5 Body Recomp Mistakes (Why You're Not Losing Fat or Building Muscle) | Ep 395
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Your body isn't listening. You train consistently, watch your protein, do everything the evidence says, but body recomposition isn't happening.
The problem isn't your effort. It's the signal between your actions and your physiology.
Discover the 5 biggest body recomp mistakes keeping intelligent, hard-working lifters stuck at the same body fat and muscle mass for months.
You'll get specific fixes to align your training, nutrition, and recovery so your body can actually build muscle and lose fat simultaneously... even if you're over 40.
Episode Resources
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Timestamps
0:00 - Why your body ignores your effort despite consistent training
2:49 - Mistake #1: Eating like you're dieting instead of building muscle
8:17 - Mistake #2: Training to burn calories instead of build muscle
13:42 - Mistake #3: Ignoring recovery and sleep
23:20 - Mistake #4: Tracking the wrong metrics
28:25 - Mistake #5: Expecting rapid results
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Philip Pape: 0:01
Do you ever feel like your body isn't listening despite consistent training, watching your protein, doing what the evidence says to do, and yet body recomposition, building muscle, losing fat is somehow not happening. What's probably breaking down is that signal between your actions and your physiology. It's not because you don't have the effort. It is probably because your body is receiving the wrong message, which then leads to the wrong outcome and frustration. Today I'm walking you through the five biggest body recomp mistakes that I see keeping intelligent, hardworking lifters stuck at the same body fat and muscle mounts in the specific fixes that align your training, nutrition, and recovery. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we are again talking about body recomposition, building muscle, and losing fat, and the frustration when you're not able to achieve it. Especially if you are putting in effort, especially if that effort is consistent. Solid training, on-point nutrition, and yet things aren't changing. Now, if you're not doing those things, that to me is the easy part. That's the low-hanging fruit. Even consistency, which I talk about a lot as one of the most critical variables, is still not going to buy you the result if you're not consistent in the right things. And maybe you're doing one thing, like you're able to lose a little bit of fat, but you feel like you haven't gained any muscle definition, or you've gained a little muscle, but you can't seem to drop that fat. This is kind of the body composition problem that is really common as we get older, especially over 40 lifters over 40 who are smart like you, you listen to podcasts, you understand the evidence, you know what protein synthesis is, you might even be tracking your lifts and your nutrition, and somehow your body's not quite responding. Now, I'm not talking about corner cases or specific medical or healthcare issues related to, for example, hormones or something going on in your blood work. I'm not talking that today. Today I'm talking about really the big mistakes that people are making that will uh quickly get you over a hump to start making progress. And so it's not about working harder, it's not about your effort, it's not dedication. And again, it's not just consistency. It's there are misalignments in your approach that compound over time. You feel like you're doing all this stuff, your body just let's say it adapts to maintain where it is instead of to transform. And that is really tough for a lot of us. So I'm gonna break down five common body recomp mistakes that create this situation. These are not just beginner errors, these are mistakes that very informed, intelligent people make, and I'm gonna give you the fixes that will make them work. So let's get into it. Mistake number one is you are eating like you are dieting instead of recomping. Now, this is a there's some nuance here, okay? This is actually the number one mistake I see. People hear body recomposition and they think, okay, I need to train harder. That's the muscle side. I need to eat less and I need to diet to lose fat and kind of do them together. And they often drop into basically a fat loss phase, which is usually some sort of calorie deficit, often an aggressive deficit, thinking, okay, that's how I can do both at the same time. And there's a lot of people that talk about body recomp from the dieting perspective. But I think the problem is that even a moderately aggressive calorie deficit is gonna highly suppress your muscle protein synthesis beyond the beginner stage. Again, we're not talking about the beginners. When you first start, your body's very responsive. You gain those few pounds of muscle, and maybe you could lose some fat, right? And that's great. But we're talking about people who have hit a wall. And when any deficit at all, especially if it's reasonable, you know, reasonably high, I should say, is going to impair your recovery, which reduces your performance in the gym. And yes, you might start losing weight on the scale and dropping some body fat and at best holding on to muscle, but you're probably not building a muscle. And I talk all the time about the importance of a muscle-first approach. And this really defeats the purpose of recomp. Now you might say, oh, what if I want to lean out first and then build muscle? You can definitely do that. You can definitely do that. Okay. And for somebody who's carrying extra weight, maybe they're not happy with the layer of fat they have in their body. I'm not against that approach. You know, setting things up for about a month or two, then going into a fat loss phase first and then going to building. I'm not against that. What I'm against here is constantly trying to bias your approach toward that dieting side, thinking that, okay, the muscle's gonna slowly build because I'm training hard, right? I'm training in the gym, like Philip says. And, but I really need to lose that fat. And you kind of get stuck in a rut between the two directions. If you were to do a very aggressive fat loss phase and just like focus and get it done, and then do a very, you know, moderate to aggressive muscle building phase, I wouldn't be judging, I'm not judging. This wouldn't be an issue because it probably would work for you. Okay. But a lot of you are just not spending the time building muscle. You are always eating like you're dieting, even when, even when you're not quite in a deficit, if that makes any sense. All right. We we look at the research, right? When we talk about muscle gain, we know that we need a neutral or slightly positive energy balance. Even in successful recomp studies, the participants are always eating at or near maintenance with high protein intake, progressive resistance training. You're not in a deep deficit, right? I this is kind of what I'm trying to get across. It's an input-output problem. Your body needs enough energy to fuel the training, the recovery, the energy-intensive process of building new muscle. And if you don't do that, you're gonna stall. So even if you're like, hey, but I want to lose fat as well, if you are in a deficit, you're pretty much only gonna lose fat. You're not gonna build much muscle. You might build a little tiny bit, but it's just gonna be negligible. It's not gonna be what you are going for. When people say, hey, I don't see definition in my muscles yet, and I've been doing this for a year or two, on that time scale, you're not going to see it unless you give it that time to build muscle. And so I think the sweet spot for a lot of people is your maintenance calories or very close to it. I personally like aggressive maintenance, which is going a little bit above that, making sure there's that high protein signal, plenty of carbs to fuel energy and recovery, right? We know the protein piece is critical. Somewhere between 0.7 and one grams per pound is kind of optimal. But if you want to push that a little bit more and see how you respond, not against that for some people in terms of experimentation, right? And so if you don't have muscle to begin with, why are you just trying to preserve the muscle you have rather than trying to add new muscle? So the fix here, I think, is yes, you should be tracking your food in some capacity so you understand what your maintenance calories are, whether you use macrofactor or whether you just do it, you know, over time, keeping your weight fairly stable and eating at the what it takes to do that. You you've got to kind of know where that level is so you're not accidentally dieting or gaining too much weight. And then you want to keep the calories pretty much there. It's consistency is a lot easier to get to when you're trying to maintain at that level or a little bit higher and really feel fueled. But you're also gonna look at your biofeedback, you know, your weight trend, your measurements, your performance in the gym. If you're not gaining strength, something has to be adjusted. And if you're eating like you're in a fat loss phase, thinking you're gonna recomp, you're not recomping. You're gonna be in an aggressive deficit, have low energy, both actual energy coming in and probably the biofeedback of energy. And that's just kind of an inefficient way to be quote unquote dieting. So again, if you're trying to recomp, if you're actually trying to recomp, try to get at least a maintenance, if not an aggressive maintenance. We covered all this in the 90-day body recomp workshop in physique university. And you could always jump in if you're a member listening, you can go find that replay from I think it was August, September, August? No, I think it was August. And if you're not in, you could always join and go grab that. And it has the whole process for doing this, including the aggressive maintenance. But I think that's the first and biggest mistake and probably the easiest one for a lot of you to fix. I get there's fear around gaining weight. That's a whole different situation. But if you're not in a meaningful surplus, you're not gonna gain much weight at all. And if anything, you're gonna just accidentally lose some fat along for the ride when you're not focusing on eating like you are dieting. All right, mistake number two is that when you exercise, when you train, when you move, you're always thinking about burning calories and you're not thinking about muscle. So notice the pattern here, okay? You know, you're listening to wits and weights. You know strength training is important. If you don't, I'm telling you right now, it is probably the number one thing you can do if you're not doing it. Everybody should be lifting weights, in my opinion, pretty much to the day you die. And you've got to lift. You've got to lift. But the mindset has to go along for the ride. And that means a mindset of training to improve and progress and get stronger and build muscle, not going to the gym and exercising, not going to the gym just to burn calories. Even when you are doing cardio, believe it or not, you shouldn't be thinking in terms of burning calories so much as supporting your muscle building and your recovery and your fitness and your mobility and all the things except that. And I know it's hard to do because we're so fixated on the old paradigm of, you know, eat less, move more, you exercise to lose weight, and you do it to burn calories. When in reality, that usually has the opposite effect. And so when you're doing the YouTube style workouts, circuit training, you're doing around, you know, as many reps as possible, no rest periods, all of that, thinking it's going to somehow help your fat loss or burning more calories, it usually backfires, it usually stalls out your muscle building, and it usually sends the wrong signal to your body that you are an endurance machine rather than a muscle, you know, strength machine. And your calories actually come down, you know, in terms of your expenditure, metabolism, right? And then it gets frustrating because you don't see the results you want, you don't see the muscle definition. And a lot of you out there I know are not training the right way. I work with new clients all the time who've been going to the gym. Maybe they have a trainer. A lot of these trainers are good, many of them not so good. And I'll give them a program. And unless I'm very careful about prescribing exactly what to do, I will see some mistakes, like, and and some of you know who you are, so I'm not gonna call out names, where they'll see five exercises with three sets each, and they'll do all five exercises for one set and they'll rotate around and do it two more times, kind of like a circuit. And I have to, I have to remind remind myself that this is where a lot of people come from. And I have to kind of reteach the idea that no, you do one exercise, you go through all the sets, and you have sufficient rest period because the goal here is to train really hard to get in the volume and also that muscular tension to grow. And then you go to the next one and the next one. Sure, there's place for supersets and all that. We're not gonna get into this on this episode, but the point of training is to build that strength and build that muscle, not to burn calories because that's not gonna optimize muscle growth thinking that way. Muscle growth requires mechanical tension, progressive overload. You have to lift heavy enough weights through a full range of motion, enough rest between sets to recover and maintain performance. And when you're lifting heavy like that, when you have rest periods like that, you're gonna find that training feels a little bit slower and more mindful. It almost feels less hard from a work capacity and a cardio or heart rate perspective, but it should feel more hard from a pure strength effort perspective. And many people find that that is a really fun, amazing change. I hear it all the time from clients like, whoa, I really like doing sets of five or eight instead of 12 or 15. You know, I really like that because it's hard in a different way. It's hard in a more satisfying, thrilling kind of way that I'm getting strong and I'm really pushing these heavy weights. And I have to be mindful and focus on my form and that tension and that neutrality, my back and the skill of the thing, which becomes its own sense of personal growth and satisfaction while also serving the purpose of building your muscles and your strength, right? And your body's gonna respond to the quality and type of stress that you apply, not to the quantity of energy that you burn during a workout. And by the way, interestingly, when you are doing really heavy lifts, oftentimes you burn just as many calories anyway. You don't really realize it. Your heart rate gets jacked up. I don't want to say that lifting is cardio, although I want to do an episode that's kind of on that theme, but it accounts for much of that heart health and cardio and calorie burn, even though that is not the point. So, going back to you think of strength training or even bodybuilding, where you're gonna have two, three, four minutes of rest between heavy compound lifts, that is because you're focused on the intensity. By intensity, I mean the weight on the bar and getting that mechanical tension with as many muscle fibers as possible. And that requires you to be as well rested and training hard as possible. So if you train for muscles instead of calories, if you structure your training, not your exercise, you're not your workouts, even though I use the word workouts a lot, you're training around that constant improvement, plenty of rest, plenty of performance, plenty of effort, right? Good form, you're gonna be good. You're gonna be good. If you need to increase your expenditure, that usually happens outside the gym. Walking more, getting more sleep, less stress, not eating like you're dieting all the time. Go back to mistake number one. And honestly, when you train properly for muscle growth, your body composition is then going to improve faster anyway, because you're gonna see much more of that muscle definition. Muscle itself is more metabolically expensive. Your expenditure might even go up just from that. Not a lot from that, but my point is the fact that you're training in that way is gonna cascade everything else. Okay, let's go to mistake number three, and that is that you are ignoring recovery and sleep. I can talk about this enough, but he but it's potentially could be the number one mistake for some of you, at least the most underrated of the five. And that is because the training that you do in the gym is a tiny slice of your week. What you do outside the gym is what really supports the adaptations, the muscle growth. You know, we know that nutrition supports all this as well, obviously. But recovery and rest is actually gonna jack up your insulin sensitivity, your nutrient partitioning, your fat loss, it's gonna reduce your belly fat, it's gonna help with your recovery and blood flow, it's gonna reduce your soreness, and the list goes on. We know that your hormones get wacky when you are restricted with your sleep. Getting less than six hours every night, if you are a less than six hour sleeper, I want you to put this at the top of your list. How can you get more and better quality sleep? Or else you are hampering your testosterone, your cortisol, your reproductive hormones, your hunger hormones, you're gonna impact muscle synthesis, blunt your glyc, you know, how you restore glycogen. It sabotages every adaptation you're trying to create with your training, thus making it so much less efficient that I'm not gonna say what's the point. I'm just gonna say why would you do that? Chronic stress does the same thing. When your cortisol is always jacked up, you're in this catabolic state. Your body wants to break down tissue to grab more energy that it's lacking because you're not getting enough uh rest in that parasympathetic state, right? So your recovery capacity then plummets, your performance then suffers. It's kind of a vicious cycle. Recovery itself is a multiplier and it goes both ways. You can't out train a system that's under-recovered. I'm actually doing an episode Wednesday all about the, what is it called? It's all about the priorities in your hypertrophy or in your training. I forget the title that I'm giving it. This is a terrible sales pitch. But it's about what should you prioritize in what order when it comes to your strength training. And not even on that list because it's overriding everything and almost makes the list less relevant, is your recovery. In other words, it's not on the list because it's part of everything. It's like the foundation of everything, right? Your parasympathetic nervous system, this is the rest and digest system, is what drives tissue repair and hormonal balance, homeostasis. It's the foundation of body composition or recomposition. But if you're in this high stress, jacked up fight or flight state, constantly training, constantly exercising, constantly stressed, you're never going to activate that system long enough to really help those adaptations. You're gonna blunt lots of things. So if you are listening to this and you're like, oh my God, that could be the reason I'm not seeing my muscles start to pop and get defined. Even if I lost a little body fat, for some reason my training seems to be going to waste a little bit. Maybe it's because you're underrecovered. I mean, it doesn't take a lot of under-recovery for this to be a big problem. The fix, of course, is to prioritize your sleep. That's the big one for everyone. Seven to nine hours, non-negotiable, and doing all the things with your environment, with your pre-sleep ritual, with the things we talk about over and over again. And I hope you you keep listening to this podcast and it'll kind of sink in over time how important this is. Because hearing it just once, you're like, okay, sleep fine. I'm not gonna do anything about that. What's the next, what's the next uh secret, Philip? Okay, no, this is the big secret because it has everything to do with your training performance and your hunger hormones, your belly fat. Hey, look, if you got too much belly fat and you want to drop that belly fat, improve your sleep. All right. The second thing is some of you are never taking rest days. You've got to take at least one, if not two, if not three, full rest days per week. And I mean a real rest day, not this quote unquote active recovery day that is so popular where you're still doing a light workout or you're going for a run or doing some intense cardio. Okay. If you've got things dialed in, if things are optimized, having sprinting or some form of cardio on those days is cool. But a lot of you just overdoing it and you're in the gym seven days a week. And I would strip it all the way back to three full body days if you've never done that before, and just see what it does for your recovery and your results. You might find, here's the thing. Imagine this: you go to three days and you do that for let's say eight weeks, eight weeks. That's like two months. See what happens to your strength and your muscle. If it improves, what that tells you is that you can get a result on this like minimum set of time in the gym and maximum set of rest. And that's a great starting point to build from. Because then, okay, if you want to add another day in, you kind of know what you're comparing to. And if it gives you a little more, great, but it's not probably gonna give you as much as just the fact that you have all that recovery. And then maybe you go to five days max, but that's it. That's it. Have those full rest days built into there. Your body needs that break to consolidate those adaptations. And then the third thing here in this thing about recovery is the use of auto-regulation. What is that? Auto regulation sounds like one of those fancy engineering words. It's actually a commonly used training term where you adjust your training to your performance capability that day. Now, I have to be very clear, it's not just a willy-nilly how I feel, like, oh, I'm kind of tired today or I don't feel too strong today, so I'm just gonna go half-acid on my workout. It's more like if you if the weights feel are start feeling really heavy and you're dragging and and you've done the things, and maybe you haven't done the things, maybe you had a bunch of alcohol last night, maybe you didn't sleep in, maybe you're hungover, maybe you ate too much last night, whatever. Okay, you warm up as if you're gonna train at your programmed level. And then if the objective signal is telling you that you don't quite have the capacity that day, auto-regulation is saying, okay, how do I regulate automatically to that situation, but still train hard? And what that might look like, it might look like a little reset in your lifts, in your weights. It might, but it might simply be you get a you get a rep less, right? Or you drop the weights on sets two and three to get the reps, like things like that where you're still training really hard, keeping that intensity high, and there's just some little give in the load or volume or some variable, as opposed to taking it all off or completely dialing back and not really getting much out of your session. That makes sense. So, like if you are in a fat loss phase, auto-reg, there are auto-regulated ways to train that allow you to train your hardest knowing that you have limited resources. If you fix mistake number one that I talked about today, like not always being in a dieting mode and you're actually eating enough and fueling yourself enough, you shouldn't have to auto-regulate in the same way you would in fat loss. However, some days you are just not gonna have the energy, you're gonna be stressed out of your mind, maybe you didn't have enough sleep. So you've basically given yourself a downgrade because you didn't do the other things, right? You didn't do the recovery. And that's okay, it happens. I'm not saying you have to be perfect, I'm saying that happens. And then it's almost like you're temporarily in a fat loss phase. And the question is, what are you gonna do about it? Now, some people may decide, you know what, since I'm working out three days a week, I've got four rest days, I can shift, I can shift out one day. You may need to do that. That may actually be the beneficial choice to make. But auto-regulation can be very, very helpful as a way to incorporate proper recovery or adjust to your recovery capacity, right? And since we're talking about recovery, I did want to take a quick break to talk about something that has been really awesome for my own recovery. I just talked about how critical sleep is for body recomposition. You know, all of that adaptation, the muscle growth, the fat loss happens during recovery. And we talked about quantity of sleep, but we also need to talk about the quality of your sleep. And I just want to talk right now about one thing that I started using, oh, about three months ago. My kids love it because they they're like, uh looks like mommy put on the uh, the cozy earth sheets. They're they're they're very special set of sheets compared to the other ones I have. They're made from viscos from bamboo. And it's kind of weird because they cool you down, right? They take the heat out. And it's winter now. And I thought, okay, does that mean they're gonna be freezing cold? No, it's like that sense of relaxing, cool, but having the comforter on top of it still keeps you overall warm, if that makes any sense. And I think the difference between those and other sheets is extremely, I'll say, I'll say palpable, right? They they're they're very breathable, they're like silky, but not in that sweaty, like actual silk. They're actually like very glide, they glide and they're soft. And what I like them because I get really hot at night and they help me stay cool through the night, which means deeper sleep, better recovery. And man, my HRV, my stats on my aura ring all seem to improve when we have those sheets on the bed. So I'm telling my wife I need to get a few more sets. Right. And if you're again, if you're looking at those things that can help you rest well and really make the most of the sleep where you optimize the use of your protein, you know, you reduce the hunger, help with your belly fat, and all that. I would think about these types of things. So I'm a big fan of cozy earth sheets. If you go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth, you can use my code wits and weights at check out and get 20% off. They have sheets. They also have a lot of other products you can check out, but the sheets are absolutely my favorite, all different colors. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Use my code wits and weights for 20% off. By the way, when you go to that site, it's gonna show you the code as well, in case you forget it. So just use the link in the show notes or go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth for those oh so comfortable, oh so cooling, bamboo derived sheets from Cozy Earth. All right. Mistake number four is that you're not measuring the right things, the my right metrics. And this is where the people listening, you you, the listener, you know, you're probably listening to wits and weights because you like data efficiency, maybe that engineering mindset that I try to bring to this process. And you probably tracking certain things. But what I find talking to people on calls and new clients that come into physics university, for example, is they're not necessarily tracking the right things or the things that they're tracking, they're not using them the right way. Let's talk about scale weight, for example. A lot of misconceptions. A lot of you are only tracking scale weight sporadically, or like once a week or once a month. And the problem with those is you can get a high point or a low point, and it doesn't actually tell you what's going on with body fat because those high and low points can be multiple pounds in either direction or kilograms based on water fluctuation. And so I'm a huge fan of weighing yourself every day because then you can take a smoothed average over time to tell you what's actually happening with the deep down storage of fat, which is hard to measure in the short term. It takes about three weeks to measure a change there. That's why I think the process is more important than the data sometimes, but they kind of go hand in hand. And body recomp in particular, where you're trying to lose muscle and gain fat, or you're trying to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, your scale weight might stay the same. And that's not gonna tell you much, is it? So, you know, yeah, that's one thing, at least to know that you're not gaining or losing too much. But then you need the other stuff, your, you know, circumference measurements. I mean, honestly, if you just had to pick one, I would go with your waist at the navel, at the navel. That alone, if that's dropping, you're losing fat. And so if your weight's the same, the waist is dropping. That's a great leading indicator of body composition change, especially if then you have indications of muscle growth, like your biceps are going up, your chest is going up, right? I usually use about six or eight different data points when I work with clients. Um, we have this thing called the biofeedback or physique and biofeedback tracker in physique university. It's basically a spreadsheet where if you put these measurements in, it'll measure your body fat, your lean mass, your fat-free mass index, and it'll also show you what's happening from one data point to the next to kind of understand, okay, over this body recomp phase, I've had roughly this muscle to fat ratio of change. And I think that's really important because it gives you a nice boost of motivation when you say, look, my scale weight hasn't changed. It's hard to see the change in the mirror because you don't notice change unless you go and look at a before and after photo over a decent amount of time. And so something like circumference measurements give you a fairly rapid indicator. And by rapid, I mean over several weeks, not you know, day to day, obviously. I mentioned photos. I think progress photos can be moderately helpful. Ironically, I think they're more helpful when someone else is looking at them, yet that's what we are most probably embarrassed to do. If you're a private client of mine, you know, that's part of the process. And I get you would feel probably safest in that environment being one-to-one. If you're more in a bigger setting or a group setting, it's not necessarily something you want to do. But I wouldn't discourage it in if if you wear appropriate clothing and want to say, hey, here's where I was eight weeks ago, here's where I am now. Here's what I'm noticing about myself. Hey guys, what do you notice? And and, you know, assuming this is in a safe place where people give you constructive positive feedback, which I tell you, any group that I run is going to be like that, or you're out. So if, you know, anybody listening who's in physique university, go ahead and post your photos in whatever channel makes sense and let us know, you know, objectively what we are looking for. Are we are we looking to get a bigger back? Are we looking to get, you know, more defined shoulders? Are you looking to just drop body fat and start showing your six pack? Right, those kinds of things can be indicators of what is going on. And sometimes only other people can see them. Uh, the next thing is really your performance. And performance is usually your lifting progress. Are you adding weight, adding reps and weight, you know, because here's the other thing people say, look, I don't see it too much in my in the mirror. My waist hasn't changed that much, but my numbers have get gone up and up and up and up. And a lot of times when that happens, you've got a little bit of a layer of fat that's been there the whole time. And now your muscles underneath have been building and getting bigger, and you still don't quite see the definition you want. That's the point at which, well, I know my fat-free mass index has gone up. I know I built some more muscle. Well, maybe now if I do a fat loss phase, I can reveal some of that and I can be kind of put a put a bow on this whole process to reveal what I've got, right? So sometimes that's what it takes is a combination of these metrics, comprehensive tracking system with some key things that make a lot of sense. That's it. That's really what this mistake is that a lot of you are not measuring the right things. You're measuring scale weight sporadically, you're not tracking your lifts, you're focused too much on, say, the mirror and feeling, you know, mirror or or maybe comparing yourself to other people or whatever. Things that are not objective that really tell you what's going on. All right. Mistake number five is you're expecting rapid results. Yep. I said it. This is the one that's about mindset more than anything. It's not about tactics, but it's extremely important because you're expecting a quick result. I'm not talking about one week, I get it, but whatever you're expecting, it's probably too quick in general. In fact, I'd like you when you're listening to this to ask yourself if what you're expecting is realistic. Because when you decide you want to recomp, you want to build muscle and lose fat, you're over 40, whatever, and you set up your training, you dial in the nutrition, you start executing the plan, and then three weeks goes by, four weeks goes by, and it it feels like nothing has changed. And this definitely ties into some of the other fix mistakes we've already talked about, doesn't it? Because body recomposition by definition is inherently slow. I shouldn't say by definition, that doesn't, that's meaningless. But the here's here's the thing the bottleneck is the muscle. It takes long, a long time to build muscle, no matter what, even if you are intentionally in a surplus trying to build muscle. So if you now slow that down by staying closer to maintenance to try to get recomp out of it, you're slowing that process down even further. And because you're not an aggressive deficit, you're not necessarily losing fat. And even if you were, you don't have the muscle yet, right? It's kind of a catch 22. So by saying that, hey, I don't want to gain fat by going into a surplus, or hey, I don't really want to do an aggressive diet because I know muscle is important, you're then putting Yourself into a new quandary, aren't you? Right. And I'm sorry because I encourage this for some of you, because you don't want those extremes. So you're left with this thing in the middle. And by definition, you're not going to have as fast results in either direction, but you're going to have steady results that are sustainable in a process and a lifestyle that you might really, really enjoy and be able to stick to. And that's why you would do it. But if you think the process isn't working, and as a result, you cycle back to some extreme, extreme diet, extreme cutter bulk, let's say, and not done the right way because you're rushing into it, that creates a bigger problem. Let's look at numbers. I like numbers, okay? For trained lifters, people who have been lifting for a while, muscle growth rates average about a quarter to a half percent of body weight a month, upper end. Okay. So if you weigh, let's say 180 pounds, you're looking at a pound, what am I trying to say? A half a pound to a pound of muscle in a month if you're doing everything right. And then and then fat that comes along for the ride, because if you're obviously eating more of a surplus than that, the rest of it's gonna be fat. That's why it's kind of hard to find that sweet spot sometimes. Fat loss is a lot faster, right? It's more like it could be a half to a percent of body weight per week, right? So it's like four times as fast. Now, when you're trying to do both at once, you're trying to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, the process is even slower because the two goals pull your body in opposite directions. Your body kind of wants to stay in the middle and you're fighting against its natural tendency by trying to push both things and doing them kind of, I don't want to say mediocre, but you're making a trade-off. So if you were to extrapolate body recomp without doing a cut or a bulk, I would give yourself six to 12 months of consistent execution to see a meaningful change that first time. Now, if you have a lot of fat to lose, or if you've never built muscle, you might be better off with a more aggressive fat loss or muscle building phase. And I know it's not what you want to hear, right? We live in a world of instant gratification. We want to see results now. We've got tools and drugs and things that make results faster as well. But your physiology doesn't care, does it? It just operates on what it's gonna do. And everyone's is different. We've talked about the difference between consistency and intensity. Intensity or speed, chasing that, you chase speed, it's gonna create instability. Think about it. Chasing speed creates instability because it's gonna create a lot of change and volatility and ups and downs that you will probably have a gut reaction to, and you'll try to go the other way, and it's gonna just create this big oscillating effect that's gonna get you even more nowhere. Whereas body recomp is trying to get somewhere by towing the line in the middle and optimizing these variables. So realistic expectations from the start are really important. Committing to six to 12 months of steady execution, you don't have to be perfect, right? Just consistent. Again, that goes back to the consistency piece. And then focusing on measuring the right things rather than the outcome, measuring the process metrics, the protein, the training, the sleep, all the things we talked about today, tying it all together, reassess. I would say monthly at minimum, but quarterly is probably where you're gonna get the best bang for your buck with body recomp. So, for example, those in our program in physique university, we do weekly check-ins that are more about the process and the wins. And then we want to look at two, three, four-month phases at a time to see true progress and then make big adjustments at that point if it's still not going where you want to go. But by that point, it should if you're doing these things. And then you could say, look, am I leaner and stronger than I was three months ago? If you could answer that question even a little bit, then you've done something right. It may not be to the degree you wanted, and in many cases, it's beyond what you expected, right? There's often a surprise in this in this situation because you're actually focusing on the process in the short term. And then three months down, you actually look at the big picture. You step back and say, before and after what happened, and you're kind of shocked. And then you'll see the progress. But if you're always zooming in, if you're looking at the day-to-day fluctuations, not the process, right? But if you're looking at the actual day-to-day outcomes, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. You're gonna quit before the process has time to work. This process is applied physiology. If it had a degree name in a college, it'd be called a bachelor's in applied physiology. Okay. And it works, but it works slowly. You have to be patient, you have to trust the process and give your body time. I'm sorry, that is not gonna sell programs. I know it's not, but it's the truth. All right, so we covered the five, I don't know if they're the five biggest, but they're five of the biggest body recomp mistakes I see. When you feed your body enough to grow, when you train for muscle, when you prioritize recovery, when you track the right things, and when you give it time, the system always works. And the neat thing about this is they are not isolated mistakes or variables or fixes. They're interconnected. Because if you, let's say if you don't eat enough, your recovery is also going to suffer, suffer, which means your performance is also going to drop, which means you can't build muscle. And then if you're not really tracking these things, you're not even gonna see that that's happening. Right? So it's all tied together. And that's how we can identify your weak points. That's how we can fix them and stop making this feel like a mystery and start making it feel inevitable. Like, hey, I have confidence, I know this works, it's inevitable. Now, last thing I want to mention, if you want help implementing anything we talk about on this show, we do a lot of really cool things inside Physique University. And the next cool thing we're doing just in a few weeks, starting November 18th, is a six-week strong finish challenge. And rather than all the other challenges out there that are designed to like try to lose fat or dial in all your habits during the holidays, which as we know is pretty close to impossible for many of us. This is designed to teach you how to maintain what you have with three options. The optimal option, the one that, yeah, you can go for it and maybe you'll get there. The minimum option, which is, hey, here's the minimum thing that is still going to give you most of the results, or option three is the bailout option. Now, I know you don't hear a lot of coaches talk about this, but you know, I was brainstorming with my assistant coach, Carol, and others, you know, some clients, and we're like, look, what if you can't even do the minimum? Like, what if just you know what hits the fan, it's the holidays, everything's a mess, my schedule's all over the place, my kids got all these activities, and I literally just can't even do the minimum. What do I do? That's where the bailout strategy comes in. That is like, what is the not even minimum? What do you call it? It's like the backup to the backup plan that still gets you a win. And I think psychologically it can be very powerful. And that's what we're gonna be teaching in this challenge. I know it's very different. It's called the six-week strong finish challenge. Starts November 18th, which means it takes you through the end of the year. What's cool about the challenge is everybody's gonna be able to get tons of wins and really feel proud about themselves going into the end of the year that you maintained instead of backsliding like everyone else is doing. And then you're in a really good position mentally and physically, you don't feel depleted going into the new year. And I'm all about New Year's resolutions if you want to do them. I'm sure we're gonna have some sort of challenge or group cohort or something in the new year to help people who really want to get off on the right foot. But let's finish the year strong. So, anyway, if you join physique university right now, you can get a head start because you'll get a custom nutrition plan. If you use my code in the show notes, it's a free plan. And you'll get access to the course library. You can kind of get things rolling with our onboarding and get your nutrition plan set up and start figuring out the habits you need to dial in with our help. And then in a few weeks, the challenge begins and you'll kind of be in a good state to just execute on that and be fairly low stress through the holidays rather than trying to run one of those all-out fat loss challenges at just the wrong time of year. So if you want to get in on that, go to witsandweights.com slash physique or use the link in the show notes. Use the code FREEPLAN, get the free custom nutrition plan that I will build for you personally. Get ready for the strong finished challenge. I'll see you there, witsandweights.com slash physique. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that body recomp isn't about doing more, it's about aligning the right inputs so your body can adapt. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
