Q&A - Post-Bulk Fat Loss, Walking Too Much, and Diet Fatigue (Brandon DaCruz) | Ep 354
Check out the other half of our Q&A on Brandon's Chasing Clarity podcast, where we tackle your questions on hunger, cravings, appetite, and artificial sweeteners.
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Just wrapped a bulk and scared to lose muscle? Over 50 and unsure if gains are still possible? Walking 20,000 steps a day with no results?
In this Q&A, I team up with physique coach Brandon DaCruz, host of the Chasing Clarity podcast, to tackle five hot topics around fat loss, muscle building, and diet fatigue. We break down smart post-bulk strategies, how much walking is too much, and realistic expectations for muscle gain over 50, plus how to recover when dieting burns you out.
Don’t miss part two of this episode on the Chasing Clarity podcast, where we explore how hunger, cravings, and sweeteners impact your results.
Main Takeaways:
A smarter way to cut after a bulk
When walking too much backfires
Muscle gain over 50 is slow—but possible
Don’t underestimate diet fatigue
Lifestyle stress and recovery matter more than you think
Timestamps:
2:00 – Post-bulk strategy for women 40+
8:34 – Are 20K steps a day too much?
22:15 – Building muscle after 50
28:49 – Best small-space home gym setup
36:56 – How to recover from diet fatigue
41:08 – Training and recovery during a fat loss phase
46:54 – The signs you're hitting a wall
53:50 – Training mindset and strength drops during a cut
Check out the other half of our Q&A on Brandon's Chasing Clarity podcast, where we tackle your questions on hunger, cravings, appetite, and artificial sweeteners.
What to Do After a Bulk, When Steps Stop Working, and Diet Fatigue Hits Hard
You just finished a bulk and want to cut fat without losing the muscle you worked so hard to build. Or maybe you're 50+, training hard, and wondering why your gains feel slower than ever. Maybe you're stuck walking 20,000 steps a day and not seeing any new fat loss progress. Or you're simply tired of tracking, dieting, and trying to care when your body just wants a break. If any of that rings true, this episode was made for you.
Brandon DaCruz and I got together to answer five tough questions that cut through common confusion about body recomposition, diet periodization, and realistic results. These aren’t surface-level tips. We went deep into physiology, recovery, psychological stress, and the mindset needed to play the long game.
Post-Bulk Fat Loss for Women Over 40
This one comes up a lot, especially among high-achieving women who went all in on building muscle but are now hesitant about cutting. The fear of losing progress is real, but Brandon laid out a strategy he calls “descending and dynamic,” which means starting your fat loss with a slightly more aggressive deficit (think 1% of body weight per week) and then tapering it down as fatigue sets in.
Key takeaways:
Preserve muscle with proper resistance training. Train the way you built the muscle. Don't back off just because you’re cutting.
Eat enough protein to preserve lean mass and support appetite regulation and insulin sensitivity, especially during hormonal transitions like perimenopause.
Do bloodwork before cutting to check thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol. You want your physiology in a good place before pushing into a deficit.
Track more than just weight. Body measurements and strength data help you understand what’s really changing, even if the scale moves quickly or not at all.
Is There a Limit to Steps and Energy Expenditure?
Yes, but almost no one hits it.
This question came from someone already getting 20,000 steps a day, wondering if walking more would help with fat loss. It opens the door to a common misunderstanding: the idea that the body eventually "shuts down" and stops burning extra calories from additional activity.
The reality is more nuanced:
There is a constrained energy expenditure model, where your body adapts and limits total calorie burn at very high levels of activity.
But that threshold is far higher than most people will ever reach, typically in the range of 4,000-5,000 calories per day or more.
People like the Amish who average 14,000-18,000 steps daily still maintain lean body compositions and high caloric intakes without metabolic collapse.
The real problem isn’t too much walking. It’s how much else you’re stressing your system with (undereating, undersleeping, and overtraining all at once).
Instead of piling on more steps, consider increasing the quality of your movement: walking on inclines, rucking, or using walking to recover rather than burn more.
Muscle Gain After 50
Here’s the honest truth: muscle gain is slower as we age, especially after major weight loss. But it is still very much possible if you train right, eat enough, and give it time.
Brandon offered rough monthly weight gain targets based on training experience:
Novice: up to 2% of body weight per month
Intermediate: 1-1.5%
Advanced: 0.5-1%
Fat loss can happen much faster than muscle gain, which is why most people need a longer building phase, what Brandon frames as a 4:1 ratio of building to cutting over the course of the year. You can’t expect to cut for three months, bulk for three months, and repeat endlessly.
And the best marker of muscle gain? Consistent strength improvements (at least early on), steady scale trends, and measurements that reflect muscle growth in the right places. As always, patience is the name of the game.
Small Home Gym Setup
If you're lifting at home and want to build an effective space in a tight footprint, go for sustainability and adaptability. My take: start with a squat rack and free weights. Even if your room is small, most people can fit a rack and barbell with a little creativity.
Brandon’s take: go hybrid. One great option is a multi-use rack with cable attachments (he recommends the Prime Prodigy) paired with adjustable dumbbells and a solid bench. That lets you do almost every compound and isolation movement without needing ten machines.
For a budget option, I still love the Fitness Reality rack with a cable add-on, and microplates are a must if you want to make small progressions.
Handling Diet Fatigue
Fatigue isn’t just hunger. It’s psychological, physical, and lifestyle-related. We talked about clear signals to look out for:
Rising hunger and cravings
Mood swings and irritability
Decline in training performance
Poor sleep and low motivation
Brandon’s “pull to push” approach includes:
Deficit deloads: 4–7 day breaks from the diet by increasing calories to (or above) maintenance, with mostly whole, filling foods.
Deload weeks: temporary reduction in training intensity or volume to promote recovery.
Lifestyle support: meditation, self-care, outdoor walks, and even programming relaxation into your plan.
My go-to strategy is aligning food and training with real life. Use weekends for planned refeeds. Pause dieting when you're traveling. And be intentional with your training split so it supports your recovery, not just your progress. You might even train better with fewer but higher-quality sessions during fat loss.
The big picture here is this: you don’t need to grind through every phase. Fat loss, maintenance, and muscle gain all serve a purpose. Structure your year and your habits around that cycle, and you’ll avoid burnout, keep your results, and feel better doing it.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
Maybe your body isn't transforming the way you expect it. Maybe you just finished a bulk and you're terrified of losing all that hard-earned muscle. Maybe you're over 40 and wondering if building muscle is even possible anymore. Or maybe you're so burned out from dieting that the thought of another cut makes you want to give up. Today, I'm teaming up with Brandon DeCruz to answer five body composition questions that keep you up at night, the ones that determine whether you'll actually achieve the physique you want or stay stuck for years.
Philip Pape: 0:39
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 I'm very excited, guys. I'm bringing you something fun here a collaboration with none other than Brandon DeCruz, accredited nutritionist, world-class online physique coach and co-host of the Chasing Clarity podcast. Now Brandon is joining me for the third time here on Wits and Weights to help me answer your most pressing questions about body composition, building muscle training and more, based, as always, on the evidence and our firsthand in-the-trenches experience coaching many, many clients where I joined Brandon to tackle even more questions related to managing hunger during fat loss, beating cravings and other topics related to that.
Philip Pape: 1:29
Head over to the Chasing Clarity podcast. Find it in your podcast app or click the link in the show notes. Give it a follow. You're gonna find that episode in your feed right now. We dropped them on the same day. Again, the link is in the show notes. Go look for Chasing Clarity podcast. And Brandon my man, thank you again for reaching out to make this happen and for coming on the show again.
Brandon DaCruz: 1:48
Absolutely, my friend. It's a pleasure and I'm really happy with how our last episode just went, since we're recording back to back, and I'm really looking forward to digging into this and really giving a lot of evidence base and also practically applicable information for your audience.
Philip Pape: 2:00
As you always do, and the two episodes have quite different topics. So, guys, definitely, when you're done with this, next in your feed, go right over to Chasing Clarity and we're going to get right into it with our first question today. This is a good one. What is the best post-bulk strategy to preserve muscle and lose fat for women over 40, especially during perimenopause?
Brandon DaCruz: 2:18
All right. So this is a situation I deal with quite often because I work with a lot of women over 40 that are going through hormonal transitions like perimenopause. Now there are a few key strategies I use when transitioning a client from a building phase into a fat loss phase, especially if the goal is to preserve muscle, drop body fat and do it in a way that supports their long-term health and sustainability. So the first thing I want to look at is the rate of loss, because that is something that we're going to have to determine right off the bat, and the first. How I really approach this is I use what I call a descending and dynamic rate of loss. So when I kick off a fat loss phase, I actually start with a slightly quicker rate of loss up front and then gradually I slow it down as we move throughout the phase. So instead of tiptoeing into a deficit which is something that some people make the mistake of doing and they're not really getting progress off of that what I'll do is I'll create a more assertive calorie deficit at the start, which allows us to leverage the motivation they have, the fact that they have very little, if any, diet fatigue and they've been in a surplus for an extended period of time, so there's more calories to pull from. And then also, I want to utilize the fact that body fat is at its highest, meaning that there's more stored energy that we can pull from and there's less risk of muscle loss. And within that, what I found is, when I take a, you know, a quicker rate of loss in the beginning, let's us get some wins, and it's a psychological win for that person because those early body composition changes create momentum and that momentum facilitates better adherence, so we're getting better outcomes in the long term. Then, as we diet and fatigue you know, diet fatigue especially accumulates, I'll taper the deficit down to a more moderate approach. So usually what I'm doing and this is I'm going to give you a broad-based perspective, but oftentimes it'll look like something like I might start at 1% body weight loss per week and then I'm going to taper to 0.5. And then when I get especially women very lean, it's going to be like 0.25 per week towards the end of the phase.
Brandon DaCruz: 4:01
Now the second key component is going to be resistance training. We cannot, you know, overlook that. You know, it's so important that if your goal is to preserve muscle, that you train in a way that sends a signal to maintain it. So I always tell clients that the training that built the muscle is a training that will maintain it. And this becomes even more critical for women over 40, who may be dealing with hormonal changes that make muscle retention more challenging. So we want to make sure we're sending the right signal to your body that that muscle is needed.
Brandon DaCruz: 4:25
The next thing I'm going to do is I want someone to follow a high protein diet and this is really going to help with enhancing your ability to maintain muscle. It's going to help with appetite regulation and it improves insulin sensitivity, which is really important. If we're looking specifically at women over 40 in that perimenopause transition whether that be peri or even into the menopause transition a lot of times the downregulation of hormones, especially the decline in estradiol, is going to contribute to impacting their body composition, their appetite regulation and their metabolic health, especially from an insulin sensitivity perspective. This is a little bit different than most people would recommend, but one thing I found in practice to be very advantageous is I always suggest having your labs done prior to jumping into a deficit, because we want to look at how things are looking internally, and personally I work with a lot of women from the ages of, say, 35 to 55, and many of them are high achievers, and that's great.
Brandon DaCruz: 5:13
I love that mentality, I love that type A personality.
Brandon DaCruz: 5:16
But what does that come with?
Brandon DaCruz: 5:17
For every gimme, there's a gotcha.
Brandon DaCruz: 5:18
So many of these women are burning the candle at both ends between their professional and then their personal lives, and they're often putting their health last.
Brandon DaCruz: 5:25
So what I like to do is have clients run blood work to assess sex hormones, thyroid function and stress markers to make sure that things are in the right place. And I really want to make sure that estrogen and progesterone aren't bottomed out yet at this phase in life, that their thyroid function is sufficient to support fat loss. And I also want to make sure that cortisol isn't chronically elevated from, whether that be stress under recovery or lifestyle factors, Because if you start a fat loss phase with dysregulated hormones and metabolic dysfunction, it's going to make the process harder and a lot of women in this age group are already having trouble with that. So if you have put in the time, effort and energy to do a muscle gain phase which I commend you for because I love seeing women become the strongest version of themselves you really want to put yourself in the position to succeed, making sure that everything is in check before you go into a fat loss phase and then take approach that's going to be fit to your physiology and also to your psychology.
Philip Pape: 6:12
Yeah, I love everything you said, especially how we're coming from a strategy here, from someone who should be congratulated for doing something that very few people, let alone women, but men and women will, I'll say, have the courage to even attempt and to go after really building, going into an improvement phase, adding weight, knowing that some fat might come along for the ride to optimize their ability to build muscle, which is one of the most critical things at this time of life, because of what you talked about, the hormones. I also like the phrases you have for everything descending and dynamic. I'm going to steal some of this because I do love the idea of going all out, pretty aggressive at first. We also have to understand, as part of that I wanted to piggyback off of that the idea of lean mass versus muscle, versus body fat, because there's fears that go both directions. The fear going up, of course, is I'm going to get too fat, I'm going to gain too much fat. The fear going down is I'm going to lose all my muscle, I'm going to get deflated, and it's helpful if you're tracking and measuring circumference I don't want to say body fat directly, but you can infer body fat from trends reasonably accurately so that you understand. Okay, there's sometimes that whoosh effect early on in a fat loss phase, which doesn't mean you've lost all your muscle within two weeks. I think that helps from the fear in this question, which is how do I preserve muscle?
Philip Pape: 7:22
Obviously, you hit on training being the biggest signal, protein being extremely important.
Philip Pape: 7:26
But even understanding that you are not losing muscle, even if the data shows a big drop in weight or quote unquote lean mass, because a lot of that's going to be fluid, so that you don't react, you don't overreact and say, okay, I need to get back out of this, you know, and stop trying this. The diet itself, too I always like to think of how are you eating during your bulk? Were you maintaining the foundation of whole foods or are you adding a lot of processed foods? Again, no judgment. Some people do that if they need to get the calories, but it can be more difficult when your diet has biased or skewed away from that when you go back into fat loss phase, and it takes a different mentality to reset to that point versus somebody just maybe starting fat loss for the first time not having gone through the muscle building phase. So I think we hit on the big things with again training, protein, the rate of loss, the lean mass and then the diet itself. Anything else you want to add?
Brandon DaCruz: 8:17
No, I think we really recapped that. Well, my friend.
Philip Pape: 8:20
Cool. All right, let's go to the next one. Good luck on that fat loss phase. We're here for you. So the next one is about oh, this is a good one. This is good for Brandon, because Brandon is the energy flux guy. All right, and I guess I'm answering it first, but you're going to have a lot to add to this.
Philip Pape: 8:34
The question is is there a point where increasing daily steps no longer boost energy expenditure meaningfully? I get this a lot. You probably do as well. You probably get it a lot Because it's interesting. You'll have somebody say look, I get 20,000 steps a day, should I go to 30? I'll get interesting questions like that and I was wondering where I should attack this.
Philip Pape: 8:57
One prong is talking about the constrained energy model, because I love the subtleties behind that. I know you've talked about on your show a lot and it's highly misunderstood. So we'll see if I don't misrepresent it. But for most people, you know, an increase in movement is going to be somewhat correlated with an increase in expenditure up to a point, and then there's some sort of diminishing returns and it's all tied into how the body compensates. But it's also very individual, right? It depends on what kind of responder you are to NEAT, whether, when you increase your step count, you are compensating elsewhere, and so on. So I think, number one I always think of, are you measuring and tracking the result of these changes pretty precisely? For me, for my clients, that is, we're tracking food, we're tracking weight, so we have a good estimation of your expenditure.
Philip Pape: 9:43
Let's change one variable. You talked about this earlier, I think it was on your show, or this one, I don't know. Yes, sir, changing one variable at a time. Right, like an engineer, like a scientist, go ahead and add that 5,000 steps a day and see what it does to your biofeedback, to your expenditure, to everything else. There is a sweet spot, though. Is also part of my answer hearing that most people are going to benefit somewhere in that eight to 12,000 range, and maybe a little more. But once you get into the twenties, I suspect that now you're getting into a slightly more excessive, extreme regimes of walking for a lot of people, but not necessarily everybody. And is it stressing you out? Is it affecting you know, your cortisol, your feeling of burnout? Are you forcing yourself to do it because you feel like you have to burn more calories? And there's other levers you could take advantage of. So I'm going to start there, brandon, because energy flux is part of this and I want to hear your take on it.
Brandon DaCruz: 10:30
All right. So I'm going to disentangle this from energy flux, because the high energy flux approach that I've taken is mostly done through dialing in and increasing energy expenditure through steps, but I'm also doing it with a concomitant increase in food. So if you ever hear me speak about this concept, it's always eat more, move more. It's never the reverse, nor is it are we chasing movement to get down calories. It's more so that I'm trying to get this intrinsic link between energy expenditure and energy intake and getting this coupling effect where I can get someone into a higher maintenance calorie intake. And there's many things more nuanced approaches that I utilize and very context specific that often I don't get to get into with podcasts, just because you know I'm not able to do a lot of like case study reviews, but when it comes down to it, when I saw this question come through, I said this is definitely targeted towards me because, especially of a podcast, I've gotten a lot of questions about that. I did with Lyle McDonald and a few months back we really broke down some of the misinterpretations of the constrained energy expenditure model and that was a three-hour podcast, so I won't be able to re-encompass it here, but I will give you my thoughts, both based on the literature because I read 22 papers for that podcast and then, in conjunction with having worked with 1,100 plus people over the years, utilize step count as a way to increase energy expenditure, increase maintenance, calories, be able to get people on who what I consider and what I refer to as a state of abundance in addition. So, first off, that I do want to make it clear because sometimes people get this misconstrued I do believe that energy, energy compensation, exists. I do believe in the constrained energy expenditure model, but I think that the point where additional activity stops contributing to meaningful energy expenditure increases is actually a lot higher than most people think. And I think that a lot of people have taken that model where you do a comparative analysis and you look at the constraint model where it's a, you know, sloping off and it's also like an asymptote, and then you look at the additive model where it just literally goes up and many people say, oh well, the constraint model means that you know if I do extra cardio, I'm never going to burn, you know, the calories that I thought I could. Well, there's many inaccuracies within that because of the fact that a lot of these activity trackers are very off in terms of their accuracy in estimating energy expenditure. So there was a meta-analysis on this that found that risk-worn and commercially available activity trackers are between 28 to 93% off, I believe.
Brandon DaCruz: 12:41
Now, when it comes to step counts, now this is very interesting because we have limited data from people that have consistently hit high step counts. So the one study that I can think of that actually looked at this was a study I often speak about, which is the Amish study, and this is essentially where researchers tracked physical activity in traditional Amish community, and so what they found was that the Amish men in this culture consistently averaged 18.4 steps per day, and then the women averaged over 14,000 steps per day. But then, when we look at their body composition, the men were walking around with 9.4% body fat, with no dietary intervention. They ate plenty of food, I think their calories were around 3,600 calories and the women had 25% body fat. However, the average woman in that culture, specifically in that Amish community that they looked at, had six to seven children. So the data is confounded by the fact that a lot of times when they're doing these measurements, some of these women are pregnant, so obviously they have higher adiposity levels, which is essential for carrying a baby to term. Now, even with very high step counts between 14,000 and 18,000, we still see clear metabolic and body composition benefits, so it is safe to say that they are burning more calories.
Brandon DaCruz: 13:49
But to really answer this question, I think we need to discuss a concept that's often overlooked, which is referred to as maximum metabolic scope or maximum sustainable metabolic scope, and what that tells us is how, far above your resting energy needs, your resting metabolic rate, can your body maintain energy output on a consistent basis? And the best data we have from that is actually an endurance training study. It's an overview like an umbrella review by I believe it's by Thurber and colleagues, and they looked at athletes ranging from extreme endurance athletes like triathlons to ultra marathons, to even like the race across the USA, which is, I believe, a 20-week essentially contest or competition, where you run a marathon a day, six days a week for 20 weeks. So we're talking about very extreme expenditure levels. Now, when we actually look in short bursts, elite athletes, especially endurance athletes, can burn between nine to 10 times their BMR in events like Iron Man's or even ultra marathons.
Brandon DaCruz: 14:42
But when it comes to your actual sustained energy expenditure like Ironmans or even ultra marathons. But when it comes to your actual sustained energy expenditure, the maximum sustainable metabolic scope is found to be 2.5 to three times basal metabolic rate. So I'll give you guys an example to really break that down practically. I have a BMR that's around 2000 calories. So that means my maximum sustainable energy expenditure would be 5000 calories per day. Now if you're someone out there that you're lighter than I am, I'm over 200 pound male. I'm over six foot tall, so I'm a little bit bigger than the average individual. But say that you're the average woman walking around, your BMR is usually going to be closer, say, the 1600 calories. So that means your maximum daily output is still 4,000 calories per day.
Brandon DaCruz: 15:16
But to actually reach that amount of energy expenditure you need to be moving essentially all day. You need to train, walk and be physically active, probably four to six hours a day. I actually did some calculations for my podcast with Lyle and it was really like higher level output in addition to training for five to six hours a day to get to these maximum sustainable outputs. Now here's the thing, that's, if you did it in a single day, you would have to do this consistently to actually see a constraint. And just realistically. I always think about this in a practical perspective. I work with people in the real world. They're busy. A lot of people are actually underactive, more than they're overactive, and so the average person, the general population and most of our clients. They aren't anywhere near the ceiling. So, yes, I do believe that there is a point of diminishing returns, but no, the vast majority of people won't hit it and I don't believe that they have to worry about it.
Philip Pape: 16:01
Yeah, have to worry about it. Yeah, you hit it on the head right there. I was just thinking like let's stop overthinking it. You know, I'm sure you have the client that loves to send you multiple questions a day and overthink all this stuff, which is great. I love curiosity. But the question was, you know, implying, should I keep going up because it's going to help my energy expenditure? And I like how you answered that.
Philip Pape: 16:18
Um, what's interesting is we can think more creatively when it comes to our movement and our time efficiency. My clients are all super busy, I'm busy, you're busy, and I always think, okay, what are you trying to do when you ask this question? If you're trying to boost your energy expenditure, can we just make your walking a little bit harder, right? Can we use inclines and rucking Little things like that is the way I like to go to it, brandon, right? That way we're not just adding, adding, adding, because, as you know, once you've used up the time in the day, then you start hitting your stress, then you start affecting your sleep, then you start making eating harder and all of that. So, again, practical, real world. I think we covered it.
Brandon DaCruz: 16:51
Absolutely no. I will admit that I am a data nerd myself. I'm just saying, practically I'm the person that probably spoken about step counts and energy flux the most and I have very infrequently seen someone that I truly believe has hit a cap and when it has, it's been confounded. So I'll give you an example. We actually there's research, by Willis, I believe, that looks at the influence of energy balance status on energy expenditure from activity and it's within this constrained energy expenditure model and they find it was a best fit model essentially. So this is statistical modeling, but what they did was they looked at interventions where people are in a large deficit versus maintenance, versus a surplus, and wanted to see what the best fit, what they mean by that. What model best fits this? Is it the constraint model or the additive model? Well, in my model for energy flux, I'm keeping people at maintenance or in a slight surplus, but I'm allowing activity to increase that maintenance, calorie intake and also help with nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitivity and nutrient delivery. Now what's interesting about that? And now I was utilizing energy flux. I think I had spoken on your podcast about it even before this Willis paper came out, because it's fairly new. Now the interesting thing about that is that when they did a best fit model analysis they found that the constraint model only was the best fit, meaning it was most applicable when someone was in a deficit in an active period of weight loss. Now that could be for multiple components, but we also know that metabolic adaptation down-regulates a lot of the same components. That would also decrease energy expenditure and could be confounded or conflated for the constrained energy expenditure model.
Brandon DaCruz: 18:15
It's very hard to disentangle metabolic adaptation, low energy availability and the constrained energy expenditure model Because if we think about it a lot of times, neat down-regulations can be in the realm between 400 to 500 plus calories per day. But then if someone's doing a lot of activity but then they're sitting a lot, that could be a downregulation in NEAT. But then it's almost conflated because they're doing 24-hour measurements of energy expenditure through doubly labeled water. They can't really disentangle. Was that from NEAT or were they not burning as many calories as we assume they would, based off the cardio or the step count that they were doing? So there's many things that we can disentangle there, but when you look at maintenance or in a surplus, the additive model meaning the more steps you do or the more activity was specifically activity. So I don't want to mischaracterize the research. It wasn't looking at step counts, but the more activity you did, the more calories you burn, and so we have to. There's many influences within that. There's many different variables where for most people, I don't think they have to worry about it.
Brandon DaCruz: 19:08
There have been some very specific cases and I can be a case study or an example. I have had many women that were conscious prep athletes. They were competitors that have come to me on enormously high step counts 25 to 30,000 steps per day. They're on very low energy intake and it's almost like it's something that people within the functional realm refer to as weight loss resistance, which I have a little bit of an issue with, just because the fragility narrative that comes with that and it's a misunderstanding of physiology. It's not that they don't respond to a deficit, it's that their energy expenditure is so low in so many other components that they're not eliciting a rate of loss that would be in alignment with what most people would expect.
Brandon DaCruz: 19:43
Now I have a specific case that it was an IFBB figure pro which was on under 1200 calories per day doing two plus hours of cardio per day. Her step count was approximately like 20,000 steps per day. Most of that was actually being done through cardio, though, because she was doing higher intensity cardio for 120 minutes a day, so it wasn't picking up. It wasn't like she was doing a lot of daily activity, it was more so. She was getting like 14,000 steps per day just through cardio, like intentional cardio, and then about 6,000 throughout the course of the day. She was very sedentary in between these bouts early in the morning, fasted cardio an hour, before bed an hour, and then throughout the course of the day she was very she. She wasn't too active.
Brandon DaCruz: 20:20
However, when I looked through, I mean I put a comprehensive lab analysis every I mean her thyroid, her sex hormones, everything was downregulated. She had hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is essentially the cessation of menstrual cycle for three or more months due to low energy availability. So all these different physiological components were downregulated to the point that her body wasn't burning a lot of energy. So it was just what she had from resting metabolic rate and she was a very small female what she had from energy expenditure. But all these different components, including her need, her non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, were downregulated.
Brandon DaCruz: 20:47
So a lot of times that may be misconstrued for the energy constraint model, and it could be. It could definitely be a constraint, but I think that there are many other inputs for a metabolic adaptation perspective, specifically from an adaptive thermogenesis perspective, which is where we see a decrease in metabolic rate specifically, or energy expenditure specifically, that exceeds what we would expect from weight loss alone, and then we also have to tie in low energy availability and relative energy deficiency. So, just for anyone out there, I don't think most people have to worry about this, and if you are someone that you're just trying to become a healthier version of yourself and improve your body composition, you're at 10,000 steps per day. Don't worry about going to 12,000 and that you're not going to get a benefit from it.
Philip Pape: 21:23
Exactly, and how many of those people in these studies are lifting weights too? I always, I always, think that right. The last thing I want to add to this we'll go to the next question is I just recently did an episode about the walking snacks research from like 2022 that compared squatting.
Brandon DaCruz: 21:36
You're talking about exercise snacks.
Philip Pape: 21:38
Yeah, but specifically they looked at squatting versus walking, versus sitting for seven and a half hours, and the vast difference in muscle protein synthesis and vascular blood flow and insulin sensitivity between those groups, walking being the superior group of them all. So even when you talk about confounding variables and what happens during fat loss, how you start to compensate across the board, it's important to tie those together and not overthink it. That's the goal, not overthink it. So, all right, let's go to question three, which you're going to answer first here, and that is what is a realistic rate of muscle gain for someone over 50 who's lost significant weight and is now training hard?
Brandon DaCruz: 22:15
All right. So I think the first thing that we need to consider and understand is that the rate of muscle gain isn't linear and it depends heavily on your training age. So, both based on like the research and then also my experience coaching clients of all different ages and training levels, I found that the best way to go about this in terms of how to conceptualize this, is to scale your rate of gain based on your level of advancement. So if you are now, this question didn't really disentangle, you know it could be assumed that they were training previously or they just started training. So if you are a novice, I would aim for a monthly rate of gain of around 2% of your body weight per week. The less trained you are, the more essentially, the larger of a ceiling you have and the quicker you could push for gains. If you're an intermediate, I would aim for a rate of gain of 1% to 1.5% per month, and then, if you're advanced, it can be as low as 0.5% to 1% per month. So for someone who's over 50, who's lost a lot of weight and is now training hard, the rate of gain that they will have will depend on whether they're more of a novice or they've trained consistently for years. And then I get a lot of clients that I want to cover this because of the context that this listener sent to us about the fact that they just lost weight. And I get a lot of clients who are very fatless, focused initially, and now they want to focus on building muscle.
Brandon DaCruz: 23:24
And if this is where you are now, I think it's important to realize that fat loss and muscle gain do not operate on the same time course. So the rate of fat loss far exceeds the rate of muscle gain. So in a deficit, most people can lose and safely lose, say, 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week, especially early on. But in a surplus, I would only really recommend most people if they're really trying to maximize we're talking about maximizing muscle gain in terms of lean muscle, cruel and fat and making sure that there's not excess of that mass accumulation I would recommend most people to target 0.25% per week, and so that's going to even taper down as someone becomes more experienced. So I think one of the biggest mistakes people get when they've been in this cutting mindset is they're used to seeing quick progress, especially things they're seeing like almost daily improvements, and they want to spend equal amount of time cutting and building, and that just cannot be the case. The reality is that muscle takes much longer to build than that takes to lose, and that means that your yearly strategy needs to reflect that. So with clients myself, I like to do a four to one ratio in terms of building time in time spent in a surplus or even at maintenance, as compared to time spent in a fat loss phase.
Brandon DaCruz: 24:31
So you know, if you're 50, or you know 50 or not, realize that muscle gain is going to be slow. But with the right strategy it's possible, especially if you're doing the things that support hypertrophy the most. So you want to make sure that you're eating in a modest surplus, you're prioritizing protein intake, you're progressively overloading in your training and that you're not overlooking the lifestyle variables, especially in your 50s. You want to make sure that you're managing recovery, you're getting an adequate sleep, especially in your fifties. You want to make sure that you're managing recovery, you're getting inadequate sleep and you're managing your stress, because these are all things that could have downstream effects on not only hormones, your biofeedback, your recovery, but also your ability to accrete or to gain muscle mass and another. Just food for thought, or just like a little suggestion out there is be patient.
Brandon DaCruz: 25:10
You know, a lot of times I've had a lot of clients that come to me.
Brandon DaCruz: 25:12
I have a lot of clients that are between you know, I generally work with people between 35 and 55, but right now I have, you know, at least a handful of individuals that are between 60 and 70.
Brandon DaCruz: 25:21
And I find this to be very interesting. But they're very impatient and sometimes it's I'm not saying that they're that they're in their life, but they have waited so long to make these changes that they're so excited to do so. But they want to see fast progress. They want to see it right out the gate. And what you have to realize is you have to be patient. You can't mini bulk your way to meaningful gains and you have to realize that this is a process just like anything else, and give yourself grace and know that this is going to be a process, that it's an investment. I look at it almost like I would an investment fund. Every day that I train or I have a client train, it's a penny into the progress bank and over time you realize, hey, I have a lump sum of money or I've been able to save something that's really going to be able to set me up from a foundation perspective later on in life. But it doesn't happen overnight, so don't rush the process.
Philip Pape: 26:06
Yeah, patience seems to be underlying everything, everything we talk about, including fat loss, and I'm going to cross that off my list because you mentioned it. But what I like that you did in addition to talking to the rate, because people do get kind of hung up on how fast should I be able to gain muscle, and therefore it implies maybe there's a lack of patience for that. You talked about the time scale in two respects one being the ratio, which is a nice way to put it, because then you put in perspective well, how much should I be cutting on a regular basis it's not what most people think where it's a switch that you're always going into dieting mode, and then also the implying how long it should take then to gain the muscle, which is a lot longer than people think. Right, it's at least in my experience working with clients like a good six or nine months or more sometimes for a thing, and people are like, well, can I just do it for two months and then go back? And I think there's disadvantages to that because you're not going to see the result. You're also going to not give yourself that anabolic advantage let's call it of sustaining that surplus for a while and you see some magic happen when you hit months, three, four, five, with everything, including your metabolism, cranking up.
Philip Pape: 27:06
For a lot of people which is another point I wanted to mention in that, if you're not tracking this somewhat precisely per the numbers that Brandon's mentioned which are not that big, they're like kind of almost in the noise if you don't have a good way to track it or a good coach to work with, you might fall behind on the intake needs. It happens all the time. Right when you plateau going up because you're not sort of staying ahead of that with your intake, I'll get clients who say why am I feeling hungry? I'm like that's probably your body telling you you are under-resourced right now and that metabolism is cranking up. Maybe, maybe not right, could be cravings, could be other things, and so that comes to mind.
Philip Pape: 27:43
And then hitting on the actual numbers, how do you even measure all this? This goes back to something we talked about on your podcast with body fat and lean mass. I think it could be very helpful to have your measurements, have your strength numbers. Understand there's also a difference between strength and hypertrophy, depending on how experienced you are.
Philip Pape: 27:57
If you're a novice, you're going to get a lot of that neuromuscular adaptation. Your numbers are going to go shooting up, but you're not going to see anything visible for a while. You're just not, and that's okay. So you're going to have to be patient with it. If you're more advanced, you kind of know what to look for. So I think that kind of puts it all together and then be patient but also be ready to say when you've hit the goal you want to hit, because it's kind of an art, not all, not just the science. Right, you might say it's six months, and then you know you get to six months and everything's feeling great and the numbers are moving and you really don't notice too much extra body fat. There's nothing preventing you from continuing. You know you could, you could, you could train and gain for a long time if it's right for you. So, all right, I guess we beat that one to death. Right, that's a good one.
Brandon DaCruz: 28:37
Hell yeah.
Philip Pape: 28:37
All right. So question number four is about home gym equipment. I love this one. What's the best use of space for a small home gym, free weights or machine like the total gym? Am I taking this one first?
Brandon DaCruz: 28:49
Yes, you are. You're going to be definitely going to be the expert, because I have only trained in a home gym during one period of my life.
Philip Pape: 28:55
You know what A home gym is. What got me where I am right now? Because back during the pandemic, everything shut down. I didn't have anything and I had to hustle on Craigslist and Facebook to get a rack and a bar and around that time I was reading the muscle and strength pyramids and starting strength and all of that. So, look, it's all going to depend on what your goal is, how you want to train, how much you're willing to invest in the space and all that. However, I think people make excuses on this a little bit, in that if you give me your footprint, if you send me your blueprint of your room, I could probably fit a power rack in there. Almost always, even a tiny room, I mean there's exceptions. You also have to consider the ceiling clearance right. If you're in a basement, you're not going to be able to necessarily do overhead presses with a seven foot high basement. So I think the best use of space to me is the one that's going to be give you sustainability for growth. We talk about progressive overload. If you invest a ton in equipment that is going to seal, you know, hit a ceiling, within six months or a year you're going. You might regret that decision. So I would think carefully about what's going to allow you to have longevity.
Philip Pape: 29:55
For me, a home gym is one of the biggest hacks for people who are busy. It's not for everybody. Not everybody can afford it or have the space. Some people like to go to commercial gyms for a lot of reasons the plethora of crazy equipment. They have right, lots and lots of equipment, the camaraderie, the community, the music, whatever.
Philip Pape: 30:13
But think of the pros and cons here, of you save on your commute, you have a lot of convenience. You can do some clever things like two days, you know, very tiny sessions, exercise, snacks, all that fun stuff that I'm doing, and you could do rehab, you could do therapy. It gives you a lot more options when you're at home. So, long story short, what's the best use of small space? I would see if you could fit a rack or free weights as the foundation. That is my opinion. But I have clients who have a tonal. I have clients who have Bowflex and it can work, but it tends to you know, it tends to like top out at some point and it's kind of weird to be able to do all the potential training you want to do. So I'm going to start there, brandon, and curious on your thoughts.
Brandon DaCruz: 30:52
Perfect. Yeah, I definitely agree with the power rack and then some additional equipment pieces, but I think that it's very important to really get down to the brass tacks and really realize that this is going to depend on your goals, your experience level, your budget and then how much you prioritize space efficiency versus exercise variety and I say the latter because I work with a lot of intermediate to advanced trainees that are trying to get to that next level, and so a lot of times we are trying to bias certain regions of a muscle group and I'm not saying they're beyond compound basic lifts but we need a little bit more variety, we need a little bit more equipment accessibility. So you hit on things that I would say for the general person a hundred percent and I'll take this more maybe from the clientele that I work with and maybe some of the home gyms that I've built out. What I found to work best for clients that train at home, especially when I'm walking them through the process of, hey, we're going to build out a gym. This is a lot of people that come to work with me. They are very they're high achievers or high performers and whether they're a high and, you know, bought into the process than your average gym goer.
Brandon DaCruz: 31:58
To be honest with you, and so often what I do is I recommend a hybrid approach, and what I mean by that is I want to combine free weights and then a multi hybrid rack or like cable season. And the one I like most and I recommend clients to get a lot is one of the prime prodigy racks. They have a full series of them and so, like one of the constructions that actually looked into some of my client programs to see, like some of the setups that I've given them, one of the ones that has worked really well that is really good for a small space Like I have. Some people with a one car garage or one room of their basement is to combine adjustable dumbbells, which you can fit into tight spaces, which is also going to replace multiple pairs, and then a prime prodigy rack which, if you guys aren't familiar with that, it has a squat rack in it. It has a dual high and low cable pulley system in a single unit and also has a pull-up bar, and so if you get a barbell and then you get an adjustable bench, you literally have everything that you need and you can do almost every both free weight and cable-based exercise you could think of.
Brandon DaCruz: 32:58
You could do flies, you could do, you know, lengthen partially all these different things cable pull-downs, all these different exercises, both for the upper and lower body, and it's not small by any means, but it has a good footprint for as much of its delivering. So you can have a squat rack, you can do your compound basic, you know multi-joint movements but then you can also do other movements that you wouldn't be able to do if you only had free weights and you also wouldn't have the same resistance profile. So one thing that I really like to do this for is a lot of like cable lateral work and I'll do it in, you know, really be able to get into a lengthened position, because if you are only using something like a dumbbell, you're only going to have short overload at the top of the movement. So these are just a little more advanced and maybe a little bit more intricate strategies, but I think either way that you would go.
Brandon DaCruz: 33:40
If you are someone that's willing to invest into your health, your fitness, your body composition and build a gym in your home, I commend you. So any way that you could start off work. But if you're trying to get into a little bit more of the nuances of things. I think that would be the direction that I would suggest or, you know, head you in.
Philip Pape: 33:58
This is why I think you're such a great communicator, right, because you laid out the actual product, the products and the specific things. It's funny you mentioned the Prime Prodigy because there's a really cheap rack on Amazon by Fitness Reality. It's been around for maybe eight years. I've told tons of people about it just because it's so inexpensive for the budget. It's like $400 and it has a an optional lat pull down, full up and down cable attachment and the bar built in. But there was a funny Amazon or a funny YouTube video about it, cause it was my first rack that I ever had and it said watch how this cheap rack handles 700 pounds. And I thought it was going to implode. They basically loaded a racks up high with a bar weighted with 700 pounds and the guy just dumped it onto the spotter arms and in slow motion. You're like, oh no, this thing's going to collapse. And it just bounced gently up and they're like this is a good rack. You know what I'm like. Okay, I feel I feel good recommending that to people.
Brandon DaCruz: 34:48
Yeah.
Philip Pape: 34:48
It's steel, right, it's. It's two by two, it's not three by three, but it's steel. So I love that idea. And the adjustable bent dumbbells too. You know, I know there's the power, the power blocks and Bowflex might still make theirs. Occasionally, walmart might even have something that comes through. It doesn't matter, I mean. So what I wanted to add to that was microplates. Right, having microplates for both the barbell and the dumbbells is helpful, because people say how do I, how do I go up by five pounds on my dumbbell from 15 to 20? I can't do it. Microplates are really helpful.
Philip Pape: 35:16
And then, when you are trying to be efficient with space, you alluded to multi-use A leg developer at the end of an adjustable bench. You can find that is really helpful for leg curls and extensions. It's all plate loaded. All my stuff is plate loaded, just because that is how they sell it. And then a pec deck, reverse fly. So anything that could do three or two or three things is a great idea. So awesome, I love it. Good stuff, man, perfect. Want to go to the next one, absolutely Okay.
Jerry: 35:42
Hey, just wanted to give a shout out to Phillip. I personally worked with Phillip for about eight months and I lost a total of 33 pounds of scale weight and about five inches off my waist. Two things I really enjoy about working with Philip is number one. He's really taken the time to develop a deep expertise in nutrition and also resistance training, so he has that depth.
Jerry: 36:05
If you want to go deep on the lies with Philip, but also if you want to just kind of get some instruction and more practical advice and a plan on what you need to do, you can pull back and communicate at that level. Also, he is a lifter himself, so he's very familiar with the performance and body composition goals that most lifters have. And also Philip is trained in engineering, so he has some very efficient systems set up to make the coaching experience very easy and very efficient and you can really track your results and you will have real data when you're done working with Philip and also have access to some tools likely that you can continue to use. If all that sounds interesting to you, philip, like all good coaches, has a ton of free information out there and really encourage you to see if he may be able to help you out. So thanks again, philip. Really encourage you to see, if he may be able to help you out.
Philip Pape: 36:56
So thanks again, philip. Actually this is the last question. So diet fatigue you get to answer this one first. What nutritional training or lifestyle changes do you make when someone's dealing with diet fatigue?
Brandon DaCruz: 37:10
All right. So I have taken a lot of clients through fat loss phases. So I've experienced and encountered a lot of diet fatigue and really, if you are someone that is unfamiliar with the concept, it's just the fatigue, both mental and physical, that can accumulate across the course of a fat loss phase. And really, when I encounter this or I see a client that is dealing with this and it's starting to come across in their check-ins and their biofeedback, even in their photos, sometimes I'm a big fan of pulling back to be able to push forward, and that's actually an expression that I use with my clients. I have a push and pull method. So there are times that I'm pushing them towards fat loss, where we're driving greater body composition change, and then there's times that I'm pulling back and dissipating fatigue. And I see this very specifically because the clients that I work with are high performers and they're also those types of individuals that they were buried themselves if I wasn't there, and so it's not always about pushing harder. You know, I like to take what I call a systems-based approach that supports both someone's physiology and their psychology and that's going to utilize all three of these interventions. So this was a great question that they're looking at nutrition. You know training and lifestyle. So on the nutrition side, I will usually start with refeeds and high days. But if a client is deep into a dieting phase and their biofeedback is showing signs such as heightened hunger, low mood, elevated stress, even some water retention like you're getting some edema from just very high stress levels and potentially from cortisol I'll often implement what I refer to as a deficit deload and that's essentially a four to seven day diet break where I raise calories back to maintenance or even slightly above, and I would rather overshoot it than undershoot it. I'm really trying to use this as a restorative break to lower their perceived exertion, both physically and mentally, their perception of restriction. So I'm trying to get them more into a mindset of flexible eating, flexible eating control or flexible eating attitudes, rather than rigid restriction. I'm trying to reduce stress and I want to reset them before the next fat loss phase block and so during a dusty deload, like I said, I'm going to bring calories back to maintenance or above and we're really focusing on high satiety whole food meals to support appetite and micronutrient needs. Because if your biggest piece of feedback that is indicating diet fatigue, besides the mental stress of it all is that you have very heightened hunger.
Brandon DaCruz: 39:16
A lot of times people kind of I don't want to say blow it, but they almost don't take advantage of the deficit deload or some people would term that a diet break. They start eating hyper-platable foods, they start having fun foods and things that are going to drive generally passive overconsumption. So sometimes they'll overshoot their calories but they actually didn't get a satiety benefit. And one of the biggest mistakes I see with clientele, or that I've seen just in other applications, is where someone takes the same amount of calories that they have and they increase them. So say they were dieting on 2000 calories and they were in a 500 calorie deficit, so we brought them to 2,500 calories. But they brought that 2000 calorie diet that was mostly made of whole, satiating, micronutrient dense foods. They bring 20, bring it up to 2,500 calories but they eliminate a lot of the satiating food sources that they had that were helping with satiety appetite regulation. They they, you know swap it with with fun food, which is great from a pleasure perspective, but now you're not actually getting the appetite regulating. You know effects. You're not getting the micronutrients that are going to help with you know hormonal status and mood and neurotransmitter secretion, and so that is something that I really try to be very consistent and very deliberate with the food sources I use. And I found that by inserting a deficit deload before clients hit a wall, they're able to come back refresh, refocus and ready to make better body composition progress, going forward without burning out.
Brandon DaCruz: 40:29
Then, from a training perspective, I'll usually pull, you know, auto-regulation strategies, because a lot of times people who love lifting they forget that in a deficit. You know, lifting and training is another stress, it's another stimulus, but it's not another stress. So if I see biofeedback is starting to suffer, this could be things like poor sleep, nagging, soreness, or like joint aches and pains, what I would refer to as the niggles. I'll auto-regulate intensity by raising RRR. So I'm going to take them, say, if they're training zero reps in reserve, we might go between two and four. I'm going to reduce their total training volume and then I program a deload week. Now the goal of the deload is not to push performance, it's dissipate the accumulated fatigue, both physically and mentally.
Brandon DaCruz: 41:08
Another component of deloading that I really like to do is to make their sessions more time efficient, because I want to give that client more time back in their day and then I specifically direct them. It's going to depend on the client and how well I know them or what things work best for them, but I encourage them to use recovery promoting strategies so that can be extra sleep, that could be a nap. For some that's yoga, A lot of times it's meditation, or with a lot of people it's just like take time off your feet, watch a movie, just relax. You don't always have to feel like you have to be hyperproductive and really what I'm trying to do is shift them from that sympathetic state into a parasympathetic state. Then, from a lifestyle perspective, I like to realize that this is a total accumulation. We have to look at stress. It's your total allostatic load, which means your stress accumulates into one stress bucket. We cannot separate these. You don't have training stress in one bucket, lifestyle stress in another and nutrition stress in the other. It is all going into one bucket that oftentimes is overflowing. So oftentimes I'm going to lean into recovery-based strategies.
Brandon DaCruz: 42:04
So one of the ones that I use most frequently is meditation. So I had mentioned previously that I recommend an app called the Insight Timer and I like to help clients utilize that, especially at night, but also midday, if they find a stressful part of their day. We kind of schedule this based off like what is this highest stress portions of your day? When are you feeling anxiety, stress rumination, things like that. But meditation has so many benefits from a mindfulness perspective, from a psychological perspective just stress reduction, anxiety reduction, and so that's something that I personally have been practicing meditation for 15 years and I got away from it, and this past year I've dedicated at least 30 minutes a day towards meditation and it's just had such a profound impact on my life and quality of life specifically that I find that integrating with clients I could speak from experience and then also it's been very helpful. Other things I really like to do is having them go for walks in nature, and the reason for that I like to combine two things. Walking is just a great activity in general, especially for your health, but specifically when you do it around greenery, it helps to lower cortisol and improve mood, and there's a lot of research that backs that.
Brandon DaCruz: 43:03
Another thing I really do with a lot of women that I work with specifically is self-care days. I find that I work with a lot of like busy mothers that they're always doing for others, so all day they're working like a high level corporate job and they're attending to their boss's needs or their client's needs or whatever it may be. Then they go home, they're attending to the kids, and then the big kid which is their husband, and so all day everything is about other people and they really take on that maternal role, which I love, but at the same time there isn't enough time where they're just introspectively, you know, kind of looking into themselves and saying what do I need? So a lot of times what I'll assign is like a spa day or a day to get their nails done or a massage, or even just a weekly you know, weekend family outing, and I do it specifically as part of their programming. So I actually build this into their program.
Brandon DaCruz: 43:44
And I do that because when clients feel permission to recover and to pull back, they see recovery as part of their plan and it shifts their mindset from I'm failing or I shouldn't be doing this or I need to be more productive, to I'm succeeding and going to do better by taking care of myself, and Brandon told me to do so. So it's almost like I don't want to say I'm giving them permission, because that's not what it is, but I'm kind of just encouraging them and I'm specifically putting in the plan. The plan and a lot of the people I work with are just executors and so by me incorporating this into actually something that's scheduled, I build out different programs for individuals, but when they receive their nutrition program, it's not just a nutrition plan, it's not just a meal plan. It is a nutrition and lifestyle plan. So there are modifications on a weekly basis going to any categories that fall within that, and that's been very helpful for the clients that I work with. So that's what I would suggest.
Philip Pape: 44:28
It's a lot, man. I mean that in a good way. There's a lot of hacks in there and a lot of principles. I'm not going to repeat everything you had. I want to touch on a couple of them and then add things you didn't already recover, which is a challenge, brandon, because you covered so many good things.
Philip Pape: 44:39
The deficit deload you mentioned overshooting. My listeners need to hear this because you guys you hear me talk all the time about, like, when I go to maintenance, when I want you to go to maintenance to kind of really push it and make sure you're truly at maintenance, otherwise you don't get that full benefit and I think that's really fun. And then you tied to what we talked about in the bulking question about not biasing your food toward the fun food, because then it kind of throws the other phases off. I think that's just a. If you think of your whole periodization strategy gaining, losing, sustaining as having these principles, you're going to be good right, because that's thinking over the long game. The macro rather than just this, is an extreme thing I'm doing right now. The satiety by the way, guys, check out the other podcast, chasing Clarity, because we talked a lot about that if you want details on that.
Philip Pape: 45:21
And then you said allostatic load. Sometimes I call that the metabolic stack. It's like here are the 20 things that are adding up in your life that could affect your stress and your metabolism and everything else. Where's the low hanging fruit? So you mentioned relaxation days as well as building them in. I'm going to add to that and say, yes, you have permission to do whatever the heck you makes you relax. If I want to play video games and shoot people in my video games and that relaxes me, I'm going to do that and you're not going to judge me and then also take like a four day vacation. I mean, this is the thing I've been recommending more to people is we get in a mindset of you know we're disciplined, we've got our routine, we've got our training program. Yes, we might have D loads. Is it okay to maybe take almost a week off? Maybe? I mean some people might need that, right, brandon? I mean some people need that, need that, right, brandon? I mean some people need that. I know somebody, one of my clients.
Philip Pape: 46:12
She works in the news industry man Talk about stress these days with everything happening in the news, you know so she just she just needs to take some time off and just literally do nothing for a few days. So I'm going to add to some of what you said. First, you mentioned a few of the signs of diet fatigue. I think it's important that we are tracking what's important to us so that we can recognize those signs not just subjectively but somewhat objectively, like on a rating scale or something like that. What you mentioned the hunger, the irritability, even the decline or plateauing in your strength, right, because strength and muscle, kind of, are at different timelines. If you will we talked about that earlier If you're food obsessed, if you are having trouble sleeping, a lot of those things are good signs. And then you mentioned nonlinear dieting quite a bit.
Philip Pape: 46:54
I'll say one of my favorite strategies is just the weekend refeed, right, because almost everybody has the weekend is special versus the week generally. But if your week looks different because you have shift work or your weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday, think about a weekly lifestyle that you have and align your food with that. It would be a lot easier. As well as the macro timeline of travel, right? Don't maybe you shouldn't be dieting when you travel. That's a great time to take your break and a great time to take your deload or break from training. As far as training goes, some things I've found work really well when you go to a fat loss phase, prepare for that phase with how you're going to train. Are you going to continue how you're training now? Does it make sense, or are we going to go to a new program? And this is a great time to evaluate the days per week. You know if you were doing four or five, maybe you're better off with three because you get more sleep days. Maybe, as it happened to me at one time during fat loss, I was better off with six very short sessions because it was recoverable. So think about recovery versus stress.
Philip Pape: 47:50
The second thing about training I like is auto-regulated programs as opposed to pushing your numbers programs. Right, I got a lot of guys in our community who love to push their lifts. They like PRs. You're not going to be chasing those during fat loss, most likely. And so what's an alternative? Well, rep range style programs, hypertrophy and bodybuilding style conjugate, like there's a lot of options that allow you to, on the given day, train, you know, out or near failure, whatever makes sense, without necessarily pushing your numbers, and then fatigue can really build up during fat loss if you're not careful. So tracking those sore spots, those hotspots, maybe joint connected tissue, low back fatigue, those kinds of things, measuring your soreness and energy as you go along and kind of seeing like, is that tied to your overall allostatic load and your recovery stack, can be very helpful. So I think that's all I wanted to say.
Brandon DaCruz: 48:40
Awesome. I do want to hit on something. You did mention the potential performance decrements that could be experienced in a phallus phase. I do think that it's important that you go in with a mindset of progression. What I mean by that is you should be going to try to lift more, whether that be from a rep or load perspective, especially in that initial phase, or that initial, you know, say first few weeks of a thalos phase.
Brandon DaCruz: 49:00
A lot of people they go in one of two directions. The one direction is it's almost a scarcity and fragility type of perspective where all of a sudden I've been into deficit. I've had clients that have emailed me two days into a 300 calorie deficit, which is a very modest deficit, and they might've been in a 10% calorie deficit and they've already told me. I think you know performance has dropped and it's just been a psychological thing. Our psychology has a massive impact on our physiology and it's very important to realize that. But at the same time I have the opposite end of the spectrum very advanced trainees that they want to continue making gains as they had been in a building phase and I've pushed their calories up quite high. Their training volume is in a good place in terms of their recovery ability, their volume capacity, their work capacity. And then all of a sudden they start seeing some loss of a rep here or there or they can't lift the same loads, and it's very important to realize that that is a natural and normal part of fat loss. We have to think about it from even just some biomechanics or a leveraging perspective. So say, for instance, the biggest example that I see and I just had this conversation with a client named Mark just a few days ago. He is a very advanced trainee. He's been a natural pro bodybuilder and he no longer competes, but he's still I mean, his physique is at such a greater level now that it was even when he competed. So he is an outlier, to say the least. But this past off season we did an eight month building phase leading into the current fat loss phase we're in. He hit his all time greatest strength, greatest strength numbers, greatest performance, I mean from a load and a rep volume perspective. He was off the charts and I've been training him for two and a half years so I'm able to compare really things over time and we were able to get to body weight high. That was the same as we did the last building phase, which was over a year ago, but his performance blew it out of the water. So it was just very good nutritional periodization plus training programming, matching everything together but this just recently reached out to me that his performance is dropping. Now we're 10 weeks until fat loss phase.
Brandon DaCruz: 50:46
This dude is around 7% body fat and so he's very, very lean. And what I had to explain to him is Mark, you're not only down 16 pounds as compared to where you were in the building phase, but you have lost some of your leverage. So, specifically, what he was noticing is, on his barbell incline press, he was unable to lift the same loads or he was missing like a rep or two, which still, when I broke it down from a body weight perspective, in terms of body weight towards body, you know the actual lifting, you know the actual way he was lifting. He was stronger, pound for pound. However, I've explained to him the fact that when you lose fat, you don't indiscriminately lose fat. You lose fat from your entire body. So, in terms of a pressing movement especially, you have to realize you've lost fat off your back and then also off your chest. So, technically, if you were doing the same amount of weight, you would actually be lifting more because of the fact that now it's a longer range of motion that you have to go through to get the same If you were going quote unquote full range of motion. In terms of your technique and execution, your range of motion has now been extended. So say you lost an inch off your back, an inch off your chest, just from a body fat perspective. You now have two more inches to cover with that same load. So it's not reasonable to think that you won't be able to maintain that.
Brandon DaCruz: 51:54
So you have to realize that there's many inputs that are causing potential decrements in your actual training performance. The one is that you're losing body fat, so you're a smaller individual. Your mechanics might change. It might be harder to brace certain lifts. Most times people will notice that things like their presses, some of their pulls they'll be most impacted. Then, secondarily, you have to realize that the acute energy deficit that you're in is impacting the substrates that you have available to fuel actual training performance. Now that could inhibit some motor unit recruitment or even just a recovery capacity. So now you have depleted glycogen stores, you have less actual fullness in your muscles, so that's also going to interrupt your ability to contract muscle or even go through the range of motion in the same capacity, have the same force or muscle output that you would have if you were in a full-on surplus or building phase. So there's many things. I think that we have to be a little bit more aware of these things and realize all right, I want to go in with the mindset I'm going to keep progressing, especially in that beginning. But if I start seeing things falling by the wayside I'm not saying falling in terms of like a rep or two here or there and you're deep into a fallacy realize that's par for the course. We can make adjustments to try to alleviate that, whether it be a volume reduction or intensity reduction. We're really focusing on a different rep range.
Brandon DaCruz: 53:04
I often find that it's advantageous to shift rep ranges during a fat loss phase. With some of my clientele I actually will shift them down in rep ranges rather than most people will shift things up. I actually want them to maintain that top end strength as much as possible. So I'm trying to have them feel those same loads from a neuromuscular perspective. So say, for instance, they were lifting a specific weight for six to eight reps. I might downshift that to five to seven reps during a fat loss phase, or four to six reps. I'm still going to stay within that hypertrophy zone, but I want them to feel those lifts. So it's still familiar, they still have confidence. They just may be doing, you know, say it was 300 pounds on bench. They may be doing that for three sets of four to five rather than three sets of six to seven, and so these are just different adjustments we can make. But there's also a mindset and a mental perspective you need to bring to your fat loss phases from a training perspective. That's very important.
Philip Pape: 53:50
I agree. Act as if you're building strength and muscle. Don't let it hold you back. Don't assume failure. The relative strength also often increases, and so that's kind of a fun metric.
Brandon DaCruz: 53:59
I think it's like a Wilkes score they call it.
Philip Pape: 54:00
The Wilkes score. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Right. And you mentioned lower rep range. I really do love that, because that's another misconception. Right Is is that you need more volume or more reps, or you're trying to burn fat. I do love top set back offset for people in fat loss and and only doing two sets for some people, cause it's a good way to save time sometimes and keep that top end intensity on that first step, then get the volume in on the second. That's just a little aside of something I'm in love with these days.
Philip Pape: 54:23
I think we covered it at all, didn't we? I think so, my friend. Yeah, All right. So some of the you know these were some fantastic questions and they're only some of the ones we're answering for you guys, so I want you to go catch the rest of them that we covered Appetite hunger, a whole bunch of topics on chasing clarity and, yeah, we covered four questions on there. So go follow chasing clarity, your podcast app. Check out Brandon and I over there. It's in your feed right now. Use it's in your feed right now. Use the link in the show notes. We're going to see you over there, Brandon. Thanks, brother, for doing this, for setting it up. I really, really appreciate it.
Brandon DaCruz: 54:52
Absolutely, philip, I want to say thank you not only for joining me but also for having me on, and I really hope that everyone out in both our audiences really values the evidence-based information that we brought, and I was really glad that we were unite and really benefit both our audiences in the process.
Philip Pape: 55:18
Yeah, and I always benefit personally too, man, from talking to you too and learning and growing along with the audience. So again, thanks again.
Brandon DaCruz: 55:24
Absolutely Bye.
