Ep 108: How to Build Muscle Without Getting Fat
Today, we are re-examining the science of building muscle without accumulating unnecessary fat. Based on a new study that just came out this year, we will find the sweet spot between the “you gotta eat big to get big” dreamer bulk crowd and the “maingain/gaintain” crowd, so you have the optimal caloric surplus for muscle gain.
I’ll share my experience with these various muscle-building ranges, re-emphasize the role of strength training and protein, and discuss practical takeaways to set up your effective bulking strategy. This episode gives you a nuanced approach to lean muscle gains to help you achieve a muscular and lean physique without the extra fat.
__________
Click here to apply for coaching!
__________
Today you’ll learn all about:
[2:27] Personal experience with the dreamer bulk approach
[5:55] Finding the optimal calorie surplus for muscle gain
[9:23] Study on the effect of small and large energy surpluses
[11:53] The importance of a moderate calorie surplus for strength gains
[14:03] Key points on the Helms study
[19:30] Gains with aggressive surplus
[23:01] Adjusting body fat gain based on the rate of build
[25:27] Setting targets and rates for a muscle-building phase
[33:23] Outro
Episode resources:
MacroFactor app – use code WITSANDWEIGHTS to extend your free trial to two weeks (and support me and this show!)
Email Philip: philip@witsandweights.com
👉👉👉 Click here to apply for coaching!
👩💻👨💻 Click here to schedule a FREE results breakthrough call with Philip
The FREE metabolism assessment is available! Click here to take the assessment and find out how high your energy flux is with a free report and strategy.
Take the assessment here!
📱 Follow Philip on IG @witsandweights
📧 Get Philip's emails here
📞 Send a Q&A voicemail
🥩 Download Ultimate Macros Guide and 50 High-Protein Recipes here
🫙 Get high-quality 1st Phorm supps here
⭐ Leave a review here
💁♀️ Donate to support us here
👥 Join our free FB community here
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Use your favorite podcast platform or one of the buttons below. Then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” and you’re good to go!
Transcript
Philip Pape 00:00
But I'm going to start at the extreme right side of the curve, what we call a dreamer bulk or also called the seafood diet, you see the food and you eat it. And this is what I would say I did for my first successful bulk meaning successful that I was able to build a lot of muscle. Not so successful and that I also gained a ton of fat in the process. But it was really the first time I was ever doing it that way, the first time I was ever intentionally eating to gain weight in my entire life. Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast. I'm your host, Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Wits &
Philip Pape 00:58
Weights community Welcome to another solo episode of the Wits & Weights podcast. In our last episode 107 The secrets of zero injury running while optimizing body composition with Louise Valentine, Louise and I discussed some new and exciting strategies and considerations for female and endurance athletes, in particular, women 35 and beyond who love to run and want to improve their body composition. So go check that episode out. Today for episode 108. How to Build Muscle without getting fat. We are reexamining the science of building muscle without accumulating unnecessary body fat. And there's a new study that just came out this year. Literally last month, we're going to find the sweet spot between the you gotta eat big to get big dreamer bulk crowd and the main gains slash gain teen crowd so that you have that optimal caloric surplus for muscle gain. I'll share some of my personal experience with these various ranges, these muscle building ranges and of course, re emphasize the role of things like strength training and protein, and discuss practical takeaways to set up your own effective bulking strategy. This episode gives you that nuanced approach to lean muscle gains so that you can achieve a muscular and lean physique without the extra fat. That's the whole point of this. So let's jump into today's topic, how to build muscle without getting fat. And I want to start talking about my personal experience with this first so that I can tie it into the evidence. And keeping in mind that everyone's individual experience is going to vary. And in fact, a lot of this data no matter how good it gets, is representative of the population and not necessarily any one individual. So always keep that in mind. But I'm going to start at the extreme right side of the curve, what we call a dreamer bulk or also called the seafood diet, you see the food and you eat it. And this is what I would say I did for my first successful bulk meaning successful that I was able to build a lot of muscle not so successful, and that I also gained a ton of fat in the process. But it was really the first time I was ever doing it that way, the first time I was ever intentionally eating to gain weight in my entire life. This was back in the 2020 timeframe. And I had been introduced to starting strength for example, which famously talks about the Go med diet the gallon of milk a day. And to be fair to them they that's geared toward younger males in their 20s who are quote unquote hard gainers and just need to gain a bunch of weight. Nonetheless, I took those ideas to heart at the time, because I didn't really know what I was doing on the nutrition side. But I was lifting with progressive overload, I was using the compound lifts, I was working out three or four days a week. And I just started eating everything I started drinking milk, putting milk in my protein shakes, we're talking whole milk, eating anything processed otherwise didn't matter. And developing some not so great habits on the food side. But nonetheless, seeing the results on my lifts on my gains and so on. Now, one of the cool things about gaining weight is that in addition to the anabolic effect of gaining weight for building muscle, you will also find an improvement in your leverages for building muscle. And I was reminded of this a couple times this week, once by my client and friend Tony, who is going to be on the show soon actually where he talked about how the levers change after he went through his successful six week cut with us working together and how they started to change as a as he got off of that and started to gain weight again. And I also heard about it on on a it might have been the starting strength podcast, I'm not sure talking about the angle between the muscles and the bone. When they insert based on how much mass you have. We don't have to get into all the science. The point is your levers change and you're able to actually move more weight as you get heavier. So I was getting the benefit of that during my bulk back in 2020. And I was actually gaining quite a bit of strength. I mean, I, I doubled or tripled my big lifts from what they had been before. And so that is one approach. The problem is I gained probably 40 to 50 pounds overall, and it wasn't almost, maybe maybe 10 to 15 pounds of it was muscle, which is awesome, right? Like in your first, you know, six to 12 months as a male to gain that much muscle is what you're going for women, it's going to be potentially a little bit less. And the problem is now sitting sitting with this extra body fat, which expressed itself in my physique, right. So that was that was my experience with a dreamer bulk. So less, do you think that just eating more builds more muscle, it's not true, the amount of muscle you can gain will top off at a certain point. And all that you're gonna gain after that is fat. So that's part of this equation. Now let's go to the other extreme, which is the idea of trying to build muscle while not gaining any fat at all, by maintaining your weight, or maybe being in the tiniest, tiniest surplus, you know of like, of like 50 calories a day or something, which is barely a surplus, your body hardly knows it. And you might gain weight over a long period of time, but it look like you're hardly gaining weight. Some people call this Lean training or main gaining, or I think gain training, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of words for it. And I would say that there are special circumstances like brand new lifters where you can get a ton of benefit and some body composition going on at maintenance. And I highly, highly recommend doing that. If you have a little bit of weight to lose when you start that process, so that you're not, you don't have to face that fear of gaining more weight just to build muscle when you already feel like you're a bit overweight, it's more of a psychological thing. But if you want to build muscle as effectively as you can, and you only stay at maintenance, you're barely giving your body that anabolic environment to build the muscle. And so it's going to take a lot longer. And the idea here is we know we need a calorie surplus to build muscle. But the question is how much is too much? How much is too much. And the typical range that I that I've talked about often and I still stick to and I think is still supported by the newer evidence we're gonna talk about today is around point one to point two 5% of your body weight per week. But we're gonna give it some more nuance, we're going to talk about how the new science or the new research by Dr. Eric Helms, maybe also just supports that or gives us some more ranges to work with, depending on your training age. And you'll come out of this with maybe even more clarity on what might make sense for you as an individual. Okay, so let's talk about the basics first, right, a calorie surplus is definitely needed to grow your muscles for hypertrophy, for strength, all of that. But it has to be finely balanced. We just talked about the range of the point one 2.25%, which for some people might seem actually too slow, right? Like the point 1%. If you're, let's say 200 pounds, what does that come out to be? Point two pounds a week, or less than a pound a month. And I actually had any Morgan on my show a while back. And he was talking about a ballpark of two to three pounds a month. For males, he worked primarily with males who were probably around anywhere from like 160 to 190, kind of the average height average weight, gaining two to three pounds, which is more more in the 1.23% range. Or not, I'm sorry, you have to scratch that more in the point 4% range, a month or a week, point 4% range a week to get that two to three, I'm sorry, I'm throwing all these numbers at you, it's not going to matter, we're gonna come out to very clear recommendations in a moment here. So you can make quick gains by eating in this upper range, but you're also going to gain fat, whereas the Lean gains are not the Lean gains, the lean training might not build enough muscle. And so we want to lean gain, right? We want to be kind of in that sweet spot of lean, gaining maximize your muscle, minimize your fat. So there is a new study that came out. And this is what kind of what I want to get to and what drove me to create this podcast episode and revisit this. A new study came out in August 2023 by Dr. Eric helms at all by the way, Eric was on the show as well and we'd love to have him on again off to reach out. But the study was effective small and large energy surpluses on strength, muscle and skin fold thickness. So just think about just look at the title effect of small and large surpluses. So we're talking either, you know, very, very lean to no gain versus a larger gain on strength, muscle and fat. So skinfold thickness is a way to measure body fat. And there were three diet conditions in the study maintenance, a moderate surplus, which was a 5% calorie surplus, or a large surplus, which was a 15% calorie surplus. And they wanted to see the different impacts of calorie intake on muscle and fat gain. But they were also measuring like, one RM, I think it was back squat strength, we're not gonna get into all the strength results that they found, I think the general consensus is, it didn't make a huge amount of difference, relative to the fat gain difference. And that's really the goal of what I'm trying to get at today. But I'm gonna give you an example of if you were, let's say 180 pounds, we're just gonna take 180 pound person with a 2800 calorie maintenance. So the maintenance calories are 2800 180 pound person, this is actually kind of similar to what I am right now, I probably have a maintenance around 3001 85 right now. So 180 pounds, 20 100 calories maintenance. If you were in the moderate group, you would be in a surplus of 140 calories a day, which would equate to about point two eight pounds gained a week. So if you do the math, that's like a pound a month or a little over a pound a month. So pretty lean, pretty small surplus. If you are in the large group, again, 180 pounds 2800 calorie maintenance, you would be eating 420 calories surplus a day, which equates to point eight, four pounds a week, which is over, which is over three pounds a month. And again, going back to the when I mentioned any more than the two to three pounds a month, you can see we're both under the either way under that at around one, or kind of at that top range or a little bit above it a bit over three. Again, for a 180 pound person in this calorie range, you might weigh more or less and you might burn more or fewer calories, it's gonna be very individual. So the results on the strength gains and body composition showed that the moderate rather than the large surplus, or the maintenance was most effective for strength gains and improved body composition. And I'm going to share a few quotes. The first quote is going to be from the Eric Trexler review of the study recently published in the mass research review. And he said quote, for beginners, a rate of weight gain above point two 5% per week is likely defensible, assuming they're in a hurry and wanting to maximize their rate of muscle gain, okay, above point two 5% per week. Now that's normally the upper range we're talking about. And he's saying you know, if you're a newer trainer, and you really want to just make this happen pretty quickly, which a lot of us you know, we want the results quickly. Or maybe there's a there's a scheduled reason for this or what have you. above point two 5% is defensible. For most experienced trainees a more moderate pace of point one 2.25% per week is probably more appropriate, particularly if they're wanting to avoid a disproportionate degree of fat gain. Again, this is from Eric's quote. For people who are extremely advanced and legitimately close to their personal genetic limit for muscularity, then their rate of weight gain should be quite slow. So he's kind of separated into three groups, beginners, or early intermediates, intermediate or advanced trainees and very advanced trainees, I'm guessing most people listening to this show are in the first or second group, I would consider myself in the second group, a lot of you are in the first probably some of you are in the third group as well, which I love to have you listening to this because it's all applicable. But I'm gearing this toward the general lifestyle lifter person who wants to improve their physique, their body composition, we continue to see evidence that the point one 2.25% is probably kind of an average range. And if you have some advanced training if you have some training under your belt, but point two, five above point two 5% per week, may be a better number to shoot for if you're more on the beginner to early intermediate side. Okay, now switching to the study itself, the home study homes, homes at all, a whole bunch of researchers on the paper. He said, I'm going to share the three key points from the study and then the quote from the conclusions, okay, and I definitely encourage you to go look at the study itself if you want to get all the nuances because there are some limitations here. It was done during COVID. They had some people drop out. There's a whole bunch of limitations that we always have to consider when it comes to these things. But here we go the key points number one, when assigning intended energy surplus sizes of five to 15%, faster rates of body mass gain primarily serve to increase the rate that fat mass accumulates, rather than increasing rates of hypertrophy or strength gain. So that's really important. So the five to 15% range, which was the moderate to the large group. Mainly what he's saying is, the faster you go, the more fat you're gonna gain without any extra strength or muscle gain very important. Key Point number two. It is possible however, that faster rates of body mass gain could enhance hypertrophy to some degree, if a sufficient training stimulus is provided, ah, so this is really interesting, because he's not really distinguishing training age, he's just saying that, in general, maybe you could go faster, but you really have to have a solid training stimulus, very effective programming, sufficient intensity with your lifts sufficient volume for you, where you're actually getting the growth that you intend. Otherwise, it's sort of going to waste isn't it and that's where the extra fat mass comes in your body wants to partition those nutrients for the purpose that you're telling it you need it for. And that's where the muscle building signal comes in.
Philip Pape 15:50
Hey, this is Philip. And I hope you're enjoying this episode of Wits & Weights, I started Wits & Weights to help people who want to build muscle lose fat and actually look like they lift. I've noticed that when people improve their strength and physique, they not only look and feel better, they transform other areas of their life, their health, their mental resilience and their confidence in everything they do. And since you're listening to this podcast, I assume you want the same things the same success, whether you recently started lifting, or you've been at this for a while and want to optimize and reach a new level of success. Either way, my one on one coaching focused on engineering your physique and body composition is for you. If you want expert guidance and want to get results faster, easier, and with fewer frustrations along the way to actually look like you lift, go to wits & weights.com, and click on coaching, or use the link in my show notes to apply today, I'll ask you a few short questions to decide if we're a good fit. If we are, we'll get you started this week. Now back to the show.
Philip Pape 16:53
Key Point number three, while further work is needed if a sufficient training stimulus is provided, the rate of body mass gain that will best support hypertrophy is likely individual rates may be influenced by prior training experience, hereditary factors which influence one's potential maximum rate of muscle gain, and other variables, sleep stress, etc. Now, doesn't that sound familiar? Isn't that what we talk about all the time on this show that there are so many factors that affect your expenditure, your ability to build muscle, your personal results. And it really comes down to figuring out what that is for you by giving you the shot by experimenting. And these this evidence we talk about on the show is simply a starting point, it gets you in the ballpark, knowing that it could go swing in either direction, sometimes, quite severely if you are an outlier. If you are an over under responder, for example, he even mentioned the head of hereditary factors, it's true, some of us just have better genetic dice roll of the dice. And some of us less it's not an excuse, it's just we have to understand what it gives us in terms of these these ranges. Okay. And then finally, in the paper itself, the conclusion state quote, ultimately, we recommend conservative energy surpluses scaled to your training experience of so here the surpluses, they recommend of five to 20% over maintenance energy, or rates of weight gain of point 252 point 5% of body mass per week, scaled to training experience such that more advanced trainees consume smaller surpluses and gain weight more slowly. Okay, so so far, we're hearing a consistent message that if you have more training under your belt, you're simply not going to be able to gain muscle as quickly there's diminishing returns, the more muscle you've already built. And that means you don't want to have as large of a surplus because you're gonna gain more fat than a newer trainee. As far as the ratio of fat to muscle. Okay, what does this mean for your personal muscle building or bulking strategy? It seems that all of this evidence continues to support a gain of around, I'm gonna say point two to point 3% of body mass per week. Okay, I think Trexler mentioned that range in there as well, I think it's a good range, it gets you sort of on the top side of that point, one 2.25, it pushes it kind of on the top side of that pushes you a little past that upper range, and gives you that sweet spot of point, two 2.3% of body mass per week as a generalizable sweet spot for gaining muscle without gaining too much fat. Because again, an aggressive surplus beyond this will lead to quicker or may lead to just slightly quicker muscle gains, but you're going to accumulate fat and at some point, it's just going to be mostly fat, right? So you kind of you want to hang around that and not get too impatient. Knowing that it takes time to build muscle, it's easier to it's way easier timewise to cut fat, psychologically, it's a different story. But timewise it's way easier. So you kind of have to balance the two, you could say, I'm gonna go a little bit more aggressive, because I'm just not sure. And I want to see how my body responds, and I'm gonna train really hard and see what happens. And then I'm willing to take the risk that it's going to take a bit longer to just cut the fat later, and that's fine. That's your choice to do. Or if you know, you're not an over responder, or you've already been training, or let's say you're a woman, and women just tend to build muscle slower than men, you may say, You know what, I really don't want to be in that aggressive bulking phase range, I'm going to stick around a quarter percent, you know, point 3% body mass per week. And I think that's a great number, I really do. I've often recommended to newer male lifters to go around point three 5.4% on the upper end, and I've done that myself with pretty good results. And that's just so I that's for me, so I ensure that I gain as much muscle as I can, knowing that I might gain a lot extra fat. But for others, I would say keep it around point two 5%, you're golden. Again, as a starting point. Now, there is a massive role of strength training alongside your nutrition that we just alluded to, when Dr. Helms mentioned, the training stimulus is the training stimulus. And it's important to this whole thing, it's a very crucial role. All of this that I'm talking about assumes you are lifting properly. And the best way to know this is with information and what information do I like I'll give you I'll give you a few different things. First, your lifts are going up in some way your your volume, but primarily your intensity intensity, meaning the weight on the bar or the dumbbells or what have you are going up so that either weight on the bar and or reps are going up and or sets or a combination of these based on your programming. And you feel like you are getting stronger and you are performing more and it's not totally over fatiguing you and causing recovery issues. Assuming you're including proper D loads and such as needed, you should be able to see this progress pretty consistently. The second thing is I like to take body circumference measurements both during Fat Loss and Muscle Gain. And when you're building muscle, two important measurements are your biceps and your thighs, your bicep and thigh circumference. So also possibly your neck circumference which which may go up during fat loss or during muscle building phase as well. All of these can tell you yes, I'm building muscle. Now you these are going to go up with fat gain as well. And that's where the improvement in your leverages come into play. But you you definitely want to see them going up. You don't want to see them flatlining. And then you also want to see that your waist circumference whether you take a simple kind of belly button waist circumference, or you do the the three, you know, naval inch or two above the Naval Institute below the navel kind of measurement, whatever, whatever you're doing that it is going to slightly increase over time because you're gaining fat but we don't want it to increase too much. That's kind of the the toggle or what am I trying to say that's the the limiter that you want to see, that tells you that you're not really gaining fat too quickly. Okay, you're going to gain it, but not too quickly. Now, I've said it before, you can't rely on any form of body fat measurement for accuracy. But if you use something like the Navy formula, which for men requires neck and waist for women requires neck, waist and hips, okay, not not thighs, hips, like all around to the peak of your, your but basically your hips. The trend of that can tell you how quickly you're packing on body fat. And I've seen this for me in the past when I've done in a more aggressive build where I'm like at point 4% versus a more lean gain at like point one or, or so I will see that the fat gain slows down when I'm going at a slower rate, which is great. It's it's validating what you're doing. So those are the things your lifts are going up your bicep thigh, neck, waist or hip circumference, circumference, and then your weight also are your waist circumference is going up and not by a lot. Okay, so the practical takeaways here. How do you do a muscle building phase? Let's just recap the whole thing based on the data. All right, number one, you have to find your maintenance calories. Now if you've never tracked your food before, if you've never done this before, I'm going to recommend listening to some of my other episodes where we talk about tracking your food, where we talk about what do you do first you build you lose Do you maintain? There's a few in there. I'm going to try to link to them in the show notes. But they're easy to find if you go look at the back history of the show. But you want to find your maintenance calories and know that your maintenance calories are not fixed. They change daily. And in my opinion, the best way to find that out is to use macro factor. That's an app called macro factor all one word downloaded if you're a new user that's never used it before. Use my code Wits & Weights all one word all spelled out Wits & Weights to get an extra week on your free trial. Use it try it out you're going to be really excited about how it works because unlike Like the other apps like My Fitness Pal, and so on, it's not just a logger, it actually feeds you back information that helps you modify your intake each week, because it calculates your metabolism, it calculates your maintenance calories based on your food and your weight. It's, it's really awesome. Okay, so rather than trying to do a bunch of spreadsheets, or definitely don't use a calculator online, because that's not going to be anywhere close to your real maintenance, it can be off by 400 calories in either direction. Use macro factor, find your maintenance, log food for about three weeks, you'll log your weight every day. And you'll have a pretty good number to start from. So do that first, and then you want to set your target and set your rate. Okay, so how do you set your target, the way I like to do it is, I don't like to just pick a number out of the sky, I like to pick a duration, and based on the rate set the target. So I've said this before on the show. And if you haven't heard this before, it takes time to build muscle. And so you want to spend time building muscle for multiple reasons. One reason is because you want to get that win of actually seeing a meaningful change in your physique. And the other is just the sheer time that it takes, okay, versus fat loss. So I would assume six to nine months of building or bulking or improvement, whatever term you want to use six to nine months. So we're gonna assume that you're 180 pounds, right. And let's say you want to build for six months. And it's a good time of year, right? Because it's what almost this episode's coming out almost October. So November, December, January, February, March, April, that takes you all through the holidays and winter. And then you could do a cut or mini cut going into summer. Maybe it's tiny bit later than you would normally want but it's in the ballpark. So assume six months. Now let's go with the rate we talked about before the new sweet spot rate that I mentioned, from all of this evidence, point to 2.3% a week. So if you pick a number in there, it comes out to around a half a pound a week, if you weigh 180 pounds. So I always like round numbers just easier to think about easier to follow, it doesn't have to be down to a decimal half a pound a week. All right, so half a pound a week, for six months, and a few extra weeks beyond that gets you 15 pounds. Again, rounding up. So we're gonna go from 180 to 195 pounds in six months, right. And that's six months, maybe you want to go for nine months, that's fine, too, maybe you want to build for a year. So our target rate is gonna be our target weight is going to be 195 pounds, our target rate of gain is going to be point five pounds a week, which is around a quarter percent or so maybe it's like point two 7%. But again, we're rounding and then what you're going to do is just set your targets for calories based on that. So a half pound a week is going to be about 250 calories a day surplus. Okay, nice round number. And then every week, you're going to adjust that based on what is happening to your body. And again, the best way to know this would be to use something like macro factor, which will tell you hey, your expenditure has gone a little bit up or gone a little bit down this week. Therefore, we're going to adjust the calories up or down to keep you on that rate of gain, because we don't want to go too fast and build and lose fat. But we also don't want to go too slow and start to stall out. Okay, so this is all based on what's happening to your body. Now, as you go through a building phase, if you're going half pound a week, you will overall your metabolism should increase. You know unless your activity level just goes way down. Like if you go from 15,000 steps a day down to 3000. And it kind of offsets the building. You know, if everything else stays the same, your expenditure should be going up. This is like the opposite of not the opposite. It's metabolic adaptation, but in the opposite direction as what happens during fat loss when your body adapts. So you're going to have to eat more and more food over time. Most people don't really complain about this. But if you're you know a bigger person who has to eat a lot of calories, you know, eventually it can become a little bit tedious just like fat loss does, right psychology. So what do we what do we set for our targets? Well, if you're using macro factor, it's going to give you appropriate targets based on the evidence. And but if you're doing this by hand, we're gonna go back to the simple rules of thumb protein, point eight to one gram per pound of your target bodyweight. Well, if your target body weight is 195 pounds, we're gonna shoot for 160 to 195 grams of protein fat, I like to peg it at about 30% of calories. You could go as low as 20%. Either way that 20 to 30% leaves plenty of room for carbs for the rest of your calories. So don't overdo it with protein and not leave enough room for carbs. Don't overdo it with fat like at the Keto range where you're up at 50 60%. I mean you can but it is going to then eat into your carbs and limit your ability to build muscle because carbs are muscle sparing they give you energy to give you recovery. They allow you to lift more and we know from the evidence that a standard higher carb diet or average carb diet is going to be more effective for muscle building than a Keto style diet. And then finally, we have meal timing, just very simple rule of thumb, four to five meals a day to have protein is probably what you're going to need at a higher calorie level to get your surplus in four to five, four to five feedings of protein a day, and then some protein and carbs around your workouts. Okay, this is totally up to you. I know some people like fasted training. I think in general, for most people, you're going to, you're going to progress more and get that bigger stimulus if you are fed when you train. Another reason to do that, going back to what Dr. Tom said about the training stimulus being very important. So some protein some carbs around your workouts before after, you know I've given more specific recommendations in the past, but I'm just generalizing here that you want to be fed for your workouts. Okay, so there you have it, a moderate calorie surplus of point two to point 3% balanced set of macros sufficient protein, sufficient carbs, targeted high stimulus, effective strength training with progressive overload, these are all the keys to unlock muscle gains without gaining excessive fat. And as with any physique engineering strategy, the principles as you can tell are straightforward. They really are, they're pretty simple. And the challenge is going to be in applying them being consistent, putting in the reps, and probably most importantly, making adjustments for you your results and your lifestyle. So if you prefer a faster rate, and you're comfortable with the extra possible fat gain, just in case that you're an over responder, or if you know you are, then give it a shot, like experiment with an N equals one experiment with yourself. Worst case, it will confirm that you gained a little too much fat, because you're measuring all the things right you're measuring your circumference and how you feel and all this and that you all you'd have to do is a slightly longer or more aggressive cut to lean back out. Best case, though, that you're gonna find that this is perhaps your sweet spot. So it lets you find that number more efficiently than just just picking the same number every time from what a podcaster tells you. Okay, in our next episode 109 High Performance Training built on a platform of strength with Andrew Roamio. I'm bringing on my longtime coach Andrew to chat about how to make fitness a core part of your identity, how to balance the demanding roles of family work in life, and how to make strength training work for you at any age. Last thing, I didn't want to forget this if you want to build muscle and are not sure how to start. Or if you want help following the process they laid out in this episode. Just reach out to me I'm a human being I will have a conversation with you not selling anything. Literally just hey, reach out. This is what's going on. Cool. Great to meet you. Based on your question, maybe check this out. Here's a video here's a guy here's an episode or I'll give you a straight up answer on what to do for your situation. To do that, just send an email to Philip at wits. & weights.com Phillip at wits & weights.com
Philip Pape 33:12
My name is Juan L. Just make sure to spell it right Phillip at wits & weights.com And you could also find links to contact me there and other ways in the shownotes. As always, stay strong. And I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits & Weights podcast. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits & Weights if you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up their Wits & Weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then stay strong
