Build Muscle First, Cut Later for Easier Fat Loss and Less Hunger | Ep 429
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If all you've done is diet, every cut will be harder than the last.
More hunger, less energy, slower results. There's a reason, and it's not just your age or metabolism.
Learn why building muscle first makes cutting (fat loss) dramatically easier, how more lean mass directly reduces hunger per calorie of deficit, and why chronic dieters sabotage their own results by skipping the building phase.
Discover the specific rate of gain, timeline, and nutrition setup to maximize muscle while minimizing fat, plus how resistance training affects appetite hormones like GLP-1 and ghrelin differently than cardio.
Whether you're focused on body recomp, strength training over 40, or finally breaking the diet-regain cycle, this is a practical blueprint to stop fighting your body and start cutting from a position of strength.
Episode Resources:
Try Calocurb for natural appetite support: witsandweights.com/calocurb (10% off first order)
Download the free Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint: witsandweights.com/muscle
Join Wits & Weights Physique University: witsandweights.com/physique
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why dieting without building muscle makes every cut harder
2:43 - The muscle-first approach to easier fat loss
6:40 - The chronic dieting trap and how to escape it
10:54 - How building muscle reduces hunger and increases calorie burn
13:48 - GLP-1, satiety signals, and why strength training beats cardio for appetite
19:36 - The psychological advantage of building before cutting
25:13 - Practical build plan: rate of gain, duration, and nutrition
29:41 - Training, cardio, and when to transition to a cut
33:11 - Metabolism is a skill you build
36:45 - Bonus tip to know if you're training hard enough
Most people try to diet their way into a better body, only to find each cut gets harder: hunger rises, energy drops, and results slow. The core mistake is sequence. When you start lean dieting without meaningful lean mass, you lose a little muscle each time, lower your baseline metabolism, and sensitize your appetite in the wrong direction. A muscle-first strategy flips the script. By investing months into building strength and lean tissue, you increase daily energy expenditure, improve insulin sensitivity, and create stronger satiety signals so your next fat loss phase is shorter, less hungry, and more effective. Think of muscle as metabolic hardware: it raises your capacity to train, recover, and eat more while still progressing.
Mechanistically, adding muscle has a compound effect beyond the six to nine calories per pound per day that tissue burns. Stronger lifters typically move more, train harder, and handle higher volume, increasing non-exercise activity and session burn. Better insulin sensitivity smooths post-meal blood glucose, reducing crashes and cravings. There’s emerging evidence that more muscle improves GLP1 responsiveness, the same satiety pathway targeted by popular medications and natural GLP1 activators. Resistance training itself suppresses ghrelin for hours, often lowering immediate appetite compared to cardio. All of this means a lifter with more muscle can maintain a bigger deficit with less discomfort and fewer dietary gymnastics, making adherence far more manageable.
The psychology matters as much as physiology. In a build, food becomes fuel, not a threat. You chase performance, stack PRs, and watch shape changes that outpace the scale. That identity shift—from dieter to lifter—reduces food anxiety and restriction fatigue. When it’s time to cut, you approach it from abundance: more muscle to reveal, higher maintenance calories, and confidence from months of consistent training. Contrast that with chronic dieting, where every deficit feels like a grind and the results never “look” like you hoped, because there wasn’t enough muscle to show. Building first turns leanness from a temporary outcome into a sustainable state.
Set up your building phase deliberately. Commit to six to twelve months of steady progress. Target about 0.3 to 0.5 percent of body weight gain per week for most, translating to roughly one to two pounds per month for women and two to three for men. Use a mild surplus—about 2,500 calories per planned pound per month above maintenance—and hit at least 0.71 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. Train three to five days per week with progressive overload, track lifts, and push sets near failure. Keep steps high and cardio moderate so recovery stays on track. Judge success by performance, recovery, and visual changes more than the scale. Then, when you cut, run eight to twelve focused weeks or a six-week mini-cut, supported by high protein and hard training to keep what you built.
Treat metabolism like a skill, not fate. Strength training, adequate protein, and consistent recovery teach your body to partition nutrients toward muscle, raise your basal burn, and reduce the perceived pain of a calorie deficit. This matters more with age, when sarcopenia and bone loss accelerate. Every year spent dieting without building is lost ground. Start now, increase your metabolic capacity, and make future fat loss phases a precision operation instead of a slog. To calibrate your training, try an AMRAP on the final set of a big lift once in a while. If a programmed set of five turns into twelve, you’re undercooking your effort—use that data to load up next week. Build first. Cut from strength. Stay lean by design, not by constant deprivation.
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Philip Pape: 0:00
If all you've done is diet and you've never spent time building muscle, then every diet will make the next one harder. More hunger, less energy, slower results. Today I'm going to show you the muscle-first approach to fat loss. You'll learn why more lean mass means less hunger per calorie of deficit, how chronic dieters sabotage their own metabolism, and a timeline to set yourself up so your next fat loss phase actually works. This is how you stop fighting your body and start cutting from a position of strength. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and founder of the Fitness Lab app. And I want to talk about building muscle versus losing fat because most people approach fat loss in a backward sequence. They are desperate to lose weight or to lose fat, and they say, eventually I'll build muscle once I'm lean enough. And on the surface, it makes just logical sense, I suppose. You get lean, then focus on performance. But it creates a compounding problem that a lot of you never get out of. Because every time you cut without adequate muscle mass, you're just making the next cut harder. You might lose a little lean tissue, your metabolic rate, your metabolism might drop slightly, your hunger hormones are always adapting to try to fight that deficit. And then the next time you try to diet, you're starting from a slightly worse position. You're in this tiny window that is highly unproductive. And you've got to get out of your head and just go for building that muscle. Women, men, a little extra weight to lose. It doesn't matter. It's actually gonna pay off tremendously. You know what? My own story was the first time I finally did a bulk, it was a crazy bulk. I wasn't really trying to. I actually gained a ton of weight and I was a little bit down on myself because I had gained some fat. And then when I cut it off, I realized, you know what? That was the only thing I could have done in my entire life that actually allowed me to build muscle. And of course, I'm gonna teach you how to do it much more efficiently than that. So you don't gain a lot of weight, and and it's gonna be a game changer. I want you to get out of this chronic diet or trap. It's why some people feel like every time they try to lose fat, it's just this hard thing. They don't quite get the result they want. Maybe they lose a few, maybe they gain it back. So we're gonna flip that around. Today is episode six of our eight-episode appetite series for January. And you're like, appetite, aren't we talking about building muscle? Well, I wanted to make the connection where a muscle-first strategy, if you spend time building that metabolic capacity before worrying about your next cut again, when you actually do it, when you actually do a calorie deficit, you're going to have less hunger, you're going to have better adherence, you're going to eat more calories, and you're going to retain more muscle. And at the end of the day, that's just going to make all those fat loss faces in the future so much easier. So it's a little bit of investment now for a massive payoff later and for the rest of your life. Then at the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a simple test that you can do in your next workout to tell you whether you're actually training as hard as you can train. This is pretty cool because again, we're talking hunger, but we're really talking about building muscle. And it's a little trick that I've found, especially with newer lifters, who I know a lot of you are not training hard enough. Well, if you're going to go and spend time building muscle, I want you to do it effectively as well. So stay tuned for that. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from a marisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb. All right, let's start with the pattern that I see, just so you can kind of put yourself into the shoes of this avatar of clients, questions from listeners, the fitness community at large, a lot of you are doing this. You're desperate to lose weight. Let's just be honest. You want to lose 20 pounds. You'll want to lose 10 pounds, 20, 30, whatever. So what do you do? You start a diet and you eat less. Maybe you add some cardio, maybe you track your calories and macros, maybe you're doing it all quote unquote the right way, and you lose weight and you lose some fat. You know, obviously there's some water weight loss in there. And maybe some of that is muscle because you're not quite in that mode of knowing how to hold on to the muscle as effectively. Because you've never really spent time truly training for building muscles. So it doesn't translate either into your fat loss phase. Regardless of how you did it, that that you go through, you might lose five, 10, 15, even 20 pounds, and then life happens, and then you stop tracking, then you go back to normal eating, then you regain some weight. Six months later, you try again, same approach, same results, but maybe it feels a little harder. And if you've been trying to diet your whole life, okay, I know you know the women out there on average try over 100 diets in your lifetime. That this is the statistics we see. It just gets harder and harder and harder. You're hungrier on the same calories, your energy is lower, your progress is slower, your metabolism is dropping. We don't like that. We don't like that. And what's happening is very well-documented phenomena, repeated dieting with, I'll say, mixed or lack of adequate resistance training and protein, you lose muscle. But even if you're doing those things, you don't really have much muscle to hold on to. And so you have a lower metabolism as a baseline, right? And it just means you don't have the capacity to make that fat loss phase as effective. And at the end of the day, once you lose the weight, even if you did lose just fat, there's not much muscle to reveal either. So it's kind of both of those pieces. And I'm tying it more to the appetite and hunger side because of our series, but it really is all of that, right? And speaking of hunger, there's the hormonal piece. Now I've beat to death the hunger and appetite hormones over the last several episodes. So please go back and check those out. But because your appetite system adapts to being in a deficit, all of these hormones, you know, leptin that makes you full, ghrelin that makes you hungry, and your body's sensitivity to these signals trend in the wrong direction or they're staying down regulated just a bit because you're always in that dieting state. Okay. Also, people who've repeatedly dieted have stronger responses to the negatives of these than people who haven't. So we don't want to keep doing this and compounding the issue as we get older. So, in practical terms, of course, two people eating the same calories in a deficit, while they might lose the same weight, might have different hunger levels. And to be in that deficit, you might be in different calorie levels too, because you might have a higher metabolism. So to be in the same deficit, you can eat more than someone else, right? And that affects hunger. So building muscle is going to be really important. This is the trap, though, this chronic diet, always have to diet, always have to lose weight, always afraid of gaining weight and gaining fat. And that's why you're not building muscle or you're afraid of getting bulky or some nonsense like that. And I'm sorry to say that is exactly what it is because, ladies and men, it takes a lot of work and time to actually build decent size. And ladies, you're not gonna get bulky. Your bodies don't do that, you know, unless you you're on performance-enhancing drugs. Men, we want to get bulky, and it's hard to do that. So let's put that aside. All right, so how does building muscle change this whole equation? What does it do mechanistically? Well, first we have the calorie side. Muscle tissue is gonna burn more calories in a lot of different ways. I did an episode a while back about how muscle burns more calories than you think. And it's not just the tissue itself. The tissue burns six to nine calories per pound a day. So it's more than fat, and you're going to thus add, if you had 10 pounds of muscle over time, you might increase your calorie burn up to say 100 calories a day. That's not nothing, right? But it also increases how much you train, how hard you train, how much weight you can carry around. You tend to move more. All of these things kind of compound on their, on their, you know, on themselves. And then you're more efficient with your nutrients. So you have better insulin sensitivity, right? It all actually, at the end of the end of the day, gives you a higher metabolism, right? And that burns more calories, which means you can eat more calories. So that is very important that a person who's more muscular just burns more calories because of the muscle and because of the weight, and because they're doing, they're burning more calories, doing activities, and because they tend to be more active anyway, given their lifestyle, right? So your deficit's gonna be more forgiving. And then so that's the muscles or the calorie side. And then we have the appetite side, which gets really interesting for this episode. We know that muscle tissue affects insulin sensitivity. Well, when you're more insulin sensitive, your blood sugar stays more stable after meals. You're gonna have fewer blood sugar crashes, and that means fewer hunger spikes, fewer cravings, and less of that desperate need to eat something immediately after a meal. And I think we spoke about this on the last solo episode, how muscle just seems to make people less hungry. And I've seen this anecdotally as well, right? People just have a little more muscle mass. I don't know, they just don't have as many appetite issues, as many hunger issues. And that alone could be the reason you want to do this, right? I've seen a lot of clients and our physique university members, mostly women, I'm gonna be honest, who are like, you know what? I'm finally gonna let it, I'm finally gonna listen to you, Philip, and I'm gonna build muscle, and I'm gonna just I know there's fear of gaining fat and gaining weight, but I've got you in my corner. You know, we talk them through it. And it just opens up all these doors because they can eat more food, they have more flexibility, they start to feel great, biofeedback normalizes, better sleep, start getting new PRs. Everything just turns out for the better. And six months later, they're like, oh my God, that was awesome. You know, I gained like six pounds on the scale, but five of them were muscle. You know what I mean? And it's like that was a great result, you know, and they're almost looking at scale weight gain as this huge positive because it allowed them to gain muscle and they're leaner. They have less, you know, even if they haven't gone through a fat loss phase yet, because they did it in a kind of a lean way, they have smaller waist size, right? More muscle definition. And that's what I want for you. And it's gonna make all these things easier. All right. There's also emerging evidence that muscle mass influences your incretin hormones like GLP1, which we've talked about a lot throughout the series. That's a satiety signal that drugs like semaglantide, you know, manjaro, terzepatide, wagovi. I'm mixing brand names and chemical names, but you get the idea. And it's the same pathway that like the calllocurb we've talked about is the sponsor of this episode, addresses, right? And some research suggests that people with more muscle mass have a better GLP1 response to meals. So this is a funny one because I was I was responding to somebody in our community in in physique university who said, Hey Philip, have you actually used Callocurb? And I said, Yeah, I think I'm a super responder because when I use it, it actually like dampens my hunger quite a bit. Now, I'm not in a fat loss phase, but I I thought, oh, I seem like a super responder. And it could be because I have some muscle mass, right? Like, and and I wonder if people who are more trained will over-respond to something like that, which means it could be a really powerful tool and you don't even have to take very much of it, just as a side thought. So more muscle, greater satiety signal per meal, less hunger and a deficit. I mean, it all compounds in a good way on itself. And then, of course, there's the training itself. Like when you resistance train, you tend to be less hungry, especially versus something like cardio, especially the chronic, stressful, high, you know, intense cardio or lots of it, high volume cardio. Resistance training, on the other hand, makes you less hungry. It suppresses ghrelin, usually for a few hours after your workout, right? And so people who strength train tend to feel less hungry compared to cardio sessions, which is great, which I love it. So when someone says build muscle first, then cut, which is what I'm telling you today, it's not just about like building muscle. It's it's it's changing the difficulty of the fat loss that comes afterward, making it easier. So I just I just briefly mentioned the sponsor for today's episode. I want to talk about them for a second, Callocurb, because I'm I've become a big fan. I've become a big fan of this. I didn't realize this would happen until I learned about them. We had Sarah Kennedy on the show last week to talk about the science behind it. And we've been talking about GLP1, right? GLP1 and how it affects satiety, how that tells your brain to gut brain access that you're satisfied after eating. Well, Callowcurb is a natural supplement that upregulates your own GLP1. So your endogenous GLP1 that your body produces, when you take callocurb, it basically triggers that to increase by about 600%. Whereas when you eat food, it goes up by about 300%. And so you take it about an hour before your meal, and it effectively has a mechanism that makes you start to feel fuller and you haven't eaten anything. And that's why it tamps down the amount you eat during the meal. And it does that through bitter hops extra a bitter hops extract called amerisate. So the bitter hops gets down into your lower gut, time release, and then it triggers your bitter taste receptors, and that causes your body to not want to eat as much. And there have been randomized controlled trials, clinical studies showing a big reduction in cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%. Now notice that's cravings and hunger. So cravings has to do with food noise and emotional eating and stuff like that. Hunger, just general hunger by 30%, and the end result being average calorie intake reduced by 18%. And this is on top of the tools that you guys are using already: macro tracking, eating whole foods, eating more fiber, they compound. And if you take GLP1s, you could potentially take a lower dosage while taking these or even come off of them altogether because these upregulate your hormones, they don't replace them. It's right, so it's not a stimulant, you don't need a prescription, it's not a drug, it's just a really good tool that I think a lot of people can benefit from. So Calicurb's awesome. You go to wins and weights.com slash calicurb and get 10% off. Link is in the show notes. I would say that if you are in a building phase and eating in a big surplus, it may not be the best tool for you, right? Because you're not trying to tamp down hunger. But when you are at back in maintenance or in a deficit and transitioning to a cut and the hunger signals ramp up, having something that supports your natural satiety can make a huge difference in the amount of deficit you can sustain, right? And that's why I like it for myself. And I'm actually using it in my fat loss phase in a few days that I'm about to start, along with our get lean in 45 days workshop and course in physique university. We're gonna do this together. And so I'm definitely recommending this as a tool for some people because I use it myself or I'm going to because I know how powerful it is. I seem to be a super responder. So go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb, C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. Get 10% off. Just try it out. Like, I can't tell how well it's gonna work for you until you try it. But the science is really solid. It's owned by the New Zealand government, not a company. It's pretty cool. Witsandweights.com slash callow curb. All right, so let's talk about the psychological advantage as well of building, because of building muscle first. Because a lot of you think it's a psychological disadvantage. You're worried about gaining weight, you're worried about gaining fat of bulk, you know, whatever the whatever the situation is, or maybe you're afraid you're not gonna be able to lose it or something like that. But but let's reframe this, okay? When you're in a building phase, food is your friend. You're eating at or slightly above maintenance, you're fueling your performance. You are hitting PRs in the gym constantly. You're watching your strength increase, you're seeing your body composition change in a positive direction, even when the scale's going up a bit. This is a very common story, and it's surprising for people, but you don't know until you do it. And you're like, whoa, I see my shoulders are starting to pop. I'm actually might even see a little bit of abs popping through, you know, the the tiny, the little layer of fat you have that, you know, we can get rid of that later. Let's build, build, build right now and give ourselves the capacity. And this, here's the cool thing: it creates a completely different relationship with food than chronic dieting ever does. Because in a deficit, food is restricted, right? You are restricting something. You're managing portions, you're saying, I'll say you're saying no to things. Hopefully you're building in your flexibility, though, but you are dealing with some hunger. And even with all the satiety strategies and food hacks and tools in the world, there is an inherent psychological tension when you're eating less than your body wants. There's something there that you're gonna just notice, right? And some people notice it a lot more. But when you're in a muscle building phase, now you're eating to perform, carbs become fuel for your workouts, protein is the material that's building, building, building all these muscle cells. You're not constantly thinking about what you cannot have. You're focused on what you're building, and this really, really matters. But when you finally end the build and decide to transition to a cut, you approach it from a position of psychological abundance. Think about that. You've spent months not obsessing over food, but you've built a positive relationship with your training. Your identity isn't as a dieter, it's I'm a lifter who's now temporarily gonna cut my fat. That's it, right? I'm just I'm cutting it off, and then I get back to it. So compare that to the person who constantly diets, always feeling restricted, always dreading being hungry, always thinking, here we go again, same deficit, different experience. Okay. And the the I the thing that I think people flip in their head, I mentioned this before, is they think, I'm gonna cut first, and then I'm gonna have the body to enjoy my building phase. But that never happens. Nobody's ever pleased with that smaller body before they start the building phase. They might be mildly like, oh, okay, the scale's down, but don't really look much better. And that was a lot of work, and that kind of sucks. So now what? And and and sometimes you get obsessive about it where you're like, well, now I have to stay at this weight because now I've achieved this weight and that was my goal. And what's the point of all that, right? Then then you then you just start a cut. Then you just, if you do your next cut, let's say you gain weight back and now you cut again, but you didn't do it by gaining muscle. It's just it's a cyclical, never-ending, you know, hellscape, just to put it like mildly or whatever. And you just get these long ruling fat loss phases, right? And we just have a whole community in physique university of folks who are doing the opposite. And I love to see it. They're just thriving, they're building, they're cutting from abundance, and the deficit feels easier because you earn that ease. All right. So keep keep listening because look, at the end of this episode, you're you're like, okay, you're talking a lot about building muscle. Well, I'm gonna get into that in a second, and then later on, I'm gonna give you a technique you can use in your next workout to find out if you're training hard enough. This is a way to calibrate mentally whether you're training hard enough. It takes just one set and it's gonna give you data. Okay, trust me. This is this is a really cool technique. All right. Of course, when someone says trust me, you're not supposed to trust them, right? So I shouldn't have done that. All right, what does this look like practically to build muscle? Now that's a huge topic, but just a practical framework. And I'm gonna give you some numbers here, all right? How long should you build? I would spend six months in a building phase or more, six to 12 months, even. I mean, you may really enjoy doing it for a full year, just putting dieting in your rear view for a while, depending on the mental side of this and depending on the how it aligns with holidays and things like that. And I know it sounds like a long time, but it's not. If you're doing it at a lean level of gain, you're not gonna gain a lot of weight on the scale, but you're gonna invest in that capacity and infrastructure and the psychology and recovery that you need. It's gonna make fat loss easier. You're gonna learn a ton about yourself, trust me. And that whole time is gonna be a learning experience. It's gonna be amazing. How fast do you go? All right. Well, this is where there's there could be some controversy because you'll hear some influencers say you could you could build muscle maintenance. You hear others say like you really need to push it if you're a new newbie. The evidence says anywhere from 0.2% body weight a week to like 0.8% body weight a week. It's pretty big range. When you do the math, you realize even at that upper range, it's not a lot of weight. It's it's not a ridiculous amount of weight. I would say one to two pounds a month for females, two to three pounds a month for males, if if you just want to go with simple round numbers. From a percentage basis, if you are my client or if you're in physique university, I'm gonna push you a little bit toward that 0.4, 0.5%, only because we're really helping you look at the data and adjust and everything. But if you want to be more conservative, 0.3 is decent. Now there's a whole other experience that's like a very lean gain where you can go as low as 0.1, 0.2. It's just not gonna be optimal. It's not gonna, it's gonna take a while. You're you may not notice as as many results. That's more of a special use case. Most of you I'm talking to probably need to push it a little bit up to that 0.3 to 0.5% body weight a week. So if you're let's say 160 pounds, that's like a half pound a week. Like I said, about two pounds, a little over two pounds a month. So that'd be like a kind of a thin male, a skinny male, or kind of an average female, whatever. I mean, people are all over the place. But for a 160-pound person, that would be like 12 to 20 pounds over six months. And if you think about it, 12 pounds, but more than half of that is muscle. That's six, seven, eight pounds of muscle. That is so worth the three, four, five pounds of fat because you're actually gonna look leaner even before you go through the fat loss phase, most likely. If not, you're at least gonna look more muscular, you're gonna be stronger, you're gonna be so recovered that when you cut it off, it's just gonna be beautiful. All right. How do you set up your nutrition? Well, you're gonna have a mild surplus because if you're aiming for a body weight increase, you're gonna have an increase, you're gonna have a surplus. Now, two ways to do this. You can use an app like Macrofactor, or you can calculate 2,500 calories per pound. Not 3,500, 2500. This is my the special rule that I use when you're gaining, because muscle is denser than fat, and remember you're trying to gain a bunch of muscle along with the fat. When you lose fat, you're trying to lose mostly fat. So when you gain, use 2,500 calories per pound that you're trying to gain. So if you're trying to gain two pounds a month, then that's 5,000 calories a month above maintenance divided by, you know, 30 days in the month. So it's not that much. It might be like a couple hundred calories a day at most for most people, but it might be a little more than that. So that's nutrition. Proteins, protein, protein. 0.71 gram per pound, always my rule of thumb, no matter what phase you're in, for most people, most of the time, with some small exceptions that we don't need to get into on today's episode. So 0.71 gram per pound spread throughout the day because of practicality. All right. Training is just train your butt off, use progressive overload. Almost any program is going to work as long as you are adding weight, reps, volume over time, track your lifts, you know, get those compound movements and those big movement patterns in there along with isolation, and train three to five days a week. That's it. You know, get close to failure most of the time. The typical rules, again, we're not gonna explain all of that today. I've I have full episodes on that topic. Cardio, I would keep it, you know, low to moderate. Get get your eight to ten thousand or more steps a day. And then, you know, beyond that, totally optional cardio, depending on what your goals are. And then mindset, you know, your metric is not the scale, even though you need the scale to know if you're gaining, right? It's the performance, though. Are you getting stronger? Are you recovering well? Are you hitting your protein? Are you is your biofeedback all training like you would? I don't want you to accidentally dip into diets as you're trying to build. And then after this six to nine to 12 months of progressive, continuous growth, really stable body composition, solid nutrition, and now you're ready to cut, right? And then that's when you enter a deficit with more muscle, higher baseline metabolism, better insulin sensitivity, better psychological framework. It's gonna be awesome. And then the cut itself, you may have heard this me tell you this before, but I like eight to 12 weeks for most people. But we are doing a workshop, let's say, I don't know when this, we already did it when this episode comes out, I think, on getting lean, get lean in 45 days. You can come into physique university, witsandweights.com slash physique, and you can still get the replay. And also when you join now, immediately when you join, you get access to our eight-week course that will walk you through a mini cut. So a mini cut is more of a six-week, slightly aggressive fat loss phase. So if and when you're ready for that, hop on in. Okay, $27 investment, wits and weights.com slash physique. It's $27 a month, and you get access to all that stuff. The goal is never to be in a deficit forever. It's to be in a deficit maybe a fifth of the time, at most a fourth of the time for the rest of your life, until you get to your goal, you know, leanness, and then you probably never have to use a deficit ever again. Okay, now I want to close this episode with a reframe to tie this all together. Most people think of metabolism as something that happens to them as they age, right? Or genetics. You have a fast metabolism, metabolism, slow metabolism. You're lucky, you're not lucky, it's hormonal, it's menopause, whatever. And I think that holds people back. I think that's holding you back because your metabolism is something you have a huge amount of control over and that you can build. Starting however old you are, it doesn't matter. And the the best metabolisms are the result of years of training, of recovering, of having solid nutrition, the decisions you make about how you treat your body. And when you build muscle, you are literally increasing that capacity, right? And your ability to eat more food, maintain your body composition, support the tissue that drives growth in your body. Anabolism is what it's called it. Tissue growth, right? Thriving, growth, repair, abundance. Doesn't that sound so much better than the opposite? So when you train hard, when you recover well, you're reinforcing those adaptations. You're training your body and your nervous system. You're training your nervous system to function at a higher level, to use more of your muscles, to put nutrients where they're supposed to go, instead of being a lazy grifter floating on the couch, aim, aim, you know, wandering mean mean meaninglessly and aimlessly through life. Okay. Tried to string together a poetic sentence there and I couldn't do it. A faster metabolism is not a gift, it's a skill. It's a skill. And you could develop that skill. You can develop that skill. So a building phase is a huge investment in what I'll call sustainable leanness. Sustainable leanness. When I talk about lean, I'm not talking about skinny. I'm talking about having muscle, upgrading your operating system, your hardware, and your software, which is your nervous system, and now, you know, being able to draw from that bank account for the rest of your life, if you will, to mix metaphors here. Right. So for those of us that are getting older, if you're over 40, over 50, over 60, it's probably most of this audience. This matters even more to start this now, right? You're at a point where muscle loss starts to accelerate if you don't actively fight it, fight it, sarcopenia and all those issues, osteoporosis, et cetera. So every time you, every year you spend just trying to cut off a few pounds, you're losing ground. You're losing ground. Building your muscle now, it's not just about looking better in six months, even though ironically, you probably will. You probably, you're not gonna actually look fatter, you'll probably look stronger and better. It's it's it, but it's preserving that functional capacity for the for the rest of your life, right? So stop trying to earn the right to build by just, I just need to get to this weight. I just need to lose weight first. Don't just stop. Just get that out of your head right now and start building such your cuts. Cuts don't cost you everything you work for and you actually can do this the right way, right? And and just one last thought I have just I'm sorry, indulge me. It is my podcast. It is more fun. It is more fun to build first, right? And I know it sounds trivial. We're talking about science and hormones and metabolic adaptation, but the reality is the people I know who do this, they have so much fun. I kind of mentioned that already. We have so many awesome people in physique university who are just like sharing every day how much fun it is to eat more and work out and feel better when you work out and set PRs. I mean, I see wins all the time now about PRs from somebody who was focused on losing weight when they join, and now they're focused on getting stronger. Their mood is better because they're not chronically underfed. They're building something visible that can be measured, you know, in multiple ways than just the scale, right? And then and then you could do your cut from a position of strength and do it pretty efficiently and do it pretty easily almost. And that again is where I do love my six-week mini cut for people who have done this the right way. So if you're there sitting thinking, I need to lose 20 pounds and then I'll focus on muscle, I want you to mix that around, flip it around, and tell yourself I'm gonna build muscle first, build a better machine before you ask it to run on less fuel, if you will. Right. And then the cut will be easier, the results will last longer, you'll enjoy the process of getting there. And before I let you go, remember I did promise you a way to find out are you actually training hard enough to build muscle? And this is a technique you can use in your very next training session right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here is that quick tip you can use in your very next workout to make your building phase more effective to figure out if you are training hard enough. All you have to do is pick one compound lift. Might be your squat, your bench, your deadlift, pick a heavy one. In this case, I'm asking you to pick one of your hard, heavy lifts. And instead of stopping at your programmed reps for the last set, I want you to do an AMRAP. Amrap means as many reps as possible. And you're like, what the f this guy who who who taught who who tears down CrossFit and is all about training low and slow, and I'm telling you to do an AMRAP. Yes, this is something I learned from Alex Bromley, who's very much a volume and set-based progression type guy. And one of his programs, I did amraps on the last set. Now that was every major exercise. Well, it wasn't every single one, but it was all the big ones. And by doing an MRAP, you can tell how many more reps you're actually able to do. So let's say you programmed in three by five squat. Now, this isn't something to do on a like starting strength style program where you're just trying to get sets across and then going up in weight. This is more of a hypertrophy type program when you're an intermediate or even a late beginner, but you can do this anytime as a test. Three sets of five. On set on the third set, instead of doing five, you just keep going. Six, seven, eight. If you could do 12 or 13 or 14, you know that you were nowhere close to failure on that fifth, on that, on those previous two sets. A lot of you think you are and you're not, right? And so if you programmed, you know, six to eight reps on the last set, keep going past eight and see how far you get. If you get to 15, 16, 17, hey, you were nowhere close. If you could barely do nine, you're probably pretty darn close. Not only does it tell you if you're training hard enough and how many reps were in the tank, right? R-I-R, reps in reserve, it will give you the confidence to know how much you can jump next time. Like if you only hit an extra rep, you're probably right where you need to be, right? If you could easily do double the reps, well, then it was way too light. And you can convince yourself with data right in the moment, oh, well, that was way too light. I need to like jump up by, you know, 15% next week instead of just say 5% or 10%. So try that out. Do an amrap on your final set of a particular lift to give you objective feedback on whether you're actually pushing hard enough to build muscle, and then make sure to go up the next week to close the gap. And then you can start progressing in a more normal line from that point on, right? Try this, try it this week on one lift. Do it, do it. All right, that's it. I want you to keep using your wits. I want you to keep lifting those weights. And remember, the best time to build muscle is Ollie right now. Talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
