in studies, you know, randomized controlled trials, human studies going back decades. There was even uh, if we go back to some of the seminal or classic work in this area that came out of Rockefeller University, they took people and changed their weight up or down by 10% under controlled lab conditions and measured what happened to their energy expenditure, their metabolism. When people dropped 10% of their weight, their bodies burned a good chunk fewer calories than their new smaller size would predict. And then when they were overfed to gain 10%, they burned even more than would be predicted. So the body seems to push back in both directions, and that's where this concept comes from. But then, you know, social media said, okay, we're gonna take the biggest loser, which is like the most extreme scenario you could pick, what we call class three obesity, a very brutal aggressive pace of weight loss, hours and hours of daily exercise, it's a television competition. And they said, okay, well, that's how the body's gonna work. We should learn from that. And the problem is that even Kevin Hall, the NIH researcher who ran the biggest loser study, who I have a lot of respect for because he follows the data even when it contradicts his earlier work. He later went back and said that this enormous slowdown the contestants saw in their metabolism was probably driven in large part by the sheer volume of exercise they were doing, not by the weight loss itself. So that's why you don't tend to see this in the average people doing it in an ordinary diet. So the set point, thermostat, body set point, settling point, picture, whatever, definitely has some things we can poke at. Okay. Your body doesn't necessarily do it the way it's described. If your body defended a fixed weight in such a rigid way, then the obesity epidemic wouldn't have happened. But instead, people drift upwards slowly over the years without much resistance at all. Like, why are we saying it works one direction but not the other? That wouldn't make sense. But if you try to drift downward, your body fights you really hard. Well, if settling point theory was correct, it would be somewhat symmetrical. So if it's not like, let's say, a fixed thermostat defending a fixed number, what is the reality? Well, the model that actually fits the

  The "floor" your body defends hardest

  Philip Pape 7:18

  evidence is a bit asymmetrical. It's a bit lopsided. Your body defends the floor a lot harder than the ceiling. It treats weight loss as a threat, but fat gain is, yeah, that's fine. And researchers have a few names for this, but the practical version is that there is a range your body is comfortable in and it barely notices when you drift up and it pushes back when you drop below where you've been. So it's not a settling point. It's more of a settling floor. And the floor gets defended much more aggressively than the ceiling. And I think the insight here is when your body defends its weight, what you tend to think about is okay, my metabolism is tanking or my furnace is shutting off. And then it leads to fear about your metabolism being damaged, broken, whatever. But the metabolic slowdown in somebody on a normal diet is actually smaller and less permanent than you might think. You have one camp looking at extreme cases like biggest loser, and they're like, okay, the slowdown is big and it lasts a long time or maybe forever. And then the other camp with researchers like Katia Martins, who went and measured people after their weight had stabilized instead of while they were starving in the middle of the diet, and they found the metabolic adaptation was actually small. It was just a few dozen calories a day. Often it disappeared within about a year or two, and it didn't predict who regained the weight. So think about that. It did not predict who regained the weight. So if metabolic slowdown isn't really the main thing that's holding people back, then what is?

  The real cause of real fat loss resistance

  Philip Pape 8:54

  Pretty simple. It's your appetite, it's hunger. That's where the real durable defense of why we can't lose weight can be found. And it's often ignored by set point theory discussions. In fact, it's ignored a lot, period. Fat loss is often so focused on the deficit, on energy balance, on calories, sometimes on protein, but not as much on appetite, hunger, sustainability, adherence, which is really where the success versus failure occurs. So there's a landmark study, Summithrin and colleagues, in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they put people through significant weight loss and then they track their hunger hormones. And then a full year later, so this is a year after the diet ended, their hunger hormones were still shifted toward eating more. So ghrelin, that's the hormone that drives hunger, was still high. The fullness hormones were still suppressed. And then when they asked the people how hungry they felt, they were still hungrier than before they lost the weight, even a year later. Now that is pretty wild. Like that is to me, stands out far more than this very subtle effect on metabolism. So a bot, your body, which has turned up your hunger signals and stay turned up, think about how much of an issue that is. It's also not surprising when you think about just the general population, why GOP1s have become so popular. The driver underneath a lot of this is leptin. That's the hormone that your fat cells use to tell your brain how much energy you have in storage. And when you lose fat, the leptin drops and your brain reads that drop as kind of a starvation alarm, right? I don't like the term starvation mode, but it's it's an alarm that says I need to eat more to make up for this loss of energy. So it cranks up hunger and it makes food more rewarding. Now we're getting to the crux of the matter. Now it nudges your expenditure down a little, but the food cravings, the rewarding, the reward, the noise, even the food noise is often from this. And we know that leptin is driving this because when researchers give weight-reduced people, so people who have lost weight, leptin back to top off what they lost, a lot of the adaptation gets reversed. So the low leptin is the driving signal, and the hunger is your body responding to that. So why this matters so much for you, listener, is if you believe that the thing holding you back is your metabolism, you're gonna chase fixes to your metabolism. You're gonna chase supplements, metabolism boosters, protocols that promise to repair or fix your metabolism. And you'll be solving the wrong thing. It's not actually the problem. The thing actually pulling you back toward that old weight that you did, and you keep cycling over and over and over is hunger and the drive to eat. And it operates for months and months and months after the diet is over, which means the fix is not repairing your metabolism. The fix is planning for the hunger with intention and building eating patterns that keep the hunger manageable. And that's a completely different game. You can win the game, you can take control of it, we do it all the time, but that is the game we are playing. And that's the thing I want you to plan around because if your body is going to fight the fat loss, then the approach

  Building a diet you can stick with

  Philip Pape 12:21

  you take to undo that or prevent that or mitigate that obviously matters a ton. Now, just as an aside, that is what we built our program for eat more, lift heavy. I mean, it's right in the name in a way. The eat more is not about just eating unfettered. It's about eating more of the right things, eating enough to fuel yourself, not worrying about the metabolic piece of it, but really about the sustainability and the enjoyment and the satisfaction and the fullness and having just a great diet that's flexible and works for you. And we teach you these skills over 26 weeks. If you go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, you can learn about it. Scroll to the bottom, you'll actually see you can expand each of the three phases across 26 weeks and see what you learn every single week. But we don't just drop you into a deficit and say, hey, wish you luck. No, in that first phase, we want to get the intake, your food intake and your training dialed in before you ever push hard on fat loss. So when you do, you're losing it from a stable base with some an approach of building muscle and maybe even having more muscle and a slow enough rate of loss, which we talked about on the last episode, that your body doesn't fight back, along with how you eat, what you eat, all of that great stuff. And then we build the transition back to maintenance after fat loss in the right way. So you recover really quickly and you don't do the rebound and you don't do the binging and you don't have the food noise. So if you are just done with the crash and burn yo-yo dieting, the cycling more and more and more and re regaining, that's what this is for. Find out more at eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmorliftheavy.com. So let's get practical now. You know where the resistance is coming from. It's coming from hunger and appetite and your body defending its floor, not a wreck damaged metabolism. So what do you do with that? Well, there's four things. Okay. And I'll say that the first three are the boring ones that actually work, all right?

  3 fixes to remove the fat loss friction

  Philip Pape 14:19

  Number one is well, expect this to happen and use a slower deficit. We talked about this on the last episode. If you missed it, go check that one out as well. When you, when you know that your body is going to turn up hunger as you lose weight, well, the single single biggest thing you can do is not lose weight so fast that the hunger becomes unbearable and gets ahead of you. A slower rate of loss, something in a range of half to maybe 1% of your body weight a week. But for a lot of you, that's going to be sporty. So the half percent is maybe where we start. Tends to preserve more muscle, keeps the hunger signals from spiking, is hard. It all depends on your metabolism, your size, all that good stuff, right? That's why we have to personalize this. But there's plenty of controlled research on this in athletes, for example, showing that the slower you go, you tend to hold on to more lean mass. You might even be able to gain some lean mass. And of course, it's sustainable. That's number one, the deficit aggressiveness, how fast you go. Number two is of course, keep your protein high and keep lifting. I mean, how many times? I'm gonna repeat this on this episode, but if you're listening to this wits and weights for the first time, this is the biggest game changer of all. Protein is the most filling macronutrient, it directly fights hunger. Lifting weights is what tells your body to build and hold on to muscle while you lose fat. For the protein, we're looking at 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. And for the lifting, we're looking at lifting heavy enough with the right movements, with progressive overload, so that you actually get stronger over time and build that muscle. And this is especially true into your 40s and 50s for women into perimenopause and the menopause transition, where lean mass loss, bone loss, fat gain all tend to accelerate. Even when the scale doesn't necessarily move, your body composition is getting worse. And lifting in protein are how you fight that. And I know if you've listened to the show for a while, you're like, all right, move on, Philip. We need we got it. But it's so important to remember and get motivated to do this. Number three, and I'll say a lot of people don't do this. Number three is to plan the end of the diet before you start the diet. So a lot of people diet until they're tired of it, right? They're just sick of it. They're tired, it's not or whatever, and they stop and then they fall off a cliff and they go back to old habits. And now your hunger hormones are exacerbated, but you haven't really planned for all this and done it the right way. I'm sure you've done this, right? You, you, you white knuckle it to the goal. Maybe you don't even get to the goal, and there's no plan for what to do afterward. Instead, I want you to decide up front, hey, I'm gonna end this fat loss phase in a deliberate way at the right time, and I'm gonna recover up to maintenance calories on purpose. I'm not gonna reverse diet and take forever to get there. I'm going to plan in diet breaks or refeeds along the way where I spend two days or a week or several weeks at maintenance where I jack up those carbs. I have a recovery. It's in the middle, but it's allowing me to continue going on, right? And I'm holding on to my lean mass and I'm feeling good in the gym. I'm holding on to my sanity to help stick to the plan, but I plan the end of the diet before I start the diet. Okay. Now here's the fourth thing. And this is more of a warning. This is, I'll say, the popular thing that I want to talk you out of this, okay? And that's reverse dieting. And I just mentioned that briefly,

  The truth about reverse dieting and recovery

  Philip Pape 18:27

  but I'm gonna lean into this. You've probably heard of reverse dieting. It's the idea that after a diet, you add calories back very slowly, 50 calories a week, 100 calories a week, whatever, over many weeks or months. And this supposedly protects your metabolism or restores it or keeps the fat from coming back. And it sounds very scientific, and you hear it everywhere. And so many people come to me like, well, I tried reverse dieting, or I'm in a reverse diet, or my coach had me reverse diet. Um, I hear it with physique competitors as well. And it sounds like a nice, careful, a careful conservative approach, and a lot of coaches and apps sell it that way. The problem is it doesn't do the thing it claims. And we had plenty of research on this. There is a controlled study that tested reverse dieting directly. They took people coming off a diet and they split them up into two groups. One group did the slow reverse diet, and one group just went straight back to their maintenance calories. Now, when I say maintenance calories, I don't mean their original maintenance calories, I mean their current maintenance calories, which may have declined from when you started the diet. One group just ate however they wanted, and the reverse dieting group did not protect their metabolism better, and they did not keep the weight off better. So actually, it was three groups. I apologize. So the just to clarify what I said before, you know, reverse diet, back to maintenance, and the other one just however they wanted. So, anyway, the least structured group actually regained the least, which actually makes sense when you understand the mechanism we talked about, because the thing suppressing your metabolism is the energy deficit and the low leptin. So the fastest way to reverse that is to eat more sooner and not crawl back up over the months, you know, three months or whatever, keeping yourself in a mild deficit the whole time. So trying to do that slow conservative crawl keeps you in a suppressed low energy state longer. And that's why potentially a group that just didn't care and just ate whatever, they just ate what their body was telling them they needed and they more than overshoots shot their metabolism to make sure they recovered. Now, whether that would lead to additional fat gain, that's a separate discussion. But when we work with clients and eat more lift heavy, that's that's part of the process, is like, let's know where our metabolism is at all times and let's jump right to it and recover as fast as we can without the extra fat gain. Now, I'm not saying reverse dieting is totally useless. I think for some people, adding calories back in a structured, gradual way from a practical perspective might keep them from going out of control, like binging as soon as the diet ends. So that's where structure is helpful. It's kind of like why, you know, intermittent fasting has no benefits other than if it practically helps you from a schedule perspective. So, same thing with reverse dieting, if it keeps you kind of grounded, sane, undoing your progress versus trying to jump right up and it kind of disrupts your eating plan overnight and it's hard to adapt to it, it might be superior for you, despite the fact that you are not recovering as fast. Do not use it though because you think it is protecting or repairing your metabolism or you're worried about gaining too much fat. Because that doesn't hold up. Use it more as a behavioral tool. It just like any of these other things that could be behavioral tools. Because at the end of the day, behavior and adherence, again, is where it's at. And we're actually gonna go deep on this in an upcoming episode on reverse dieting again. So keep an eye out for that. Hit follow to make sure you get that because it deserves a revisit and a full teardown on reverse dieting. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the top that I'd give you a two-question check you can run before you start any fat loss phase to tell you whether you are ready to keep the weight off or you're gonna bounce back. That is coming up in a second. But if this got you thinking, hey, the answer is in an aggressive crash diet or keto or carnivore and cutting carbs or intermittent fasting, no, I need to get the foundation right first. I have a free guide for you. It's called a 14-day rapid start fat loss guide. It's not a crash diet, it actually walks you through building the two habits that make fat loss work before you get to the deficit, which is I'm just gonna reveal it, hitting the protein floor and getting consistent with strength training, which are, I think, is number two of what we talked about earlier. So this guide will help you like a jump start to that. Okay, I want you to go to witsandweights.com slash fat loss or use the link in the show notes, witsandweights.com slash fat loss. It's not calorie counting, cardio, none of that. It teaches you to read your trends properly, to track a few things for just a couple weeks so that you get started. Go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. And if reverse dieting is something you've been curious about or you're even doing it, make sure to hit follow because we're gonna have that full breakdown coming up. So again, for the free 14-day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide, go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. All right, here is that check. It takes 30 seconds before you start your fat loss phase. I know you're impatient

  Bonus: 2-question check before your next fat loss phase

  Philip Pape 23:22

  to get it going. Okay. Question one when my diet ends, what am I doing next? Sounds simple, right? But think about it. I really want you to think about it. I want you to think about the numbers, the eating pattern, what you're going to eat, how it's going to work, even when it might happen. That's a little bit more nebulous because it depends on how it goes. But if the answer is, you know what, I'll worry about it when I get there, you are not set up to succeed. Your hunger is going to be high, and just waiting to see what happens is going to set you back tremendously and it's just not going to be successful. So you have to plan ahead. Question two is the rate of loss I'm planning for in my fat loss phase. So how many, you know, pounds a week I'm expecting to lose or half a pound or whatever. Could I live at this level of hunger for as long as I think it's going to take to lose the weight I want? Okay. If the honest answer is no, then you're already setting yourself up for a problem. Now, you may have heard me talk about starting more aggressively first and then tapering down. You can definitely plan that in. And then you have to answer the question that way. Hey, could I do this for three weeks and then go down to this level and do that for another X number of weeks? Whatever it is. Okay. You basically want to build in the dot deficit so it's not too aggressive and you know it's not too aggressive right from the start, and be open to changing it as you go. So those two questions. Where am I gonna go with this when it ends? What am I doing? And could I live at this pace for the duration of the diet? And that's it. It's pretty simple, but a lot of people don't think about it and they they screw themselves during the process. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body is not betraying you when it fights fat loss, it's doing what it's built to do. And once you know how and why, you can plan around it instead of taking it personally. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Slower Cut That Beats a Fast One (Fat Loss Over 40) | Ep 490

Speed is the wrong goal for fat loss over 40. You'll lose more weight (and body fat) by picking a rate you can sustain for months. Most people pick the biggest calorie deficit they can stand, then quit by week five, regain the weight, and have to re-lose the same pounds next year.

I'm breaking down the real reason aggressive cuts fall apart and the one rule I use to set the rate of weight loss. You'll also hear why the head-to-head research says faster wins, what happened when researchers put postmenopausal women on a severe deficit, and the 3-question gut check that tells you if you're cutting too hard. 

Hit play if you want to lose the fat and keep the muscle without starting over every January.

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The most important part of the fat loss equation
4:38 - Where the "slow and steady" rule comes from
6:28 - What a steep calorie deficit requires
9:56 - The start-and-stop cycle that wastes 12 months
11:37 - Research that contradicts the slow approach
15:14 - When slower wins, and for whom
18:02 - The rule of thumb for rate of loss
19:42 - Room to be human during a cut
21:21 - 2 things you can't skip while cutting
23:00 - Severe restriction and postmenopausal women
24:53 - How to choose the right rate of fat loss
25:56 - Bonus: 3-question gut check BEFORE your deficit

• Transcript

  The most important part of the fat loss equation

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Did you know that the total fat you can lose is how fast you lose it times the number of weeks you stick with it? Might sound obvious, but most people only optimize the first half of that equation. They pick the fastest cut they can stomach, the big calorie deficit, the dramatic first month quick fix, lose a bunch of pounds fast, and they ignore the second half, the number of weeks you can stick with it. And that's the part that actually decides whether you're successful. So today I'm gonna show you why the slower, more moderate approach often gets you to the body you want sooner. Not because slow is something magical, but because it determines whether you make it to the finish line. And then we're gonna wrap it up at the end with a 30-second gut check to tell you whether your current deficit is too aggressive before something like the scale or the mirror tells you that. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that it does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and back on episode 479, I made the case for the aggressive cut, the short, sharp cut, rapid fat loss, and who it's actually for. And I stand by every word of that. There is a real place for a fast cut, and I'm not gonna walk that back at all today. This is the compliment or the companion or the yin to the yang of that episode, because the answer to how fast should I lose weight or how fast should I lose fat is always, of course, it depends. And today I want to give you the framework for what it depends on, which may not be what you think. So I want you to stick with me. This is one of those fun episodes where we dissect the things that make fat loss successful. So you can go all in on that. It matters because, especially if you're over 40, like me, and you got a lot going on in your life, most people are picking their rate of loss, like how fast they want to lose weight, just based on feels and based on vibes. Let's be honest. Faster, of course, sounds better, doesn't it? So you tend to go fast, often too fast. And you run a big calorie deficit, you kind of try to push it right to that limit. Like, well, I might as well go as big of a deficit as I can handle. That way I'll lose faster and I can get it over with. And what happens is very quickly you start to run into issues and start to white knuckle things, and it's very hairy. And somewhere around week four, five, that's when I see these things fall apart and you start to graze, lick, binge, all the things that tends to hold you back. Not only that, your energy is going down, your training quality is going down, like something happens in your life. Let's be something is gonna happen in your life and it gets in the way, or you just bail. You're like, okay, this is too much work. Or you kind of finish the crash diet successfully, I'll call it, in quotes, and then you rebound, you rebound right back. And then you're like, okay, this doesn't work for me, or how do I actually stick with the results? Right. It's not just about the loss, but the sustainability. The real problem for a lot of you is just that you picked a speed or a rate that was not sustainable for you. And then you get into a pattern, the start and stop and start again, which is why you're not getting to the result and why going slower, going more slowly, can actually be faster. And I actually mean faster, not just better, if that makes sense. And I'm gonna show you the math on that. Now, I want to be straight about evidence always, because there is a version I could have given you today that I'll say oversells the slow approach. The head-to-head research, when they look at fast versus slow weight loss, does not say, does not show us that slow wins when it comes to total pounds lost. It mostly says the opposite, believe it or not. So the case for going slower, you're gonna wonder how that compares to the evidence. And I'm going to have to add context for you so you understand why. This is where the coaching experience and working with hundreds of people, thousands of people at this point is gonna help you because it's not just about, okay, go as fast as you can stomach and you'll lose the weight. And that's what the evidence shows. So therefore, that's the way I should do it. There is more nuance. Nuance is what this episode is about. And then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second gut check. Three questions. You know how much I love these. The very practical little self-quiz to tell you whether your current aggressive is too aggressive, your current deficit is too aggressive for you specifically before other data starts

  Where the "slow and steady" rule comes from

  Philip Pape 4:38

  to tell you that. So here's what we're covering today. First, I'll show you why aggressive cuts often fail or break down for most real people in practical real life, and why that makes slower genuinely faster over, say, a year, like a 12-month period. Then I'm gonna walk you through what the strongest research that I could find tells us, including the part that I'll say contradicts some of what I'm telling you today, seemingly, but really doesn't. And then a decision rule that you can use to make this simple. We're also gonna look at why a moderate deficit tends to give you room to breathe and take things like breaks or an aggressive one doesn't, and how that helps things like muscle metabolism, bones, all of the stuff. So I always like to play devil's advocate. And if let's say tortoise in the hair, you guys know the story. Slow and steady wins the race. When it comes to fat loss, if you listen to any other podcast about fat loss, you hear the half a percent a week or one to two pounds a week is thrown out quite often. You know, half a half a percent to one percent of your body weight a week. We actually see that in obesity guidelines. We see it in evidence-based coaching in general. It's kind of a consensus at this point. And we see it baked into apps like Macrofactor, for example. And either you try to follow it and then you struggle due to other reasons, or you try to override it because you're like, well, that's too slow for me. I can handle more, my metabolism may be higher, whatever the reason you want to justify or rationalize for yourself, and you want that number to start moving, you want to lose the weight. You see your friend on keto or you see your friend on GLP ones or whatever, losing all these pounds, you're like, okay, I gotta do that. And I'm gonna be the one that can sustain it. After all, I listen to wits and weights, right? Or, you know, whatever. Like, you know, I eat a lot of whole foods and fiber. So I like to bring this back to math and numbers. Let's just take the emotion out of it. Okay.

  What a steep calorie deficit requires

  Philip Pape 6:28

  The total fat that you're gonna lose, of course, equals your rate of fat loss times the number of weeks you stick with it. So rate times duration. That's it. That's like the very simple math. I've written a million charts and graphs for clients showing this. Now, if you put all your attention into that, which again, if you're using an app like MacroFactor, that's kind of what you're scoping into. What am I trying to say? You're like very myopic. It's very focused on just the rate of loss and then the deficit. If you pour all your attention into that, and then consequently how fast the scale is dropping, because that's the feedback loop, then you're gonna think, okay, this is starting to work, or this is the process. Now I just need to go as long as possible to get to the weight I want. As if you're gonna be able to keep going that duration. Does that make sense? But the duration is the hardest variable in all of fat loss, not the aggressiveness, believe it or not. Because you could, I mean, think about it. You could probably fast for three days if you really had to, and you could do it and eat zero calories for three days, but you couldn't do it for a week or two weeks or three weeks. And again, I'm giving you an extreme, but it's the duration, the sustainability part that's the issue. The bigger and more aggressive your deficit, conversely, the harder it is to sustain it. So, and and it sounds obvious, but it's a true phenomenon. We have to understand the mechanism behind. Okay. Think about what a steep deficit demands of you and your body. It demands that you're gonna be hungry a lot for a long time and to keep making good decisions anyway. Whether you're the type that gets hangry or not, you are going to get some level of hangry. It demands of you precision, okay? When your deficit is small, you have all this margin to play with. If you overeat on the weekend or you go to a party, you're still in a deficit. Maybe it's not as big. But when your deficit is very, very aggressive, the margin to hit that deficit is gone. Now you're like, wait a minute, isn't that contradictory? Because now I have all this room to play with. The problem is if you have a bad day or you go to a restaurant, whatever, and your deficit is predicated on the fact that you need this huge deficit because of the duration. And now you're cutting into that significantly every week, the duration part goes out the window. Does that make sense? Like in other words, if the deficit is smaller, you're kind of expecting the duration to be longer. And in general, things feel more sustainable. And so going off track occasionally doesn't meaningfully impact the duration. Does that make sense? It sounds counterintuitive, but hopefully that made sense the way I put that. Yes, you have more margin on the big deficit, but you're quickly erasing the whole point of the margin, which was to shorten the duration. Does that make sense? Okay. Also, when it's very aggressive, you have to have not just more willpower, but more accuracy, more tracking, more consistency week after week, less room for the normal messiness of you're a human being over 40 with a job and a family and a life. And on top of all of that, it affects your training. So when you're eating in a big deficit, your lifts are going to just feel more sluggish. They're going to suffer. You're probably going to regress. You're going to have less energy in the gym. Your recovery between sessions gets worse. And then the strength you were building starts to regress. And now you're hungry and you're tracking kind of obsessively, but you feel weak in the gym and you're doing all of it under all this pressure with less slack and less margin. How do you keep that up? How do you keep that up? How long do you keep that up? And for most people, the honest answer is maybe a few weeks, but it's just another form of deprivation, if you ask me. So what happens in the real world? Well, in the real world, this is what happens to you when you do this. Okay. And again, this is not contradictory

  The start-and-stop cycle that wastes 12 months

  Philip Pape 10:48

  with my rapid fat loss episode, which is a very, very, very short, like two, two-week deficit. I'm talking about a very aggressive deficit where you go really fast, and then right around week or four or four or five, you start to hit that wall. You start to crash. You take a few weeks off to recover mentally. And then maybe you start again and then you crash again and start, stop, start, stop. And so the stops are not just like pausing and going to maintenance. Oftentimes it's a rebound and you're actually eating more than you probably should, and you're binging, and you maybe not eating the best things for yourself. And then you have to relose that same five pounds over and over again for the third, fourth, fifth time. Add up a year of doing that, two years, ten years, raise your hand. And the tortoise versus the hare comes in. The tortoise over there, who ran this nice slow deficit that they barely noticed, and they just didn't stop because it was super easy and sustainable. They got to the finish line, they lost more fat than you, and they did it through one long phase. It wasn't because their diet was better on a given week, but because they were still going on after, you know, four months, six months, whatever the length might be. That is why slower is actually faster. And I mean that word actually faster, because over a 12-month horizon, a moderate deficit that you can run continuously is gonna beat an aggressive deficit that keeps getting broken up. That keeps getting broken up. That makes sense, right? Slower isn't better just because it is gentler, let's say, or more moderate. It's because you can finish it. That's it. Now, I have to, I'll say, complicate my own argument here for you and be honest, because if you go

  Research that contradicts the slow approach

  Philip Pape 12:28

  looking for studies that directly compare fast weight loss to slow weight loss head to head in in humans, you might find a contradiction in what I'm saying. So I want to walk through that. All right, being this is this is part of how we examine the evidence. There is a big trial by Purcell and colleagues published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endrocinology back in 2014. They took 200 adults with obesity, they randomized them to lose the same amount of weight, either gradually over 36 weeks or rapidly over 12. So that's like a third the duration, right? And then they followed them for almost three years. And what they found is the rapid group was more likely to hit the target, 81% of them versus 50% of the other group. So the the rapid group was actually less likely to drop out. And then the regain afterward was identical between the two groups. And so they actually ran an editorial that was titled Slow and Steady Does Not Win the Race. Now, I just spent the whole segment telling you Slow and Steady wins a race. Fast fat loss tends to fall apart for a lot of people. And here's a study that contradicts that. So let me square it for you. In that trial, the rapid group wasn't crash dieting and they weren't doing it freewheeling on their own. They were on a structured, monitored, total meal replacement program and had a research team helping them out and checking in on that. So if you take someone who struggles with an aggressive diet and you hand them a rigid plan, and but then you remove the guesswork about what to eat and you watch them hold them accountable, well, then more of them are definitely going to finish. That's not who I'm talking about. In other words, if you come into our program, eat more and lift heavy, we can guide you through any level of aggressiveness to help you be successful. And there's a much higher chance you'll be successful with a more aggressive diet. But if you're trying to do this on your own or there's other complicating factors, which we can get into, you're at home, you have access to your own fridge and your own life kind of get in the way. You're not part of a research study. Maybe you don't have coaching, maybe you do, but you still have all this stuff happening that's different than what's in a research study. You don't have that level of supervision and accountability, which is the thing that fixes precision and consistency for a lot of people, right? And if you don't have that, you got to listen up to what I'm saying today because it may not work for you. So this is not a pitch for coaching. This is just trying to understand the different variables. So that trial doesn't prove that fast is easy to sustain. It's it proves that fast can be sustainable when somebody removes the roadblocks, helps you out, guides you, tells you what to eat, and holds you accountable. Okay. Then there's another trial called the tempo trial. Seyman and colleagues, they ran a severe versus moderate restriction in postmenopausal women. The severe group lost about twice as much weight and fat at 12 months without losing more lean mass and with no difference in their grip strength. And then in another trial in older women, they are averaged age around 859. The faster initial weight losers, not losers, but people who lost weight, were five times more likely to still be down 10% a year and a half later. So if you came to this episode wanting me to tell you that going slow means you lose more fat in a controlled trial, I can't tell you that. When someone else is helping you with the diet through coaching, accountability, structure, precision, sometimes meal planning, like if it's a dietitian, then the faster is often the way you do want to go because it's more efficient. It's more efficient. So we should be honest about that. For many people, going faster can be totally successful if you have the support in place. So

  When slower wins, and for whom

  Philip Pape 16:05

  when does going slower win, though? Well, in your real life, unsupervised, the moderate deficit is what I've seen actually works. Now, even coaching clients, for many of them, they have so many things going on. They have trouble getting sleep, they have a busy job, they can't get their steps in, all these things that that's also a reason to go slower. They're again, they're not in this structured, supervised context, even though they have a coach. I still would guide them to go slower. The other reason, though, and this holds even for a disciplined person who can finish a fast cut, is just making sure that you're holding on to your muscle mass and maximizing the fat loss. And I don't want you being a situation where the pounds are flying off, but some of it or a lot of it is muscle. And so a lot of these research trials are optimizing for weight, purely weight loss. And if that's your only goal, then yeah, the faster you go, the better. We see that with GLP1s, but you know, what tends to happen is you lose muscle mass, you lose lean mass if you're not training and if you're going too fast. So if you care about body composition, not just scale, if you care about muscle and how you look and feel, then we have to add that nuance to the equation. When you look at studies, excuse me, that hold weight loss equal and then look at the body composition, we actually start to see that slower weight loss is superior. There's a meta-analysis by Ashtari Larki and colleagues, and they pooled all the head-to-head trials. And for the same total weight loss, the gradual approach produced about a kilogram more fat loss, a meaningfully bigger drop in body fat percentage, and significantly better preservation of metabolism, of resting metabolic rate. So for the same scale change, they had better body composition and I'll say a metabolism that didn't drop as much or would crash as much because of going slower. And then one of my favorite studies on this, uh, which is relevant to anyone who trains, Garth and colleagues, these were elite athletes, all of them resistance training four days a week, and they split them into a slow fat loss group and or a slow loss group and a fast loss group. Both of them lost fat, but the slow group gained lean mass, they gained about 2%, and the fast group was flat, right? They didn't gain or lose. And the slow group gained more strength. So they had the same goal, which was fat loss, but the slower group had more muscle and more strength than the faster group. I really love that study. So now you see coming full circle, when we care about body composition and sustainability and real life and muscle mass and all of that, there's a very good chance that going a little bit slower is just the thing you need. If you want your body to look good, function well, hold on to your results. Very, very important to think about this. All right. So here's the fix. And it it really is simple, even though getting here was not because I do love to talk. But hopefully that was helpful

  The rule of thumb for rate of loss

  Philip Pape 18:54

  context. Pick the slowest cut you can tolerate that still shows you visible progress in about four to six weeks. That's it. That's the rule. The slowest rate that still produces a result that you can see and that you're happy starting to get. Not the fastest one you can survive, but the slowest one that still works. And as a side tangent here, you're thinking, wait, I want to lose X number of pounds. Stop thinking that way and start thinking about sustainability and let the actual number work itself out for you. Because you may not need to lose 10 pounds. You may not need to lose get to X weight. You may find that you feel look what you want to at a different weight. Or you might find that, hey, losing five pounds makes a huge difference. Another five pounds would be great. You just will know. Work on the sustainability piece first. So for most people, that does land somewhere around half a percent to 1% of body weight a week. But I want you to lean toward the slower end of that range, especially the leaner you already are, and the more you care about keeping muscle and getting through this. Also, if you have a lower metabolism, if you have more fat to lose and you're fresh and you're a novice, you can start probably more aggressive and it still wouldn't feel that aggressive. People who have actually a lot of extra body fat, I say, hey, your advantage is you have those fat stores, you have that energy store in your body. A pretty big deficit may not feel like a deficit to you or your body. And yet you're gonna drop the fat, right? Now, as you lean out, you can ease off the gas. As you get closer to your goal, you can always ease off the gas because the longer diet goes, the harder it is anyway. So we could always start faster and go slower, things like that. Now, we've been dancing around the fact that there's a huge benefit of going with a moderate deficit instead of an aggressive one. And it's

  Room to be human during a cut

  Philip Pape 20:33

  it's maybe the reason why people finish, and that is it gives you room to be a human being. When you're only a few hundred calories below maintenance, you can take a planned diet break. You can eat at maintenance for a week. You can take a weekend refeed when life gets busy or you your head mentally needs it, when there's friends that you're gonna hang out with, when you're going on a trip, whatever. And then you can slide right back into the deficit and you barely cost yourself anything when you do the math. You could even intentionally run it in a wave-like form, like a nonlinear form instead of a straight line. We do that all the time. In fact, in eat more lift heavy, one of the things we love to do is help people non-linearize their diets. Instead of saying just do this deficit every day, let's mix it up for you. Maybe around your cycle, maybe things like that. But when you're already, you know, hitting the gas with a very, very aggressive deficit, you really don't have slack in the sense I mentioned this before. If you take a break, you feel like you're losing a lot of progress. It really extends mathematically the end of the cut. And it kind of just feels like counter, like it's um, you know, a tug of war. So a slower cut is like a stick that bends without breaking, let's say, like a fiberglass stick instead of a wood one. And so it can absorb. So another analogy would be a rubber band. You can stretch it and it can come back. So it can like absorb, it has buffer for things like vacations, a very stressful time in your life, a bad week, and then you keep going, right? If it's aggressive, it's kind of like the rubber band's brittle and can snap as soon as life pulls on it. So we talked a lot about duration and aggressiveness. And I'll say that that is really,

  2 things you can't skip while cutting

  Philip Pape 22:12

  really important. But the non-negotiable that has to be there anyway is lifting and eating. And by eating, I mean eating enough protein, not eating enough calories, because obviously, if you're in a deficit, you're only eating those calories. But eating enough protein that turns a slower cut from, you know, let me just be patient and get through this to, oh no, I'm actively building, I maybe actually gaining strength and muscle even on a deficit because it's a slow deficit. And so you can almost think in terms of I'm not really in a diet, I'm not in a diet. I'm not fat loss training. I'm just training, training, right? I have a I have pretty close to full energy, not quite there, but pretty close. It's not like an aggressive deficit. I have plenty of protein. I can get through this and I can train and maybe even hit still hit some PRs and keep growing. So for protein, that's 0.71 grams per pound of body weight, spread across your meals. Great rule of thumb, resistance training, two to four days a week with progressive overload. We have plenty of other episodes that get into those details. And those are the biggest variables that are going to support you no matter what. And a lot of people doing crash diets or keto or carnivore or GOP1s or whatever, and they're not doing that, they're not going to be successful. And then I want to give you permission that if you've been running an aggressive diet, diet or deficit and you feel like garbage and watching your lifts go backward and you're like, what's wrong with me? I can't do this. Nothing's wrong with you. You picked a rate that is probably too fast for you, not good for your recovery, for your life stress, for your hormones, whatever, slowing down is not giving up. It's choosing a different path that you can finish in the best way possible. All right. So I looked in the research and there's a couple other things I wanted to mention about bone and

  Severe restriction and postmenopausal women

  Philip Pape 23:52

  whether the aggressive approach can actually make sense. So on the bone piece of this, in the tempo trial with postmenopausal women that I mentioned, the severe restriction group lost two and a half times more bone density at the hip than the moderate group. So that's the same study where the fast group won when it came to pounds of weight loss, but the fast, the fast group lost when it came to bone density. So bone is important, I mean, in my opinion. It's super important for the rest of your life, especially for women, but really everybody as we get older. And that alone is a reason to favor the moderate deficit to lift heavy, which of course loads the bone. We talked about that on our last episode as well, and not be crash dieting your way just to get to a number. Right. So that's really good context. And then secondly, I want to clear up, be clear about where my argument maybe doesn't hold up because I'm not saying fast fat loss is bad. We've talked about rapid fat loss many times. I made that case a few weeks ago. If you have a hard deadline, if you're carrying a lot of fat, want early momentum. If you genuinely do better with a defined, you know, sprint than like an open-ended, I'll call it a slog. It doesn't have to feel like a slog if it's moderate enough. But in that case, a faster approach can be totally the right call for you. And the research tells us, hey, it can be effective as well. It's not going to doom you to rebound. They're both true. So they're true in different contexts. And the skill, I think, is just knowing which context you are in and using the right approach. So everything I just described, picking a rate that you can sustain, tapering it as you lean out, holding on to muscle, that is can be difficult to do for yourself because you're inside your head and you're inside your life, and there are a lot of variables at play. I get it. It's hard to be objective about your own deficit when you're hungry, maybe when you're impatient, maybe when the scale

  How to choose the right rate of fat loss

  Philip Pape 25:44

  isn't cooperating. And that's why support structures exist. However, you get the support, I highly encourage finding what works for you within your budget, within your life. One thing that we offer, and I always want to mention it because it's helped so many people, it's called Eat More Lift Heavy. Coach Carol and I are in there helping people human to human. And we also help you build the skills over 26 weeks. We've got a lot of great tools as well. One of those tools actually helps you determine these things like transitions, how fast to go, uh, what phase you should be in, et cetera. We help you pick a rate that fits your life, your recovery. We help you adjust as you go and run into roadblocks. So if you've done the cycle over and over again, if you've done the cuts, but they're not sticking, we're trying to break that pattern for you. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check out the information. No pressure at all. Just check it out. And then I'll have a link in the show notes as well. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. All right, before we wrap up, that 30-second gut check that I promised you, is your diet too aggressive or not? It's three

  Bonus: 3-question gut check BEFORE your deficit

  Philip Pape 26:47

  questions. So question one, are your lifts going backward? Like, do you have a trend over and over again where the weights are just feeling heavier and heavier and heavier? That's your body telling you maybe you can't recover at this deficit. Number two, is your sleep getting worse? Is your mood getting worse? Cutting too hard affects your brain and it affects your sleep. Okay, that is a great sign. And then number three, could you keep doing exactly what you're doing right now for another eight weeks? Not could I like barely survive it and hang on by a thread, but could you just live it pretty predictably, even if some things come up? And if the honest answer is, yeah, not really. Not really. This is really, really tough. I don't think I can make it. Then the rate is too fast. So if you said basically yes to the first two, lifts going backwards, sleep getting worse, no to the third, no, I can't keep doing it. All right, then let's ease up on that deficit. Let's add a few hundred calories. You're gonna do it from, you know, probably mostly carbs, maybe some protein depending. Add the carbs around your training to fuel you best, and then keep going so that you can get through the deficit and get the result. It works. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the goal is never to weigh less, it's to keep the muscle and the strength and the bone that make that weight loss mean something for you, your body, and your future. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Are the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, and Row Actually "Unsafe" After 40? | Ep 489

The barbell squat isn't as dangerous as you've been told. It's one of the few things that keeps your bones from thinning after 40. But a popular podcast just ranked it the most unsafe exercise you can do, with the conventional deadlift and barbell row right behind it.

I'm breaking down the 3 errors in their argument and the real reason people get hurt lifting. You'll also hear what muscle activation actually tells you about muscle growth, why their own co-host kept disagreeing with them on air, and what happened when researchers put postmenopausal women under a heavy barbell. 

Hit play if you want to keep squatting and deadlifting without worrying about your back.

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The 3 lifts called "unsafe" by a popular podcast
4:16 - The strongest case against the big lifts
5:56 - The first error in their argument
8:56 - What EMG activation really shows about muscle growth
11:40 - How to train the big lifts safely and for a long time
13:55 - What goes wrong when a lift starts hurting
16:58 - Barbell training next to running injury rates
20:15 - What heavy loading does for your bones after 40
24:55 - The question to ask before you swap a lift
27:15 - Choosing a gym that lets you lift properly

Episode Resources:

• Chris Duffin on biomechanics, resilience, and training heavy after 40

• Transcript

  The 3 lifts called "unsafe" by a popular podcast

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've ever been told that the barbell back squat is dangerous, or that the deadlift is gonna wreck your spine, or that a bent over row is just asking for a back injury, and you should swap all of them for other movements or machines. I want you to hear this before you give up the best lifts you potentially have in your arsenal. Today I'm gonna walk you through why the case against these lifts falls apart under its own logic and why for anyone over 40, especially women going through menopause, heavy loading on those exact lifts is one of the best things you can do for your bones. You'll learn the three thinking errors that make a safe lift sound scary, what the actual injury numbers say when you compare lifting to something like running, and the one variable that causes most lifting injuries, and it's almost never the lift itself. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode is based on a listener. I want to give him credit right up front, Tim E. He's a valuable member of our Eat More Lift Heavy program. He came to me a little while back and he said, Hey, Philip, I was listening to another show. And I'm not gonna give credit to this show. We're gonna pick it apart, but I'm not, this is not a call out. This is addressing some serious assumptions in that show. They ran this whole countdown of exercises that they called unsafe. And I get it, social media podcasts, you want to be provocative, you wanna be counterintuitive, you wanna be contrarian. But the problem is when it gets people to change their behavior for no good reason. Number one on that list was the barbell back squat. Number two was a conventional deadlift. And then a little further down the list was the bent over barbell row. And Tim basically said, Hey, can you stress test this, Philip? Because it doesn't sit right with me. I've been doing these lifts, I've been successful, you know, building muscle and strength at these lifts. Millions of people use them every day. We talk about them all the time. And what I want to know is there something to this claim that they are unsafe? Right. And they and the episode was like, you know, the three most unsafe exercises or something like that. And I really love that because that's what I want you to do, what Tim is doing. I don't want you to just accept any claim. I also don't want you to reject it because you don't like it, but just say, hey, what is my skepticism radar telling me? Is the reasoning good here? Does it make sense? Does it pass the sniff test? So, Tim, this one is dedicated to you. Now, I want to be fair here. As always, nuances is important. This is not a hit piece on another show. I'm not gonna name them, as I said. Some of the alternative exercises that they talked about are genuinely perfectly fine. These sounded like two fairly intelligent guys who have a history training. One of them was kind of questioning the main host's list as it went along. So I did appreciate that. That's not the issue. The issue is the reasoning used to condemn the big lifts because it gets repeated. It gets repeated like a game of telephone, and maybe it gets twisted here and there. But you hear it from trainers, from physical therapists on social media, from articles telling men, you know, go ahead and trade your squats for goblet squats. Men, women, whatever, people over 50 because you're old, whatever it is, right? And it's kind of everywhere in the water supply of what you're fed through social media. So we're gonna address that. And then stick around to the end because after we get through all of this, I'm gonna share a study result that should change how really everyone over 40 thinks about lifting, but women in particular. And then a question that you can ask yourself before you decide to swap, say, a barbell lift for a machine, before you give it up, right? So I want to really help you make these decisions for yourself. So here's where we're going today. I'm gonna show you the three logical errors in thinking that run through every argument of, oh, this lift is dangerous. I'm also gonna give you the injury numbers, which I'll say surprise me the first time I dug into them. Um, and I want you to know what that looks like. And then we're gonna talk about why axial loading, which is like a fancy way of saying load that runs down through your spine is specifically a feature, not a bug. Okay.

  The strongest case against the big lifts

  Philip Pape 4:16

  It's a feature, not a bug, especially as we age, and you can actually take advantage of that rather than being scared by it. So let's steel man the case first, uh, because I don't want to, I don't want to knock down a weak version of an argument. I don't think that's helpful to you. But the argument against these lifts usually goes something like this. The back squats put a big compressive load right down through your spine. And that's risky, especially as you age. The deadlift is the one that everybody talks about as well, where you're bent over, you've got a heavy bar, and if your form breaks down a little, you know, you round your back, oh, you're gonna herniate a disc. And then we have the bent over row where you're holding that hinged over position under load while you're also yanking a bar into your torso. So now your lower back is doing a bunch of work. And the recommendation from that is okay, we need to find alternatives, like just the assumption that they're gonna most likely hurt you. Alternatives or use machines, or use a leg press instead of squatting, use a chest supported row. So your lower back is out of it. And look, if you use AI and ask AI these questions, it's probably gonna validate your concerns and suggest these things, especially the way you ask it. So we need to really dig deeper. Or it's gonna say, oh, use a trap bar, or just do RDLs, or just do split squats, take the spine out of the equation, and then you don't you take the risk out of the equation. Now it sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive, and it tends to be generally wrong. Not because the alternatives are bad. Okay, though some of those are great, though, all those exercises I named, but the logic underneath is built on three specific errors. And then once you learn these, you can't unlearn them. Okay, here

  The first error in their argument

  Philip Pape 5:56

  we go. Let's walk through them. The first thinking error is treating load as a hazard rather than the thing that you seek to help you adapt. Load, the heaviness, right? The weight. This is the big one. And I think it's kind of underneath the rest. It cascades into the rest, let's say. When somebody looks at a heavy squat, and it especially if you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, let's say, and you see this compression on the spine, and you're like, oh, that seems dangerous. You're looking at the load itself as a threat, right? Something to minimize. Oh, how why would you put all that compression on your spine? Well, the problem with that is that load is the entire reason that the adaptation happens. The compression, the tension, the force running through the bone and the muscle and the tendon, right? That is not like a side effect to be worried about. That is the training signal, the stimulus, the adaptation that the thing that your body then responds to when you sleep, when you eat, et cetera. Your bones get denser because they're loaded. Your muscles grow because they're loaded, you know, through mechanical tension. Your tendons and connected tissue get more resilient because they're loaded. I've even had PTs on the show tell us this themselves. This is a PT. People who are concerned with rehab and coming back from injury saying, look, load and oftentimes heavy load on the exact muscles and joints you're concerned about is often what is needed to recover. So if you take the load away in the name of safety, you've removed the medicine, the prescription, let's say, in John Sullivan's words, the barbell prescription, right? You've made the movement quote unquote safer by doing, making it do less of what it's intended to do. Now, I had Chris Duffin on the show back, I think it was episode 456. And if you don't know him, he's the guy that squatted over a thousand pounds in his 40s for reps. He's a got a biomechanics and engineering brain, absolute legend. And he said something on that episode that stuck with me. He said that we adapt to nearly any movement or stress that's imposed on us. That is what's get getting stronger is, right? And we've heard that, we've heard that description through starting strength and through plenty of good strength coaches and practitioners. That is what getting stronger is. It's your body responding to load. So when you get afraid of a lift, if you're afraid you're hurt, you'll hurt yourself, you stop pushing and you stop adapting. And you may not even pay as much attention to good, say, form as a result, which is the irony of it. And then you actually do not get stronger or more resilient, and the fear itself becomes the problem and manifests in potential further weakness and injury. You've probably heard the phrase, I'd rather have a strong bad back than a weak bad back. And that kind of summarizes it nicely because the strength and the risk and chance of injury, they're two separate things. We want the strength there. So error number one is that, you know, load is not the enemy. Load is the stimulus. And when you take it away to feel safe, you're throwing away the thing that's going to help you. Now you're

  What EMG activation really shows about muscle growth

  Philip Pape 8:56

  just gonna get stuck. Error number two is confusing muscle activation with muscle growth. Now, this one's more technical, but I want you to just stick with me because it's it's all over the place. And I still hear the term activation thrown out a lot where it shouldn't be. So a lot of the content about this exercise is just as good or better than this is based on something called EMG, electromyography. Basically, they stick sensors on your muscles, they measure the electrical activity during an exercise, and they say, look, the chest-supported row lights up the lats just as much as the barbow row. So you might as well do the easier, safer one. Or this machine activates the quads more than the squat does, so it's superior. The problem with that is that is an acute activation signal, acute meaning like localized, the EMG number we're talking about, that electrical signal, it does not reliably predict how much a muscle actually grows over weeks and months. And there's a good body of research on this. There's a really sharp critique from a researcher, his name is Andrew Vygotsky. And the point is basically that activation in a single session and hypertrophy over time are two different things. One does not, does not cleanly forecast the other. So stop paying so much attention to muscle activation. And we have training studies where a heavier load produced more EMG activation, but the actual measured muscle growth came out about the same as a lighter load. So it's not always correlated, is my point. If so, if EMG doesn't track growth, then the argument of this exercise activates the muscle just as much as that is not a valid reason to call, for example, a barbell lift redundant and having no other benefits. You're comparing the wrong thing, apple to oranges, right? Like judging two cars by how loud the engine is instead of how fast they go. It's like a distraction or a red herring, if you will. And then there's a flip side here that favors the barbell lifts. A lot of the recent research points to training muscle in a stretched, lengthened position as a real driver of growth. And what do a full-depth squat and a full deadlift do? They load your muscles at long lengths. They activate many muscles. Uh and there I use the word activate, but they I should say they recruit many muscles. And big compound lifts, by design, give you a ton of benefits in that sense. Now, isn't that interesting? But the very thing that makes them feel harder and makes you maybe want to avoid them is the thing that makes them work. So that's error number two: that activation is not growth and not a reason to switch up your lifts. Now, before I give you the third error, I want to take a pause because we're about to hit the most important one and it connects

  How to train the big lifts safely and for a long time

  Philip Pape 11:40

  directly to something I do every day. So many people think they need a different exercise. And what they actually need is someone to help manage their load and the fatigue and the recovery along with their nutrition so that the big lifts stay productive and you do them safely instead of them turning into a problem. And you then you build the confidence to do them and you gain the benefits from them. Now that's the whole idea behind our Eat More Lift Heavy program, exactly where Tim gave us this question. This is our 26-week coach program where we teach you to eat enough to support your training, to fuel properly. We help you progress any of your lifts that you want to do with proper programming and adjustments and dealing with the recovery and potentially injury. Look, we have a lot of folks that come in and they're like, I'm dealing with this injury or this rehab, or I had a surgery or this or that. You know, not from us, but they they they have it going on and then they want help. And one of the things I like to say is look, if you wait till you're ready and everything is perfectly healed, let's say, and you're over 40, you'll never be ready. We all have some level of pain or injury or something going on. And so you kind of need that guidance. And if you've been nervous about the big lifts or somebody talked you out of them or whatever, that is who this is built for. So you can find information at eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. Now I bring it up right here on purpose because the reason people get talked out of be out of these lifts is our third error. It's our third error. And I want you to really listen up to this blaming the lift for what is actually a programming problem. Okay. Blaming the lift for what is a programming problem. So I see the pattern over and over and over again. Okay, it's just so predictable at this point. Somebody's back starts hurting. Honestly, I've been through this cycle in the past. Your low back starts hurting. They've been squatting and deadlifting. And the conclusion is it's the squat and deadlift are hurting my back, and those lifts are dangerous, or some level of that. But then when we look at what actually happened when you dig in, it often wasn't the movement. It was how the movement was loaded. For example, jumping up in weight too much too soon, or too much volume,

  What goes wrong when a lift starts hurting

  Philip Pape 13:55

  or training through fatigue. And that could be the physical fatigue from a lack of energy, but it could also be because you're not eating enough or you're in a deficit or something like that, where your form starts to degrade set after set and you don't stop, or you get distracted, or you're listening to music when maybe you shouldn't, or you're talking to someone in the gym or scrolling your phone, and an and an. You get all these things are forms of fatigue or distraction. Not enough recovery between heavy sessions. You're going five days a week and balls to the wall, and it's super heavy. Right? These are all programming variables. I didn't even mention the actual form of the lift, right? That's also important too, but maybe overstated versus some of these other things. And those are all dials that you can turn, right? And then when you get hurt and you blame the lift instead of the dial, well, you're never going to fix the root cause. And going back to, I mentioned Chris Stuffin, when he was on the show, he talked about people getting into lifting later in life and they get strong pretty fast, right? Because they're very responsive to the stimulus. And then all of a sudden their back starts hurting. And the reason is your muscles tend to adapt faster than your skeleton does, and even your connective tissue. And so your muscle can handle the load before your bones and disc and connective tissue have caught up, and you can outlift your own structural readiness if you rush it. Again, also why we like to for beginners to be eating and not dieting when they first start, just to kind of be fully supportive of that process. And again, it's not the lift itself, it's not the deadlift. It's the progression being too aggressive for where the person is. Because when we talk about lifting heavy, it's relatively heavy to what you're capable of, not just heavy in general or just trying to lift as much as you can or going up 20 pounds overnight on a lift. So it, you know, if your body is tightening up, you're feeling pain, it's often not because you're squatting, it's because you're squatting like garbage, because you're squatting wrong. The movement itself isn't the problem. It's the way it's being loaded and executed. And granted, there's a lot of fear-mongering, even with that, talking about sheer forces and all of these things that people are not understanding properly. So I don't want you to be scared away. Again, it's not the movement, it's how it's being executed. So again, error number three is when a lift hurts, the culprits almost always load progression, fatigue, recovery, or technique, not the lift itself. Now, I want to connect all of these things. Notice what they all have in common. They all point the finger, these errors, I should say, these errors in thinking, all point the finger at the movement. Like, okay, the movement's dangerous, the movement is redundant, the movement hurt me. And sometimes I hear people say, well, yeah, it's because of technique, not the movement, but nobody can do it right, which is BS. That's total BS because thousands, if not millions, of people do do it right. And there's a lot of tolerance for, you know, having your own, I'll say version of the form that's still within the bounds of correctness and safety. And so it's not the movement, it's the variables around the movement that matters. And guess what? You can control those. And sometimes you need help, sometimes you need coaching, sometimes you need advice, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever to figure it out because it's a

  Barbell training next to running injury rates

  Philip Pape 16:58

  process, right? Now, let's talk about the numbers. What do the injury numbers say? If these lifts are so dangerous, you would expect the injury data to be pretty ugly, right? You'd expect people who squat and deadlift to be getting hurt left and right all the time, you know, falling over. Oh my God, everybody, you know, my aunt, my cousins, my parents, my my, you know, kids, whoever, all these people lifting are just just getting hurt left and right from their lifting. But they're not. They're not. And it's not even close in the data. When you look at the systematic reviews on injury rates in the barbell strength sports, powerlifting comes in somewhere around one to four injuries per thousand hours of training. Weightlifting, you know, the Olympic lifts, that's in a similar range, roughly two to three per thousand hours. That is really, really low. Now let's compare that to running, which every, well, I'm not gonna say everybody thinks, but a lot of people think of as this like safe, gentle, healthy thing. You should do more of, you know, strap on your shoes, anyone can do it. Well, novice runners get hurt at a rate around 17 or 18 injuries per thousand hours, right? Versus one to four for powerlifting, 17 to 18. Recreational runners, which means they have a little more experience, still seven or eight. So running injures people at something like two to more than 10 times the rate per hour of powerlifting, right? And that's just running. We know soccer is also up there, and that's also due to like contact injury and stuff like that. So, from a framing perspective, when it comes to injury, barbell training, when you do it with reasonable programming for what we just talked about, is one of the lowest injury things you could do with your body. And what matters for the whole argument about unsafe exercises is okay, well, what if what about when people do get hurt lifting? Where is that happening and why? Well, the most common sights are the lower back and the shoulder. Sure, we we all can attest to that. I can personally attest to that. But the mechanism, we see this over and over again, is load and fatigue and technique. The beginner who jumped the weight up too fast, the person grinding through the form that's already broken down because of ego, and they don't want to rack the bar, they're ego lifting. It's almost never, hey, they performed the squat properly, and but because it's a squat, they got injured. No, it's how it's loaded, which is the exact same point as error number three, and we're just tying it to the injury data. Mismanagement of the lift, that is the risk, not the risk, not the lift itself. Now, I care about intellectual honesty. So if you think about the argument from the podcast that I'm addressing, that fatigue degrades your mechanics, that is true. So there's a cascade. When you're deep into a very tiring, fatiguing set, and then your form falls apart, that is a window where injuries can occur. So they're not wrong that there can be danger when it comes to that, but it it happens upstream in the fatigue and the programming that allowed you to get to that point. Does that make sense? That allowed you to get to that point. And it could go beyond that too, to like secondary and tertiary variables like your diet, right? If you're not eating enough or if you're training fasted and you're just wiped out, that just enhances the fatigue. You know, if you're not sleeping enough, that just enhances the fatigue. All right, so why does this matter to you? What do we do about it? We've established that the lifts are not inherently dangerous. Injury data backs us up. And now I want to get on the positive side of things because this is specific to you, especially if you're getting older, you're over 40, you know, you're concerned about the injury

  What heavy loading does for your bones after 40

  Philip Pape 21:06

  and the health and the joint risk. Maybe you're new to this, maybe you've never done this before. And for example, women, you know, reach out to me all the time, going through the perimenopause, postmenopause transition, also have a lot of questions about these things. And I like to be very positive and empowering about this because it's not a negative. You are not hopeless at all. It's quite the opposite. So the compressive load through the spine, that axial loading, the thing that people always talk about as potentially dangerous for your bones. That is the single best evidenced non-drug stimulus we have for building bone density. Or at least preserving bone density, if not building it. There's other things that can also build bone density, like jumping type movements. And this matters enormously right now, at this point in time, because the menopause transition accelerates your bone loss. A meaningful chunk of a woman's lifetime bone loss can happen in those few years around menopause. Right. And I'm not fear-mongering, that's just stating a fact. And we can do something about it. I've talked about the lift more study before, L-A-F-T-M-O-R. And most studies are done on young men in college. This was actually done on post-menopausal women, average age around 65, who already had low bone mass. And they're the same type of population that gets told as they get older, they go to their doctor and they're told, what are you doing lifting weights? What are you doing lifting heavy? You got to protect yourself. Oh, you got to watch out for your bones. So, what they did in the study is they had them do heavy deadlifts, heavy back squats, overhead presses, all around 80 to 85% of their one rep max, twice a week for eight months, and they were supervised. So heavy stuff, okay? The stuff that the internet Like it's gonna break you. No, it's not. And what happened? Well, their bone density in their spine improved by almost three percent. While the comparison group that just did light home exercise, they lost bone. Hip bone improved, strength improved, balance improved, posture got better. What about safety? Out of the whole group, one minor adverse event, it was like a back spasm. That's it. So this is heavy barbell training in 65-year-old women with weak bones. It was effective, safe, and hugely beneficial. And remember that I mentioned they were supervised. Okay. So the women didn't just walk in off the street and they were like, here, load 85% of your max, go for it. They actually spent a month first learning the movements and building up with lighter loads. Exactly what we talk about. That's the whole point. That's progressive overload. It's not just grab the heaviest thing and jump into it. It's you build the skill up over time with completely manageable weights and increase that load, which is the medicine, which is the prescription. As I mentioned correctly, you have to dose it correctly. So when you hear all this stuff about unsafe exercises and you're like, oh, you should do the leg press or the chest supported row and forget the other ones. You may be missing out on that load on your spine and hips that you actually benefit from, especially for your bones, especially for your skeleton. So I wanted to mention that. Now I'm not saying machines are bad, of course not. Okay. We can't, these are not mutually exclusive things. For building muscle size, machines, free weights come out about even. We had uh Lauren Calenzo Semple on here to talk about that. Nothing wrong with machines at all. I use machines all the time. If you like the leg press, use it. It's a great tool. And I'm not saying the alternatives they suggest in the podcast or anybody suggest are quote unquote wrong. There's so many options you have. A trap bar, for example, sure, it does reduce the load on your lower back compared to a straight bar. So if it's a better fit for you, great. Again, you're missing out on other things big time, potentially, maybe not, right? It depends on what your goals are. RDLs, goblet squats, split squats, chest supported rows, they're all legitimate exercises. They're great supplements, they're great substitutes to the mane occasionally, or maybe you work them in on different days other than the mains, for example. And sometimes you have just those in and you don't have the mains for a while. And I'm not saying everybody should barbell squat and deadlift no matter what. If you've got a diagnosed issue, a back problem that really flares up with a movement, a movement doesn't work for you, you don't have the mobility, whatever, you have to individualize. Okay. If you regress on something, you have to build it back. It helps to work with someone. That's just a smart thing to do. And then I'm not saying form and fatigue don't matter. Obviously, they matter enormously. That's the whole point. So the big barbell lifts, in conclusion, are not the hazard. Load is a stimulus, it's not a dangerous thing. Activation is not equivalent to growth. When a lift hurts, look at the programming. All right. That will help you find the root cause. Load progression, fatigue, recovery, technique, that is it. Now, before we wrap up, remember that study result that I promised you about heavy lifting and women over 40 and a question to ask before

  The question to ask before you swap a lift

  Philip Pape 25:46

  you swap a barbell lift for a machine. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if this episode changed how you think about the big lifts, do me a favor and just text it to someone, share it with them, email it to them. You know somebody who is scared of lifting or squatting or deadlifting or who, you know, tells you, oh, isn't that dangerous and just doesn't know. And it's holding them back. Or maybe they think they're too old or too fragile. Text this to them. That is the person who needs to hear it. And it might be the thing that saves their lives. I can't understate that. That is not an under an overstatement. It's gonna keep them strong for decades to come. All right, so here's the number that I want to share with you. Up to 20% of the bone a woman loses in her entire life comes off in the handful of years around menopause. I alluded to this before. It isn't just spread across decades. It's actually concentrated right there in a window that for most women is happening at the same time that everything else is changing. People are telling you to be careful, take it easy, skip the heavy stuff. You might be getting gaslit by all sorts of doctors. You know, you've got the symptoms of menopause, the hot flashes, whatever it is personalized to you, the hormonal fluctuations, the stress in your life. So the timing is pretty tough because this is yet one more thing you might be afraid of or not sure it's gonna help, or thinking it's gonna exacerbate the other issues. And yet the signal for your skeleton, for your bones from heavy lifting is phenomenal. So the next time you're about to swap a barbell lift for a machine to be safe, ask yourself a question. Be honest with yourself. Am I swapping this because the movement genuinely doesn't fit my body? Or because someone told me it was dangerous, or I haven't mastered it yet, right? I haven't, I haven't mastered the things Philip talked about in this episode. There's something else that I need to work on before just giving up the lift. And if it's the second one, then you're not really solving the problem, are you? Right? You're just give kind of giving into fear and not getting the benefit from it. And I just want you to be honest with you. So I want to motivate you to see if you can keep the lift, if it is right for your body, or if the reason isn't that it doesn't fit your body, but for these other reasons, and fix the other stuff. You know, we can help you do that. I've talked about that before. I'm not gonna pitch my stuff again, but get the help if needed. Up and one final little thing

  Choosing a gym that lets you lift properly

  Philip Pape 28:06

  about this is seek out the right gym and equipment as well. Don't settle for what you have. I see a lot of women, for example, come to me and all they have access to is a Smith machine. And then they're trying to squat with a Smith machine. And it's it's really dangerous form they're using because they can't get into the right form given the constraints of the Smith machine. Forget the Smith machine. Go with the free the free weights or other machines. Anyway, um, that's a separate topic. I'm gonna leave it at that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the barbell isn't the risk, it's a tool and used well. It's one of the best things you can do for your body over 40. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How to Build More Muscle Lifting 3 Days a Week After 40 (Martin Silva) | Ep 488

What if more gym days are killing your gains? 

Could training less help you build more muscle?

Are you working harder just to recover worse?

Strength training over 40 isn’t about cramming five or six workouts into your week. It’s about creating enough stimulus to build muscle without burying your body in fatigue.

Coach, former pro physique competitor, and Optimize Your Body host Martin Silva explains why fewer, higher-quality lifting sessions can improve hypertrophy, recovery, strength, and body recomp.

Learn how training frequency and volume work together, why stopping one to three reps before failure can produce better muscle-building results, and how mechanical tension, tempo, and technique matter more than destroying yourself in every workout.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why more gym days backfire
2:00 - From high volume to better results
5:45 - Minimum effective volume and frequency
9:50 - Mechanical tension, tempo, and technique
15:10 - Staying shy of muscular failure
19:56 - Choosing three days or six
25:46 - Better activities for recovery days
28:09 - Mobility, injuries, and changing beliefs

Episode resources:

• Podcast: Optimise Your Body with Martin Silva

• Episode mentioned: I Trained 3x Per Week... And Got Leaner

• Website: optimiseyourbody.com

• Instagram: @martinsilvafitness 

• Facebook: @Optimiseyourbodycoaching

• YouTube: @martinsilvafitness

• Transcript

  Why more gym days backfire

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You're getting a bit older, but you still want to build muscle, lose fat, and feel like yourself. You know it's important to lift weights or at least work out in some way. So you're in the gym five, six days a week. Maybe push-pull legs, maybe an upper lower routine, some cardio added in, but the scale just isn't moving. Your strength isn't going up. Your joints aren't feeling it. So you think maybe I'm not doing enough. My guest today spent close to two decades preaching exactly that. He's competed at the pro level. He's built a coaching practice around training people hard and often, but then he started doing less and his results got better. So today we are getting into why most lifters over 40 are training too much and often for the wrong reasons. What's holding back your strength training results, and how a smaller number of higher quality sessions can do far more for you than five or six days of grinding it out. If you're showing up to the gym week after week and the work isn't paying off, tune in to find out if less really is more. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna talk about how often you should be lifting weights to build muscle, to lose fat, to get lean, especially after 40. Now, the popular advice tells you always that more is more. More days in the gym, more volume in each session, more sets, more cardio on top of that. And then the results don't come, and the assumption is, hey, I'm not doing enough. My guest today is Martin Silva, a coach with close to two decades of experience, an ex-pro physique competitor, host of the Optimize Your Body podcast. Go follow that right now because we've got a back-to-back on our shows. Martin works with someone probably a lot like you, who is busy, a professional, maybe over 35. You want to build muscle, lose fat, feel strong, feel like yourself again, without rebuilding your entire life around going to the gym. Now, what I like about Martin is

  From high volume to better results

  Philip Pape 2:00

  that he changed his mind and he did it in public. He used to train a lot more. He used to train five, six days a week, push every set to failure. He used to recommend more volume is the answer to everything. And then he started training less. His results got better, as did those of his clients. So today you're gonna learn why high frequency training may not be the best approach for you, what to do instead, and how to apply this, whether you've been lifting for many years or you're just getting started for the first time. Martin, welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Martin Silva 2:30

  Thank you very much for having me on, brother. And thank you for that intro. That was awesome.

  Philip Pape 2:34

  Yeah, man. So I've been I've been listening to your show. I encourage listeners to do the same to follow you as well. But I really love talking about frequency and volume because there's a lot of confusion over just the general principles of it, what works, what doesn't, as well as individual responsiveness. And coincidentally, in my feed yesterday, I don't know if you follow Paul Carter, you know, love him or hate him. Yeah. He said building muscle is not a hard work endeavor. You can literally max out your physique, hitting the gym twice a week, never doing more than five reps, never training to failure, not bulking. If you're consistent and have a load progression scheme, you'll make all the gains you can make. You agree or disagree?

  Martin Silva 3:07

  Yeah, I do agree to an extent on that, but you hit the nail on the head, right? The individual, whatever word you use, but individual variants 100% plays a big part. Now, with that, obviously with the the not training to failure piece as well, which we can get into. I think the key thing is here, Philip, and you'll know this with all the people you've coached, it's obviously the consistency piece, right? It's like you could do the worst program in the world and get better results than the best program in the world done inconsistently, right? So just we we got to put that one in there first before we get into the science. If you're not consistent, forget about all the nuance, right? Because people talk about, you know, should I be doing this, that, and the other? And should I be doing like a single-leg squat and you know, balancing on one leg and all these bands? And it's like, don't worry about that, just show up first. But then there's a hell of a lot of nuance which we can get into. So I do partly agree with what he said in terms of training twice a week. So if you do it properly, and if you just think about again the consistency piece, I just want to hammer that home. If you look over the space of you know one year, because you'll probably you probably heard this with people you coach or you know, people you have on that initial call. And a lot of people haven't really trained for a year consistently for either a a long time or b ever. So if the person who's doing two sessions per week, and we know the research shows you need to hit every body part at least twice per week. So two or three times per week to get maximum results. You want to send that muscle building signal. So it's like every two or three days max, even four days. Let's say you trained on a Monday, you know, by by Thursday or Friday, that muscle building signal you've sent to any given body part has kind of died off at that point. So you want to hit it again. That's part of the research behind that frequency piece, right? So, yes, doing twice a week, you can get great results. And actually, not training the failure, you know, stopping one to three reps shy of failure, you're gonna get the same muscle. Well, you know, again, there's a little bit of variance there when it comes to training to failure, depending on the level you're at. But most people, 90% of people, right, they're gonna get way better results stopping one to three reps shy of failure. You're gonna get the same muscle building stimulus and growth without the fatigue, essentially. So, what he's saying there is pretty much bang on for most people. And and that's the tough part, I think people always want to do, which we can definitely get to today. They always want to do more. And I used to judge a good workout by how sore I was the next day, which you find a lot of people still do. They'll say things like, you know, I was sore, but but in a good way. And you're like, okay, let's let's unpack that a bit. How long were you sore for? You know what I mean? And if you're more, if you're sore for longer than generally a day or two, really, you've already crossed the line with the intensity, actually. So actually, you

  Minimum effective volume and frequency

  Martin Silva 5:45

  don't want you want you might feel like you've done something the next day, but actually you don't want to be oversore for the most part as well. You want to recover, which is the key thing, right, Phil?

  Philip Pape 5:53

  Yeah, I agree, man. Recovery is number one. Like you reverse engineer everything from that. So you mentioned frequency. So let's clarify frequency and volume for Volks. Cause when you talk about hitting every body part two to three times a week, you're talking about the frequency of hitting that, getting that muscle stimulus across the week versus the number of sets within those sessions. Because we're I I eventually want to get to talking and comparing, like, okay, how does six days compare to two, but if it's the same volume and things like that? So one thing this brings up is a term I've seen lately, body maxing. I've seen people talk about it where you might train two or three days a week and you know, maybe seven or eight or nine different exercises per session, but you're only doing two sets. So you still save time, you still have a typical length, but you're now hitting different areas of the muscle, different muscle groups in different ways. From that perspective, like what do you think of the effectiveness of that approach to get the frequency or to get the volume? Or is there a more optimal approach than that?

  Martin Silva 6:50

  So, yeah. So when you look at, you know, it's weird, right? Because it's not weird, because when you look at research, there's a lot of things it doesn't account for, right? So what I'll say is, you know, maximum muscle growth and gains, 10 to 20 sets per week per body part, right?

  Philip Pape 7:03

  With a minimum of five, maybe, you know, yeah.

  Martin Silva 7:05

  Minimum of five, bare minimum. But you know, if you do it properly, and look, if we look at a beginner, for example, someone who just gets started, they've got the the beautiful newbie gains, right? Where they just they'll respond, and then obviously genetics plays a big part as well. Well, they'll respond really well because it's the body thrives off novelty, right? So it's a new stimulus, and they can start off by doing like anything, right? Literally, they could do one set and they'll build muscle. So if you're doing two exercises per body part and you're doing like seven to nine exercises each workout, 100%. If you look at that, even if you did two or three sets per work, let's say you did only did like the minimum, let's say you did five or six sets, right? If you're just doing those two workouts, let's just say you did five or six sets each body part and they were both full body workouts. If you're doing it right and you're focusing on that mechanical tension piece, I think that's the piece that gets overlooked the most. And we can get into that as well with like the uh, you know, just for what we mean by that is is really adding because the muscles only really know tension. So they don't really know how much weight you're lifting, right? Whether you're doing 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 100 pounds, all they know is how much tension you're applying to the muscles. So that's why technique, you know, mind muscle connection, and this is where I think the variable of doing slow tempo reps is just is just so underrated. You know, if you look at the optimal, I believe the optimal hypertrophy rep range, I'm pretty sure is a you can do a 3-1-1, but a 4-2-2. So just for the audience, that's basically a four-second negative portion of the rep. So on the lower portion of the rep, think about that. Four seconds, and then a two-second pause, and two seconds when you're actually doing the concentric part, you know, on a curl when you're actually curling, for example. So that's an eight-second rep, right? That's a long workout. So let's say people did that, or they even did, you know, because it takes forever, right? Let's be honest. If they do a three-one one, three-second negative, and they did what you said, they did the two sessions and they did it with intention, right? And they really focused on the skill of each movement, and they weren't just, you know, go in there to sweat. They were actually focused on the intention. What am I doing with this movement? You know, how can I improve it? You know, sure, they're gonna get results, right? So that's where the nuance comes in with, you know, don't throw that rep away because you never get that rep back, right?

  Philip Pape 9:24

  Exactly. I I so I love where you're going. There's two concepts, two principles you mentioned specifically, and that was the mechanical tension and skill. Like you use the word skill, I think is super, super important. And I think, you know, it is true. Mechanical tension, it really all comes down to that. Even if we talk about progressive overload, you can only achieve that because you're hitting the enough mechanical tension to get the stimulus to grow to then go heavier night. You know what I mean? It's all like secondary to mechanical tension. So the slow tempo, let me

  Mechanical tension, tempo, and technique

  Philip Pape 9:50

  ask about that, right? Because I think there's people conflate like time under tension versus I think what you're alluding to, which is the long, the lengthened and shortened positions and the eccentric and concentric having their own value, like eccentric, I know, is correlated with flexibility, you know, as well as the stretch reflex versus the pause, each having its own value. I I love pause everything these days because of like joint issues, it's great. So I love that. Yep. And then the concentric, like exploding out and using those muscle fibers. There's a lot behind it. And I don't think people have to understand it all, but like if you boiled it down to, you know, how to lift, like how would you describe that?

  Martin Silva 10:28

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, because like when you when you go into the gym, right? This is why I say the clients, it's showing up, like I said at the start, right? If you don't show up, forget about all of this. You've showed up, right? You've done the hard part, you got to the gym. I'd say that's the hardest part anyway, because the being there for the most part is the easy part when it comes to getting in shape. That's the fun part. So once you're there, then it's like, what's the intention of what I'm doing? Right. So I'll give you some examples now. When I have clients, the intention now, you're doing, let's just say they're doing between four to six reps or between two to six reps. The intention with this rep range now is for us to get stronger, physically stronger. I've built them up to a point where they're focusing on lifting heavy, and that's the goal is to get stronger each workout. Make sure you're having plenty of rest in between, and we're getting stronger each week. We're adding weight to the bar, and then obviously the side effect of that is building muscle. You know, you're gonna get some hypertrophy from that if you do it right. Then you've got the hypertrophy, let's just say the the time and attention phase. You get into the gym, think in your head to do it right. Like, what is my intention? What am I doing here? Okay, well, I'm doing, I don't know, it could be anywhere between six to ten reps, and I'm gonna do slow tempo. That's generally or eight to ten, even eight to twelve, but I I like to cap it off at 10 with the with the slower reps. If you're doing like a three-second negative or four-second negative, then your goal then is just exactly what we said it's the slow negative portion of the rep. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to just apply as much tension to the muscle, primarily on that lengthening portion that Phil talked about, when the when the muscle when the muscles lengthening out. So, simple example is obviously when you're squatting down, you're going down nice and slowly. And as you're as you're bending your leg, obviously your hamstrings are stretching out, and then when you drive up, you're flexing the quads when you stand up. So on the way down though, as you're sitting into that squat, that's when you're getting a lot of the tension. So, yeah, that and then and then you can do like a higher rep range then, which is basically like you know, it's basically similar to cardio when you do that, right? If you're doing, you know, 15 to 20 squats, for example, you're not gonna go too, you you know, you're not doing slow reps for any more than if you're doing it properly, I'd say more than 10 reps. And then you, you know, your goal then is I'm gonna get a good pump on, I'm getting the heart rate up, I'm still gonna stop two to three reps shy of failure, but I'm I'm going for a higher rep range. So obviously, then I've got to take the weights down to accommodate that. So that rep range, you know, plays a part in the rep tempo, of course, a big part. And I would just say when you're going into the gym, you know, you and you also should be feeling, you know, some people, again, it's the punishment mentality, which I was stuck in before. When they go in the gym, like I really want to get into this. It's not for everyone, right? Some people, less is not more, because some people need to go to the gym and push more. But the majority of people, 100%, especially people we we coach as well, right? Where if they're above 35, I know you generally work with people that are over 40, you know, in that age category, generally, you know, they've they've they've got the all or nothing mentality. That's probably a lot of the times what's holding them back, held them back a bit from getting in shape. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. So then that transfers into the gym and you're going all out, you're like pushing yourself, and that's good to obviously progressively overload, but you want to be keeping the few reps in the tank at the end of each set. You don't want to be compromising technique, and you want to really be leaving the gym like with more energy. You should be leaving energized. You should never feel like you've got to lie down or like, oof, I'm tired. I need to sit down and just gather myself. You've crossed the line when that happens, and that's gonna slow down results because the body's gonna, it can only do you know these two things separately, right? So you've got recovery, the body's recovering is the recovery process, regenerating, and ultimately repairing your muscles and everything else, and your nervous system's recovering. Then you've got the adaptation when your body adapts to the stimulus. So they happen at they don't happen at the same time. So you want to recover as fast as you can so you can adapt quickly, and and when you adapt, the body adapts by you know building muscle or getting stronger. You know, that's that's the plan.

  Philip Pape 14:29

  Yeah, man, the recovery trap. So that that's gonna tie to a question I'm gonna ask in a second about the days per week. Because that's really what would what the reason I'm asking these questions is because I surmise that training less means you have to train more effective. And conversely, if you're training effectively, you can train less. So just hitting on that point a little more, first of all, some of the takeaways I got here for the listener, right, is that nobody wants to do 20 rep squats, but if you do, it's gonna affect the tempo, right? Because you don't want to be miserable doing a five, five minute set of super, super slow 20 rep squats. But it's gonna affect your tempo and your breathing. And there's kind of these variables that interplay with each other. You know, you've got the load, you've got the reps, you've got the breathing, you've got all these things. And I also think there's an aspect to that with the tempo

  Staying shy of muscular failure

  Philip Pape 15:10

  of the mind muscle connection and listening to your body and learning things, especially when a lift is new. So then my question is how do you know you're near failure if you're trying to stay one to three reps shy and you've never really trained like this? Is there a technique like AMRAP or testing yourself or something that you would do to kind of really hit what true failure feels like?

  Martin Silva 15:29

  Yeah, this is this is a really good question because you know yourself, it just takes a long time to get intuitive with the body. You know, after a while you get intuitive, but if someone is if someone is just starting out, I would actually start off with more in fact. So I would go for more like two to three, two to three, leaving two to three reps in reserve at the end of each set. Now, to gauge that, there's not really like I try and keep it as simple as possible with clients. I don't I don't want to use like a formula or anything like that. I actually did a video recently where I was just kind of like showing them what it looks like, literally, where it's it's not it's not you know stopping one or three reps shy, but losing technique along the way and just going, okay, I reckon I can get one or it's actually really focusing on like stopping short of losing form, really. It's more a case of stopping short of losing one to two or even three reps of form. So that's why, you know, the best way to do it is again, you have to get intuitive and gauge it as you as you go. But I don't think it takes that long to get intuitive and like, okay, I'm gonna go for 10 reps. That's my that's my target. So let me pick a weight, let me just roughly gauge a weight that I reckon I could do 12, 13, maybe even 14 reps with, right? Roughly to absolute failure. I'm gonna pick that weight and then I'm gonna stop on around about 10 reps. You know what I mean? So it's kind of a tough one to explain. So I don't I've tried using like different things in the past where it's been almost like like a formula with clients and stuff, or a little, and it's just like I find it's just more it's too complex, and they get they get better when they just get more intuitive with it. You know what I mean? It is at the same time, one more thing. If yeah, you don't really know what it's like. That's the other, the other flip side. You don't know what it's like unless you've trained the failure as well, though, right? Actually gone to failure, and you know what that Phil, there's with that, that's all in there, man. There's so much in the tank. Once you experience and you know the technique and stuff and the tension piece, there's so much in the tank, right? Once you've got that piece.

  Philip Pape 18:08

  And I'll say, just mysteriously, you tend to go l farther from failure on the exercises you don't like. It's funny how that happens.

  Martin Silva 18:14

  That's a really good point. That's a really no, excuse me, that's a really good point. I do the same thing as well, you know. Like you say 15 to 20 squats, you probably got like 40 in the tank and you stop on 15.

  Philip Pape 18:24

  You're like, this is just too much. You know, it's funny, I ran Bull Mastiff last year. This is an Alex Bromley program, and it was the first time I've been exposed to like Amrap sets. It's the reason I ask it, but it does involve math a little bit in that you you tack on a last set and you go to Amrap and you realize how many sets you how many reps you really have in the tank. You're like, whoa, I have like seven left in the tank, and I thought I had two, but it helps you gauge the progression for the subsequent weeks, like based on a formula, actually. But it's interesting. Yeah, you just have to figure this stuff out over time. So then now let's talk about the frequency volume kind of interplay here, right? When we talk about three days a week, what are we comparing that to? Because I'm thinking a lot of people are trying to do like upper lower splits, typically four days, maybe some sort of power building, like a five day. Some people are insane, they like to go to the gym every day, right? And you mentioned recovery. So I think, okay, part of this is a recovery factor of just literally having that day off, even if it's to do other stuff, like you've been doing some mobility stuff I saw on your IG, right? Like that's still recovery. Is it that because we don't get enough sleep? So it's a couple extra days to sleep in, is it all the above? And I'm asking that because some people say, you know what, I'd rather have six days of half the session length in my home than three days, and it's the same volume. So are we talking two different things here?

  Martin Silva 19:41

  Definitely. And that's that's really interesting because personally I find it hard to get people to do like frequent workouts. Now, they they will do it, and I do have some clients doing it, but doing something every day, for example, in an ideal world, 20 or 30 minutes, 30 minutes, it really depends on the level, right? But let's just say 20 or 30 minutes every six days a week. Maybe one day then they could just have an active day where they walk or maybe do some mobility. Um, I would say for most people, especially when we look at age, and and it's not just you know what it's like, Phil. I know how many kids have you got, by the way? Two, two kids. You got two kids, yeah. I got a I got a kid on the way as well. I got a boy on the way. So uh yeah, man, I'll be joining you there. But but when you look at that, right, the responsibilities people have just naturally we get as we get older, right? So it's like you've got work stress, you've got kids, you've got this stress bucket filling up. So actually, you know, it's it's a lot harder to cross the line when you're doing 20 to 30 minutes, like a purposeful workout each time, then you'll cross the line with intensity and then get stuck in that recovery trap we talked about when you're doing those short workouts, generally, if you get it right with a workout. Then also you you you do you it's that frequency thing as well, right? You're sending that signal,

  Choosing three days or six

  Martin Silva 20:47

  that muscle building, anabolic signal every single day and doing something. And then you can split that, you know, you can split that into like a lower up, maybe uh, and then just like a light kind of accessory workout or full body or even mobility, or you can split that into like, you know, three full bodies, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then just do some light body weight stuff. Literally, it could just be your own body weight, squats, you know, push-ups, sit-ups, or core stability stuff and some mobility on the on the Tuesday and Thursday, for example, right? So there's there's different ways that you can split that. But yeah, I would say really for most people, as long as as long as they're getting, you know, the it's the time they spend in the gym, right? So if as long as they're if you're doing three workouts in a week and you're doing one hour per session, for example, it's totally fine, right? Because some people they can do that, they find that more consistent. I think a lot of people find it easier from my experience with being consistent with someone like that. And then, but they normally want to do more than that three a week, right? So generally, you know, again, the all or nothing, they want to do more, more, more. So I do my best to start them off slow with that three a week. And then if they want to do an extra gym session, let's just say, for example, on top of the three full bodies, then they could go, like you said, they could do some mobility, they could even go and do some light stuff on even machines, but like this is where it gets a bit more technical, then, right? So it's like you've got to kind of like program them for that because then it's like you've got to take the intensity right down, and you're literally just gonna get like a light pump on on the eat into the next main training session.

  Philip Pape 22:13

  Yep, yep.

  Martin Silva 22:13

  There we go. But we should touch on what you said the upper lower stuff, right? You mentioned about like most people want to do that because I don't know, personally, I actually find that more enjoyable as well, doing like upper lower, you know, because you do a lot of things.

  Philip Pape 22:28

  I gotta do legs every day.

  Martin Silva 22:29

  Exactly. That's it. That's it, man. Legs every day, we're full body, it's not not pleasant, or at least one or two exercises. So, yeah, upper lower split four times per week, where you're doing, you know, let's say the whole of the upper body one day, and then maybe legs and abs the other, and then an upper lower again. Can work well as also. So yeah, I think the key thing is, you know, you're making sure that you're getting adequate recovery. It goes back to that, right? You get an adequate recovery. So let's just let's just look at three different scenarios, right? Because I'm thinking in my head, people that are coaching stuff. So it's like three, four bodies a week, right? The person who does that and they do that properly, a proper program, which is geared for their body. You know, if you work with someone like you know, Phil, for example, right? He's experienced and he's got the wisdom and he knows the nuance, and we're getting older now, mate. You know what I'm saying? So you know, you know the deal, right? So it's like you can program something properly and you're gonna get more bang for your buck. It makes a big, big difference, you know. I think there's so much nuance to the training piece. People always talk about nutrition, especially strength training. I think it's not it's not spoken about enough. So three per week, if someone did that consistently, right? Full bodies for like a year, six months to a year, the results would be amazing, right? But you know, I think for mental health and just for getting that boost and just for a habit to do something every day strength related is just a really, really good way to look at it, you know, because that actually it does it does a lot. Because again, you're sending the signal every day and you are getting a little, don't forget about all the other impacts that you get from strength training, right? Now, when you go into more than that, when you go into like the five and the six sessions per week, I just feel like at that level, you know, that's gonna be for more of an advanced person. If you want to actually lift that many days a week, realistically, I'd want you to be at a really, really high level. I do get some clients doing that. I can think of literally one guy now where he does like six a week. He's an absolute weapon, but he's been consistent for like three, four years. And you know, he just he just loves it. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, you know what I mean? It's it's a rarity, though. If you if you want to do that consistently and consistently get results and build muscle, it's got to be very smart that programming so you you know you don't get stuck in that recovery trap.

  Philip Pape 24:31

  Yeah, I think I think you hit on it, right? Like it is about consistency and if you can make it work, because because I know even personally, and then working with clients, trying four, five, six days a week, you just get weeks where you feel like you can't make that work for whatever reason. Business travel, you know, family events, holler, and you're like, am I gonna have that many weeks that are interrupted where this makes sense, or should I default to three and add in one or two? And that's a little bit of a psychological twist on them on it, right? So, or are you gonna do it for a short period, you know, leading up to a powerlifting meet or something, and then it makes sense. So I like that.

  Martin Silva 25:03

  Hey man, let me let me let me touch on that real quick because that's such an important point you make, is the behavioral aspect. We can talk about the science and frequency and everything else, but that gets overlooked. And it's like when you're traveling with work or when life, because life gets people don't never think about that, right? And you you you have to you have to remind people, don't you as a coach to anticipate these challenges that are gonna come. And if you're doing like an if you start skipping body parts, you know, you're doing like an upper lower split, you miss a leg day, right? Which is probably gonna be the leg day, it gets more tricky. You end up getting discrepancies, then mentally you kind of check out. Whereas if you're doing full body, for example, like we said at the start, on a bad week, I say this to clients, right? You're away, life's hectic. Can we get those two in this week? You know what I mean? Two full bodies, and you're still hitting every body part twice. And even if you don't do every single body part, if you just do the compound lifts, even if you just did like legs, shoulders, back chest, for example, right? The the so you're doing the compound movements, you can stay on track much easier then. So that's a good point.

  Philip Pape 25:59

  Yeah, I mean, I think you hit on the basics. This is what people need to understand and make make their plans flexible. And it sounds like different splits can work as long as you're getting the frequency, as long as you're getting the volume, which is all well established in the the research, like you said. And so I guess the last thing is in those in-between days, you know, you did touch on like something strength related, but I do know a lot of folks who would rather have the flexibility for just walks or, you know, playing some sports that they like or some sprinting or just not doing anything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Other than some walking. Like, what are your thoughts on, you know, working with clients? Like, what are the big activities that you'd recommend to fill in those recovery days to keep them active,

  Better activities for recovery days

  Philip Pape 26:37

  but not necessarily more strength movements, let's say.

  Martin Silva 26:40

  Yeah, yeah. Very simple, right? And it's not rocket science, bit boring, but just walking, right? Getting outside and moving as well, because a lot of people are like stuck indoors all the time. Or better yet, it's just doing something fun that they enjoy, right? Because as we get older, we forget to have fun. So if they've got a hobby or something that requires moving, you know, and just keeping themselves active, 100%. I would say just like literally, just the more you can move, the better. Yeah, simple as that, really, because you know, and I probably you probably see this as well. People you work with, you know, most people are just sat down most of the day. So it's a good opportunity to get outside, move, and ideally get in nature as well. The way I look at nature now is like a vitamin for me personally, you know, it's something I need. It's it's not it's not like it's something that's negotiable anymore. I need it to perform and to be able to deal with stress better, you know. So I factor that into my week as well. So that's what I I try to do with clients as well, is you know, get them to what are they doing for fun this week, for example, right? What are you doing for fun on the weekend or something? So I think it's a good good way to look at it for people is like, what am I doing for fun on the weekend? Let's plan something ahead. And it can be active stuff as well, right? It can be outdoors or whatever.

  Philip Pape 27:46

  I think it's really important what you hit on there. I had a coach who was a business coach, and he he actually he wasn't he wasn't helping me with nutrition training, nothing like that. And he's like, Philip, when's the last time you just took your laptop outside for half an hour? Like you just enjoyed nature. Yeah, I'm like, you make a good point. You make a good point. I'm a hustler, like I'm constantly, you know, we just get wrapped up in our our high stress world and and try to find that is important. So last thing I want to ask you then is in your own journey, right? Like, I'm sure you've changed your mind on things. I alluded to an Instagram post about incorporating mobility in between and how you need coaches and you need accountability. So, like, what's something that you've really evolved on over the past few years that you used to think this is how it is, and now maybe a little bit more flexible thinking on that.

  Martin Silva 28:29

  Yeah, I'm glad you reminded me of the mobility piece, actually. I got to bring that one in because you saw my post. So now I'm I'm 39 in a few months' time, right? So 38 now. And you know, in my 20s, I only started doing mobility in like my late, I think it was my late 20s, I started doing mobility. And I was just like, wow, this is awesome, especially lift before I lift. Mainly, I was I was trying to get it in before I lifted and just working on those usual kind of tight areas, hips, you know, shoulders and thoracic mobility, and then you know, the trunk rotational movements. And I because because back then I was more obsessed with

  Mobility, injuries, and changing beliefs

  Martin Silva 29:00

  kind of aesthetics, right? From the bodybuilders stuff, and I noticed, wow, I actually can lift way heavier when I do this, you know. So that was, and then it was like, okay, and I my body actually feels better, and I kept doing it. And then over the last year, I just got slack with it. I was just getting away because I was this is a trap that we all fall into as well, with loads of different things, right? When you can get away with something or it doesn't cause problems initially, then you try and get away with it, right? We try all of us try and cut corners, and you know, at times. So, anyway, long story short, I noticed a twinge in my in my shoulder a couple of months ago, and I'm like, yeah, okay, you're taking the mick. And I tried, and knowing everything I know as well, right? So almost 20 years of coaching, knowing how well I know my body, I would just go, I would warm up, I'd feel a little bit of a twinge in it. It's like a bit of an impingement, and then I would just go, I'm all right, I'll just I'll just train. I'm fine now, I feel fine. And me, I uh what happened? I don't want to go on too much of a ramble here, but like last week, I randomly, right? I never haven't been this for ages, I was just upstairs on my rooftop, did a bit of a workout like body weight, and I just started throwing a jab to see how my shoulder was. I literally couldn't even lift my arm up, and that was like a wake-up call. I'm like, this is ridiculous now. What are you doing? Right. And I was doing like I'm doing like heavy bench press and stuff as well. I'm like, it's it's it's crazy. Anyway, so started that last week, and that's something I've changed my mind on, really, is mobility is just a necessity. And and you know, mobility is is it involves some flexibility, but it also involves strength when you're doing mobility, and that is not only is it gonna stop you getting injured, right? That's the bare minimum requirement that you get from these things, but it really helps you get better results because it kind of amps up your nervous system if you do it before you lift, and then obviously if you're doing static stretches as well, that's really important. I'm kind of slack on that, but I can get away with the more mobility dynamic ones, right? So I should add in some static stuff, but the dynamic one takes care of most of it, and doing that before you lift, you get better results, and then obviously, you know, at a bare minimum reduces injury, but you feel so much better, man. Another thing I've changed my mind on, I was thinking about this is nutrition. Oh, sorry, the less is more thing. Everything we just talked about, I've even over the last couple of years, I've still realized with clients in particular and myself, less is more, less is more, right? It's like less, even less is more, right? How can I just scale that back a bit more in terms of results with building muscle? And how can I get them to change their relationship? Not even not relationship, but change their outlook with training so I can sell them in to those kind of little short workouts or shorter workouts done more frequently for most people. So, like 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, you know, whatever, just done like more frequently. And even if it's body weight stuff or even the bands and stuff or mobility on the days in between, quick workouts, because they just get better results and they feel better. And then they get it's the mindset shift they then get with just doing the stuff, doing the strength stuff without having to like push themselves. It's the whole mindset shift. So I feel like that is something I've really kept changing my mind on over the over the years. It's like less is more.

  Philip Pape 31:50

  Yeah, and that's what I love is that we should be open to changing our minds and realizing everybody's different. So, man, this has been really cool. I think we hit on, I think we hit on the main points. I want to send folks to connect with you. And also, if you if you happen to have a resource or a good episode related to what we talked about today, we can send them there. Any any place you want to send them to?

  Martin Silva 32:08

  Great, yeah, yeah. So, in terms of an episode that we yeah, I've got some recent ones actually. I think I just did a recent one on not the most recent trainer, one on my YouTube and on my podcast. It's I think it was like eat less, what was something like I got bigger, eating less, or something like that. Sorry, training less, not eating, train less and and built muscle. I trained less and got bigger. It's literally a few episodes ago. It's everything we touched on, but a bit more depth in terms of uh you know the stuff we touched on. So go check that out. Yeah, and like you said, the podcast is optimize your body on all platforms, and yeah, it's just modern silver fitness on on YouTube. Yeah, that's that's pretty much it. And obviously, Instagram as well at Martin Silver Fitness. So, in terms of my resources, you can find you know most stuff on uh on my Instagram on the link there. And yeah, that's pretty much it, my man. Yeah, man.

  Philip Pape 32:50

  We'll throw the links into the podcast, obviously, Instagram, YouTube, that specific episode so people can find it. And then, of course, we're doing a collaboration between our shows, so we'll have me on your show as well. So follow both shows. Uh, I think you're gonna love Martin. I mean, I follow a lot of nutrition and fitness podcasts, but then I unfollow a lot of them because they get kind of monotonous. And uh I try not to be that, and I I get the sense you're not that either. You have very, you know, targeted problem-solving topics that are really good for the uh this audience. So go check them out. Martin, thank you so much, man, for coming on Wits and Weights. It's a pleasure to know you and chat with you today.

  Martin Silva 33:23

  Same, man. Thanks for having me on, man. I'm looking forward to interviewing you next. Cheers, my man.

  Philip Pape 33:27

  Looking forward to it. Cheers.

Is My Metabolism Damaged From Dieting? (What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You) | Ep 487

Has years of dieting on and off damaged your metabolism? It that why fat loss feels so hard now?

This is one of the most common fears I hear, and the short answer is almost certainly... no. So what is going on?

Most of what feels like a broken metabolism is one of two things: either the normal discomfort of a deficit or the way your appetite pushes back as you lose fat, preventing a consistent deficit (where you feel like you're dieting but can never lose weight).

If you look at weight loss studies, those reporting the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least, implying that too much hunger isn't by definition "necessary" for a successful deficit.

Learn about metabolic adaptation in a moderate diet, the "four-week wall" when most people quit a fat loss phase, and the difference between the discomfort you should "ride out" and red flags where you should take a break or change something about the diet (like the speed/aggressiveness).

The people who finish are the ones who lose the fat!

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, body recomposition, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?
1:46 - The satiety diet question
4:10 - Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting
8:31 - Why more hunger predicts less fat loss
12:24 - What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit
19:29 - Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags
23:27 - Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish
25:33 - A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40
28:12 - Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

• Transcript

  Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've dieted on and off for years and you're wondering, has all that restriction damaged my metabolism? Is that why fat loss feels so hard? This episode is for you. The short answer is no. It's almost certainly not damaged, and I'll show you the research behind that. But there is something real going on, and it's often about hunger and how you read the signs of your deficit. Some of what you're feeling is what it's supposed to feel like. But oftentimes people quit right when that calorie deficit is starting to pay off or about to. Some of it is a warning sign that maybe you shouldn't push through. So today I'm going to show you the difference between those, why your metabolism is more resilient than you've been led to believe, and whether you should push through or stop. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pate. And a few weeks back, a couple episodes ago really, I made the case for the satiety diet. The idea that you can lose fat without fighting hunger the entire way through. And I still definitely stand by that. You should build your diet so it's as comfortable as possible, that it gives you as much satisfaction as possible, because that comfort, at least relative terms, to say a crash diet or a severe deficit where you are not thinking about satiety is what keeps you in the game. It's what leads to what we call adherence, sticking to that deficit so you can make it through successfully, especially when it's going to go on for a longer time because you have a lot of fat to lose. But then I got a question after that episode that drives today's episode. And it's something like, okay, Philip, I built a satiety diet.

  The satiety diet question

  Philip Pape 1:46

  I'm eating the protein and the fiber and the volume, and I'm still hungry sometimes. I still have days where my energy is lower. Is my metabolism just broken or adapted or downregulated from all the years that I spent under eating? And that question, the is my metabolism damaged from dieting, is probably one of the most common questions even today. Even though we've addressed it on this show quite a bit, I don't want to take for granted that we hear that message that you need to fix your metabolism. So we're gonna answer that head on. The short version is that your metabolism is far, far more resilient than social media might lead you to believe, especially when they're trying to sell you a program or a diet. What feels like a broken metabolism is usually two different things. It's either it's the normal discomfort from a deficit, but it's also the way that your appetite and your body pushes back when you lose fat and when you're in a deficit. Now, this is independent of other aspects of metabolism from, for example, muscle loss over the years and things like that. We're gonna set that aside for now and just talk about the adaptation piece and the, you know, is your metabolism damage piece? But if you can kind of learn to make sense of this, what's normal, what's not normal, should I finish my cut? Should I push through? Or maybe are these signs things telling me I need to slow it down or maybe take a diet break? That's what I'm trying to help you with because I think that's where we can make the right decisions so that we are successful with our fat loss and can take what I often call the fastest path, which isn't always the quickest path, if you know what I mean. Sometimes you have to take breaks and sometimes you have to slow it down so that you can continue and then be successful. This matters a lot if you've been dieting for many years, like many of us have. Uh, I think the statistic is the average woman diets over a hundred times in her lifetime. And you've probably been told, hey, if diet feels too hard, something is wrong with you or wrong with your metabolism, or you know, there should be an easier way to do it. We're gonna take that apart today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second self-check. These are three questions you could ask yourself on any given day within a cut, okay, a fat loss phase, to know whether to keep going or to back off. So I love these little kind of self-checks so that you can course correct if needed. All right, here's what we're covering today.

  Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting

  Philip Pape 4:10

  First, why the advice to just fix it when it feels bad backfires and makes people what I'll call serial diet quitters. And unfortunately, the message on social media is often, you know, fat loss can be effortless. I'm gonna show you how by my program. We're gonna talk about what the research actually says about whether your metabolism is damaged, about hunger during a diet. And, you know, I'll warn you now, the hunger part is maybe not what you would expect. So we're gonna give you a little tease on that. And then the part that you are probably listening to this podcast for is how to tell the manageable discomfort apart from the real warning signs and what should you do for each one. We're gonna get practical. So let's start with where most people are right now. You let's say you start a fat loss phase and the first couple of weeks feel all right. Maybe even feel great because you're motivated. The scale maybe starts to move because of especially the water weight that drops in that first week. You see these stories a lot of time, like, I went on keto, I went on carnival, I started fasting and I lost all this weight in the first week or two. And you can see this on any diet, really. And then around week three, four, five, let's say, this is when things start to get a little bit hairy, where you're a little bit hungrier between meals, your workouts start to feel maybe a little more sluggish, maybe you're a little bit more irritable, maybe you're shorter with your kids, and then the doubt creeps into your brain, something's wrong, this isn't working, the diet's broken, you know, especially when you don't see the scale move, you know that voice that I'm talking about in your head, right? You know what I'm saying when the scale doesn't move, especially. So what do you do? Well, you fix it. You add some food back in and say, okay, I'm listening to my body, that's one approach, or you cut harder, that's another approach. Sometimes either of those approaches actually can work, right? Cutting, cutting calories further and or eating more or eating more food volume. But for a lot of people, what happens is they they relax the deficit every time that it starts to feel like a deficit. And if a deficit never really feels like a deficit, I guess the way I'm gonna put it, you're probably not in one. Okay. And so then you never finish the cut. Does this sound familiar where it starts to get a little bit hard, or you succumb to maybe emotional eating or binges, or you have all these things come up in your life, and all of a sudden the average calories end up drifting back to where you're not really in a cut. And you're like, well, my numbers say that I'm in a cut, and this feels great. Like, like I've been told it doesn't have to feel that bad if it's a moderate deficit, right? Even Phillips talked about that. If I have satiety, uh enough satiety in the diet, but then I'm not losing weight. So what is happening, right? And so this is what I want to get you away from. I want you to realize where the rubber hits the road and you have to kind of stick with it and ride things through rather than go in these waves and like quickly react to hunger or conclude that fat loss just doesn't work or your metabolism's damaged or whatever. Does that make sense? So I think the trap is that if it feels bad, you need to change something. I think that is correct if it's a high level of negative biofeedback, but not necessarily if it's just a little bit of something like hunger. And so we want to talk about the difference today. I don't want you to treat every uncomfortable feeling as a red flag when many of them are just a little bit of a warning or a little bit of a signal that maybe things are working and heading the direction you want. Does that make sense? And many people listening, dear, many of you listening have gone through many diets in the past and you can't trust your body and you feel like you can't trust your hunger signals. But that's because they were crashed diets or you were cutting carbs or something like that. If we take a reasonable approach to this, that's under control, under control and with intention, you can then distinguish the difference between these. Now, on the other extreme, you have the message that, hey, fat loss, you know, losing weight requires a little bit of suffering. You have to push through, you have to have discipline, and that's garbage too. I mean, that doesn't comport with the evidence or what actually works. It just makes pick makes people miserable, it makes them quit. And so we kind of have two sides of the extreme, right? Either that side or, you know, it shouldn't feel bad at all, it should be easy, you need to optimize your diet. And I'm gonna show you how to do that if you buy my program, right? So that's why I made the satiety episode.

  Why more hunger predicts less fat loss

  Philip Pape 8:31

  But here's the part where I think we should talk about hunger and what the research says, because this is a very important mechanism. And it surprised me a little bit as I reviewed the research, because I've heard for many years, and you probably have as well on podcasts, that hunger is the signal that fat loss is happening. I've said that before, and I still say it to clients: I'm like, well, if you're having a little bit of hunger, you can expect that. It's just not gonna be, we don't want it to be too high, and we also don't expect zero hunger either. Putting GLP ones aside, because that changes the whole game. And that the more you white knuckle it, the more it's working because, you know, you have to have some hunger. Now, whether you are talking white knuckling or just a little bit of hunger, you know, I've always said, okay, you have to have some. What the research says is that people who report the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least amount of weight. There's a study called Beef Wise. It's six months of behavioral weight loss. And those who came in hungrier and more prone to deprivation lost less weight. People who reported more satisfaction with their diet lost more weight. Okay, so this kind of aligns with the satiety episode that I did not long ago. There's a big study called Pounds Lost. And the the the variable that predicted who actually hit the 5% weight loss target was not hunger, it was dietary restraint. Not restriction, but restraint, meaning the skill of controlling what you eat, right? Which is which is what we try to do all the time when we talk about on the show, like knowing what you want to eat, how much you want to eat, tracking it, et cetera, and being in control of that meal planning, meal prep, and all of that. There's also data we have that shows that on times or weeks where people rate their hunger highest, their adherence that same week tends to be lowest. So if you put all that together, hunger isn't necessarily the cost or the price of the progress you want to make to get those fat loss results. It's often the thing that makes people stop their fat loss, which you would say, okay, well, then all those people saying you should go through a fat loss phase without feeling hungered, it should be easy. Maybe aren't they then on the right track? Well, stick with me. So your body fights back when you're losing fat. And one of the ways it fights back is by cranking up your hunger. And people who feel that hunger the most are the ones that are likely most likely to stop their fat loss, to bail on it, right? So if the idea of just feeling hungry all the time means your fat loss is working, it's gonna lead you to chase getting to that point of feeling that hunger. However, the evidence shows us that too much of that causes you to stop your diet and get out. So it sounds like a catch-22. What do we do? Well, the goal is to feel the least hunger you can, even though you still have hunger while still being in a deficit. And that's the fine balance that we're trying to find. Now, this is important, so I don't get accused of contradicting myself. That doesn't mean that a could, a good cut feels like nothing. You cannot reliably lose fat with zero change in appetite. Some hunger is simply what you're gonna feel from a negative energy balance because your body is trying to defend that settling point. It used to be called a set point. Now we use the term settling point. It's trying to defend that weight, get back to homeostasis because it's getting the sense that you were depriving it of energy. It's like, what is going on? We need you to eat more to make up for this. So the point is that you shouldn't feel anything, it's that more discomfort doesn't correlate with more progress necessarily. And in fact, a lot of discomfort is more of a red flag that you're gonna end up quitting your diet. So that is the difference we're talking about today. I hope I didn't take too long to get to that setup. That's where my thought

  What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit

  Philip Pape 12:24

  is going. So is your metabolism actually damaged? I want to answer this question. If you've been dieting for many years, especially, for almost everyone listening, the answer is no. I don't care how many diets you've done, how extreme or restrictive they were. And I want to go through why so that you stop blaming a broken metabolism or listening to anyone who suggests that. And then we can see what's actually fixable and in your in your control. So people assume that after enough diets, their metabolism has adapted almost not permanently. Maybe they know that it's not permanently, but they think it's, you know, look at the big, biggest loser science and how long it took to recover, and they're like, well, my metabolism is tanked. I'm also older, I've done so many diets. That is why I can't lose fat, and that is why the scale is stuck. And there is a phenomenon under this, of course, it's called metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is where your body burns a bit less than predicted when you lose weight, both because of the weight loss, but also because of the lack of energy while you're in the deficit. Now, in a moderate deficit, okay, a moderate diet where you're in, let's say, less than a 500-calorie deficit a day, the adaptation is something like 40 to 90 calories a day. It's not this catastrophic amount. We've seen that in the literature. Of course, it varies from person to person, also varies of how based on how long you've been at the diet. But these dramatic numbers you've heard, like the biggest loser study, where the metabolism dropped hundreds of calories below baseline, that was extreme starvation level dieting plus hours and hours of daily exercise. Okay. And that is not most people, even if you've had trouble dieting, even if you're doing quote unquote too much cardio or whatever, you're nowhere near to the level they were doing it on biggest loser, where they had to be pushed to that extreme. So that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more of a moderate cut, where when it gets hard around week four of the cut, which is typically, you know, a month in, your metabolism, it's not like it's breaking, or you're all of a sudden gonna plateau permanently and like that's it. We've seen in studies like the Kevin Hall studies at NIH that even unrealistically large amounts of metabolic adaptation don't really change when your weight plateaus. What changes is the lack of adherence that compounds, that adds up over time. And that's good news. It simply means most people are not in the deficit they think they are. And in their brain, they think they are. So it seems like your metabolism is broken. That's pretty cool. And I I've seen this in my own data where it's very, very hard sometimes to trust things unless you are tracking, right? Unless you know for sure you've had those taste-licks bites, those extra calories, you've had things that are more calorie dense than you thought, et cetera. And it all does add up. Now, damaged isn't the same as unchanged. Okay, change happens all the time. Transitions are happening all the time in your body. If your body has lost weight, then you are running on fewer calories than you used to be from being smaller, and because of that adaptation we talked about. And that's why maintenance calories take fewer, fewer calories than people would expect when you've lost weight. But that's just normal, right? That's just normal. There's also that this this wall that people hit around four to six. The question is, is this a real wall of weight loss, right? When you you you know, you lose weight pretty quickly in those first couple of weeks, maybe it starts to slow down weeks three, four, and then all of a sudden it seems to stall. Well, there, you know, there's nothing special that happens day 30 of a cut, but there are a few things happening. There's the motivation that was there at the beginning is starting to wear off. You know, the whole novelty of the diet is starting to wear off. The accumulated hunger from being in a deficit starts to add up. The initial fluid weight loss that occurred might have given you an artificial feeling that it was faster than it was. So all of these things added together feels like you hit a wall. And it shows up for the vast majority of people who are in a diet. And it's often right when people quit, or pretty soon after that, they quit the diet. That's where I see the frustration. That's where I see in our program eat more lift heavy. People start to vent in the comments or the community. And that's exactly where we can kind of talk them off a ledge by saying, Well, let's look at your data. Let's look at your data, understand what's going on. And this is probably the moment at which you just want to continue doing what you're doing because things are about to take a turn for the better. And here's the other thing appetite doesn't just reset overnight. There's research that follows people after significant weight loss that shows that their hunger hormones still shifted toward hunger even a year later. So being in a reduced state comes with elevated appetite and then it lingers, which I would say is just more reason to treat manageable hunger as something you would expect and kind of ride it out rather than try to fix it in a moment of panic. And then you might make things worse because then you might still have hunger and you're eating more food. Beyond that, if that makes sense. So, what we've established so far, just stay with me here, is some discomfort is normal and unavoidable. But more discomfort is not better, and too much discomfort is a red flag that you're probably not long for this diet anymore. But your metabolism is mostly fine. And the hard part of a diet often occurs right around when most people give up. So, now what do you do with all that? All right, I'm gonna share the fix in a moment, but if you're looking for a more accelerated way to get there, what we're gonna talk about with support, with personalization for you, if you want someone in your corner to look at the numbers and tell you, hey, what I'm feeling is normal, or am I cutting too hard, or what is the data telling me when my weight stalls? That is a huge part of what we do inside Eat More Lift Heavy. You can learn about it at eatmoreftheavy.com. This is the 26-week coached program that we run, real human coaches. And honestly, the single thing people tell us that made the most difference wasn't a, you know, tweak to their macros or something like that, something very tactical. It was having someone in their corner during the hardest parts of these phases. Okay, the four or five weeks into the diet doubts that creep in where we could say, you know what, this is normal, just hold the line. Or, you know what, your data is telling us maybe you do need a diet break. Maybe you do need to change these variables over here. And that is a very hard call to make for ourselves when we're hungry, when we're starting to second guess everything, or when you haven't done this before and you haven't built the confidence yet. So if that is where you are, if you're trying to lose, let's say, eight to 15 pounds of fat and you want a very structured, supportive way to do that, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Just take a look. All the information is there, the pricing is there, it's completely transparent. We've built this for especially people over 40 who are just tired of starting over and over again, who want to sustain their results and will help you get there. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.

  Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags

  Philip Pape 19:29

  All right, so the whole game behind this is learning to sort what you're feeling into the right bucket so that you can act on data versus feelings versus whatever. And the the first bucket is I'll call manageable discomfort. It's what you should expect, but maybe you didn't know you should expect it. And that's where you generally just ride it out. The other bucket is unmanageable struggles, right? The struggle bus, where something has to be adjusted in your protocol. And it may feel the same. And everybody's feelings are different for like, you know, when you go to the doctor and they're like, tell me your pain on a scale of one to 10. I hate that question because I don't know, what is my six compared to your six? How is that objective? So it's kind of the same thing, all right? That's why I think this is more difficult than people make it out to be. And I wanted to do a whole episode on it. So let's look at both buckets. The first bucket, manageable discomfort. What does that look like? Well, you're hungry between meals, but you can get to the next meal without it really affecting you that much. Doesn't ruin your life, doesn't make you, you know, run for the fridge. It's just this feeling, right? This feeling of a little bit of a gap, a little bit of emptiness, a little maybe, maybe some rumbles. And then along with this, your other biofeedback are things like your workouts may feel a little more flat than they used to be, but your strength is still there. Maybe you are hitting more reps still, right? Maybe you're mentally a bit more irritable, but it's kind of a blip. It's not like it takes over. It doesn't, you don't obsess about it. Your sleep is still pretty solid. And then the real key to this, to tell you that it's manageable, is that it is, I'll say stable or slowly getting more familiar to you, like you adapt to it, is my point. Like you kind of getting used to it and it's stable rather than getting worse or worse. That I honestly is the biggest indicator is okay, you've had a little bit of hunger, but a lot of people, everybody's gonna experience that. The question is, it does it kind of even out and stayed roughly in that zone, which can be indicated if you're trying if you're saying measuring your hunger on a scale of one to 10, and you go from a 10 to a nine to an eight to a seven, and it kind of hovers around six or seven and doesn't keep going down. For example, now for you, a six might be terrible. I don't know. I'm going back to my earlier comment about the one to ten. But your body, when it's in a calorie deficit, is going to give you a little bit of hunger. It's stable. You can ride it out. You expected it, you looked forward, not look forward, but you expect that to happen. Okay. The other, the struggle bus piece, the unknown. Manageable struggle is a completely different beast. Okay, that's something that you don't want to push through because you're going to make matters worse. And honestly, a lot of you have been in this situation. And hunger that is relentless, that's ravishing, that keeps driving you to binge eat, where you are not choosing to eat more, you're just getting overpowered emotionally. Food noise, along with a lack of performance in multiple areas of your physiology, like your strength is dropping over and over. Your sleep is getting worse. Your mood is maybe getting worse and affecting your life. You know, for the women listening, this could even affect your period, which that would definitely be red flag potentially. Feeling cold all the time. I mean, when I'm in a big deficit, I actually start to feel cold. And usually it's if it's a big deficit, I'm keeping it really short as well. I don't like that feeling of just feeling weak and cold, right? Dizzy, uh depleted. Any of that is potentially a red flag. And the answer here is hey, the deficit's probably too aggressive for you, or you've done it for too long, and you just have to back it off. Now, there's a lot of ways to do that. You can slow the rate down, you can take breaks, you can use refeeds, you can go on and off and do intermittent dieting. Like there's a lot, not fasting, intermittent dieting, right? You go into the diet or out of the diet across days or weeks. Okay? So that's kind of like your instrument panel giving you the dashboard warning of what's happening. Now, how do we be pro how do how are we proactive about this?

  Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish

  Philip Pape 23:27

  So you don't even have to overthink any of this stuff. Well, it's annoyingly simple, let me tell you. That's this podcast is all about giving you the simple fix. It's to run a smaller deficit than your brain wants you to. Okay. A lot of us pick a deficit based on how fast you want the result. And then you're like, oh, but it feels hard. If we instead aim for something like at most a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of your body weight a week, for a lot of you, that's going to be slower than you want. Some of you, that's right in the realm, and you're probably good. And for some of you who are smaller with lower metabolisms, that might be too aggressive. So again, it's highly individualistic, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot around that 0.5% of your body weight a week. And I know that's not a sexy answer, but the slower deficit is gonna produce way less of that struggle bus discomfort, or it shouldn't produce it at all for the most part, which means you're far more likely to keep going and actually make it through. And what we know from the research is that people who finish are the ones who lose the fat. Sounds obvious, but if you don't actually finish your diet, you're not gonna get the result of the diet. There's even good data in post-menopausal women, specifically, that the more aggressive cut, it's not, it's not just that it feels worse, but it does potentially cause muscle loss and bone loss. I don't want to overpitch that, but there are there is evidence on that. And we do know that going too aggressive does risk muscle loss, which is not something we want. Of course, I'm not talking about that level of aggressiveness today. I'm really talking about when you're just past the line versus coming under that line and finding out where that line is, right? Now, if you're keeping protein up high enough, somewhere around 0.7 to one grams per pound of body weight, if you continue to lift, those are the important things for holding on to muscle while you lose the fat. They also happen to blunt hunger. Back in January of 2026, we did a whole hunger series on this podcast. Go find those. And at least one or two had to do with the link between training, lifting weights, muscle, and hunger.

  A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40

  Philip Pape 25:33

  And I do want to make one final comment about the women who are listening who are in their 40s or 50s, peri-postmenopause. I am definitely not gonna tell you that menopause makes this hopeless or ridiculously difficult, or your body is uniquely broken. There is research comparing how peri and postmenopausal women respond to a diet versus younger women, but it's very thin, it's almost non-existent. That's one of the problems we have, is we don't have very much data in your specific population, especially not head-to-head trials. But the one direct comparison I could find showed no difference in how much fat they lost or how well they stuck to it. Because if you can get into the deficit, you can lose the fat. The other things that are going on are things like your body composition shifts due to a lack of lifting weights, for example, due to a loss of muscle mass. And if you are in our audience or you're working with us, we get you lifting weights. And so that solves a big percentage of all of these potential issues or even symptoms that you have. I shouldn't say all the symptoms, but many of the symptoms you have during this period once you start lifting weights. But if you have rough symptoms, you should be talking to your doctor or therapist or hormone specialist or whatever about all the options. You should just always be looking at all the options. And I'm not going to pretend there's like a menopause-specific diet hack because there is none. There is none. But what I am saying is simple. You should expect some discomfort during a deficit, but learn to read it. Ride it out if it's manageable, respect the warning signs and the red flags, and run the slowest cut that you can stand. And there's many reasons you can or can't stand a slow cut. I know you want to lose X number of pounds, so you want to do it a certain amount of time, but you're not going to get there if you go too fast, is my point. If you do that, if you run the slowest cut you can manage and stand, then you're going to finish it. And finishing is the whole thing here. All right, before we wrap up, I promise you that 30-second self-check to tell whether you should stay in the cut or not. That's coming up in just a second. But if this episode appealed to you, if it taught you something, if you think someone else would benefit, please just share the episode with them. Text it to them, say, hey, I think I'm gonna like this. It's pretty cool. And there's other episodes around this. And if as an alternative, if you'd rather yourself go back and listen to another episode related to this one, I would go listen to the satiety diet episode. Just look for satiety diet in your feed and make sure to follow the show so you can get the whole feed. That one is about building a diet that is comfortable in the first place. So that combined with a moderate deficit is really what it's all

  Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

  Philip Pape 28:12

  about. All right, here's a 30-second check that you can run. Anytime you have a hard, difficult day during a fat loss phase. The first one is my strength holding? Like, are my numbers in the gym kind of holding steady? I mean, they could be going up. That's even better. But things aren't dropping. I'm not feeling tanked in the gym, really tired, really sore, really weak, or even skipping gym sessions. Okay, that's the first one. If the if the numbers are steady or growing, you're fine. You're probably fine. You haven't been hit by any big energy crash or reds or low energy availability or anything like that. If they're dropping or have any of these other symptoms I just mentioned, that's a flag, a red flag that, you know, maybe you need to take a break. Number two, can I get to my next meal? And what I mean by that is okay, not am I a little bit hungry? Everybody's gonna be a little bit hungry. That's totally allowable. The question is, is the hunger in control of you or are you in control of the hunger? If you're losing that fight, especially on a regular basis, if you're binging, that is a big flag. That is a big flag. We don't want to be doing that. And number three is how is your sleep and mood? I'll say across the week. So, like as a trend, not just today, you know, you can have a bad hour, a bad day. I know I've had stressful days and totally changes my mood. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like an entire week where you're just not getting good sleep or your mood is just in the gutter, that's a red flag. Now, if you have zero red flags from those three questions and you're feeling a little bit of hunger or a little something, that's probably just the cut working and you can ride it out. If you have even one or more of these flags, even just one, I would suggest you probably need to back off on the deficit, at least to allow those things to resolve. Strength, hunger, sleep, mood, very important signals. You don't need a coach to do that check. You can do it yourself, and it's very quick. So I hope that's helpful. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the goal is never to feel nothing, it's to feel just enough hunger and I'll say discomfort to know that it's working and know the difference when it's not. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Eat More Protein to Lose More Fat (No Calorie Deficit Needed) | Ep 486

Most of us treat fat loss as a subtraction problem. Eat less, move more, lose weight.

Energy balance (calories in calories out) is definitely real, so that holds at the top level when it comes to pure weight loss.

The trouble is that "eat less" is often done restrictively, often leads to even LESS protein, nutrient, and fiber intake, and often done at a rapid pace, any of which cause you to lose muscle, energy, get hungrier, and all the other things that ultimately make you quit (or gain he weight back).

This episode goes deeper than calories to the power of... protein! Protein does not behave like the rest of your calories. It costs more to digest, though that effect is smaller than people claim. It is also the most filling thing you can eat, and I get into a study where people dropped hundreds of calories a day on their own, without being told to, just from eating more of it. That is the real lever, and why eating more can make you leaner even when you are not "trying" to push an aggressive calorie deficit.

Then there is the claim that you can eat unlimited extra protein and still lose weight and body fat, so we'll examine that nutrient partitioniong claim. I also discuss daily protein targets, what to do if you're already leaner, and a 30-second way to think about the scale that explains how your body can change while the number stays flat.

Try my favorite custom protein! Get 20% off your first custom protein blend at truenutrition.com/witsandweights with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. Build your own protein from the base up, pick your flavor and sweetener, add "bosts" like ashwaghanda, fiber, creatine, and more, and hit your daily target with something you're excited to drink!

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why eating less keeps backfiring for fat loss
3:30 - Energy balance vs. differences between macros like protein
7:28 - Does protein burn more calories to consume vs. fats and carbs?
9:20 - Why protein is the most filling macro for fat loss
10:03 - How high protein creates a deficit through appetite
12:30 - What is the best protein supplement?
13:40 - Nutrient partitioning and mouse studies
16:00 - The myth of "free" protein calories in a surplus
20:30 - Your daily protein target for muscle and fat loss
22:35 - Why protein matters more for lean dieters
24:50 - Free macros guide for body composition
25:33 - Bonus: the two-envelope trick for body recomposition

Episode Resources

• Free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition (Fat Loss Macros) guide - how to find your maintenance and set your protein, carbs, and fats for any phase (fat loss, building muscle, or body recomp):
  https://witsandweights.com/macros

• Transcript

  Why eating less keeps backfiring for fat loss

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Can eating more protein actually burn more fat without even being in a calorie deficit? Well, protein does something to your body that no other food does. It's the most filling macro you can eat. It costs you way more calories just to digest it, and it's the one nutrient that protects your muscle when you're losing weight, which means eating more of it can leave you leaner, sometimes even when you're not in a deficit. Today I'm going to show you the science behind that. I'll call out the one protein claim that gets oversold, and I'll give you the exact number to hit no matter what your goal is right now. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and today we're going after one of the most deeply held beliefs in all of fitness, which is that fat loss is a subtraction problem, that you need to eat less and move more, shrink those numbers, reduce those calories. If you're over 40, if you've been dieting on and off for years, hey, we all have. Maybe you're even going through perimenopause or menopause right now, and you feel like your body isn't cooperating anymore, you have almost certainly been sold the subtraction model over and over. And it is not that the math is wrong or that calories and calories out is wrong exactly. It's that the math hides an input, a very important input having to do with the composition of what you're eating that is a very, very powerful level. And that, of course, is protein. And when you understand why it's different, and we're going to get into some more nuance today than you probably hear on most podcasts, where there is a lot of discussion about protein today, for sure. When you understand these differences, you stop thinking about fat loss as how little can I get away with eating? And you start thinking about it as what do I need to add into my diet, into my nutrition, so my body does the work for me. So things are easier. So I feel better. So I perform better. So I build muscle. So I lose fat. So I get leaner, all in a way that doesn't feel like this huge amount of misery and suffering. And then I want you to stick around to the end of the episode because after the main content, I'm going to share a 30-second mental model that I use with clients called the two envelope trick. And it's a very fast conceptual visual way to understand why the scale is very unreliable, especially when you're trying to change our body composition, but also to motivate you to focus on what we're talking about today. All right, so here's where we're headed. I'm going to show you the three real reasons that protein affects your body fat differently. I'm going to be honest with you about a big claim that floats around online today that does not survive what I call skeptical scrutiny. And then I'm going to give you the protein floor to set and hold no matter what phase you're in. So some of this is going to be a refresher, but there are going to be some surprises today for you in how powerful protein really is. So let's start with the belief, because the conventional data that gets shared often creates competing camps that don't necessarily need to be competing. Meaning there's some truth in a lot of what people say online. There are a lot of falsehoods as well. And sometimes the truths overlap from two different camps. So the conventional model is really about energy balance. Calories in,

  Energy balance vs. differences between macros like protein

  Philip Pape 3:30

  calories out. It's like your body is a calorie bank account. You eat less than you burn. And you now your body has to withdraw from the fat account, right? If it's a bank account, and therefore you lose weight. And at the highest level, that's pretty much true. I'm not a calorie denier. Energy balance is real. Thermodynamics exists, it's physics. Okay, we need to assert that that is a truth. But what the model treats as an assumption that is not true is that it treats every calorie as identical. Now, a calorie is just a measurement of energy. So, in essence, the energy piece of it is identical. But your bot the way your body processes calories changes drastically depending on what you eat. And of course, we know this because we know that, for example, eating all processed foods versus eating mostly whole foods, you're going to be hungrier and you're going to eat more just naturally because they don't fill you up as much. Well, that's because it's affecting your hunger and your hormones related to hunger. That is a real phenomenon that's occurring because the calorie source is different. So we have to kind of separate calories, which is a real thing, it's a unit of energy, from the practical reality of when you eat foods from different types of macros and nutrients separate from the calories. There's other things going on, is my point. So a hundred calories of protein, a hundred calories of rice, a hundred calories of olive oil, they all go into your body with the same amount of energy. And yes, but that's not the whole story. There's a lot more that's actually far more important, in my opinion. In fact, when you only count calories, you often do yourself a disservice because then you start making choices based on calories rather than based on these other factors. When you think about what happens when a chronic dieter, and a lot of you listening are chronic dieters. I say that with love because I've been there. When a chronic dieter tries to lose more fat, and oftentimes you talk in terms of weight loss instead of fat loss, which is the first problem. But anyway, what do you do? What's the move? I'm gonna cut calories again. I get emails from people who say I've cut down to 900 calories and I still can't lose weight. And they say it as if I should be losing weight because I've cut calories, not realizing that there are other factors involved, both on the calories and in calories outside. Now, where do calories usually get cut from? Well, people cut the thing that's easiest to cut, which is usually whatever the food is on your plate in general. And so protein tends to drop along for the ride, even though, as we're gonna discuss later, protein is one of those things you want to keep anchored at a reasonably high level, but it tends to drop and now you're eating less total and you're eating less protein specifically, and you're hungry, hungrier, and your training suffers. And even if a scale drops, part of what you're losing might be muscle because now you're not holding on to that. If you're even lifting weights, which many of you are not doing that either, and you have to be lifting weights. The older we get, the more this is a problem, especially through periposmenopause, where you're already fighting to hold on to that lean tissue. So the subtraction model, if you follow it, you're going to walk straight into a big cyclical vicious cycle, I should say. A big vicious cycle where you're losing muscle tissue, your metabolism's declining, you have to cut more, you stop losing weight, so you cut more, metabolism declines. You get what I'm talking about. It's a vicious cycle. So it's not that calories don't count. It's that eat less as this blanket instruction results in all of the wrong decisions for protein, for nutrients, for energy, for performance, for muscle that are essentially the opposite of what we're trying to do. Which you're gonna understand why that leads to, okay, why so why some people say eat more to lose weight or eat more to lose fat. And even that is overly simplistic. You have to explain what you mean. What are you eating more of and why, and in what you know, phase and process are you doing it? But anyway, let's talk about why protein is so different.

  Does protein burn more calories to consume vs. fats and carbs?

  Philip Pape 7:28

  And the first one is a little bit oversold, but I want to talk about it, and that is the thermic effect of food, T E F. This is that protein burns more calories to digest than the other macronutrients. That is true. Every time you eat, your body spends some energy just processing what you ate. And the macros are very different in how this happens. So when you eat fat, it costs almost nothing to process, about 0 to 3% of the calories get consumed. Carbs are around 5 to 10%, and protein is around 20 to 30%. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's gonna spend something like 20 to 30 of those calories just breaking it down and putting it to use. So you net as little as 70 of those 100 calories. Now, this is a real thing that has been measured in humans, but the size of it probably gets oversold a little bit. So let's say you're eating 180 grams of protein a day. That's a very solid target for a lot of people in this audience, probably above what many of you are eating, to be honest. But that's what I eat. So I weigh 180 pounds. I tend to eat around 180 grams. That is 720 calories from protein. So if you're netting an extra, call it up to 20% back compared to eating those same calories as fat, you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 calories a day. Now that is real. I'm not gonna call it magic, but that is very real, right? 80 to 100 calories, but it's also not massive and you know, 500 pounds a day, a pound a week type of reel, but it's starting to move the needle. And guess what? It's the smallest of the effects I'm talking about, even though a lot of people fixate on this, but I think it's good to know. Okay, so it's a nice little tailwind. Now let's get to the next part that starts to change your behavior and starts to change the result. And that is, okay,

  Why protein is the most filling macro for fat loss

  Philip Pape 9:20

  that is satiety fullness. Protein is by far the most filling macronutrient per calorie. And this has evidence behind it, despite the keto and carnivore folks trying to suggest that fat is the most uh filling, or some people say carbs are the most filling. It really comes down to protein. Now, protein as a whole, I get it, it's a macro and it contains lots of different foods. So we have to look at specifics. But there's a classic study from 2005, Weigel and colleagues, where they raise people's protein to about 30% of their calories. And then, and this is really important, they let them eat as much of anything they wanted, totally free. We call this ad libinum. That's what the researchers call it. And what happened is people spontaneously ate about 440

  How high protein creates a deficit through appetite

  Philip Pape 10:03

  fewer calories a day. That's it. So they were not counting calories, it was purely natural because they were full. They just stopped reaching for more food and they ate 440 fewer calories a day. And so what happened? Over the study, they lost fat without being told to be in a calorie deficit or trying to be in a calorie deficit. So the protein created the deficit for them through their own appetite. It's not that they weren't in a deficit. This goes back to why I say energy balance is a real thing, but how we get there and whether we get there and whether we stick to that deficit is much more practically important. So if you think about that, this flips the whole psychology of dieting. The restriction or subtraction model says you have to fight your hunger with willpower, you've got to be in a calorie deficit. Cut, cut, cut. You've got to starve, you've got to do optavea, you gotta do uh uh what's that called? Weight watchers, whatever. The protein model says, hey, just raise your protein high enough, and a big piece of that psychological battle that you've had for years just disappears because your gut is sending the fullness signals. Your hunger hormones tend to settle down. The food you would have grazed on or licked, tasted bit in the evening no longer is attractive to you, or you don't, you just simply naturally don't reach for it, or you simply feel full. This is the difference between white knuckling a diet and one that is running a little bit on autopilot, which is where we try to get our clients to and what this podcast is all about. I want it to be easier for you guys. And if you're on GLP1s and you start to do this, you might find that you're too full and you have to reduce the dose or even start to come off of it. This is one of the key levers that we use to help people reduce their dosage or potentially come off of it with working with their medical professional, because that is not in my scope of practice. And if the, let's say the evening snacking, that's where you tend to fall into the temptation, right? This is a great lever. More protein earlier in the day. We actually see studies where front loading the protein can be even more beneficial, can vastly help than just trying to try harder. And we know this from the evidence. So this is a great time to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because getting more protein into your day is what they help solve, but in a very cool way, because you get to build it yourself. Instead of a one-size-fits-all tub, you customize

  What is the best protein supplement?

  Philip Pape 12:30

  everything the base, the flavor, the sweetener, and even what they call boosts. It just takes a few minutes. You pick the base first. There are, I think, over 20 types of protein: whey, plant-based, dairy-free, all third-party tested and then tested again at their facility. Then you add the flavor, which is sweetened with stevia or monk fruit, and you set how intense the flavor is, or you go unflavored. And then you add what they call boosts, like fiber, probiotics, ashwa ganda. They have a whole bunch of those as well. And honestly, I love how it tastes. So I have a blend with whey, egg, and casein protein, cookies and cream, stevia sweetened, and it is very smooth. None of that chalky aftertaste or chemical aftertaste you get from a lot of proteins, and it doesn't affect my stomach at all. So if you have an intolerance, this is a great way to control what goes in your protein. So if you're looking for a supplement that kind of solves everything, tastes great, and gives you a little extra in terms of these boosts, go to true nutrition.com slash wits and weights and use the code wits and weights for 20% off your first custom blend. That's true nutrition.com slash wits and weights, code wits

  Nutrient partitioning and mouse studies

  Philip Pape 13:40

  and weights for 20% off. Try their customizer, build it today, and enjoy getting delicious protein customized exactly to your needs. All right, now we've covered the two effects that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to protein's magic, the fullness and the digestion. But there is a third one that potentially is more exciting, but also more overrated or oversold. And so I want to get into the nuance here, and this is why I saved this one for last, because it requires a little bit of explaining. The idea is called nutrient partitioning. And in its, I guess the strongest claim is that when you're building muscle, your body preferentially shuttles nutrients toward that muscle and away from fat storage, so that when you add protein and of course you're training hard in the gym, you can produce muscle gain and fat loss at the same time, what we call body recomposition. And there's a good review by Habers and colleagues from 2025 that talks about the mechanisms here, which is that growing muscle pulls in glucose and the muscle growth signals, the signals from that growing muscle, then increase the release of fat. And because building tissue is metabolically expensive, the energy gets quote unquote spent on construction of the muscle instead of stored as fat. And so it sounds awesome. It sounds like like the holy grail for body recomp, you know, body recomp. But in that same review, in plain language, it says this partitioning effect is most apparent in animal models. That's in mice. And the best demonstration we have in humans comes from a class of drugs called myostatin inhibitors, like bimagrumab, where people gain lean mass and loss significant fat at the same time. But that's a drug. You have to be taking that drug. That's not just eating more protein. So when you strip it down to what do we really know based on the evidence and what's proven in humans eating food and lifting weights, the effect is there, but maybe it's smaller and slower than we think it is based on the animal work, even though there is a whole set of research looking at myostatin inhibitors that could change the game in the future, just like GLP1s have. So muscle and muscle gain and fat loss can happen at the same time. We have plenty of human recomposition data that I'm gonna get to in a bit, but your body isn't

  The myth of "free" protein calories in a surplus

  Philip Pape 16:00

  this like magic nutrient partitioning machine that ignores calories, right? You still have to have you still have to have the energy balance accounted for as well. So this brings me actually to the biggest online claim for protein. And it comes from real studies, as many of these claims do, right? Things get cherry-picked and then they get reinterpreted so often incorrectly. These are the Antonio studies where resistance-trained people ate huge amounts of protein. And we're talking like 4.4 grams per kilogram. So that's hundreds of extra protein calories a day. And then on paper, when we look at their numbers, they didn't gain any body fat. And then people took that to mean, hey, protein calories in a calorie surplus are essentially free. Like you literally cannot get fat from extra protein. And I've heard really good folks like Dr. Bill Campbell talk about this research, not with that language, you know, with the right amount of nuance, where they're like, yeah, there's there's other things going on. What it's it seems that you're adding protein in and then not gaining body fat. But what is actually happening? Well, the first of all, there's methodological issues with the studies themselves. We could break that down first, and that is self-reporting, which is always a challenge, not, not, not the be-all-end-all, but self-reporting what you eat. And we we know this is one of the most consistent findings in all of nutrition research that people are terrible at reporting their intake, especially when you ask them to eat way more than usual. And it's honestly right there in the data. I mean, if the subjects didn't gain the weight you'd expect if they'd actually eaten all that extra protein above and beyond their current calories, they probably didn't eat as much as reported, or they unconsciously compensated by moving more and eating less elsewhere. And the moving more piece, people want to focus on and say, well, yeah, that's okay, Philip, but it's because their metabolism, their energy out must have gone way up to make up for it. It didn't go up at that much. I mean, it probably went up for sure. And there's things like the thermic effect of food we've already talked about. But when you actually control for these things, like in a metabolic ward where researchers are controlling the calories that you eat, and by the way, they did this in 2012. Bray and colleagues, these what they call protein overfeeding studies, we do see an addition of body fat. So I think there's some contradictions here. People love to glom onto something that seems like, you know, the secret, the magic. And you know what? It's close to magic, not as much as some of these people claim, but it's still phenomenal. Eating more protein definitely will result in less body fat added and more lean mass added than overfeeding on carbs or fat. So we definitely lean by toward biasing protein, but it still also comes down to energy balance. So the the honest like conclusion here is you cannot eat unlimited protein in a big surplus and expect zero fat gain. Okay. What does come out of this data that matters to you is because protein is so filling, because it costs more to digest, and because it drives your body to build and repair instead of store fat, then if you build your diet around a high protein floor, it will tend to naturally settle you near maintenance or a mild deficit on its own, even when you're eating what feels like a lot of food. Okay, and your metabolism, your expenditure might be a little bit higher as well, which means you could eat more than you would have otherwise on a purely calorie basis as well. You're not gaining fat because thermodynamics doesn't work, because calories in, calories out doesn't work, but because, or it's not that you're not gaining fat because of those, but it's because all of these things tend to stack together, resulting in you being at maintenance or in a slight deficit while it feels like you're eating a lot more and you're preserving or building muscle. So you're getting some body recomp at the same time. So I know you want it to be all flashy and this amazing like eat unlimited protein and you're gonna lose body fat. I will say people who jack up their protein do often lose body fat, but it's not because of thermodynamics being broken. It's because of all these other things that are that are happening, which guess what? For practical purposes, that matters. Like that's super important anyway. So you can say, you can say at a top level, eat more protein, you'll probably lose body fat. And it's probably generally true for a lot of people, which is phenomenal. That's pretty cool. So now when we talk about body recomp, the idea of losing fat and

  Your daily protein target for muscle and fat loss

  Philip Pape 20:30

  gaining muscle at the same time, we the discussion was always in the past, oh, that's only for beginners or that's for people on drugs, you know, performance and anti drugs or whatever. And that's not true. You know, we know a lot more people can experience body recomp, even experienced lifters. Eric Helms, I have a lot of respect for Eric. He put out a great piece recently working through the math of it in mass, uh the mass research review. And the bottom line is that whether you gained or lost body energy depends on the relative change in fat mass versus muscle, not the number on the scale, right? Because a pound of fat holds roughly 3,500 calories of energy, whereas a pound of muscle holds only about 800. So the density difference makes a difference here. And it it complicates the math. So when people are trying to do the math, they they tend to get lost in it because of those differences. So you can hold your body weight the same, like your body weight doesn't change. But then if you lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle, that is a massive change in your body composition without a change in your body weight, which is what we deal with all the time when clients are like, oh, my weight did not go down. I was hoping to lose weight, but my inches went down and my lifts going up, and I honestly look a little bit trimmer. You might still have a little belly fat that you want to lose. That's fine, but you are getting leaner. So that's pretty incredible. All right. So if protein is this big, close to magical lever, how much do you need? Let's just get that out of the way again, especially if you're new to the show or you need Refresher. The target that I usually go with from the research is roughly 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day. That's about 1.6 grams per kilo in metric. And there's a really well-known meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues in 2018 that found muscle gains start to plateau around that point. More than that is not harmful. There's no issues with it. If you like to eat more protein, awesome. Enjoy it. There is a case for going higher up to a gram per pound, especially where when you're in an aggressive fat loss phase and you're trying to hold on to that lean mass.

  Why protein matters more for lean dieters

  Philip Pape 22:35

  And then it's fine to go up just because of preference. And if you happen to get benefits that we talked about today, like satiety above and beyond that amount, and that affects your calories overall and makes things easier, go for it. There's newer research, it was a meta regression from Reffalo, Trexler, and Helms that looked at how much protein you actually need to hold muscle in a deficit. And the interesting finding is that pushing protein really high, like around 1.1 grams per pound, only mattered for the leanest people. So for example, women already under 20% body fat and men under 12%. But for everybody else, and that's most of us listening, protein explained only a small slice of who was able to hold on to muscle. Guess what explained more of that? Well, the size of the deficit and whether they were training hard. So I'm not going to oversell the protein floor. I never have, or at least not in a long time since I started doing this podcast. I often use the 0.7 grams per pound as adequate for almost everybody. And if you want to go higher for other reasons, that's fine too. The last thing I want to mention is the idea of anabolic resistance. A lot of the research we have skews toward young men, but anabolic resistance gets more pronounced as you age. It means your muscles respond a little less to a given amount of protein than they used to. And I guess the practical upshot of this is it kind of simplifies things that, hey, you should just make sure to get a lot of protein. Just 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal is usually a way, good, good rule of thumb. Don't wait for dinner. If, if anything, front load it if you can and spread it out throughout the day so that you can get that floor. All right, before I wrap up, remember I promised you that 30-second mental model at the end, the two envelope trick. I'm gonna share that in a second. So stay with me. But if this episode sold you on the idea that protein is the lever and eat less is probably not way the way to go, the next natural question is okay, Philip, what do all my other numbers look like? How much protein should I eat? And then how do I set my carbs and fat? So people ask, what should be my macros be? Well, I put together a free guide

  Free macros guide for body composition

  Philip Pape 24:50

  a while back that walks you through setting up your macros for different phases and why and the kind of flexibility you have behind it. It's called Nutrition 101 for body composition. Go to witsandweights.com slash macros, totally free. And it's my whole framework on flexible dieting. How to find your maintenance, how to set your protein, carbs, and fats, how to make it sustainable. Just general ideas of setting this up, the basics. Everything we talked about today, put into the actual targets that you can use. So go to wits and weights.com slash macros to download that free guide. All right, here's the two envelope trick or concept. I want you to imagine your body as two envelopes. That's it. It's it's just two envelopes. One has

  Bonus: the two-envelope trick for body recomposition

  Philip Pape 25:33

  all your fat in it, and one has all your muscle in it. All right. And they're gonna have very different amounts of energy. A pound of fat has 3,500 calories, a pound of muscle has 800 calories. But you have different amounts of fat muscle. Let's not worry about that. Now, over a couple months, you lose a pound of fat and you gain a pound of muscle. So what happens? You're gonna take a pound of fat out of your fat envelope, you're gonna add in a pound of muscle to your muscle envelope, and so they're gonna balance each other out. What's gonna happen? You're gonna step on the scale, it's gonna read the same. No change in scale. And so if you're only using the scale, you conclude, oh, nothing happened. I was trying to get leaner. That means I was trying to lose weight, nothing happened, right? But you just took 3,500 calories out of the fat envelope of your body, and you only put 800 into the muscle envelope. So you've actually gotten rid of some volume and you should actually be leaner. Your clothes should fit a little bit differently, you should feel stronger and look leaner, and none of that is visible on the scale because the scale only measures weight. And yet you just traded a light energy dense tissue for a heavier, leaner one. All right, that's the best I could do it to visualize this on a podcast. The next time the scale doesn't move, I want you to ask a better question. Not, hey, what do I weigh, but which envelope is filling and which one is emptying? Because you want to fill the muscle envelope and you want to empty the fat envelope. That is the game. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, fat loss was never really a subtraction problem. Protect your protein, protect your muscle, let your body do the math for you. And I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How Hard Should You Really Be Lifting After 40? | Ep 485

How hard are you REALLY training? Is it enough to build muscle?

Most lifters believe they are stopping a rep or two short of failure, when the real gap is far wider, and it often stalls muscle and strength.

Learn about the research on proximity to failure and how badly we misjudge our own effort, including predicting reps to failure and how close to failure you need to train to build muscle. We get into why the common advice to leave reps in reserve backfires for people who picked up strength training over 40, what training to failure does and does not require, and how women and older lifters recover from hard sets.

Plus, you'll learn a calibration drill and a mental trick to make your effort objective so your gym time pays off.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps

0:00 - Effort and proximity to failure
2:27 - Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40
5:00 - Training hard vs. training volume
7:55 - Accuracy of estimating reps to failure
10:05 - Proximity to failure and muscle growth
12:20 - Progressive overload methods
13:24 - Calibration drill to calculate true failure
16:30 - Recalibrating effort over time
18:50 - Bar speed and effort signals
20:30 - Training to failure for older lifters
22:13 - Rep range goal setting 

Episode Resources

• Progressive Overload Guide (free) - every method for adding load over time, plus a rep range system that moves the weight up on schedule. Find this and more at https://witsandweights.com/free

• Transcript

  Effort and proximity to failure

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Let's say you're at the gym and you just finish a set, you rack the bar or dumbbells, and you're like, oh, that was a hard one. Maybe I've got one or two reps left in the tank. I'm doing awesome. Progressive overload. But here's the problem. There is a decent chance that you had five or six reps left, not just two. And maybe you have no idea because you really haven't felt what real failure is like. Today I'm going to pick apart some of the common advice about not going to failure and being careful and all of these pieces of advice that actually might hold you back and give you a simple way to find out where your actual limit is so that every set you do counts. This is about training hard. What does the research say about how far off we are versus where we need to be, how close to failure you need to train to build muscle, and then how to actually fix how hard you train, as well as a little trick I have toward the end of the episode. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Ape, and today I want to talk about effort. Because if you're doing strength training over 40, especially, and you feel like you're working hard, you're following a program, you're showing up three, four, five days a week to the gym, and the muscle isn't developing the way that you expected, or you're not getting stronger, or you're hitting a wall, this episode is for you. There is a specific reason it happens. Remember, I'm an engineer. I like to solve problems, and we can solve this for ourselves. It's often not the reason you've been told or that you think. It isn't that you're too old. It's not about your hormones. It is not usually your program either. It is that the effort that you think you're putting in and the effort you're actually putting in are far apart, and the gap between them is even bigger than you thought. And that's why you're hitting the wall. And you're like, okay, great, Philip. So that I'm done. Thank you for the advice. I'm gonna go in the gym and I'm gonna train hard. No, we can be very objective about this. This is a skill, and we're gonna break it down. And then at the very end, I'm gonna give you a little trick that I like to use, a mental trick in the gym. But we need to set the stage. And what does the research say about training hard? And what do you often hear about maybe not training too hard? What's useful, what's not, what's helping your results, what's not. How badly do we misjudge our own effort? And then how do we take the guesswork out of it? All

  Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40

  Philip Pape 2:27

  right. So you probably often hear in social media maybe you're overtraining or you're working too hard or you're doing too much. Um, this is often marketed, especially toward women. Ah, you're doing too much. And it gets conflated with what the heck are we talking about? Well, we're usually talking about stressful cardio, right? Too much chronic cardio or not getting enough sleep and recovery, things like that. But you also hear it when people talk about proximity to failure. And they say, well, leave a few reps in reserve. You don't need to train to failure to build muscle. And I've even shared the evidence on, you know, one to two, three to four reps from failure to get the mechanical tension necessary. You don't have to go to failure. And you should stop before your form starts to break down. And then also you should be careful, especially at your age. How many of you be careful? Don't look too heavy, you know, watch out. And I want to be clear that a lot of that advice is good advice, depending on what we're talking about, because I'm not telling you you need to grind every set into the ground, because that definitely is going to backfire. That can get you hurt, that can get you over-reached, over-trained, under-recovered. The research definitely does support leaving something in the tank. And we're going to get to that. But the catch here, why I'm creating this episode, is that's only if you know what failure is like. That's only if you know what training to failure really is and really means. That is for lifters who can push a set to the absolute limit and then deliberately back off to reps. And for that person, if you say two R-I-R or eight RPE, they know what to do. But this is why I don't like reps in reserve for beginners. It took me a long time to get to where I really, really knew what failure is. And even to this day, when I go into the gym and I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to train hard and I'm pushing toward those limits, it takes mental and physical effort to do that. So, let alone a newer lifter, like many of you probably are, you're trying to figure this out for yourself. You don't really know where that wall is. So it ends up holding you back because of that. Okay, now a lot of you came to lifting later in life, like I did. You know, I didn't really start lifting properly till I was about 40 years old. Or maybe you're getting back to it after years away. Maybe you started in your 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s. I mean, look, you can start. I hope you're if you're 85 listening to this, if you've never lifted weights, get started. This is this is the perfect time to start, is now. But maybe you've spent most of your life training on machines or in classes or boost camp, boot camp classes, or YouTube videos, or whatever, P90X, things

  Training hard vs. training volume

  Philip Pape 5:00

  like that where it's not really the structured progressive training and you've never really approached a true limit. You may have done it to where you're sore or you're sweating or somebody's pushing you rah-rah with like music, but that's not the same thing when we talk about you know, strength training and mechanical tension progressive overload. Okay. Also, you might be a little bit afraid because you don't get injured or you're not sure about form. I just spoke to somebody uh recently who's joining Eat More Lift Heavy, and you know, he said he had hired a trainer maybe six months ago. One of the reasons was accountability, but the other reason was form and he didn't want to get injured. I'm like, that is super, super smart, right? Nobody wants to get injured. We want to have the right form. And so when someone says, Well, no, you need to train hard, you have to have a lot of effort, that's one of the fears that goes through your head. But it also means you might never have been close to that edge. You don't know where that edge is, that wall is. And so when someone says, Hey, leave two reps in the tank, you can't if you don't know what the tank limit is. Right now, I'm not saying go David Goggin style, where it's like, you know, when you think you're at 100%, you're only at 30% or whatever. It's not necessarily that either. It's a more objective thing in between. So you often are probably ending your sets in the gym every time almost because it's uncomfortable, because your breathing has changed, maybe you feel a little bit out of breath, because the weight started to feel heavy and your brain's like, okay, that's probably enough. Don't push it, or I'm gonna lose form here, or something's gonna get broken or injured. Tell me if that isn't right. You've had those thoughts in your head. I have as well, right? Or you feel a little bit of a tweak, or you feel like your back is rounding on an RDL or deadlift or something like that, and or there's a little bit of a grind that you think is a grind, even though you probably do have more reps than you think. And then you think, okay, that was a strong effort. That was a good set. My quads are sore, my whatever is sore. Good. Now, if even if you're doing that, you're probably leagues ahead of many others who don't even train, obviously, and who don't, or those who go to the gym and really aren't training. Even if you're if you are training with a structured program, then great, that's awesome. Like that's the first step. But today we're talking about training and getting the most out of it. Because I don't want you to waste your time in the gym. I don't want you to take more time than you have to. I know folks that can train two or three days a week and get super, super effective workouts because they know how to train hard. And others that go in with these like body part splits four, five, six days, and they're not making progress because they're not training hard. They're just going in and putting in quote unquote work, but it's not effort. So if, you know, you're standing in front of the mirror, you're trying to flex your muscles, you're like, why does my body look the same, independent of fat loss, let's say, because that's a different factor. And you're like blaming your age or your metabolism, or hey, I'm not a responder, or the program. The real answer is that maybe you've been way inside your comfort zone and far short of the stimulus that actually builds muscle.

  Accuracy of estimating reps to failure

  Philip Pape 7:55

  So let's quickly look at the research here, and then we'll parlay that into practical tips as always. Okay. There's a researcher named James Steele and a group that includes Jurgen, Giesing, and James Fisher, and they ran a study that a lot of people should be aware of. They took 141 people, so it's a decent sample size, not massive, but it's not, you know, eight people. And they had them predict how many reps they could go or or do on a given exercise. And they had them actually go all the way to failure. Okay. They pushed them to true failure where they couldn't move the weight anymore, their muscles give out. And everyone underestimated across the board where they thought their limits were. They stopped or they thought they they thought they'd stop well before they had to. The least experienced lifters were off about four to five reps where they thought they were near their limit, and then they had like a half a set left, right? When we're talking about, you know, 10 to 15 reps, that's a lot. And the more experienced lifters were closer. They were off by about one or two reps. Now, when you pool all the research together on this, and there's a really good review by Israel Halperin and colleagues that does that, they the average miss across everybody, the average miss is around one rep. So if you've been lifting hard for years and you really know your body, your guesses are probably pretty decent. And I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the person who came to this later in terms of doing it properly. The person like you, dear listener, who's been told to be careful their whole training life, because for you, the four to five rep gap is probably more like reality. And that's what we're gonna fix today, right? You feel like you're near the edge, but you're not. That's pretty wild, actually, if you think about it. Just quick tangent, right? You could be smart, dedicated, consistent, going to the gym, doing everything the program says, and still be so far from what's real effort that you're essentially doing a really good warm-up and calling it your working sets. And it's not because you're lazy, it's not because you're trying, you go through all the trouble to get to the gym on a regular basis, but because you haven't calibrated effort. That's it. You just haven't calibrated the effort. Like, what does it really mean? So, okay, Philip, great. Now, how close

  Proximity to failure and muscle growth

  Philip Pape 10:05

  do I need to get? Do I have to go to failure? I want to connect that to muscle. And we've talked about this in some recent episodes. And the answer obviously is no, you don't have to go to failure. There's the analysis in just a couple years ago, 2024, by Zach Robinson, Michael Zordos, and colleagues. You guys know Zordos from Mass. And they looked at this across dozens of studies. So this is a meta-analysis. They found that getting close to failure does build a bit more muscle, but the effect is small and mostly shows up in the last few reps before failure. So training with one to three reps in reserve is fantastic. It builds muscle really, really well. You don't have to hit true failure, you know, zero reps left on every set. In fact, if you're big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, all the heavy stuff, you probably shouldn't because of the fatigue costs. It's very, very high, as well as the safety and injury costs potentially. I don't want to overhype that, but it's really more about the fatigue. It's the systemic fatigue. And so you're kind of balancing the two. So if you sit with those, that's really the whole premise of this episode. You don't need to go to failure. One to three reps is plenty, but that only works if your one to three reps is actually one to three reps and not five or six. So it's not that it needs to be one to three. It's that you need to be at your actual one to three reps. So the fix isn't to train harder exactly. It's to find out where that edge is so that you know that you're training harder, if that makes sense, right? Like hard is this subjective thing, but we can make it objective. And I think it's a good moment to pause here because I said something a second ago that I want to give you a free tool for right now. I said that the real judge of whether you're training hard isn't the feeling, it's whether your reps and weights are climbing week over week, right? Because that is showing you that you're getting close to failure and getting the mechanical tension. And we call that progressive overload. Like that is the game. And a lot of people hear progressive overload and they think it just means add weight or reps every week. And you can't add five pounds to the bar forever, right? Like we talk about you hear that in programs like Starting Strength, which are designed for novices, novice and linear progression. You can't just add five pounds to the bar forever.

  Progressive overload methods

  Philip Pape 12:20

  There are a bunch of ways to push the load up, to add a rep, to shorten rest periods, to change how you run a set, to change the order of exercises. There, to do it to modify two variables at once, to increase the sets without increasing the load and the reps. So there's so many permutations on how to do progressive overload. And that's where like good programming comes in and good experience and knowledge comes in. So I do have a free guide that lays all that out, every method, when to use each one. My own favorite way to run a rep range so the weight goes up in a somewhat consistent fashion. And I think it pairs well with today's episode because once you have the effort calibrated, like knowing that you're close to failure, then you combine it with the progressive overload scheme and oh, you are golden now to really start making progress. So totally free guide, go to wits and weights.com slash free. It's called the progressive overload guide. I'm gonna include a link in the show notes, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash free to find it and many of our other resources. Progressive overload guide, again, link in the show notes. All right.

  Calibration drill to calculate true failure

  Philip Pape 13:24

  So what is the deceptively simple fix, as I like to say? Well, it's a calibration drill and a shift in your mind. Okay, we're gonna do both. So the calibration drill is to pick an isolation exercise, not a squat or deadlift, not a heavy barbell, anything, just something where if you fully fail, nothing bad's gonna happen. So this could be a leg extension, this could be a dumbbell curl, curls are classic. It could even be a machine chest press, right? Where you could just like let go and it just resets to where it is without any harm. It could be a leg curl. Something we're running out of gas and just like hitting complete failure means the weight just can't move anymore, and you just have to like set it down or drop it or whatever. Now, take that exercise and actually go to true failure. Okay, don't just go to where you're uncomfortable. You have to mentally push past that point and go to true failure. We're not not talking about the heaviness of it or telling you how many reps, just the point where you are trying with everything you've got to move the weight. Your brain is connected through your nervous system to those muscles and it will just not move. Okay, many of you have been there, you've done that, many of you haven't because you get uncomfortable and you stop, or you're counting reps. Don't do that. Go all the way to the point where your brain says stop, and then I want you to go past that where it gets hard, and then I want you to go past that to where you normally stop, and I want you to go past that again until your body, until your body, not your mind, says, sorry, I just can't do it for you. Your brain is well past your body at this point. That's what I want. That maybe that's more of the Goggins mentality, but do it. Okay. And I want you to count the reps as you do it. However many reps you got past the point where you normally would have stopped, that is the gap in what you think is hard versus what is actually hard. Okay. I know it sounds simple, but have you done that before? Have you done an MRAP? Have you pushed a complete failure? I take this for granted because when I got into, I'll say exercise, it was through CrossFit. And one of the benefits of CrossFit was that you did push yourself a lot. It's, you know, Metcons, it's wads, it's sometimes stupid stuff with bad form, but because of the more conditioning aspect of it, you pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and you kind of developed that mental toughness and it it carried over nicely into training. But even then, when I got to like heavy squats, sets of five, it was very hard to push close to failure. Now, the nice thing about beginners using sets across, like sets of five, three by five squats, is that if you're lifting the weight, if you're adding weight to the bar each session, it's going to push you to those hard moments that you wouldn't have pushed yourself. But for today's exercise, I'm talking about an isolation movement like a curl and just mentally going all the way to your brain, till your body physically can't do it. Like it's physically, you try and you shake and it just doesn't do it. All right. Now, the first time you do this, you're like, oh, oh, that is fit. Wow. Okay. Like I thought I was doing the 25-pound dumbbell.

  Recalibrating effort over time

  Philip Pape 16:30

  I thought I would get, you know, 12, but I got 20. Like I got 20. Well, that's insane. That's what they've been talking about. I'm serious, guys. Now, for some of you experienced lifters listening, you're like, God, Philip, shut up. Like, I know how to train hard. Okay, fine. Maybe this episode isn't for you, or maybe it's a good boost of inspiration to recalibrate your own toughness. So that calibrates, that's the drill that I was talking about. It helps you calibrate and give you a reference point. And now when you go back to your normal training, you you know better what one to three reps in reserve is. Now, you can't just do this once. You've got you've got to always be training that that maximum and feel what it is. In fact, when we talk about PRs and you getting stronger, it's going to shift where that failure point gets higher and higher. And of course, you don't have to do this every session. I'm not even suggesting that at all. There are some interesting programs. We have one called Ironclad in Eat More Lift Heavy. And it's modeled off of some set-based progression, some wave, what do they call it, undulating periodization, fancy term. But basically, it's designed with max reps for some exercises. In other words, if you're going to do three sets, you might do two sets of six. And then the third one, you go to six, and then you keep going to failure. And you do that simply to understand: am I really where I need to be? Or should I increase the weight much more next time than I would have otherwise? Like, should I go up 10% instead of just 5%? Or am I truly at failure? And maybe I just need to stay where I am and add reps, or go up, you know, just a few percent. But if you want to do this for yourself just randomly, I would do it every couple weeks on a safe isolation movement just to keep yourself calibrating and then calibrating, and then it inspires you to really train hard. So that's the drill. Now, what the shift in mindset I was talking about is to, I want you to stop trusting your feelings. Now you're like, what? Shouldn't you go with how your body feels? Shouldn't I be listening to my biofeedback? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the feeling in your mind that you're actually training hard when it's something else going on. Examples are you're breathing heavy and out of breath. That doesn't mean you're near failure. That just means you might not be very well conditioned or have good work capacity. That's a separate issue. Or a weight that

  Bar speed and effort signals

  Philip Pape 18:50

  feels heavy. Not enough, guys. Not enough. Okay. Because I can't tell you how many times I push an exercise and it feels heavy. And I'm like, oh, can I do another one? And I'm like, of course I can do another one. And you have to mentally shift it to just try. That's the thing you have to try. It's that voice that tells you, hey, I I've done eight reps and last time I did seven reps. So that must be hard. That must be heavy. That must be the heavier, heaviest thing I've ever done when you can actually do another two reps. So the only honest and objective signal we have is I'll say bar speed really. Did the bar slow way down and did you have to grind on the last reps? And also, could you not do one at all physically, like we talked about before with the isolation work? Now I'm not saying you need to go to complete failure on things like a squat. I mentioned that already. But there's probably still a gap there. Does that make sense? And another good signal that you're maybe not training hard enough is that you're just not progressing, assuming everything else is on point, your nutrition, your recovery, your sleep, your movement, which that's a big assumption because a lot of people don't have those on point. Or maybe you're in a fat loss phase or something like that. So I'm not saying train to failure on everything. Please don't. Failure on big compound lifts is a great way to get hurt and to fry your recovery for days. And the extra muscle is not worth it if you would even get it because the recovery would be shot. Leave those at like one to three in reserve, but it has to be a correct one to three. I'm also not saying pain, you know, more pain, more gain, right? Old school. We're not chasing soreness. We're not chasing suffering. We're chasing an accurate

  Training to failure for older lifters

  Philip Pape 20:30

  objective gauge of your effort so that sustainable effort lands in this productive zone for you. And I'm definitely not saying you have to like train like a CrossFitter or try to, you know, push to failure and grind on everything. In fact, the research on older lifters is very, very encouraging that just about everything doesn't have to be fit at failure, but you have to get within those reps of failure. And again, hitting back to what we're talking about before, you have to know where that is. There's also decent evidence that women tend to handle this kind of work well and recover at least as fast as men, if not more so, between sets on average. Okay. Again, individuals vary widely. So I don't like to make general, you know, gender-based statements, but that's what we see on average. It's really about aiming accurately with effort that you can recover from so that the work you're doing pays off, right? And so the effort you feel and the effort you're actually producing are probably different at the moment. And calibrating yourself, even with like a set to failure every few weeks, will help you close that gap. All right, before we wrap up, I want to give you a little trick. It takes 10 seconds, a trick that I promised you early on that will give you an extra awareness of your effort. Real quick, though, if this episode was like an aha moment for you, if you realize that you've been training comfortably short of the stimulus needed to build muscle this whole time, and if you're tired of guessing on your own, this is what we help you fix inside. Eat More Lift Heavy. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. This is our 26-week coached program for adults over 40. A huge part of what we do is we teach you to read your own effort and your

  Rep range goal setting

  Philip Pape 22:13

  own data across the board, not just training, but nutrition, biofeedback, all of it, so that you stop guessing. You stop wondering whether it's working and you see that it's working. And part of that comes through the community of, hey, is this working? Here's my data. And we can help you say, you know what? Yes, you are losing fat because your waist is going down or because or you are getting stronger because your lifts are moving in this way. And if they're not, here's what you can do about it. We help you build in that calibration, set up your training around it, train the right way with the right program for your lifestyle, for your equipment and goals and all of that. And so we're in your corner the whole way. If you are looking for that kind of guidance, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. The cool thing is if you scroll down on the page, you could see exactly what each of the 26 weeks has in store, what you are going to learn, what skills you're going to build. I think it's very unique in this industry to have that kind of education along with the accountability and the results. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check that out. All right, here's a trick that can help you fix your effort even further. And this is before you start the set. So if you're doing a rep range, I want you to pick the number that you're going to hit and say it out loud. And what I mean is, let's say your program has six to ten reps for the exercise. And last time you got six with this current weight. So you got the minimum of the rep range. Now, most people are going to go in and they're going to think, okay, if I got a little stronger, I should probably be able to hit seven reps now at the same weight, right? Is that is that what you think? Right. I'm raising my hand. That's often where my mind goes. I'm like, well, okay, this week, if I hit seven, I know I'm a little stronger and I'm pushing. But that's a problem because when you do that, when you say I'm going to hit seven, your brain is going to allow you to only go to seven and then you're going to stop. And you might have had one, two, three more reps left that week. You don't know how much more stronger you actually are. You also don't quite know if you trained hard enough last time. So I want you to flip it around. I want you to go in on that six to ten, and I want you to aim for the top of the range. If you got six last time, is what I'm saying. Okay. I want you to say, I'm going to hit 10. Like that is my goal. I'm going to hit 10. And then when you get to the seventh rep, you're like, nah, I got three more reps. I'm going to 10. And you will surprise yourself more often than not. You might only get nine, but that's still two more reps than what you were aiming for at the seven and three more than last time. Does that make sense? And then when it comes to rep range progression, we call it double progression. Once you have hit 10 reps on a six to 10 for that first set, you're going to add weight the next time to bring the reps back down, but you're always going to aim for 10. Now you could push it further and say, you know what, I'm going to try to get 12, even though my range is six to 10. But you get the idea. All right. I hope that helps you guys train harder so you get more out of your gym time. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the effort that builds muscle isn't what feels hard. It's the effort you can actually measure. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why You're Exhausted After 8 Hours of Sleep, Even If You Don't Snore (Dr. Shereen Lim) | Ep 484

Doing the right workouts, eating well, and still waking up exhausted? What if your “good” sleep score is missing the real problem?

I talk with Dr. Shereen Lim, dentist, dental sleep medicine expert, and author of Breathe, Sleep, Thrive, about sleep-disordered breathing, airway health, and why women over 40 are so often missed.

You’ll learn why snoring, teeth grinding, mouth breathing, nocturia, and unrefreshed sleep can point to airway issues even when you’re lean, fit, and doing “everything right.” 

We cover sleep apnea, upper airway resistance, CPAP, dental devices, palate expansion, mouth taping, and why nasal breathing matters for hormone health, metabolism, longevity, and evidence-based fitness.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why sleep still feels broken
2:27 – Sleep disordered breathing explained
4:52 – Jaw structure and airway collapse
7:43 – Midlife changes and women’s risk
9:36 – Sleep trackers versus real testing
11:40 – Grinding, nocturia, and red flags
15:19 – When mouth guards make breathing worse
16:35 – CPAP and dental device tradeoffs
21:46 – Mouth taping and tongue posture

Episode resources:

• Dr. Lim’s book – Breathe, Sleep, Thrive

• Website: drshereenlim.com.au

• Facebook: @drshereenlim

• Instagram: @dr.shereenlim 

• Transcript

  Why sleep still feels broken

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Are you doing all the right things for sleep and yet you're still waking up feeling tired? Maybe you get enough hours, maybe you've cut caffeine, you're taking magnesium, you have a cool bedroom, and yet something is off, even if you're lean and fit, and especially if you're over 40. Now, the problem might not be in your bedtime routine. It might have to do with your airway and not the loud gasping kind of sleep apnea that we're familiar with, but something a little bit behind the scenes that you can't necessarily see and you might not see in a sleep test either. My guest today is Dr. Shireen Lim, one of Australia's first dentists with a postgraduate qualification in dental sleep medicine. She's going to explain why your body changes as we age in ways that mess with your breathing at night. What signs to look for, what to do about it that may not be CPAP or another supplement. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this episode today is about a sleep problem that many of you, even if you're relatively lean and healthy, and particularly if you're a woman over 40, might not realize you have. It's the reason you can potentially do everything right with your routine and your sleep hygiene and still wake up feeling like you didn't sleep. My guest today is Dr. Shireen Lim. She practices dental sleep medicine in Perth, Australia, and is one of the first dentists in the country to obtain a postgraduate qualification in the field. She's also the author of the book Breathe, Sleep, Thrive. Her broader work does cover airway development across the lifespan, but today we're going to focus on what happens in adults and especially adult women in midlife when it comes to sleep and often undiagnosed issues. You'll learn how to recognize these signs of sleep disordered breathing, while your sleep tracker or ring can show you a great score, even while your sleep is fragmented, and a range of interventions available to you so you can take proactive steps starting this week. Shireen, welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 2:07

  Yeah, thanks very much for having me and for accommodating my time zone.

  Philip Pape 2:11

  No, absolutely. It's a lot of fun talking to folks from the other side of the world. And I've been listening to a lot of your work. I've read your book, and I'll say a lot of misunderstandings potentially about sleep issues and sleep apnea. And in my field, in our field, nutrition coaching, we often go right to bedtime routine and hygiene

  Sleep disordered breathing explained

  Philip Pape 2:27

  and maybe sleep apnea and testing. And when a lot of people think about apnea, right, they're thinking about snoring, right, is the big one, being overweight, or maybe too much fat or even muscle around the neck. I know folks who are lifters who have an issue, they get, you know, big necks, things like that. What is the real picture on just sleep disordered breathing in general? Maybe start with a symptom. So if someone listening is experiencing them, they might recognize it. And then we can start to dig in on some specifics.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 2:54

  Yeah, so sleep disturbed breathing is really a spectrum of conditions that are related to a structurally narrow airway and increased collapsibility. So we have these interruptions to our sleep. And on the more severe end, we have obstructive sleep apnea where we have more prolonged pauses in breathing, and that can be linked to oxygen deprivation. But really, problems begin when mouth breathing starts. So even mouth breathing. And we have snoring, which is one of the first signs, as well as upper airway resistance syndrome. So we when we have not quite sleep apnea, but interruptions in our breathing. And rather than having the prolonged obstructions, there's an increased stress response, which helps to open up the airway with increased work of breathing, but it is very disruptive, even though we don't get the oxygen deprivations. So there's this continuum of problems, but they can all have the same symptoms. So that could be mouth breathing, teeth grinding, just like unexplained awakenings during sleep, people waking up and going to the toilet in the middle of the night, or feeling unrefreshed on waking. They're quite common symptoms that people with these problems may experience. And then in turn, there's going to be often problems with mood, daytime energy, and virtually every chronic health condition, there's an increased risk because we're not getting good quality restorative sleep.

  Philip Pape 4:18

  Yeah, and it's interesting because we don't often communicate about sleep from that physical perspective of the airway. And it's funny you mentioned some things that I've heard just about everybody experience to some extent teeth grinding myself. I wear a mouth guard, I have for years. So maybe I have an undiagnosed issue. But even like waking up throughout the night, sometimes unexplained, it comes out of nowhere. So I mean, you know, when you talk about like upper airway, I think you call it upper airway resistance syndrome, right? There's one of the things you mentioned as a risk factor is a small mouth. And I want to kind of separate like physical, genetic, structural limitations from maybe, you

  Jaw structure and airway collapse

  Philip Pape 4:52

  know, behavioral, I guess it would be a good dichotomy to talk about. So, you know, you talk about stuff that happens in childhood, which we're our audience is past that point, right? But like extracting molars and crowding from braces and orthodontics. And a lot of our audiences had braces as kids, probably had teeth pulled, myself included. So, how does all that play in now that we're 45 years old or whatever, when it comes to upper airway and mouth size, let's say?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 5:17

  Yeah. Well, obstructive sleep apnea really is a developmental problem that begins from infancy. And a lot of it is related to how well our jaws are growing as well as how well the mouth of our muscles are working, including the tongue. And so, in terms of the jaw, the jaws really, the upper jaw or our palate is really the floor of our nose. So the more developed that upper jaw is, the better our breathing passages. It's also our tongue space, so we have more room for the tongue. But we really want the jaws to grow forward and wide because really they are the rigid support for our collapsible upper airway or throat. And so the more forward and wide they are, the less collapsible the airway will be. And so when we have problems like the extractions that you were talking about or crooked teeth, they're really indications that the jaws aren't growing properly. And, you know, a lot of the time when we think about airway, we think what is inside the nose and what is inside the throat. But really, it is those jaws that are really playing a very important structural contribution and very overlooked contribution to how well we're breathing. And so that's why we'll find that many dental type of interventions can work quite successfully, whether it is nighttime guards that reposition the lower jaw forward, palate expansion to widen the upper jaw, or double jaw surgery to bring the jaws forward. These are all interventions that can actually address the root cause or that poor airway development.

  Philip Pape 6:58

  Yeah, that's good to know that you touched on also can what we can do about it now. And I I did, I think it's chapter 11 of your book, and you guys should definitely pick it up if you're interested. If you have kids, I want to know kind of what to think about now and going forward, because my daughter just had braces as well. So I understand it, but also what can you do now? And and I would say that there are some interventions, like you mentioned, the surgery where you know we don't like to think about having surgery, but I think a lot of people aren't considering. So that's the mouth. You also talk about like the muscles of the throat. And I know there's a specific mention you make to how progesterone, for example, in in perimenopause, the decline in that per changes the dilator muscles or something of the throat, right? And so, like, even things like that, we're not thinking how our bodies change over time. And that and that affects how open

  Midlife changes and women’s risk

  Philip Pape 7:43

  the throat is. So, does this explain a lot of why people, when they age, you know, start to experience issues independent of sleep apnea, or is it also part of the sleep apnea discussion?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 7:52

  Yeah. So as we age, we're going to have reduced tone of our muscles. And even for women where we have progesterone, it actually is an upper airway dilator muscle. So that helps to keep our throat or our collapsible airway open. So as we have less of that around perimenopause, menopause, we're going to have more sleep disruption because we're not as effective at keeping our throat open.

  Philip Pape 8:17

  So that's interesting that progesterone, you know, causes that to change. And, you know, I wonder what else with age affects what happens with our sleep. But let's get practical, right? Because people are listening or using sleep trackers, right? I have an aura ring, right? People have the watch and the whoop and all that. And I think we're relying a lot on the score. But is there a gap between like what that says or the fragmentation of your sleep, like REM and deep and all that, and reality? That's kind of one part of my question. And then also, does it miss out on measuring something altogether, if that makes sense?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 8:49

  Yeah, I think the sleep trackers are good to get a general indication of the sleep quality, especially if there's symptoms and trying, and really good for people that want some validation that there's something going on to get further sleep testing for this. But I think that they're more likely to pick up more significant or severe breathing problems, and less so the more subtle disturbances. They don't really tell us exactly how much the airflow is being limited or how hard we're having to work. It's really made me picking up the more prolonged obstructions where we might get the oxygen deprivation, where we can measure, you know, the oxygen saturation, but not necessarily the more subtle disturbances, which can also fragment or lead

  Sleep trackers versus real testing

  Dr. Shereen Lim 9:36

  to very unrestorative sleep.

  Philip Pape 9:37

  Okay. And would that then show up at least in the sleep stages? Or is that even potentially like you can have an issue with your airway or airflow speed or some of the things you mentioned, but you're not really going to see that symptomatically in like how the stages are measured, like RAM and deep and such?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 9:53

  Yeah, I think when you have a sleep study in a lab, there's sensors and it can really measure all your brainwave activity. It's just a little bit more accurate, and that will give us more information than a sleep tracker. Generally speaking, I think the sleep trackers are really effective more at picking up when there's more serious problems, but when there's more subtle disturbances, we often need to get more detailed sensors and information.

  Philip Pape 10:20

  So tell us about the testing then, you know, because the people are confused about that as well. Like what how do they even get it? What is it? What kind of sleep testing is it? Is it for, you know, am I getting tested specifically for like a CPAP machine, or is it a broader test? What are you referring to there?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 10:34

  I think if people are having sleep concerns, like they're having unexplained fatigue or different things, whether it be heart disease and we want to work out what is the extent of breathing conditions, the gold standard really is going into a sleep lab, and they have a lot of sensors that measure brainwave activity, how much the airflow is limited, the snoring, the sounds, the movement, and we can get the most accurate information. Whereas we can also do things like here, we can get a test at a pharmacy and do it at home, and it may not have any as many sensors and leads. So it might give more obvious data, like when there's big drops in oxygenation, but we don't really know exactly what's happening in terms of how aroused we're sleeping or just those subtle restrictions in airflow where we're not getting those desaturations, but we're working so hard to breathe.

  Philip Pape 11:30

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in like so a lot of my audiences in the US, you're in Australia, we have people all over the world. Like, is how would you what's the first step you would take to get a sleep test, a good

  Grinding, nocturia, and red flags

  Philip Pape 11:40

  one at a lab?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 11:40

  Oh, I mean, I'm sure it's really different in different countries. Okay. But for us, usually like we have to get a GP referral, which is from a general medical doctor, to get a Medicare rebate where we'll get it reimbursed. Yeah, so it's a bit of a process. Yeah, so go through your doctor. Yes, yeah.

  Philip Pape 12:00

  All right. Then, you know, I know you listed some things that I have never heard before in your book, or maybe I've heard, but you know, they're good ideas. You talk about stomach sleeping as a red flag, having like vivid dreams that you actually remember, or maybe not remembering your dreams. You talk about cold hands and feet, low blood pressure. Like, walk us through which of these red flags might be the strongest self-screening clues if you're you know you're not having having gone to a lab yet, but physiologically, like what how should we rank these things or tell us the the big ones?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 12:29

  Yeah, I think unexplained awakenings, waking up, you know, often going to the toilet at night because we're awake, so not having a reason because that could be an interruption from breathing that's leading to an arousal and teeth grinding. Teeth grinding is a really strong red flag. So teeth grinding uh is thought to be a stress response when there is an obstruction, so our airflow airway is collapsing, and there's that interruption to our airflow. Teeth grinding can be quite protective against sleep apnea where there's a complete obstruction of the airway. Yeah.

  Philip Pape 13:00

  I see disruption. Okay.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 13:02

  What happens is it's fight or flight response. Grind the teeth, recruit the muscles, opens it up. And so, therefore, we don't actually have that prolonged obstruction. But every time that's happening, there is an arousal from sleep. So it's getting from deep to light sleep, and in terms of sleep staging, it's going back into the lighter ends and having to start again. So never entering those deep sleep phases, which are quite restorative. And that's why a lot of people that have that teeth grinding, they're probably more likely to have upper airway resistance syndrome than obstructive sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea, you might feel more sleepy, whereas that teeth grinding the upper airway resistance might be more fatigued, you know, just feeling that unrefreshed, tired, unexplained tiredness.

  Philip Pape 13:50

  Yeah, that's interesting. And and just listeners notice Dr. Lim is talking about, you know, sleep apnea as one thing and then the upper airway syndrome as as another. And so it's important to try to figure out which one of these it might be. I was actually, I know you talk about a lot about the jaw, but like what if someone has an unexplained clicking in their jaw that starts to present that wasn't there before? Is that related to something we should be concerned about related to sleep, or is that more of a separate dental issue?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 14:15

  Yes, I I think they can be somewhat linked if they have a clicking. For me, that usually indicates there's a mismatch between our structure and our function, where our jaw structures and our muscles aren't quite in harmony. And that usually tells me that there's probably some underdevelopment of the jaws, which is undevelopment, underdevelopment of our airway structures and some degree of limited airflow. So really understanding that when the jaws are not properly developed or when we have orthodontic problems or we're needing to extract teeth to alleviate dental crowding, really that is a structural limitation of our airway.

  Philip Pape 14:54

  Got it. Does the have actually having a guard help is it a good helpful first step, or is it making it worse in some way?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 15:00

  Yeah. So if we have grinding, we should try to investigate are there any other symptoms of disturbed sleep, the mouth breathing, the snoring, the choking or the gasping for breathing, all those symptoms, the restlessness, tossing, turning, nocturia, going to the toilet,

  When mouth guards make breathing worse

  Dr. Shereen Lim 15:19

  those type of symptoms, we may be better off looking at is there an underlying sleep disturbance? Because there has been some research to suggest that when we put a guard, the typical guards that protect the teeth from grinding, it can actually aggravate breathing problems. Because what happens when we put a piece of plastic in between the teeth, it actually swings the lower jaw backwards. And so as we swing that lower jaw backwards, it pinches into the airway, and that tongue is more likely to be pushed back, which can actually create more problems as well. So some people will not be able to tolerate it. They won't be able to sleep well, they'll find it out by the side of their bed. So I think your question was about the sleep grinding appliances. Yeah, yeah.

  Philip Pape 16:05

  If it could make it worse, and you said it could, and yeah, could help, could make it worse. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So now let's get to CPAP, right? And like I think mandibular advancement. I have that in my notes. As are the, you know, are these like are these band-aids? Are these helpful? Like again, are they should should we skip them and go straight to like, okay, if you at that point you need something more severe done, or where does it fit in the toolbox?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 16:26

  Yeah. So I mean, one of the challenges in sleep medicine is that everyone's so focused on this end stage problem, which is obstructive sleep apnea. And it's really

  CPAP and dental device tradeoffs

  Dr. Shereen Lim 16:35

  very arbitrary. Like to get this diagnosis, you need to stop breathing for 10 seconds or more on average, five or more times per hour of sleep. So if that number is less than five, you won't get that diagnosis. But you could still have very similar problems where there's this collapsibility and really disturbed breathing. So a lot of the times when you have obstructive sleep apnea, the gold standard of treatment is going to be CPAP. So with CPAP, really it is high pressure airflow. It's essentially like a reverse vacuum cleaner. It blows air through often through the nose and it just spints or keeps the airway open. So that is quite effective. It's the gold standard. We know that it works. It keeps all the parts of the airway open and prevents it from collapsing. So that's usually this what people are offered. Even though it's quite effective, many people can't tolerate it. So even if they use it, many people will only use it half the night. Or even if they use it, many people will not be able to continue it all the time. Yeah, this is what a lot of places are offering as a treatment. We have the mandibular advancement devices, which are dental appliances. They're worn inside the mouth only during sleep. And what these do is they help position the lower jaw forward. So you advance the lower jaw forward, as the lower jaw comes forward, it actually stretches open the walls of the throat to keep that open, and it helps pull the tongue forward as well. So what it does, it helps to keep the throat open during sleep. The problem with these solutions is that they're nighttime band-aids. So they really address the symptom, which is that collapse of the airway during sleep. But what we really should be more focused on is restoring airway health. So when I talk about airway health, I'm really talking about nasal breathing. Nasal breathing is really the foundation for good breathing, good sleep, and good health. And we also need to pay attention to good jaw development or that structural framework for the airway, that rigid structure, and how well the muscles of our throat and our tongue are working, or how well our lips are closing so that we're breathing really well. Because if we pay attention to airway health, that is 24-7. It's not just alleviating the nighttime problem. Nasal breathing, like a lot of people don't even recognize that's how we're supposed to breathe. When we breathe through our nose, it's just warms, filters, humidifies the air, prepares it before it enters our body. We get nitric oxide, which is produced in the paranasal sinuses. So it's antimicrobial and it's a vasodilator, which promotes good oxygen exchange. And it's just really, if we close our mouth and we breathe through our nose, it promotes good muscle tone. Because if we have our mouth open and we snore and we close our mouth and we snore, we're gonna find that everything is more floppy and relaxed when we have our open mouth. Yeah. So the future really is looking at how we can promote health and 24-7 better breathing and going for more targeted options to address the structures as well as the muscles.

  Philip Pape 19:55

  Okay, and I'm sure that's a very long list. So just just in terms of the nasal breathing, and I know you you refer to myofunctional therapy, which is like working on your tongues and lips and parts of your face. Like, what are some very practical things people listening right now, you know, today, they could do an exercise, for example, maybe incorporate it as a five-minute part of their daily routine?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 20:15

  First of all, I'd really want everyone to understand nasal breathing is so important. And a lot of people would go to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and they're looking at is there anything deviated or is there anything that we can take out of the nose, like turbinates, adenoids, and things like that. So I'd really want people to understand because often people will have nasal surgery and it might not work out. There's still persistent nasal obstruction. I see this a lot of the time where people go for the nasal surgery, it doesn't work so well, and they still can't breathe well. I want people to recognize that the palate or the upper jaw has a very important structural role in nasal breathing. So if we have a narrow palate, we're going to have increased resistance to nasal airflow. And if we understand that air nasal airflow or nasal breathing is really important, then palate expansion is a really good targeted option to address that palate. Yeah. So I think I want people to understand that we need to pay attention to the jaws and nasal breathing is so important, but the palate is really critical for our nasal breathing. But in terms of what is a simple thing that people can do, like in terms of nighttime band-aids, really a lot of people will put mouth tape, a little bit of porous tape, just across their lips to help their lips close together. And oftentimes people will find that their sleep is

  Mouth taping and tongue posture

  Dr. Shereen Lim 21:46

  more solid. They'll wake up and they'll feel fresher, less mouth dried, their mouth is less dried, and people will have less headaches. So I hear that a lot as well. And it is a band aid, but we can do my Functional therapy as well, which is really retraining the muscles, retraining how to close the lips or being more aware of it or where to put our tongue. Like the roof, the tongue really belongs in the roof of the mouth. So we want to be aware when we say and we lift our tongue, that is where the tip of the tongue should rest normally. Yeah. But if it rests on the teeth, that's a low tongue posture, that is not going to be as good as for our breathing. If we have it up, we're less likely to breathe through our mouth. So that's just something to be aware of. Myofunctional therapy can retrain those habits. But you know, you know, obviously we need to look for anything that is obstructing or allergies, making sure that we have nasal sprays to clear our nose and free up the nasal passages. And again, the palate expansion.

  Philip Pape 22:52

  Okay, those are really helpful. Give me some ideas to look into the mouth tape, but definitely, you know, thinking about tongue posture and how do you promote nasal breathing? We'll include, you know, some good resources to connect with you at the end to kind of look into some of this and what you can do about it. Yeah, fascinating. So, should when should a listener then hearing all this actually then pursue like a formal sleep study? And is there something they should include or ask about? You know how like when we go get blood labs, it's like you sometimes have to be very specific about what you're looking for, else the normal test isn't going to look at it. Do you have any advice on that front?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 23:27

  Yeah, I think when should we go for a sleep study? Whenever there's any snoring or gasping or sudden awakenings from sleep, if there's any heart conditions, because we know that these disturbed breathing conditions are linked to increased risk of heart disease, their chronic stresses. Yeah, anytime there is a concern where people don't feel their sleep is refreshing, it's quite fragmented. The sleep study can be very useful. And here I think if you go to the doctor, they should be able to have various criteria. If it is a more obvious high suspicion of severe sleep apnea or that severe end problem, you can get a more basic test. But if it's more subtle and we're unsure, maybe you have to have a more comprehensive lab test with more information.

  Philip Pape 24:17

  Okay, so is there anything about like women in perimenopause that we didn't cover earlier? I know we mentioned the progesterone, but I'm I know you again talk about different segments of the population in your book. Is there anything else we should bring up for our listeners?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 24:30

  Yeah, I think women are so easily missed because the stereotype of obstructive sleep apnea is an overweight, obese male that falls asleep and has loud snoring. Uh, whereas females are more likely to be affected by upper airway resistance syndrome, the more subtle breathing responses, disturbances. And they may not even snore. It may be mouth breathing and some increased efforts to breathe. And then people think their unrefreshed sleep is related to menopause or being really busy working, having children, looking after family. And then they may be put on things like anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants without getting their sleep looked at. But really, when we have that very high sympathetic nervous system response chronically, because there is this collapsible upper airway, many women may be affected by things like functional somatic syndromes, where we there is just a heightened response to low stimulus, and it might look like irritable bowel syndrome or temporomandibular joint dysfunction, those type of conditions, or anxiety or insomnia, where sleep is not particularly restful, and then people find it difficult to get to sleep because it doesn't feel peaceful on a subconscious level. And if we can actually understand that there could be an underlying breathing disturbance before we medicate people, it may be worthwhile checking this out. And really for those people really understanding that it's not the obesity that's the problem, it's going to be their jaw structures. Who has that narrow palate, the recessed lower jaw, the history of orthodontic extractions? So there is a lot of women that are suffering with these problems that are undiagnosed. And even looking at tongue tie, where we have the connection between the undersurface of the tongue, that connective tissue connection, and the floor of the mouth is abnormally short or tight, and it doesn't allow the tongue to lift well and the tongue lies low. And when the tongue lies low, we're more prone to mouth breathing, and the base of the tongue is more likely to create obstruction of the airway. But when we're children as well, we really need that tongue elevation to help mold the palate. So these people are more likely to have the narrow palates as well. So all these risk factors there. So I think when we have women that have these problems, we're trying to get more people to understand that we need to pay attention to these more subtle breathing disturbances. But there's a the developmental origins of all these sleep diseases, really how the jaw structures are formed early on in childhood. And form follows function. And I really want people to not just be looking for these end stage problems and reacting whenever we have disease to promote healthy breathing around the clock and not undervaluing the contribution of the jaw structures. Otherwise, it's too easy to get people to go for CPAP and they're not offered other options. And a lot of women won't be able to tolerate that. And then they're at a dead end and they can't really get further treatment. But women may benefit particularly well from palate expansion, and it can actually help them as they get older. Well, help us as we get older when we're more affected by, you know, the low muscle tone and that reduced progesterone and that increased collapsibility, it can help protect us from more severe problems as we get older.

  Philip Pape 28:07

  Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think about how we do cover up a lot of symptoms with band-aids and pharmaceuticals and things like that. And you know, we talk a lot about things like gut health, for example, as you know, everything goes through your body from your mouth to the the other side, and how important it is. Well, I think of this as a comparable, right? The airway. I mean, you literally breathe every second of your entire life and you sleep a third of your life. So, folks listening, like think about this as one of those powerful areas of the toolbox where you could at least get things checked out, at least get things tested, learn about it, right? Revisit this show and take some notes. Is there anything you wish I had asked that we didn't cover today?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 28:46

  Yeah, I think, well, my passion is children's airway health. I really became involved in this area because of my husband's snoring and really wanting to get to the root cause. If if we can do dental devices that can reposition or expand the jaws, why don't we do this earlier in children when they're growing well? And so for your listeners that have children or even grandchildren, to recognize that one of the best things that we can do for children to help stave off this problem as people get older is to promote nasal breathing, healthy nasal breathing, especially when children growing in those first six years of life. Because when we mouth breathe and we have that open mouth posture, it promotes really low muscle tone. We're going to develop more narrow palates and more recessed jaws. And these are risk factors for poor airway in the future.

  Philip Pape 29:38

  Okay, so definitely it starts with childhood. And again, a lot of our listeners are moms. So let's send people to find you and reach out to you and definitely check out the book. I do think it's a good book, and you don't find a lot of these on the market on this topic. So besides the book, which we'll send folks to, Shireen, where would you like folks to reach out to you?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 29:55

  Yeah, I mean, I'm the most active on Facebook. I use that a lot as well as Instagram. You can just follow. I like I like to share cases and what I'm looking at. But I do have a website, Dr. Shereen Lim. You can find lots of information there too.

  Philip Pape 30:06

  All right. So your website, Facebook, Instagram, we'll send people there. Check out the book. Dr. Lim, it's been a pleasure talking about these. It's fascinating. And I hope people, you know, think about, you know, how to improve their nasal breathing and their jaw structure and get things checked out and sleep better. Sleep, sleep, higher quality sleep, and great for your health. Okay. Thanks so much for coming on Wits and Weights. Thank you for the opportunity, Philip.

Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, & More) | Ep 483

How long can you stop training before your muscle starts to disappear?

Most people take a week off, see that their muscles look a little deflated in the mirror, and assume the worst. The real answer is far more reassuring, and it is not what most lifters over 40 have learned.

These questions all came from members inside my Eat More Lift Heavy community, people serious about strength training over 40. 

Here are the 6 questions I'm answering (shoutouts to EMLH members!):

1. Tim E. - How long can you rest between reps before it counts as a separate set? (resting 2-3 seconds between squat reps, and 10 seconds between deadlifts)

2. Ajana B. - When she eventually hits perimenopause, what effect will it have given she's already built a foundation of strength training and whole-food eating?

3. Denise M. - Is creatine a benefit while doing Eat More Lift Heavy, and is there a better time to take it?

4. Desiree F. and JC - Best exercises to grow glutes, how often, and how many sets/reps (Desiree), plus how to grow glutes without the quads taking over or getting too muscular (JC)

5. JC - On a 0-10 scale, how important is eating protein right after lifting, and what stalls if you don't? (she now trains after dinner around 7:30-8pm)

6. JC - How many days of not working out before you start losing your gains?

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, muscle and longevity, fat loss over 40, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps

0:00 - 6 questions being answered today
2:22 - Resting between reps (when does a set count as 2 sets?)
7:04 - What perimenopause does to muscle and bone, and what protects it
12:17 - Why the scale jumps when you start creatine
16:19 - Building a strong physique without bulking up
19:17 - Bigger glutes without bigger quads (muscle specialization)
27:47 - Does protein after a workout (the anabolic window) matter as much as you think?
31:21 - How fast you really lose muscle, and the minimum to keep it

• Transcript

  6 questions being answered today

  Philip Pape 0:00

  It's been a while, but today we have another QA. Today's questions all come from our members inside Eat More Lift Heavy. And there's some really good ones, such as how long can you rest between reps before it counts as a separate set? Why does the scale jump when you start creatine? How do you grow your glutes without your quads becoming the dominant muscle group? And how fast you actually lose gains when life gets in the way. I'm answering all of these as always with evidence. And I think a few of the answers are going to surprise you, so stick around and enjoy today's QA. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, founder of Fitness Lab and the Eat More Lift Heavy program. And today is a special one because a few weeks back I asked members in that program to send me their questions, the bigger ones, the science questions, the trends, the stuff they're always wondering about, but never had an answer to. They often get these questions just day to day in the program as well as on our monthly coaching calls. But I specifically asked for some additional questions from them. By the way, if you want to send a question for the podcast anytime, go to wits and waste.com/slash question. Many of your questions actually turn out it turn into full episodes as opposed to a Q ⁇ A. But today I wanted to take multiple questions and answer them. So that's what I'm doing today. I'm giving them shout-outs, that kind of thing. And if even if you're not in that program, I definitely want you to stick around because these are very relevant questions about resting between reps, creatine, glute training, perimenopause, the anabolic window, losing your gains. And if you lift, if you eat food, which we all do, uh if you're over 40, several of these are probably gonna be highly relevant for you. And then I save the best one for last. I want you to stick around to the end because the last question, someone, the last question is something that a lot of people get wrong and causes, I'll say, the most unnecessary panic. And that is how fast you lose your gains when life gets in the way and you can't train. It's one of the most common questions I get. Hey, I'm going on a trip. Hey, I'm gonna have surgery, hey, I'm taking a break. Hey, it's been a while since X, Y, Z. How big of an issue is that? And I think it's a very reassuring answer. And I'm gonna give you the minimum that you need to hold on to muscle, and we're gonna look at the evidence. I think that's a good one. So we'll close out the episode, but let's get into the questions.

  Resting between reps (when does a set count as 2 sets?)

  Philip Pape 2:22

  All right, the first question comes from Tim E. And Tim asks, and I I love this one because it's the kind of thing you think about as you're training, and then you forget to kind of look it up. So he says, How long can you rest between reps before it becomes a separate set? Now he's doing squats, especially that third set, and he's resting two or three seconds between reps to catch his breath, and he wants to know if that's okay. And we see this with heavy work. We see this with, for example, deadlifts. It gets confounded by the fact that people have trouble knowing how and when to breathe and brace very often. Again, that's something we teach you to do. So it all is connected. But the short answer answer for Tim is that it's totally fine for a few seconds to take a breath, and that's it. That's the short answer. But I want to explain why, because there's real science here. There's a whole, there are entire training methods built around deliberately resting inside a set. So inside a set, like Tim is asking. You've got cluster sets where you break the set into little groups of reps with short rests in between. You might have heard the phrase density sets as well. You've got rest pause where you go to near failure, you stop, you take a few breaths, then you squeeze out a few more. You in in both of those, the rest is usually around 15 to 30 seconds. That's where you've restored enough that, say, your bar speed comes back and your fatigue drops. So when a coach wants to intentionally build rest into a set, that's the kind of pause that they're using. You might have heard of the dog crap method, the same idea. It's like 15 to 30 seconds. If you've ever done BFR, same thing there. So two or three seconds, Tim, just to breathe and rebrace, obviously it's nowhere close to that 15 to 30 seconds. That's actually totally normal. That's just lifting. In fact, that's good lifting in many cases because sometimes you do need that to get reset in that brief moment. We see the same thing with the deadlift. Whether you're breathing at the top or bottom, these days I tend to recommend breathing at the top. But what the, you know, when I looked into the research, there is a meta-analysis. So meta-analysis is a study of studies. This was 29 studies that compared these broken up set styles to traditional straight sets. And when you match the volume and effort, the muscle growth is identical. The strength is identical. So even if you rested long enough to technically split the set, it actually wouldn't hurt your results as long as you're getting the work in. The micro rest, if you want to call it that, is not what really matters. It's the total quality reps. Now we've talked about training close to failure and mechanical tension and all that. That's kind of where the thought is. I'm less and less of a stickler about, you know, even the number of sets, for example, or reps, if you're getting the similar effort is. I think more importantly, is can you objectively measure it and track it session to session so that you're not just all over the place? And then Tim mentioned in the thread in our program where he asked the question that some people rest like 10 seconds between deadlifts and wonder if that's too long. And my take is that on that is, you know, taking 10 seconds to reset your breath, rebrace, get your setup right is probably on the upper end, but it's not quote unquote too long per se, especially if you're doing extremely heavy reps. I mean, we're not trying to let's take ego out of it. Let's take, you know, critics from different groups or philosophies, whether it's starting strength or other, and just think of the what you're trying to do. Well, you're trying to lift the weight with good form and you're trying to get the mechanical tension, you're trying to recruit all those muscle fibers. So if you take a few seconds to get braced properly and it helps you do that, so what? Okay, so what? I mean, if you were in a competition, you're only going to do a single anyway. So on the big compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, especially, breathing and rebracing, like if you're wearing a belt and you really fill that up, that interabdominal pressure between reps is a very good technique. So with a squat, that's where it's on your back. Now I don't want you sitting there for 15, 20, 30 seconds and taking forever and shifting around and all of that. I just want you to, you know, take that breath, get braced, go down. It really shouldn't take more than two or three, maybe at most four seconds if you're really heavy and getting a little bit winded. Now, improving your work capacity, because you know, having slightly better conditioning through things like speed work or just a decent amount of volume probably will make it such that you don't need as much time. But there is a difference between like the respiration you need and the support you need through a big breath. So I wouldn't overthink it. Tim, you you're doing that, was a lot to answer your question, which I basically answered at the beginning, but I wanted people to understand the full context. So that is the rest between reps question.

  What perimenopause does to muscle and bone, and what protects it

  Philip Pape 7:04

  I wouldn't overthink it. And that's it. So moving on to the second question is from Ajana B. And this is a really good, I'll say forward-looking question, trying to be proactive. She says that she's strength training and eating whole foods right now. And she's wondering when she eventually hits the perimenopausal stage, what effect that's going to have on her, given that she's built this foundation of good habits and fitness. And I do love this question. I think you're thinking ahead and probably hearing a lot of things online or social media, or, you know, there's a lot of fear-mongering as well about around perimenopause, which is the period that could last several decades for some women. Some women, it's a lot shorter than that. But what's actually happening during that transition, starting as early as, say, your mid-30s, for many women, it's in more like their mid-40s before they get to the menopause transition, usually around 50 or a little after that, estrogen starts to decline. It gets a little bit more volatile, a little bit more erratic. And estrogen has an important, you know, stimulus in the body. It supports your muscle stem cells. Those are the cells that repair and build muscle. Estrogen supports your bone. It helps, you know. So when we hear about osteoporosis being more of an issue for women, that's why. It helps keep fat in the lower body so that the like the more hip and thigh pattern instead of the abdominal fat around the organs. So as estrogen drops, you tend to see on average accelerated muscle loss, accelerated bone loss. Women can lose somewhere in the range of one to two percent of bone density a year in that transition. And there's a shift toward more visceral fat and a little drop in insulin sensitivity. And then sleep is often getting disrupted. That affects your recovery. Your lifestyle tends to be more stressful and more difficult on all these things as well. And you know, it sounds kind of grim when I say it that way. And honestly, the whole industry is built on selling against that fear. But what's really fascinating and empowering about this, and this is how we're gonna reframe this. I'm a big fan of reframing, not delusion, but literally just looking at it from the productive angle that's gonna help you. Every single one of those changes I mentioned above is directly opposed to what you are already doing in our program and what we talk about on this show for that everyone should be doing. And we also think there's a lot of confounding evidence in the in the literature that these things aren't necessarily caused by perimenopause and the hormone changes per se. They're just correlated with many other things happening during that time of life that believe it or not, some of those things happen to men as well, like the muscle loss and the drop in bone density, which gives us even more evidence that you can control counteracting that with your lifestyle. So lifting and lifting heavy, and again, heavy is a relative term. When I say heavy, I simply mean heavy enough for you to make progressive, to progressively overload, to hit the mechanical tension. That is the single best stimulus we have, stimulus we have to keep muscle and to keep bone, because mechanical load is what tells your bones we need to stay dense, have that dense matrix. Adequate protein fights the muscle loss. You know, eating whole foods, staying relatively lean without too much body fat, that keeps visceral fat low. It helps with your insulin sensitivity. Obviously, muscle helps with all of this as well. So you're not starting from zero already, AJ, because you're doing so many great things and getting ready for that. You are actually going to be in a better position, a better starting position. Kind of like when someone has surgery and they've been lifting for a year. Now they're super strong, they're in a much better position to recover. Well, going into perimenopause, you're already way ahead of the game. And by the way, anyone listening who hasn't started, today's the best day to start. And you can reverse things, you can enhance things, you can build muscle till any age, till your 80s and 90s. And so if you're already doing it, well, of course you have a head start with more muscle, denser bone, better insulin sensitivity, habits that are more automatic, or I should say behaviors that are automatic with a series of habits that you've developed. So a woman who's built that foundation would have a different experience than a woman who is trying to do it for the first time when they're say 50 years old while dealing with other symptoms like hot flashes, bad sleep, and so on. So it kind of makes sense, right? But what do you actually have to adjust when you get to perimenopause? Well, honestly, not much. That's the good news. You keep lifting heavy, you don't back off on the intensity. That's, I guess, a lot of women have that instinct where they start to hear that you need to change things like uh how you eat, or you have to cut carbs or intermittent fast or something ridiculous like that. That's often counterproductive. You tend to have to eat more, a little bit more protein because of a little more anabolic resistance. You know, you supplements like creatine are helpful. We're going to talk about creatine later in this episode on the very next question. You know, you still want to get plenty of sleep, if not more sleep. You want to ramp your training appropriately, depending on what phase you're in, how much energy you have coming in, because your recovery might be more sensitive. Maybe your bones and joints, you know, take a little more stress. So you just have to be aware of it and have good form. And I know you've been asking about form in the community as well. So, bottom line, the foundation you're building right now is the best perimenopause insurance policy you could possibly have. Keep doing what you're doing. And for all those listening, I hope that inspires you to get on it today.

  Why the scale jumps when you start creatine

  Philip Pape 12:17

  All right. The next question, question three, is about creatine. We love creatine. So Denise M asked, and then and then a few others piled on, is creatine a benefit? She said specifically, is creatine a benefit while doing eat more lift heavy? And if so, is there a better time to take it anytime during the day or around the workout? Short answer yes, creatine is one of the few supplements I'll recommend across the board. When you get to, I forget which week of the program, it's like week 16. There's a tool that I've developed that helps identify all the supplements that would be a good idea based on your specific situation. And creatine is going to be on everybody's list. I'll be honest, it's just gonna be there by default because it's good for anybody. I want to break down the how though. So dosage, very simple, five grams a day of creatine monohydrate. That is it. You don't have to do a loading phase. You don't have you can take it with anything at any time. In fact, I'll just mention timing real quiz real quick because she asked about that specifically. Denise did. It doesn't matter. Daily consistency matters more than when you take it. There, there has been a tiny bit of research that hints that post-workout has like some microscopic edge over pre-workout, but it's so small, it's probably not actually meaningful, let's just say. So take it whenever you actually remember to take it. Like I will take it, I tend to take it post-workout on my training days or with my lunch. Like, I have a mix that I take with lunch so that I could take all my supplements and whatnot on my recovery days. So whatever it works. You know, people have talked about like caffeine and should you take it in hot beverages? Is that gonna hurt it? No, just take five grams a day. There is some evidence that higher levels of creatine might have cognitive benefits. I don't want to overstate that until we know more, but some people have asked about that. I tend to take somewhere like 10 to 15 a day just uh for a little extra boost. It's gonna get metabolized and excreted anyway. And when you start taking creatine, this is the thing that freaks most people out. So to all my members and eat more lift heavy, you know, you've heard you've heard this before, but to everybody listening, when you start creatine, the scale is going to go up almost inevitably. Of very few people have I seen it not happen to. For most people, it's gonna go up like two to four pounds. Now, if you load it, like the old days, like if you take, if you take the loading phase, you might go up even more, but there's no need to load it. So two to four pounds, it's not fat. It's water being pulled into your muscle cells and muscle cells, and that's what you want. That's a sign that it's actually working. Your muscles are fuller, they're better hydrated, they function better. That's why you get a few extra reps in the gym when you take creatine, you get more performance and more results. So when you see that first, that bump in the first week or two, be like, okay, yeah, good, good thing. That means the creatine's working. I'm getting more muscle water. And, you know, for a lot of people, it actually looks better. It doesn't look bloated or puffy like some myths have held over the years. It often looks better. But you have to account for that, which is why I prefer taking creatine when you're at maintenance, so you can just allow for that bump to kind of normalize. If you're tracking with something like Macrofactor, it might interpret it as a drop in expenditure temporarily, but then it comes back. And then when we talk about, okay, is creatine even more helpful for older folks, especially women over 40 than for younger folks, younger guys, whatever. Women have lower creatine stores to begin with. And I found a two-year randomized control trial, okay, RCTs, we we love randomized controlled trials with humans. And these were postmenopausal women, average age of 59, where creatine combined with resistance training helped maintain bone strength at the hip, the femoral neck, the femoral neck of the hip, which is the part that's very, very important for fracture risk. So they weren't looking at bone, not just muscle, which is very interesting. So take take take for that what it is. Feel free to look up the evidence yourself. I haven't really deep dived into that aspect, but if you're anybody, if you're a woman who lifting through perimenopause, menopause, creatine is definitely going to be helpful for you. Nobody should shy away from it unless they're, for example, allergic to it, which is very, very rare. Five grams a day, easy peasy, lemon squeezy as they

  Building a strong physique without bulking up

  Philip Pape 16:19

  say. So I think this is a good place for me to mention something because all of the questions today came from inside Eat More Lift Heavy. And I just want to explain what that is, real quick, for folks who are curious. It is my 26-week coached program. We have another coach in the program, Coach Carol. She's amazing. She's a women's and hormone and thyroid expert who's also really good with like recipes and meals and nutrition. And she actually jumped into the comment thread to talk a lot about the glute training, which we're gonna talk about in a little bit. That's actually the next question. But about the program, it's not a meal plan and a workout. It is a 26-week program where every week you learn a skill and you develop the skills over time, and then we have you apply those skills and we give you feedback. So it's across three phases. The first one is called stop guessing, where we get your nutrition and training dialed in with the right level of tracking and measurement for you. And I know if tracking people are like, oh, tracking, just note that we make it flexible enough that it works for you and we get you, you know, uh seeing the results of the tracking and how they help you make better decisions. And everybody who comes through tends to, I shouldn't say everybody, but almost everybody who comes through tends to realize, oh my gosh, this is what I've been missing. It's actually not that hard and doesn't take much time at all to track these things, but I get tremendous benefit from it. And we show you what tools to use, how to use them, how to interpret the numbers. That's the first phase. The second phase we call eat more lift heavy. That's where you really just focus on building that muscle, that metabolic capacity, that that just great lifestyle and health for movement and training and eating that will pay off long term. And then the final phase we call trust yourself. You learn to run your own, I'll say your own physique, but basically you're learning to be more autonomous and independent with a lot more advanced tools that we give you, as well as things that you can use on your own. So you can make the decisions and then you can get us to help you with the feedback on that. And that last phase is the whole point because I don't want you to be dependent. I want you to know how your body works, why it works the way it does, how to gain and lose body fat, how to build muscle, how to measure it all successfully. And then you're kind of off on your own, or you go to the next phase and keep leveling it up from there. So the reason these questions today are so good from our members in EM in Eat More Lift Heavy is, you know, they've gone past the basics and they're asking deeper questions. And I get that from a lot of listeners as well who've been listening to the show and been training, following their nutrition, doing the thing. Guys, this is a skill. This takes effort, this takes uh time. I've had folks write in who, you know, they've never used my services in any way, but they've listened to the show and they said, you know what, I've tried some cuts, I've tried some bulks, I've tracked like you've suggested, I've I've been very thoughtful and intentional about it. Just, and look, I've had some great outcome. And you know, my response to them is heck yeah, more power to you. I love to see it and tell the world we need to inspire more people to do this stuff because everyone can do it. I don't care if you're a man, woman, what age, menopause, doesn't matter. You can get the results

  Bigger glutes without your quads taking over (muscle specialization)

  Philip Pape 19:17

  you want. Okay, let's talk about glutes, everybody's uh favorite topic. Or a lot of people, I'll say people, but let's be honest, a lot of women ask about glutes. It just is what it is. And the question from Desiree is what are the best exercises to grow glutes? How often, how many sets and reps? Uh, we've had several episodes in the past, and I've had some guests on talking about glutes. And, you know, remember, this is the general, the general answer to anything about how do I grow something is not just about exercise selection. It's also about the principles that underlie training in general. But we're I do want to get specific about glutes. And then JC jumped in with a follow-up that I think a lot of women are thinking about, which was hey, she wants a fit-toned shape. She doesn't want her quads to get too huge, she wants the right, we'll say symmetry. She doesn't want to get, she doesn't want to look ripped or like she got a, in her words, a certain kind of surgical enhancement. She just wants the glutes to grow without everything else blowing up. And you know what? I could personally identify with that, JC, because as a man, I genetically have a larger derriere. Hopefully that's not too much information, but for a man, that may not always be a good thing if I'm doing a ton of squats and it's like out of proportion, right? And I think I get what you're talking about. So let me talk about the training first and then the I don't want to get bulky or blow up other parts of my body part second. They're like two different questions. So the glutes, the glutes grow from loaded hip extension. Okay, that is the movement pattern. So your best exercises are things like Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, regular deadlifts, hip extensions, cable pull throughs, even cable and band kickbacks. So Carol mentioned that in the post in our community when she was providing specifics. Because again, if you want to grow something beyond average and you really want to get enough volume, you want to hit it from different angles at different positions, like lengthened, shortened positions and enough, you know, enough volume, right? Enough frequency and volume. So it's it's nice that we have all these different exercises to choose from. Now, you might hear that hip thrusts light up the glutes more than squats on the muscle activation tests, right? And that's true. Muscle activation is way higher. But I don't like isolating conversations to just muscle activation. If anyone is making a claim on social media that that's the main variable we care about, they're they're like 10 years out of bed with what really moves the needle here. This is the nuance, this is the evidence. When you look at the training studies that measure actual growth over time with MRI, okay, actually looking at your body composition, hip thrusts, and score. Squats grow the glutes about the same. So activation, muscle activation does not perfectly predict visual muscle growth and size in and of itself. What you need is both. You need both form, you know, both movement patterns. You need multiple movement patterns here. And that makes sense because you just need to use hip dominant stuff and squat pattern stuff and kind of make it all work together. Now there's a bunch of other exercises I didn't even mention, like I don't know, step ups and reverse lunges and walking lunges and all of that. That could also help. And what's cool about it is there's so much flexibility that as long as you have enough different exercises at frequency and volume and you're training hard progressively overload, you're probably going to be good. And that's honestly the training hard part and the doing it consistently part is usually where people are not doing it and therefore their glutes aren't growing. I've known people that they just do a basic program with squats. You know, women just and their butt blows up because they're they're lifting heavy with squats, and I'm talking low bar squats that use all the hip musculature. But it all depends. It all depends. So frequency-wise, you're gonna want to train those muscle groups specifically two to three times a week. It's kind of the sweet spot. You're gonna aim for 10 to 20 hard sets a week. So the higher you get, the higher dose response, but it's it's diminishing returns. So if you really have the time in the gym and you really want to dedicate, you know, aim for that 20 sets. You may be more or less responsive to someone else. Sometimes women respond to a little bit more volume. That's on average, just speaking, generally, for you, you may not need 20 sets, you may need 15. Um, heavy compound work in there, you know, in the 6 to 12 rep range, let's say you've got the accessory stuff like the kickbacks, pull throughs, and stuff, maybe in the 15 to 20 plus range. Um, doesn't have to be, but in a range where you can have really good form and really feel it and get that mechanical tension and get close to failure, and then progress it over a few months. So we're talking 8, 12, 16 weeks, just run that program straight out and see what happens. Now, you're gonna want to measure them as well, right? And so I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to JC's part of the glutes question, which is how do you grow the glutes without the quads taking over? And of course, you want to be measuring your glutes, measuring your thighs. Like if you really care about that level of detail, you've got to measure them with circumference measurements on a regular basis to just validate what's happening and try to offset other variables like food and sleep and inflammation and things like that. But for growing the glutes specifically, you want to isolate them more. That's really what it comes down to. You're gonna you're gonna go lean into like the hip dominant movements, hip thrusts, RDLs, kickbacks, pull throughs, because those all load the glutes and barely touch the quad. So you just want to look at the exercises and shift around the number of sets that are hitting the X, the, the muscle group that you want to outpace the other muscle group. Now, I have heard some coaches say, just cut out altogether things that hit a muscle group that you think is already too big. And there's logic there, isn't there? There is some logic to that. I wouldn't want you to get what they call imbalance, but that's very hard to do if you're doing regular movement patterns on a regular basis anyway. You can go a little lighter on the deep, like knee dominant stuff, the deep squats, the leg presses that drive a lot of a lot of the quad growth. You know, if you've got a lot of, it's not really so much about the lightness, though, as the effective reps or the number of um hard sets and reps. So it's really more about volume. You can kind of lower the volume on those and shift that volume more to the hands and the glutes, right? You can't perfectly isolate the glute from the leg, right? Nobody can do that. We're a system, but you can bias the ratio. You can make the glutes the priority and the quads then come along for the ride. So again, Carol gave specifics in the group on like, do these specific exercises. Here's a program. We've got a glute and leg program in our in Eat More with Lift Heavy as well. We've got all that stuff. That's like the mechanics of the specifics, but I wanted to hit on the principles. Now, the big fear behind JC's question about not wanting to get bulky. Um, I think that was part of the question. I want to put this one to rest because women already have less muscle than men, just in an absolute terms. Women also have more body fat. The women, female body, it's it's not designed to get bulky, is kind of the way I'm gonna put it. It's very, very, very hard. You're not gonna accidentally get big and bulky, let's say. The toned look that a lot of women want that you're describing, that is a function of proper hard training, plenty of heavy work, training close to failure, enough fat loss to see the muscles. If anything, what you might be worried about is when you gain some fat, some body fat, or you're eating a lot and you're in a surplus, and then you get a little bit bigger or bloated or puffy or whatever from body fat. Well, that happens to men and women, right? That but that's not really bulk, that's body fat, that's not from muscles. Um, now, granted, having more muscles, could it push that out a little bit more? Yes. But I've never seen a woman that is not taking enhanced, you know, drugs that looks bulky, at least in my opinion, from from a male who, you know, I'm married with a wife, so I'm a straight guy who finds women attractive. And all I'm saying is that from my point of view, I've never seen a bulky woman who trains and build muscle. So that's kind of my thought, all right? And I joke about it that as a man, I wish I could get quote unquote bulky. Now, I I can definitely put on the fat, but it takes a lot of work to put on muscle. You have to train hard, and it's gonna take years and years and years to put on muscle. And for women, it's gonna give you the toned look you want. And if you want to get ripped or shredded or whatever, that's just a function of leanness and body fat. We're not even gonna go there right now. All right, the next one is one of those questions where I think the answer is the opposite of what a lot of people hear.

  Does protein after a workout (the anabolic window) matter as much as you think?

  Philip Pape 27:47

  And uh, JC asked on a zero to 10 scale, how important is it to eat protein right after lifting? What's what can be held back or what can stall if you don't do that? She changed her workout time. She's now going to the gym after dinner around 7:30 or 8 o'clock at night, and she doesn't want to eat a big heavy meal when she gets home. So she asked. And I said, that's maybe a three out of 10, maybe a two out of 10. Uh, this is the famous anabolic window, the idea that you've got this narrow, like 30 to 60 minute window after training where you have to slam in your protein, or then you you waste the workout, or you don't get as much muscle protein synthesis or whatever. And a lot of people believe that for many years. And we know how much body, you know, bodybuilders way back in the day believed in tons of protein and the raw eggs right after your workout and all that. But the actual research, there is a a well-known meta-analysis on this, found that once you account for total daily protein, there is no magic anabolic window. It's it, if there is, it's more like many hours on both sides of your workout, which is awesome. Okay. And the part that I think is great for JC, for your situation, is that a protein-rich meal will keep your amino acids elevated in your blood for many, many hours. So if you ate dinner and you train right after dinner, your body's still digesting and using that protein all the way through your workout and after it. So you're totally covered. The pre-workout meal is covering the post-workout window. So if you eat a second big meal at nine o'clock, it's not really going to do anything for you. It's why you don't need to do the pre-bed casing protein. It is why I recommend a lot of people do not train fasted or at least experiment with training fasted versus not training fasted. But if you do train fasted and you had a huge dinner the night before, not huge, but like you had a decent dinner with plenty of protein and carbs, especially the night before, some of that even carries through to the next day a little bit. So, what actually matters, JC, is not the timing, it's the total protein. That is really the game. That's like 90, 95% of the equation. Hit that target consistently, spread it across your meals, mainly for practicality purposes and potentially a tiny, tiny edge, but don't worry about the workout timing when it comes to the protein. If you want something small after, like a small shake or some Greek yogurt, it's fine, but you don't have to force a heavy meal down at night. Just get your sleep. Like that's what I would recommend is focus on the sleep. All right, we got one question left, the one about how fast you lose your gains. Before I get to that, just a reminder about how to submit your question to the podcast. Every question today came from a listener. In this case, all of our listeners were also members of Eat More Lift Heavy, but we definitely air questions for listeners and we make entire episodes based on listener questions. I really love these because that way I know you are thinking of something specific that you're not sure of the answer to or have not heard a good answer to out in the world. And a lot of other people are thinking about it as well. So if you've been chewing on something, if you saw a claim online, a piece of advice you're not sure about, you want another opinion, something about your own training that doesn't seem to make sense, send it to me. Go to wits and weights.com slash question. That's wits and weights.com slash question. Give me as many details as you can, especially your own personal contacts, so I can help you out directly, not just a general question. I always reply to the emails directly. And then if you want, I can give you a shout out on the show. You can select whether you want a shout out when you submit the question. So go to witsandweights.com slash question. Okay, speaking of questions, last question. How

  How fast you really lose muscle, and the minimum to keep it

  Philip Pape 31:21

  fast do you lose your gains? So this is also from JC. She asked, How many days of not working out before you start losing your gains? And I told her about two to three weeks, but I want to expand on the details. This is a very anxiety-inducing question everyone has because we're always having things that come up in our life that force us to take a break in some way, right? My my brother and parents visited for a week, almost a week and a half, and I worked out the morning that they arrived so that I could get in a workout in knowing I probably wouldn't train most, if not at all, while they were here, which turned out to be the case. You know, we were just all over the place, we were exhausted, we were traveling, everything. But then I fit one more in during the middle of it. But sometimes I'll go a week, week and a half without training. And a lot of people, when they take time off, there's probably more of a psychological panic than a physiological change, especially if you're into training. Like you once you get into this game, once you get into lifting regularly, you love doing it. You you enjoy doing it, you know that the results are there. And you know, you start to feel a little bad when you take time off. Because you're like, I don't, what am I doing? Am I setting myself back? And you might look in the mirror and say, okay, I'm looking flatter, smaller, like from a muscle perspective, you think you're like deflated, right? Have you ever had that feeling? I've had that feeling. You know, I look at my chest and I'm like, oh, it's like I don't have a as big of a chest. What you're probably seeing though, in that first week without training, is a reduction in glycogen and water from your muscle because you don't have the training stimulus. So it's more like a deflated balloon, not a you lost the balloon. Does that make sense? As soon as you start training and eating normal again, normally again, it fills back up really, really fast. And I know this both anecdotally and in the research, but anecdotally, what's interesting, or I guess this is supported by research as well, people who are detrained for years. So they haven't trained for years, their muscle comes back fast as well. So, I mean, if that can happen, imagine how much faster it must be if you only take a week off. Also imagine how much you gain in a week. Are you gonna lose any more than that in a week? Yeah, you know what I mean? So it's not, it's not much at all, even if it were that, but it isn't that. So the actual muscle mass, you hold on to that a lot longer than you would think. The research tells us that trained people can take one to two weeks off completely, zero training, and lose essentially zero muscle. So your strength then holds a little bit longer for about two to three weeks, even up to four weeks, you know, the strength, because that's more neuromuscular. Those are movement patterns that's wired into your brain. Real meaningful muscle loss usually doesn't start until past that three to four week mark of doing nothing. And then there's this muscle memory, right? This is a real thing. It's not gym, Jim Bro, what do we call it, bro science. When you build muscle, okay, and oh man, that we had a great conversation. Who was on the show? I wish I could remember, or did was this a solo episode? Well, anyway, when you build muscle, you add nuclei to your muscle cells, and those nuclei stay even when your muscle reduces in size, when it I'll say shrinks when you're not training. And there's research showing that those nuclei are retained for many, many months. So even if you lose some size on the long break, it snaps back really, really fast, way faster than it took to build, because the memory is still there. The cellular memory or machinery, if you want to call it, is still there, just waiting to be sort of reactivated and refilled up. Now, the practical version of all of this is probably more of a thing that you should care about. When life blows up your training because of travel, because of a sick week, because work is just crazy, because family's visiting, you don't have time. You don't have to have your entire program to hold on to the muscle. You actually only need a tiny bit of volume. So, as little as, for example, one session a week, sometimes a third or less of your normal volume. I've heard of it as little as one eighth, but I wouldn't go that extreme. That's basically just taking it off. So as long as the intensity is up, if you have like one session, a few hard sets for your legs, pushing, pulling, right? Just a simple upper or full body and you're still training close to failure and all that, maybe 20 minutes, then you're gonna do an even better job of maintaining. I'm not saying you have to do that. I'm just trying to say it's so little that like what I did when my folks visited, I just squeezed in that one morning session while everybody was still sleeping, just got it done. It was, it actually felt really good. You may not be able to do that, but honestly, even if you're in a hotel, if you're somewhere without a gym, there's some basic movement you can do. But you don't even have to because we know that most of this is maintained for at least one to two, if not three or four weeks, and then it comes back super, super fast. That is the takeaway. If you feel a little flat, if you feel a little bad or untrained, whatever, it's mostly psychologically, psychological with a little bit of a fluid mechanics going on. And then you come back. I would say you start with roughly where you ended if it's only been a week or two. Some people find they're even they feel stronger when they come back because they needed the recovery. But if if it feels kind of sluggish and hard, you can drop off the intensity by maybe 10%, you know, like the load by maybe 10%. But it's gonna come back right really fast. The minimum effective dose is way, way lower than what you might have thought. So that's it. I'm just answering questions today and nothing else. And if you want to submit your question, go to witsandweights.com slash question. I'll give you a shout out on the show. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the people asking the best questions are the ones who keep getting better. So keep asking them. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.