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Are you still following outdated advice for strength training over 40 when it comes to building muscle and losing fat?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