Lose Weight Through PMS, Your Cycle, and Even Perimenopause | Ep 450

You're tracking your food, hitting the gym, doing everything right. Then your period shows up and the scale jumps 3 pounds overnight.

Should you "cycle sync" your diet? Should you just ignore it as "water weight" fluctuations? Or are both approaches missing what works?

This episode covers why weight loss stalls around your cycle and what to do about it, whether your periods are predictable or all over the place.

You'll hear the actual research on how much water weight your cycle adds (it's less than you've been told), why cycle syncing your nutrition and training has almost support in the research, and what happens psychologically when you see the scale spike during PMS. 

The real problem isn't the water weight. It's that misleading scale data during your most emotionally reactive window triggers the exact behaviors that stall fat loss. 

The fix is a measurement system that filters hormonal noise and a simple nutrition shift that works with your biology instead of against it. If you're over 40, in perimenopause, or dealing with unpredictable cycles, you'll learn why the standard advice won't work and what to do instead.

Join the Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist to get first access and founder pricing on a 26-week coached program that integrates strength training and nutrition coaching together, with hormonal pattern awareness built into the curriculum: witsandweights.com/eatmore

Timestamps

0:00 - The cycle, PMS, and weight loss question
2:56 - Two bad advice camps
5:56 - How scale fluctuations change your behavior
8:24 - Evidence regarding weight fluctuations
12:20 - Hormones, metabolism, and cycle syncing
16:56 - Does cycle syncing work (for training or nutrition)?
19:22 - Perimenopause and the measurement fix
25:11 - Phase tracking and the nutrition fix
33:42 - How to structure your diet and training
36:38 - Bonus: one-meal craving strategy

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  Ladies, I've been getting a lot of questions about whether you should cycle sync your diet or training and how to deal with your period and PMS when it comes to things like cravings and hunger when you're trying to lose fat. I've also heard, hey, I get a lot of fluctuations in the scale due to water weight and maybe some other things. Today, I'm covering the real numbers behind cycle-related weight swings. Why cycle sinking has almost no real-world evidence in the literature, and a measurement and nutrition framework that does work, whether your cycle is predictable or completely all over the place. And if you're in perimenopause, that last part is for you. Your menstrual cycle, your weight, and how to actually lose fat when your body seems to be working against you every few weeks. Now, I'm recording this because over half the women I work with report hormonal concerns as a major barrier to seeing results. And the advice that they've gotten falls into two camps, both of which are woefully incomplete. And we're gonna fix that today on Wits and Weights. Stick around to the very end because after the episode wraps up, I'm going to share a one meal change that can blunt your cravings before they start, whether it's from PMS, a bad sleep night, or just a high stress day. It takes five minutes, and the physiology behind it is surprisingly clean. In this episode, you will learn the actual magnitude of cycle-related weight fluctuations. Spoiler alert, it's probably less than you think. Why cycle sinking has almost no clinical trial support and it falls apart entirely in perimenopause, and a measurement plus nutrition framework that you can start using this week that filters out some of that hormonal noise from the real fat loss progress. So let's get into it. And if you are a woman who tracks her weight, and by the way, if men, you guys are listening to this, it really helps us as guys to understand women and the plight of hormones and perimenopause, because there's a lot going on there. And the medical industry and the women's health domain is very incomplete at this point. So the more we can learn, the better. To support our ladies, our wives, our clients, our friends, anybody who needs support, who's asking for support. And one thing as a man I know is to not try to fix things unless asked. And the first thing you

  Philip Pape: 02:56

  always want to do is listen. I hope I have that right. So if you're a woman who tracks her weight and you've noticed that it jumps around a lot during your period or around your period, you've probably gotten some different pieces of advice. And I'm gonna guess that it's one of two things, especially. The first one is around cycle syncing. There's so much marketing around cycle syncing, everything. All right, eat more carbs in your follicular phase, cut back in your luteal phase, train harder in the first half of your cycle, go lighter in the second half. There's actually apps for this, there's courses for this, entire Instagram accounts built around color-coded phase charts. And I get the appeal as a numbers guy, even though I don't have a period myself, but it feels like you're finally, you know, working with your body. That's what we talk about here, right? It's like, okay, listen to the signals and individualize it, personalize it, and work with your body. The problem is the evidence doesn't necessarily support it, and we're gonna come back to that in a minute. Option two, the other thing they say is, you know what, you just gotta be patient, ladies. It's it's your water weight, it'll pass. I mean, I I've said that to some extent to folks that, like, hey, if you have a 10-pound weight that goes up and down 10 pounds and you've been stuck in that range, how much of that is water weight could be a lot of it. I don't know for sure until I know you and your patterns and what's happening. But to just be told or gaslit and said, like, well, it is just water and don't worry about the rest, it although technically true, someone telling you, hey, just ignore it without having a framework for what to do instead, so that you can track the right things, such as, hey, let's track your actual trends over time month over month, and maybe compare your different cycle phases to each other to actually get rid of that noise. Then that's like someone telling someone, you know, just live with it. That is what it is. I can't actually help you, right? And so both of these approaches, you know, like hey, cycle sync everything or don't worry about it, are obviously a failed approach because they treat the cycle as the problem to solve. Either you micromanage it or you dismiss it. And by doing that, you're not addressing the real issue. You're not addressing it, which is that most women don't have a system in place for distinguishing the hormonal noise, I'll call it, from say actual fat loss or fat gain signals. And honestly, most men don't have one either. This is definitely not a gender thing. This is a most people don't have a system, and every spike in the scale, every jump in the scale becomes an emotional event. Do you feel me? How does that hit you? Okay. And then every time you have a plateau like weight loss resistance, it feels like this permanent thing, and you can never get out of that cycle, and you know, I'm broken or I don't know what to do going forward, and I it's just not gonna work for me. Okay. And there's different flavors of that. The research shows us what happens next. What happens next in this

  Philip Pape: 05:56

  situation? A 2024 study tracked 50 women in a weight loss program, and they used daily assessments. On the days when participants saw the scale go up, they reported guess what? More guilt, more shame, lower confidence. They were less likely to track their food or to exercise that day. And essentially the behavioral response was immediate. And then there was a separate analysis of the data that found that after a full week of weight regain, participants successfully lost weight the following week only 5% of the time. Five percent of the time. So this is what we talked about in the last episode, the what the hell effect in action. Psychologists call it the abstinence violation effect. The abstinence violation effect. When you perceive that you've broken your rules or you've lost your progress, you don't only feel bad about it, you also disengage. You stop doing the things that were working. Now, here's what matters the most for today's episode. The late luteal phase, the week or so before your period, is when the scale weight is most likely to spike up, to jump from that fluid retention. However, it's also when emotional eating vulnerability hit its peak hits its peak. In other words, you are most likely to eat emotionally while you're also most likely to gain weight from fluid. Kind of stinks, right? There was a twin study of 460 women, so twins, they looked at twins, and they found that genetic influences on emotional eating were twice as high after ovulation compared to before. So you're looking at a window where the scale is least reliable, and at the same time, your psychological response to it is most reactive. And that combination is what often derails the fat loss. So I didn't even realize this powerful connection until I looked into the research for this episode. And the reason I looked into this research is because I hear this challenge all the time, literally every day with our clients and in our community, and I want to help. And this is how we're gonna do it. And so today's kind of the framework for that. Obviously, in our programs, we dive deep and actually figure it out for you as an individual. But that combination

  Philip Pape: 08:24

  is a big challenge. And it's so so it's not the water weight itself, it's not your hormones, it's the interaction between misleading data and this heightened emotional reaction. So that's the real problem we're gonna solve today, right? Not how to hack your cycle, not how to hack your cycle because the evidence doesn't say that that's something that you should even try to do. But how to stop your cycle from hacking your behavior. Ooh, mic drop. Okay, so we're not gonna hack your cycle. Your cycle's not the problem. You're not the problem. It's how do we stop your cycle from interfering with your behavior? Okay, so let's talk about what the research actually shows is happening to your weight across your cycle. Because the numbers matter, they matter. You know how much I love numbers and data and math, and it helps to understand this context. The most commonly cited figure is three to five pounds of water weight. And you'll see that everywhere for some women who have, I'll say, clinically significant PMS, that is very accurate. But the best prospective data actually tells something different. So stick with me. A 2023 study looked at 42 women twice a week. They use bioelectrical impedance across full menstrual cycles. That's kind of the uh body fat scale, like the in-body. Okay. And the average weight increase during menstruation was 0.45 kilograms. So I'm switching between metric and imperial because it was reported in kilograms. So 0.45 kilograms is about one pound, and it was almost entirely accounted for by a 0.47 kilogram increase in extracellular water. So there was no change in fat mass or lean mass and no change in body circumferences. So it was about one pound. That's like the median, not three to five pounds, even though we talk about that a lot. Even I've used numbers like, yeah, two to five. I usually say two to five because I'm a little bit more conservative. So fortunately, the two is closer to one, and one's the median. Now, does the range go higher? Of course it does. Women, like I said, women with significant PMS symptoms can retain two to three kilograms, which is five to six pounds. So that's a real thing, it's a real phenomenon. We have to acknowledge that. This is the this is the problem between population averages and individuals with certain use cases. And there could be a lot of people that fall into that latter category for sure, but you have to, you have to, when you're looking at studies, you have to compare what's being studied and what population is being looked at and don't make assumptions. So the population average is much smaller than the internet is saying, basically. And if we conflate the PMS subgroup with all women, I think that creates a lot of panic for people that just unnecessary. So this is where the nuance comes into play. So that's the pounds. Okay, so it's usually like one pound, but it could go as high as five to six if you have significant PMS symptoms. The timing is also different from what a lot of people assume. So there was a study that tracks 62 women across 765 menstrual cycles, and they found that fluid retention actually peaks on day one of menstrual flow, not during the luteal phase. The mid-follicular phase, which is about days seven through 10, shows the lowest retention of fluid. So the lowest noise, I'll call it the lowest noise window for weighing yourself is about a week after your period starts, not right after it ends. You may want to go back and listen to what I just said just to get all that. Okay, but it it it's different than what some people assume. Now, the hormonal mechanisms underneath all this are worth understanding as well because they explain why this isn't just something you can supplement

  Philip Pape: 12:20

  away. There's so much misinformation about supplements for all this stuff, hormonal support and all that. Estrogen lowers the threshold for your body to release anti-diuretic hormone. So you hold on to water at a lower set point, right? That means you're you're more prone to hold on to more water. Progesterone initially promotes sodium excretion, which you would think would help. But guess what happens? The body loves homeostasis. So when you have more, when you're excreting more sodium, it triggers a compensatory response from the renin angiotensin aldosterone system. I had to write that down because I would not remember it. The renin or renin and angiotensin aldosterone system. And that overshoots and increases your water retention. And by the way, this is what happens a lot when you're dehydrated or when you drink too much alcohol and you get dehydrated, your body compensates by actually retaining more water. And so that's why sometimes people see a big uh jump in the scale, like a day or two after they drink a lot, even though they were dehydrated because the body compensates with water retention. So this is happening hormonally with women. One study actually showed progesterone drives a nearly three times increase in aldosterone production just by itself. So your body is always trying to manage the fluid balance, trying to keep things in balance, and it is doing it in response to these reproductive hormones that are wildly changing every few days because of your cycle. And so there's really no supplement or even food timing strategy that can like override that. It's going to happen. The question is, to what extent does it happen for you? Now, what about metabolism? Let's talk metabolism. Does your metabolic rate actually go up in the luteal phase? Yes, it does. Sort of. A meta-analysis of 30 studies found a small increase that favored higher RMR, that's resting metabolic rate, in the luteal phase. But when they restricted the analysis to studies only published in the last 25 years with better methodology, the effect became not statistically significant. Okay. This is why we have to be careful how we reference the studies. So a more realistic estimate of metabolic rate going up during the luteal phase is probably about 100 extra calories a day on average. And that's about 1,400 calories across a 14-day luteal phase, which is the energy equivalent of 0.4 pounds of fat. So it's not nothing, it exists, but it's not like 300 calories a day, you know, which would be three times that amount. And you're like, oh, that's why I gain a pound of fat every month. No. But but it's not nothing. So again, I don't want to gaslight any of this stuff. I want to approach it with some nuance. And honestly, this is where this whole cycle sinking pitch starts to fall apart. I mean, it starts to fall apart. There's a lot of other ways that it falls apart. Because the premise is that your metabolism and your physiology shift enough between phases to justify different eating and training protocols. But if in reality the metabolic difference is small and the weight, the fluid retention differences are actually rather small, then the case for restructuring your entire nutrition plan around it really gets pretty thin. So I want to put this cycle sinking under the microscope even more directly. That's what we do here, right? We put these things under the microscope and see what makes sense. Let's talk about training first. The claim is that, okay, you should train harder during the follicular phase, your estrogen is higher, and then back off during the luteal phase. And there's two studies that seem to support this. One is from 2014, looked at 20 women, and it assumed every participant had a 28-day cycle with ovulation on day 14, which is one of the problems. Lauren Calenzo Semple talks about that a lot, is like these assumptions that everyone's the same, and then it totally waters down the data, if you will. And they verified the cycle phase, but only with basal body temperature, which is somewhat unreliable in doing that. The other study from 2017 mixed together naturally cycling women with women on oral contraceptives in the same groups. And neither study would probably pass the methodological bar that you would want from evidence-based advice. And that's just scratching the surface. When we balance against those two studies, there's an umbrella review. This is the highest level of evidence synthesis we have. Synthesis meaning combining

  Philip Pape: 16:56

  multiple studies together, especially a meta review, especially an umbrella review, combines a lot together, concluded that prescribing resistance training based on menstrual cycle phase is just not evidence-based. Three independent studies that used what would be the gold standard muscle biopsy and stable isotope in their methodology. They found zero difference in muscle protein synthesis between the two phases of the cycle, between the follicular and luteal phases. In other words, your muscles respond to training the same way regardless of where you are in your cycle. And this is consistent with a lot of what I'm hearing from experts in the field who understand the literature. On the nutrition side, it's even simpler. There has been no RCT randomized control trial that's ever compared cycle-synced calorie or macro intake versus consistent intake for fat loss or body composition outcomes. So there's just no evidence. Any recommendation for syncing to your nutrition is probably extrapolating from hormonal fluctuation data without testing that they actually produce different outcomes. That's all. And I want to be fair about this. I want to be fair, okay, because cycle awareness is not the same as cycle sinking. This is this is the side that I stand on. Knowing that you, you dear listener, tend to feel more fatigued and low, you have a low energy state. You feel wiped in the luteal phase. And then adjusting your training intensity based on how you feel that day and your recovery, that's a smart thing to do. That is responsive, auto-regulated programming, and it is what I recommend. Awareness of your body signals and how you feel and perform, and all of that is great. Also, tracking your symptoms so that you can spot patterns and then know what's coming is smart too. But all that is is listening to your body with a better set of data, just like we try to do with other forms of biofeedback, whether you're a man or woman, whether you're menstruating or not. That is not the same as following a color-coded calendar in an app that tells you to eat sweet potatoes on day 14 and reduce training volume on day 21. That is complete nonsense. I mean, even Stacy Sims, who came on, what was she on with Lauren Calenzo Simple? They kind of went at it and they argued with each other. And, you know,

  Philip Pape: 19:22

  Lauren's more on the side of the nuance and like much of this stuff is pretty much not supported by the evidence. Stacy Sims is probably the most prominent advocate of training around the menstrual cycle, but she has even acknowledged this evolution in the evidence recently, like last year, 2025. She wrote that there is no single right way for all women to train around their cycles. And I heard her say it on a podcast. And so she's kind of evolved her thinking as well. Good for her, right? The real story is individuality, which is essentially the position that I'm presenting here and that I always try to present on the show. Now, for women in perimenopause, perimenopause is the entire period of hormonal fluctuations leading up to menopause, which could be as long as 10, 15 years, you know, starting as early as your mid to late 30s. For women in perimenopause, cycle seeking, cycle sinking is, I'll say structurally impossible because when your cycles shift from 26 days to 45 days to skipping months as you get closer, and I know a lot of you are going through that. We don't talk about it enough, ladies. I know that your cycle is not this fixed 28-day thing. If it is, great, but that's not the case for a lot of women I talk to. It changes, it sometimes gets wildly all over the place. It extends out. Sometimes you don't have one. And this is even outside of like low energy states, amenorrhea, and all that from dieting. This is just, it happens because of hormones, because of perimenopause. In that case, what are you going to sink to? Like it's you're just going to, you know, drive yourself crazy. The entire framework assumes a predictable hormonal pattern, and perimenopause is often defined by the loss of that predictability. All right, if you're hearing all of this, if you're thinking, okay, okay, I get that cycle sinking is oversold. I also know just be patient and gaslighting isn't gonna do it for me. But I need, I want someone to actually help me build that system that works for my body. That is exactly what we've built with Eat More Lift Heavy. And I hope you guys love the name. I'm really loving it because it it says exactly the thing that many of you need to do right in the name. Eat more lift heavy. It's a 26-week coaching program launching March 30, where you get both training and nutrition coaching together, which almost nobody offers at this price point. Over half the women in our intake data report hormonal concerns affecting their progress. And our curriculum has an entire week dedicated to hormonal pattern awareness. You learn About it, you personalize it, you apply it to yourself, and you get coaching. And every member gets a personalized plan that accounts for where they actually are, not where a generic chart says they should be. If you want in at the lowest price that'll ever be our founder's price, get on the wait list now at witsandwaits.com slash eatmore. That's wits and weights.com slash eatmore. The link is in the show notes. The early access window is opening March 16. So get on the list so that you get the emails that say, here it's open. Here's the special deal you're gonna get once and only once, but you're gonna get it because you're on the list. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore or click the link in the show notes. Okay, so we've established that cycle syncing over promises, under delivers, and that just be patient does the same. So what do you do instead? All right, two things. You're gonna fix how you measure progress, and you're gonna fix how you eat during the luteal phase. Here we go. How do we fix how we measure progress? The goal is to separate the noise from hormones from the real body composition signals. What's actually happening with your body? And this is gonna help you a lot emotionally too and help you not overreact and know what's going on. The engineering principle here is simple. You don't make decisions on noisy data. You have to filter it first. So I want you to think of it like a filter. Step one, okay, we've got three steps here. Step one, weigh yourself daily, but use a trend. So for that, I recommend an app that can smooth the trend for you. You can do it in a spreadsheet, you can do it on your own, but it takes a lot of math and using the right equations and like making sure you do it. And that tends to create a lot of friction and it's harder for people to get into or stick with. So I would definitely use something like Macro Factor, that's my favorite app that does that. And that's I want you to weigh every day, not because daily weigh-ins are some magical thing, but because we know from the evidence. There was actually a study of 10,000 smart scale users in 2021 that found daily weighing was the only frequency associated with weight loss across all BMI groups and maintaining the weight loss. So the key here is you never react to a single day's number. I know, easier said than done, I get it. But if you're taking a weight every day, it eventually starts to get, it becomes less and less important, and you just kind of get used to seeing that it goes up and down. But what you really care about is the trend. And MacroFactor does this well because they have an exponential moving average, and then they have their expenditure algorithm that takes your trend weight and your calorie intake. And then they actually have their algorithm now has improved handling of cyclical fluctuations. So, and you can track your period as well alongside it. It's it is very fast. So I like that app because it does all of that. So, like if you're working with us or if you're an eat more lift heavy, that's our recommended tool. And if you come to, say, me or Carol and you want some feedback on your data, we're gonna say, hey, one of the one of the data points we need is your macrofactor data because then we have your trend weight and we know what where your expenditure is. If you don't have that data, we're kind of flying blind, right? We're kind of flying in the dark. And so if you're doing this for yourself, same thing. Step two.

  Philip Pape: 25:11

  So that's step one is weigh yourself daily and use a trend smooth, a smoothed trend. And that should that trend, by the way, should be over at least a two-week period, but I really prefer three weeks. Step two is to use the same phase comparison. So phase to phase is how you want to compare as your monthly sanity check. So you're gonna compare your weight from the mid-follicular phase this month, like days seven through ten, to your mid-follicular phase last month. That's that's your most stable hormonal windows, the mid-follicular phase. And and again, you want to take the trend weight from that point, but even if you have just a few spot weights, a few individual scale weights, at least it's been a month and you can do that comparison. But take several of them, don't just take one day. If that number is moving in the direction you want over, say three months, hey, your plan's working. If it's flat, something is off and we need to adjust. And that eliminates a lot of the false alarms that come from weighing yourself, you know, pre-menstrually and comparing it to a random day three weeks ago. Step three, and this is really important if you're in perimenopause, and that is to extend your evaluation window. Listen to me carefully. I want you to extend your evaluation window, the window within which you evaluate what's happening. Because when your cycles are more and more irregular, as they tend to be in perimenopause, especially closer to menopause you are, you cannot rely even on step two, the same phase comparisons, because there's no reliable data, no reliable phase to compare. Instead, you're going to use longer moving averages. You're going to use four to six week moving averages before concluding that any weight change is real. And I know that takes patience. And I know you got to wait. And you want the quick fix and the quick change. It, but you're not going to get it. In fact, you're going to slow your progress down. You're going to go in the wrong direction if you overreact to the short term. Because if you end up under-eating and stressing your body out further, it could actually compensate the wrong direction by burning fewer calories and actually making you have a worse outcome. But in addition to this, see that that's just scale weight. Honestly, you've heard me talk about how scale weight is just a tiny piece of the puzzle and really not that important. I would supplement your scale data with your waist measurement, how your clothes fit, of course, how you're improving in the gym with your strength, and even progress photos. Right? Those things can all be very helpful because the scale alone is going to miss all the changes in your body composition, like building muscle and losing fat at the same time, for example. And during perimenopause, those shifts can be pretty dramatic, right? We know from plenty of research at this point that the rate of fat gain tends to jump up almost double, or I think it did double at the start of the menopausal transition. And lean mass is declining as well. And of course, you know, you lift, listen to wits and weights, you lift weights, you're eating your protein, right? Right? Well, if you're not, that's a whole different thing we got to deal with and get you doing that. But a woman whose scale weight is fairly stable still might be gaining fat and losing muscle. Obviously, the opposite could happen too. You could be gaining muscle and losing fat. Uh, it depends on your lifestyle and what you're doing. And the scale alone is not just is just not going to tell you that. So that's the measurement side. On the the nutrition fix, okay, let's talk about nutrition. We have the behavioral side of this first, and this is big. Luteal phase, the luteal phase is notorious for having uh lots of hunger. So I've seen it over and over again, okay. I can't imagine where like once a month your hunger just is higher than it is the rest of the month. So I feel for you. There's a meta-analysis I found of 15 data sets that show the average increase in energy intake, so how much you eat during the luteal phase is about 168 calories per day. And for women with PMS, it's closer to 300. And then if you fight this with trying to restrict calories, that's like the worst possible strategy because all it does is amplify the what the hell effect, the all or nothing effect. And then it works against the serotonin deficit. That's what's going on here, that is driving the cravings. Now, why is serotonin important? Because serotonin levels drop in the luteal phase and carbohydrate carb cravings appear to function as a form of self-medication because eating carbs increases tryptophan. The tryptophan ratio that feeds how your body synthesizes serotonin. And there's a study on this. There was a double-blind crossover study that gave women with confirmed PMS either a high carb beverage or an identical tasting placebo, and the carb drink significantly reduced depression, anger, and cravings within 90 to 180 minutes, and the placebo did nothing. So the cravings are not a failure of your willpower. They are your brain requesting a specific input that it needs. Interesting, right? So what's the fix here? Well, it's not to fight the hunger, it's to redirect that hunger. This is a powerful tool, ladies. Listen, okay, this is something I've learned working with clients, and it works a lot. First, you've got to leverage protein. If you are not already eating the right amount of protein per day and having protein in every meal, that's your biggest opportunity. 30 to 40 grams of protein every meal, especially your first meal of the day during that luteal phase. The reason is protein is when it's diluted in your diet, like when you don't have enough, right? Total calorie intake goes up because your body keeps eating it until it gets enough protein. So if you can front load protein, you're gonna satisfy that target earlier for your body and reduce the amount of calorie you over calories you overshoot for the day. So if you're not already leveraging plenty of protein, that's number one. The second thing is using complex carbs strategically, don't cut carbs during the luteal phase. That's the opposite of what your brain needs. But what you can do is include complex carbs like whole grains, legumes, starchy vegetables in all your meals, and then you support your serotonin without the crash in blood sugar that comes from you know simpler carbs. Although, I don't want to overstate the blood sugar thing if you're eating balanced meals anyway. Even if you have simple carbs, as long as they're with proteins and fats, you tend to be okay anyway. And then if you're lifting weights and walking, it just makes it even better. But carbs can be your friend for sure. So listen up. If you're low carb, this could be the problem. Third, I want you to allow a modest increase during that phase. So actually shift your calories. If your metabolic rate actually does go up at least 100 calories or so, like if you've proven it for yourself through your tracking, and again, the only way to do that is a tool like Macrofactor where you can tell, then eating an extra, say, 100 to 200 calories during those 10 to 14 days is just gonna offset it. In other words, you're not gonna, you're not gonna stop losing fat. You're not gonna gain weight, it's just gonna offset it. And I know you want to like take advantage of the fact you're burning more calories, but if you're also massively more hungry, you might overshoot that benefit through your food. But if you intentionally increase your food a little bit to match it, then it can on the net work out better. And then over the full cycle, the math washes out in your favor. But if you're trying to maintain a steep deficit during the phase when your body's most resistant to it, then it usually creates, you know, the psychological conditions that lead to you binge eating. Does that make sense? I hope that all makes sense that I didn't get like too technical, because even for myself, I realized the way I worded all that is kind of in the weeds. But the principle across all of this is to work with your biology, not to cycle sink, but understand your body has physiological explanations that are going on and little tweaks in your nutrition and your measurement can go a long way to supporting you through your pattern of your cycle. And not every woman's gonna need every one of these strategies. Now, I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming here because again, nuance, guys, nuance. I'm not saying your cycle doesn't affect how you feel. I'm definitely not. It absolutely does. It does. Fatigue, mood shifts, bloating, cramps, you

  Philip Pape: 33:42

  name it. All of that is real. And if you adjust your training intensity or expectations based on how you feel, that's a smart thing to do. And it's independent of trying to align it with your cycle. It's based on how you're feeling. I'm also not saying that tracking your cycle is useless. It's actually very useful. I even mentioned that in MacroFactor, you can track it and then it aligns it with the other stuff going on there. And it's helpful if you have a coach or if you're in our program and then you can share your data. But for yourself, knowing those patterns gives you better data. And a lot of you do already track your cycle, you know, and I and may not be tracking it against the other things. But what I'm saying, what I'm not saying to do is restructure your entire diet and training plan around this 28-day idea that half the population doesn't even follow predictably. Like half of women don't even fall into the quote unquote normal, you know, ovulation cycle. I'm also not saying the scale doesn't matter. It's a useful data point among many, but I am saying that a single day's weigh-in during the late luteal phase is one of the least helpful things you can collect. And that making decisions based on it is not helpful for the reasons we talked about earlier. So, what I am saying from this whole episode is this you deserve a better framework than quote unquote, sink your macros to the moon, or quote unquote, just relax. The water weight fluctuations are normal and it's all gonna average out. No, you've got to be intentional. And the fix here is a measurement system to filter the noise out, a nutrition approach that respects your individual biology, and then of course, patience to evaluate progress over multiple cycles, not just days or a few weeks. Before we wrap up, remember that I promised you a one meal change that blunts cravings before they start anytime they spike. I will share that in a second. But if this episode is clicking for you, if you are enjoying this, if you want a structured system for navigating all of this with human coaching support, Eat More Lift Heavy is coming. It's a 26-week program. It integrates training and nutrition coaching together. It is built for women over 40 who lift and track but are not seeing the results. And hormonal pattern awareness is built directly into the curriculum. Not to mention Coach Carol. She is amazing. She is an expert in women over 40 hormones and thyroid health, especially, and has personal experience with all of those. The wait list with founder pricing at the lowest it'll ever be is open now. Go to witsandweights.com slash eatmore. That's witsandweights.com slash eatmore. There's no obligation at all. You can join the list for free. Just so you get the information, go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore. Uh by the way, if you're already on my email list, you still want to go there and get on the wait list specifically because you'll get tagged for the early access and the founders pricing. All right, let's

  Philip Pape: 36:38

  talk about the strategy for cravings. Next time you have cravings, whether it is PMS week, maybe you had a bad sleep night, maybe you have a stressful afternoon. Honestly, men, women, whatever the cravings are from, this is what you do. At your very first meal of the day, hit at least 40 grams of protein before anything else. And that could be two eggs plus a cup of Greek yogurt. That could be a protein shake. And the 40 grams is more than enough to suppress ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone. It elevates CCK, that's a satiety hormone. And it does so for several hours. Because cravings are partly a hunger management problem. They are partly a hunger management problem. You're like, yeah, duh. But what I mean by that is when your baseline hunger is already elevated because of your hormones or poor sleep or stress, your threshold for giving in to the hunger is lower. And protein raises it back up. It raises it back up. So you front load the protein and then you build the rest of the meal around things like whole grains and starchy vegetables, a little bit of fat, especially if carb cravings are the issue. You see what I'm saying here? If carb cravings are the issue, why don't you eat some carbs? But eat the carbs that you choose that will benefit you, right? I'm not talking about donuts and pizza. I'm not talking about reading the pantry or the fridge on a whim. I'm talking about you be intentional and have whole grains, fruits, starchy vegetables, things like that. And that way you're not fighting the craving. You are taking the edge off with intention and responding to it gracefully instead of reacting to it. And isn't that what we all want to do? All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your cycle is not the enemy of fat loss. It's just data that most people never learned to need. I'm Philip Pate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why Streaks and Badges Don’t Help You Lose Fat (And What Does) | Ep 449

You've been hitting your macros for two or three weeks, then one bad day wipes everything out and you're starting over. Again. 

The problem isn't your discipline but how you're setting up your targets.

Most people use streaks, badges, and all-or-nothing tracking to stay consistent with nutrition. The research shows those extrinsic reward systems actually increase dropout rates and erode the motivation you need to lose fat and build muscle long term. 

A 2015 study found that gamified systems made people less motivated, more anxious, and worse at the task. If you've ever felt like a broken streak meant a broken week, that's the system failing you, not the other way around.

This episode breaks down why streak-based tracking doesn't work, the behavioral psychology behind RPG-style skill leveling (proximal goals, the progress principle, and flow state research), and a 6-step method for building your macros one skill point at a time where progress is permanent and you never start over. 

Join the Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist to get first access and founder pricing on a 26-week coaching program that builds your nutrition and strength training in sequence, one skill at a time: witsandweights.com/eatmore

Timestamps:

0:00 - The cycle of starting over with macros (why habit streaks fail)
2:32 - Why gamification borrows the wrong parts of games
5:00 - Self-determination theory and the what-the-hell effect
8:15 - How RPG skill leveling actually works
11:17 - Flow state and the "just manageable" challenge
14:20 - How to apply this model in practice
18:48 - Define your increments and level up when ready
22:10 - Logistics problems vs. cognitive problems
27:10 - Bonus: 3-question flow zone test
31:30 - Reframing a missed day as a level, not a reset 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  How many times have you hit your macros for two or three weeks, missed a day, and felt like all progress was gone? The way most people structure hitting their nutrition targets is designed after gamification, which actually doesn't work as well as you think. Today I'm showing you a different approach, borrowed from video games and RPGs, but not quite the same as gamification, where progress is much more permanent and you never have to start over. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape. And if you've ever tried to build a consistent nutrition habit and found yourself doing really well for a few weeks and then falling off, and then starting over from scratch and then falling off, today is going to explain why that keeps happening. And we always come back to this, but it's not because you simply lack discipline. The problem is systemic, it is structural. It's the system that you are using to set and progress against those targets. Now I'm gonna warn you today, I'm gonna get a little nerdy and talk about some video games. And if you've ever played RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile or even old school Final Fantasy or Zelda, you already understand the mechanic that I'm going to describe. If you have it, don't worry. The concept is simple. The psychology behind it applies to everyone. You don't have to know video games. That's just my thing. All right, and then stick around to the very end because I'm gonna give you a three-question test to find out whether your current macro targets are in that sweet spot where progress can actually happen, or whether they're in a zone that's more or less guaranteed to make you frustrated and quit. And it takes about 30 seconds. All right, today you're gonna learn about three things. First, why the type of gamification most people use actively undermines the motivation truly needed for long-term adherence, right? Sustainability. Second, the specific psychological mechanism that makes RPG style leveling so effective. So getting leveling up. Okay, when we talk about RPGs and video games in this context, I'm just talking about making progress and leveling up. And then we're gonna look at why it maps directly to your nutrition behavior. And then third, I'm gonna give you a method that you can apply this week to your own

  Philip Pape: 02:32

  macro targets to turn this more abstract goal of, say, hit my protein into a concrete progressive system where you're always building and never starting over. So let's get into it and talk about the what is the popular advice and what's wrong with it. We've heard of gamification. I love the concept of gamifying your nutrition, of making it fun, you know, close the rings, right? On your uh on your watch, hit the streak, earn the badge, get the check marks. And you see this in apps, you hear this from coaches, from influencers, you see it in challenges. Plenty of tools are built around it. You see in communities, you know, my own community has a leaderboard. I don't even use it only because I know it actually doesn't work, part of what we're talking about today. It sounds like it should work, right? Who doesn't want to make a healthy behavior feel like a game? Especially something people don't often like to do. And there is a grain of truth there because games are motivating, right? We've all experienced just chilling on the couch, getting lost in a game for hours. Well, maybe not all of us, but I have many times. And you're voluntarily doing, I'll call them hard things, right? They're not hard in the IRL, right, real life context, but games tend to challenge you and get harder as you go through them, right? Whether it's a shooter or an RPG or a simulation, whatever. And so there's this feedback loop and it feels really good and it hits the dopamine center. And so the impulse is to borrow that type of energy and say, how do we apply that to other things like nutrition? And it makes sense on the surface. But the problem with these systems is they borrow the wrong parts of the games. What they borrow are extrinsic motivators, things like points, badges, leaderboards, streaks. And these are these surface elements, the shiny objects. And when you look at behavioral research about them, it's not great. These things actually don't work too well. So I'll give you a couple examples. A little over 10 years ago, Hannes and Fox 2015 ran a study at Indiana University, which by the way is one of my alma maters. I got my MBA there, um, and I know they won the national championship this year in football, which disappointed me because I'm actually a Miami Hurricanes fan. But it, you know, kind of cool that this study is from there. They took a college course and they added gamification. So they added leaderboards, badges, and points for participation. The control group got the same course, but none of that stuff. The gamified group

  Philip Pape: 05:00

  had all that, and guess what? They ended up less motivated, more anxious. They scored lower on the exams, they reported lower satisfaction. So there were more gamification elements, but worse outcomes. Now, why is that? This is the cool thing. This is where it gets important. So there's something called self-determination theory, and it's a great framework where humans have three core psychological needs when it comes to sustained motivation. Three, those three things are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Extrinsic rewards like streaks and badges, they tend to erode your autonomy or your agency. And the behavior then shifts from, hey, I'm doing this because I want to get better to I'm doing this to keep my streak alive. And then when the streak breaks, you've lost the only thing that was motivating you. Kind of makes sense, right? There was a meta-analysis by Kim and Castelli that looked at gamification across health and fitness contexts. And they found a pattern where short-term engagement tends to go up, but long-term adherence doesn't. And the average dropout rate for gamified health apps is around 75% within the first 90 days. So we've got this popular approach, gamify your nutrition, that produces this, you know, dopamine-fueled honeymoon phase followed by a crash. And if it sounds familiar to you, if you've had that experience of, hey, I'm really into tracking for the first three or four weeks, and then I have a bad day or something comes up and it destroys the whole thing, it's because the system isn't designed optimally. And this streak-based thinking specifically creates a psychological trap. Researchers call it the what the hell effect. And that's just putting it nicely because I don't swear on this show. So that's as bad as it gets. Pollavy and Herman documented this across decades of dieting research that when someone is trying to maintain a perfect record, a single slip-up, it doesn't just feel like a slip-up, it feels like total, utter failure. Like, hey, I already broke the streak. What the hell? Might as well eat whatever I want today, right? That's the all or nothing thinking, the all or nothing frame baked into that streak model. And it creates a binary that causes this whole collapse. Because like, oh my God, I just missed my streak. It's all over. And I've actually felt that myself when it comes to step, step counting. I actually lowered my step count target in the app I in the app I was using because I kind of felt that phenomenon as well. It's like, oh my gosh, I just broke a streak. It just, it just kind of disappointed me, right? So here's where we are. Gamification is popular. The the type that people are using, though, with these extrinsic reward systems, undermines intrinsic motivation over time and it sets you up for all or nothing thinking. And then that derails a longer-term process like fat loss, muscle building, all the things that we are trying to do. Okay, so if badges and streaks take from the wrong parts of games, what are the right parts? Think about how a role-playing game works. And I'll explain it if you've never heard it before. Most people do. You start with a character, and the character has a set of skills, and each skill has a level. Okay, forget classes, forget, you know, all the sub-elements of RPGs. We're gonna keep

  Philip Pape: 08:15

  it simple. So you might have strength, for example, and it's at a level three, intelligence at a level five. Maybe you can distribute your skill points at the beginning, but you have a finite amount of skills, and that's where you start. And you usually start as this lowly character with, you know, a wooden sword or something, right? Or a club or something like that with barely any clothes, if at all. And then when you earn experience by, say, killing mobsters or mobsters, monsters, mobs of monsters. I guess killing mobsters in some games, right? Then you get skill points. You get experience points. And then you can invest those points every time you level up into the skills that you want to develop. Simple as that, right? Now, two things are happening in that model that actually apply to behavior change in real life. First is that the bar is always rising, right? The bar is always rising, but it rises incrementally. Going from level three to four is a meaningful improvement and it's also achievable. You don't just jump from level three to level 15. The game doesn't let you do it unless you're hacking it or using a mod, and your brain doesn't expect that to happen either, even in real life, right? You don't expect to go from a complete beginner to completely advanced, for example. Each level, therefore, is the small win that unlocks the next level. And this maps directly to some pretty old research now. Back in 1981, Albert Bandura studied proximal versus distal goals. So that's just short-term versus long-term goals. And he gave students the same math curriculum. One group got a single end of semester target. The other group got weekly targets that built toward that same endpoint. And the weekly target group outp outperformed on all the measures speed, accuracy, confidence. So the destination is the same, but the path structure to get there was different. And the incremental path won. Teresa Amobile did research on what's called the progress principle, and it reinforces this, but but from a little bit of a different angle. Her team analyzed over 12,000 diary entries from professionals and found that the single strongest predictor of sustained motivation was the feeling of making progress on meaningful work. Okay, not the rewards, not the recognition, but actually the progress itself. Small, visible, regular progress. So that's kind of the first concept of the short-term, step-by-step, you know, micro goals and progress. The second thing, and this is the part a lot of people miss, like when you're comparing it to a gamification of an RPG, you don't ever lose your levels, right? You never go backward. You might have a bad session, you might get killed and die and lose some gold, or you know, in a in a souls-like game, for those of you into that, which are super frustrating to me and I don't have the time, in a souls-like game, you might lose a ton of your progress from the last point, but you don't go past before that point. Your skill points remain. The things you've invested in

  Philip Pape: 11:17

  so far are permanent because you've achieved that level. Now, if you compare that to a streak, a streak is more binary. You're either maintaining it or you've lost it, right? When you when the streak breaks, you're back to zero psychologically, even if nothing about your body or your behavior has changed. Whereas a skill level, it's more cumulative. Progress is always banked. All right, so now this brings me to the research about flow and flow states, which I absolutely love because there's an overlap with positive psychology. So when we look at flow, it is that state of complete absorption where your effort feels almost automatic. And it occurs when the challenge of what you're doing is slightly beyond your current ability to do it, just slightly. Okay, I've used other frameworks like put, like expanding your comfort zone. So that's flow. It's like the challenge, it's challenging and it's slightly beyond your current ability. If it's if something's too easy, you're gonna get bored. If something's too hard, you get anxious because you you're you get frustrated, right? Maybe that's why I don't like Souls like Souls like games. But other RPGs that have a leveling system, it naturally keeps you in that flow because each new level is one increment above where you proved you could perform. And there's debates about whether video games can even be something considered a flow state. That's a separate argument. All right, then there's the third piece of psychology here that's worth calling out, and that is goal setting theory, where goals have to be specific and difficult, but within reach to optimize your performance. So a vague goal, like I need to eat better or hit my macros, it doesn't produce the same behavior. When somebody responds to me to an email and they're like, hey, I like what I heard, you know, I've been trying to watch my food and alcohol. And that's the way they frame it. I'm trying to watch my food and alcohol. And my brain immediately goes to, okay, how are you watching? You know, you is this a specific, you know, way of tracking, blah, blah, blah, because I know that person is not going to succeed long term with that as their goal. Whereas increase my protein from, you know, 80 to 90 grams this week is a lot more specific, something you can track objectively, something that's achievable, and you could look back and say that you won that. And the RPG model forces that kind of specificity, right? Because think about in a video game, you can't invest a skill point in everything. I mean, you might get five points and distribute one to each, but you can't invest as many as you want in everything. You have to pick a skill and increase it by one increment, hold on to it, and move to the next, you know, incrementally. So the model looks like this: instead of tracking streaks or closing your rings on your Apple Watch, you define your nutrition targets as like skills on a character sheet, where say protein is a skill, calories are a skill, steps are a skill. It's up to you to decide what those are. And of course, we we help our clients and members come up with those, the things that you want to track. And then each week you evaluate which skills are ready for a level up. You add just the one increment, and then you hold on to it because you've built that skill. Now, there's

  Philip Pape: 14:20

  some timing involved, like how long it takes to do some of these in the real world. There are different models. I like the roughly 45-day model. Like once you've held a skill for 45 days, then it's locked in. So it's not like in a game where you can just blow through it in a few hours, but it's a very important thing. And then you add the next point and the next skill. Now, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, all right, this makes sense. How do I actually build this kind of progressive system for myself? How do I know where to start? How fast to progress, when to hold steady. That is exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is built around. That's right. Eat more lift heavy. It's a 26-week coaching program. So 26 weeks is six months, but notice 26 weeks, it's it's individual weeks that each help you build these skills. And it involves both training and nutrition progressing together over three phases in the 26 weeks. Phase one is stop guessing, where the first eight weeks we establish your baseline. We figure out where you actually are, not where you think you should be, and we build that skill floor. Phase two, the eat more lift heavy phase, weeks nine through 18, that's where the bar starts to rise and you really start to see massive progress. And then phase three, trust yourself, is the final weeks 19 through 26 where you internalize the system so it's intrinsically motivated, so you can run it without us or without the need for this education or push or accountability if you want. And the whole structure mirrors what we've been talking about today: this graduated progression, never going backward. Each week has one focus and one action item, of course, with a lot of resources behind it, tools, resources, modules. And it is a coached process. It's not a content library. It's it's not a bunch of different courses. It's one focus that takes you through the 26 weeks. And it works for everyone because of how customized it is. So if you are over 40, if you lift, you track, but you're not seeing the results you expect, go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. The program launches March 30, and the wait list is going to get early access and founders pricing. This is great pricing that will never be the same again. And you're not gonna find a discount like it in the future. So witsandweights.com slash eat more to get on the eat more heavy lift heavy wait lists. All right, let's keep going as I fumble my words here. And I want to get specific about how you apply this gamification framework in the right way. I want to walk you through the mechanics and then you can start doing it this week. Again, if you want support doing it with over a six-month period and really lock it in, go to witsandweights.com slash eat more. But here's what you got to do. Step one. All right, step one is to define your skills. So for most people tracking macros, your skills are let's say protein, calories, and either fats and carbs, or maybe a combination of those or whatever. In other words, some people don't care about the fats, but they do care about the carbs, some people vice versa, and some people like both. The easiest thing is just do all the macros. And then you can add maybe a fourth skill of daily steps or training sessions per week. So I would keep the whole list to like three or four to start. Otherwise, you're gonna spread your skill points to thin. Okay. Step two is to find your level one, your level one. Remember, we're going from level zero to one here. Okay. You started the game and you're trying to get to level one. Now, some games start at level one, I get it, but this is we're gonna start really low. This is not your goal number. Okay, I don't care. We're not talking about weight loss or anything like that, months down the road. This is where you are right now, consistently without stress, that you can get to for the next level. All right. So if your ultimate protein target is 140 grams because you weigh 140 pounds and you've heard me say one gram per pound in that vicinity, but you're actually averaging like 60 grams of protein right now, then going from 60 to 140 is not your level one. Your level one might be 75 or 90, right? It's a small jump. All right, and I want to pause right here because this is where most people push back, they resist, they feel like Seti, 90 grams of protein, it's not even 100. Aren't I going back, or it's not not ambitious enough, and I'm not hitting the target, right? But that is the streak mentality that we're trying to avoid. You are not lowering your standards here, right? You're establishing a floor that you've proven

  Philip Pape: 18:48

  you can hold, which is your zero, that's where you are now. And then every level above that is progress. Every level above that is something you earn and make progress that can stick. And again, going back to the RPG analogy, if you have a new character and you know, the game said, we're gonna give you a starting strength of starting strength, that's funny, starting skill where your strength is let's say eight instead of one, you know, you wouldn't be upset about it. You'd say, or let's say it's eight instead of 20. You'd say, okay, cool, that's where I'm starting. I'm gonna build from there, right? I kind of butchered that analogy, but you know what I mean. All right, step three is to define your increments. So this is the cool part where you where you do it like a game, and you say, okay, I can increment either by day or by week, whatever makes sense. So, like for protein, a reasonable increment might be 10 grams per day. Like, I'm going to increase my target by 10 grams per day. Now, you might be using an app like Macro Factor and it has a target of 140, and you're currently hitting 80. You can still, like mentally or in a separate place, document, hey, I'm gonna try to hit 90, then 100, then 110, then 120, whatever makes sense. Okay, what I you could stick with the same target all week and then go up the next week, whatever makes sense. So for step count, it might be 500 steps per day increase, right? Just a short walk or a few extra steps around the house, whatever. They should be small enough that the effort required to hold a new level feels barely noticeable and not overwhelming, just beyond your current ability. Remember the flow state research we talked about. So that's step three is to define those increments. Step four is to level up when you're ready. And here's the rule I have: when you've held a level for five out of seven days for at least a week, and you haven't felt like it was a really hard thing to do, like you white knuckled it, you're ready for the next skill point. Now notice I said five out of seven, not seven out of seven. We're not gonna build a streak. We're building a pattern, an average, a slight increase in our ability. Okay, a pattern out of five out of five out of seven is a skill. A streak of seven out of seven, but then you break it on day eight because you can't sustain it. That that's the trap we talked about before. All right, so level up when you're ready. Five out of seven days for a week. You can come with some come up with something similar if it's a longer time horizon. That's what, like 80% consistency. All right, step five, and by the way, we have six steps in here. Step five is to pick which skill gets the point. Ah, okay. You don't level up everything at once. In a given week, only one of your skills is going to get that increment. All right. This is where the where research on what's called endowed progress comes in, where people who feel like they've already started a task are about 34% more likely to complete it. And when you've already banked, say, three levels on your protein and then you're holding steady there, then that momentum is gonna carry over when you decide to invest a point in something else instead. So, in other words, you're you're building up each of the anchors, you're building up protein over here, maybe a couple times, and then you hold, then you Build up calories over here and then you hold, maybe you build up steps over here, then you hold, you get it. So we're doing one at a time and we're building it up incrementally. You can go back and forth, but only do one at a time. And then the final

  Philip Pape: 22:10

  step is step six to keep the old levels. So if life gets crazy, if travel interrupts your routine, if you have a bad week, you're not going to reset to level one. You're going to hold the last level that you proved to yourself that you could sustain. Now, could you drop back to level one back one level temporarily? Sure. But the overall architecture of your progress is there. You've built the skills, you have the resilience, you know what that is. A bad week doesn't delete them. So sometimes you are going to drop, but you're going to come right back to it because that is your new baseline. So do you notice the difference? What separates this from a streak-based system where every day is like green or red? There is no red day in this system. There's I'm holding my level or I'm working back to my level, and you're still playing the game. That's what that is. All right. There's one more thing I want to address because I do see this all the time with, for example, our clients and our members, just talking to listeners as well. Sometimes the reason that you don't hit your target is not about motivation, it's logistical. It's just logistical and about the environment or setup or something like that or the system. And those two problems need different solutions. A logistical problem is something like, hey, I can't figure out how to get 140 grams of protein across the three meals that I have and stay within my calories. I just don't know what to eat to make it work. Like I'm either going over on one or the other, or I'm coming under on protein or going over on calories. That person doesn't have a problem with their mindset. Like it's not the psychology. They just need someone to sit with them and show them the math, the numbers. Like, guys, sometimes it's that simple. Now I'm an engineer talking here, and sometimes very cold and calculated about these things, but sometimes that's what you need. Sometimes I need to give you some tough love and say, look, it's just numbers. Let's just figure it out. And that it kind of takes the stress out in some ways. Because then there's the trade-offs you can make and you don't get emotional about it. And that's where things like example meals and protein-dense food options and how to distribute your food and how many times that you eat and all that, those strategies can solve the math of it. And you can solve it almost instantly. Like if I if I get my hands on that problem, I'm going to solve it in about five minutes for you. Right. And I have tools for this as well. And by the way, another plug for Eat More Lift Heavy. In Eat More Lift Heavy, we're going to have like, I want to say about 10 really powerful automated tools that I've worked to code up that will help solve a lot of these problems, like how to get all your protein. And they're tools that you can access over and over and over again whenever you need them. And you're going to have human coaches too, but I think it's really powerful to have something you can go to right away. That's not AI, by the way. That's a pre-coded tool just for that problem. So that's the math side of it. That's like a logistical problem. Whereas like a cognitive problem sounds sounds different. It sounds like, hey, I know I should be hitting my 140 grams and I was doing it for two weeks, but now I can't seem to make myself do it and I feel like I'm failing. And that I see a lot too, right? It's somebody who had gotten to the point, but now they're not. And they may need to drop the target, not because they're not capable of it, but because, let's say 140 was level 12, and they were actually at level three, and they skipped levels four through 11. And so the gap between where they are and where they're trying to be is too large for that flow state. And so instead, they're in the anxiety zone. And what does anxiety do? It produces avoidance. You avoid things, you give up, you get despondent, all of that. So this RPG model handles both of these in a different way. So for the logistics problem, you stay at your current level and you just fix the plan. So you stay at your current level, right? But you fix the plan. It's just math, it's just strategies. For the cognitive problem, you're gonna drop to where you can hit five out of seven days without stress. And you're gonna call that your current level and you're gonna build from there. All right. And look, by definition, you're probably not gonna go down a bunch of levels from your current capability. It's probably that you tried to jump up too many levels and you're just trying to find your true level right now. And I know it's hard to hear. I know it's hard to hear. Nobody wants to drop their targets and feel like they're admitting it's not working and they're a failure and all this. But if we reframe it, it's reallocating a skill point. It's a strategy in and of itself. It's saying, hey, this build, this character build I have, this character class, this build isn't working for my playstyle, right? I can't be a rogue or an a sorceress right now. I have to be a barbarian. I got to go with the brute force at a lower level. Let me adjust my character. Or you still have the character, but your build is changing. And the game is still

  Philip Pape: 27:10

  going and you're just optimizing your character. All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised you a three-question test to find out if your macro targets are in the flow zone. I'm gonna share it in a second, just after this. But just another reminder: if the system I described today sounds like, yes, that's exactly what I've been missing. Oh my God, Philip, you're talking, speaking my language of what's been going on in my head, and I have been able to explain it. Eat more lift heavy is the coached and tool-based and automated altogether version of this. Okay, it's my engineering brain put into a really excellently designed program for 26 weeks, training and nutrition progressing together. You're not gonna find this in the industry at this price point. It gives you a launch, we it, not it, I, I and Coach Carroll will give you a launch plan in your first week built specifically for where you're starting, not where you wish you were, but where you're starting, how you should train, how you should track your food. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. And then you'll get early access. You'll also get founders pricing. There's no risk in doing that. It's free to get on the list. So go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. All right, here's that test that I promised you. And it's three questions, and I want you to answer it honestly. I know I'm giving you a lot of these, so hopefully this one hits if you need it. Question one over the past seven days, did you hit your protein target at least five out of seven days? If the answer is no, then your protein target is above your current level. That's it. I don't care what the excuse is, what the reason is, forget it all and just acknowledge and admit right now your protein target is too high. Not, oh no, no, no, it's fine. I just did this, this, this, and that's why I didn't hit it. No, no, no. No. Your protein target is too high. Drop it to wherever you were consistently hitting it before and call that your floor to build the levels from there. That's question one. Question two, when you think about tomorrow's meals, are you confident that you can hit your targets? Or do you feel a tightness in your chest right now? A little bit of anxiety and heat in your head. Okay, confidence means you're in the flow zone. Like, yes, of course I'm confident. I've been doing it. I'm confident, I've got my meals ready to go. I know what I'm gonna eat. I hit up the grocery store. Maybe I did my meal planning, all that good stuff. Maybe I've pre-logged, whatever it is for you, whatever your system is, if you're confident. But if you're very tight, if you've got butterflies in your stomach, if you're nervous or anxious, it means that that challenge of hitting your targets tomorrow is far, it's too far above your skill level, and you have to back it down one increment. That's it. Again, the levels. Question three. If you missed your target yesterday, did you feel like the whole day was blown? Or did you think, okay, I'm gonna get closer tomorrow? I'm just gonna start again tomorrow. I'm gonna get closer. If you felt like the day was blown, you're still thinking in streaks in all or nothing land, as opposed to levels. And that's okay. That's you've acknowledged it, right? That's step one. And now we want to reframe that hey, yesterday was a four out of five day. Your level is still your level. Today is a new attempt at your same level. You're not restarting, you're not starting from zero, you're just attempting again to the same level, and you have fallback plans that we've talked about in this episode. If it continues to be a challenge. Now, if you answered, yeah, confident, and I use levels to all three of those questions, then your targets are in the flow zone, right? You hit you you hit your protein targets most of the time, you're confident about tomorrow's meals, and even if you missed your target yesterday, if it was one of those two out of seven, you reframe it and like, okay, today I'm gonna do it again. We're all good. And then you build from there. If not, you know what you need to adjust. All right. I hope that was helpful. I hope it helped you reframe and think about levels in skill building, kind of the way I do. I hope you take with it something valuable. And until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, you don't build your best character starting at level 50. You earn it one skill point at a time. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Gym Won't Work Until You Fix THIS (Mitchell Osmond) | Ep 448

What if the missing piece in your nutrition and fitness results has nothing to do with the gym? Could the biggest barrier to body recomp and strength training progress actually be stress at home?

Leadership consultant and Dad Nation Podcast host Mitchell Osmond brings a perspective most fitness podcasts rarely talk about. Chronic relationship stress and how it quietly sabotages nutrition and fitness progress. We explore how emotional tension at home can disrupt metabolism, hormone health, recovery, and muscle building even when your strength training, macros, and lifting weights routine look solid on paper.

Mitchell breaks down why some men unknowingly use the gym as an escape instead of a growth tool and how that hidden stress environment can stall weight loss and body recomp. We also discuss sustainable habit building, why lowering the bar can actually help you build muscle long term, and the powerful “life report card” framework for aligning your health, family, and purpose.

If your lifting routine feels dialed in but your results are stuck, this conversation may reveal the missing piece behind your strength training and recovery.

Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the #1 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance. 

Timestamps:

0:00 - How home stress impacts training
5:39 - Lowering goals for sustainable progress
7:34 - The life report card framework
11:30 - Why men struggle with emotions
18:05 - The relationship stress feedback loop
23:24 - Using the gym as avoidance
26:08 - Should couples work out together
30:57 - Small habits that create change
34:10 – The eulogy exercise for life clarity
37:50 – Resources from the Dad Nation podcast

Episode resources:

• Free gift – The Connection Code (50 questions to spark the fun & bring the fire back) – dadnationco.com/code 

• The Dad Nation Podcast: dadnationco.com/podcast 

• Website: dadnationco.com 

• Instagram: @dadnationco 

• YouTube: @dadnationco 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  Some of you are using the gym the way other people use alcohol. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean that as a pattern. You walk in stressed, you grind through your session, you feel better for an hour, and nothing at home changes. The stress is still there when you get back, and it's eating at your recovery. My guest today is going to make the case that for some of you, the most productive thing you could do for your health and physique has nothing to do with your training. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where in every episode we put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're discussing what happens when your training is solid, but your recovery environment is compromised by the stress that you're knocking not taking care of at home. This is not the stress from work or from a lack of sleep, but more the chronic relationship and emotional stress that sits in the background and it quietly also affects things like your hormones, your sleep quality, your ability to build muscle and lose fat. My guest today is Mitchell Osman, a leadership consultant, executive coach, and host of the Dad Nation podcast. Go check that out. Follow it right now. Men and women are going to get a lot out of that show. The Dad Nation podcast, Mitchell coaches career-driven men who might be performing well at work, but are struggling at home. And he's observed a consistent pattern where training, your workouts, become one of these domains where men feel in control of it, but the stress that's actually limiting their results goes unexamined. So in this episode, you'll learn when the gym becomes a form of avoidance instead of a tool for growth, for recovery, how chronic emotional stress creates the hormonal environment that blunts your training adaptations and what it actually takes to fix this stress at home so it no longer holds you back from your untapped physical potential. Let's get to it. Mitchell, welcome to the show.

  Mitchell Osmond: 2:00

  Philip, thanks for having me, man. And that was a great intro. Like yes, I'm I'm a podcaster myself. And man, I want to go back and listen to the episode. I'm uh everything you just said, I'm like, man, I can't wait to get into it. So thank you for having me on the show, man. I'm I'm really excited to be here today. Yeah, man. That's what it's all about.

  Philip Pape: 2:16

  We gotta we gotta lay it out for the listener, what they're gonna learn.

  Mitchell Osmond: 2:18

  And I love it.

  Philip Pape: 2:19

  You know, people listening to the show, right? They a lot of them are into lifting. Maybe they're not yet, and they're gonna get there the more they listen. And they train, you know, three, four days a week. They might be eating enough protein, sleeping seven hours, you know, but they're having some issues, right? Maybe their body composition isn't changing. They're feeling a little fluffy, they're not feeling their best self, they don't have the energy. And I know when I dig into a lot of these issues, especially with men, it's not their job, it's the relationship or something at home or something that they don't want to bring up because it doesn't feel like a fitness problem or it's something that they're uh scared to talk about. So tell us about that pattern. Like, what do you see in your practice when you talk to men and women, predominantly you work with men in terms of how impactful home is?

  Mitchell Osmond: 3:02

  Yeah. Well, that's a great question. And I think it's a good way to start off the show because I I think of it like spaghetti, you can't pull one noodle without affecting the others. You know what I mean? And when we talk about fitness, when we talk about marriage, when we talk about our emotional life, our work life, it's all connected. And so if we think that we can keep them separate, I believe that's a fallacy. And so they they affect one another highly. And so, and what I mean is if things are off at home and maybe you're having a fight with your wife or your husband, whatever, you're just not going to be in a great place emotionally. If you're not in a great place emotionally, you're not gonna be that motivated to go to the gym, right? And train. On the other side, if you're at the gym and you're working out and you're frustrated and overwhelmed with what's going on at home or whatever, your workouts might be lagging, right? You might be not fully focused in the gym, you're not motivated. Not to mention, which we could get into, you know, later on on the show if you want, but just the physical effects that stress and emotional distress has on your body, like physically. But I think the reason why it's so important is because it's all so connected. And every single one of my clients has their own custom nutrition plan and training plan because that's a part of the puzzle. It's a non-negotiable. If you're gonna work with me and talk about how to become a better man and husband and father, and to have a great marriage, then you have to be the best that you can be. How do you be the best that you can be? You be healthy, number one, because if you're sick and you're bedridden, you're not much good to your family, right? So your body is plan A for you to be a great father, great husband, you know, all those different things. And so we start with fitness. And people join my program, they're like, shouldn't we be talking about my marriage? Shouldn't we be talking about, you know, my temper? I'm like, yeah, we'll get there. But I mean, when you exercise, let's talk about the norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, neurochemicals that are released that help you deal with stress, that help you manage your emotions, think creatively, all those different things, right? So for me, it all begins with that because it's all so connected. Does that make sense?

  Philip Pape: 5:04

  It may it makes sense. And the the light bulb that came into my head is how how bi-directional some of this stuff is, because your coaching isn't about fitness, but starts with fitness. My coaching is about fitness, but often quickly goes into other directions as well. So it's it's bi-directional, right? Because you know, I can think of a client who has his own business and was doing at camp for like the last 20 years where he would go and dedicate himself to volunteering at this camp. And between that and finances and like overhead for his business, all of that he could barely focus on his fitness, right? Even though we wanted to and he knew what he wanted to do. So it definitely goes both ways. And I like that you start there. But then also the problem is if you're doing the fitness stuff and it's not working and itself becomes a distraction, or maybe is there a way, Mitchell, that the fitness has to come down in priority while you address something else and then it kind of comes back to the top?

  Mitchell Osmond: 5:57

  Oh, I love that. I love that. And I'm really glad you asked that question because I get in trouble for saying this all the time, Philip. But here's the thing. If your goal or if your bar is too high and you're not setting your goal, lower it. Right? And a lot of people are like, What? Why should you lower your standards? Why should you lower your goals? Because a goal that you can't meet is not effective. And so you lower it until you can achieve it, right? Here's the thing: even when it comes to fitness, when it comes to relationships, conversations, ways of parenting, ways of being a husband, let's not set you up for failure by asking you to do something that's not sustainable. I'll say this all the time. If you can't do this for the rest of your life, we're not gonna do it for six weeks. Because what's the point? Are we intentionally setting habits that we're intentionally gonna break? No, we're trying to change our life. And so we're gonna do things that we can do for the rest of our lives, sustainable things. And so oftentimes, I mean, and I think it was Bill Gates who is accredited for to this, but he said he said most people overestimate what they can do in one year and they underestimate what they can do in 10. And it's like they hyper focus on this year. It's like this year, I'm gonna lose 60 pounds. This year I'm gonna make you know 500k. This year, it's like, dude, chill, man. Like, just what are you gonna do in five years? What can you accomplish in 10 years if you set realistic goals? Which brings me to my second exercise, which I would love, you know, for your listeners, write this down if you get a moment. And it's a little bit of a framework that you can use, and I call it the life report card. Now, the reason why this is effective is because, well, let me get into it. You think about like so for me, when I grew up, I would when I was five years old, I started kindergarten. One, two, three, four, five, all the way up through 12, and then you know, university. I grew up in a system. Well, you tell me, Philip, what was the goal when you were going to school, when you would do tests and assignments? What was the goal?

  Philip Pape: 7:50

  To get a good grade, to get a good grade is to get an A.

  Mitchell Osmond: 7:54

  And if you could get straight A's, you were winning, right? That was the for 18, 19, 20 years. And so what happens is we get out of school, we get out of college, we go to our job, and it's like, well, no, you have to be the best. If you want to get a promotion, you want to climb the ladder, you got to be the best. Okay, great. What happens though is we take that attitude into our marriage, into our fatherhood, into our fitness, into our friendships. And it's like, no, no, we have to be straight-eyed in everything, or else we're a failure. And so what happens is we develop this all or nothing mindset. It's like, well, if I can't work out for uh 60 minutes today, I should just not work out at all, right? If we can't have, you know, I mean, you could talk about any any situation. What happens is we get frustrated, we get overwhelmed, we hold ourselves to this high standard that's maybe not even realistic. What happens though is we don't meet it, then we get discouraged, then we fall off the bandwagon, which reinforces this negative, self-limiting belief in the first place that yeah, you you were never gonna be able to do that anyways. And so we drive ourselves in a deeper rut. So the life report card exercise says, hey, in this season and in each season and in every season, you're gonna go through your life and give yourself a report card and you're gonna assign yourself grades. So, for example, before we had kids, I was getting an A plus in fitness. I could train six times a week. I was at the gym 90 minutes a session, sauna, massage, I was doing it all, man, living it up. No, two kids, you know, an entrepreneur, growing business. Maybe I'm not gonna be an A plus in fitness, and maybe that's okay, right? So it's situations where you might say, you know what, I'm gonna have to be a B. I'm gonna take a B in this in this season, or I might be a C. And dare I say, there might be things in your life that you might need to give an F. And you might need to be like, you know what, I'm done with this. This is no longer serving me, this toxic relationship, this, you know, whatever the situation is, this work commitment that's not really moving the needle for me. I'm actually just gonna say, I'm done with this, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna give myself an F and move on. That is such a life-giving exercise because it gives you permission, not just physically but psychologically, to say, hey, I don't have to be perfect. It's okay if my fitness is a B, because you know what? It's better than an F, right? Because six months ago I wasn't in the gym at all, right? So this idea of having grace and understanding what is sustainable for me in this season. So for there are times for me, you know, when our first son came, it was like, you know, in in these next in these six months, my boy is is A, and maybe maybe my my wife is an A minus for a season, right? I mean, she's always in the A for sure. But you know, you have to understand that and give yourself grace. Does that make sense? It makes total sense.

  Philip Pape: 10:38

  And it also, if you reframe it to the space that it gives you in those other areas, totally it's super powerful because then you're like, it can reduce that stress of saying, Oh man, I was putting so much into this. I was putting 99% to get the extra 1%, but I could put in 60% and devote all that extra energy to the next thing on the list and lower the bar, like you said, like have that minimum achievable that helps you move forward. And you mentioned a six-week time frame, which I like because that's generally what we see right in in the in the literature for habit formation and breaking some of the trigger habit connections and all that stuff. So if you can't even do it for that long, it's not going to go beyond that. And then the the last thing I like that you mentioned was the one year versus 10. It reminds me of a different, a different thing I heard years ago where when you look back on your life, the last 10 years will always surprise you. The amount of change that happened in the last 10 years, you'll never have predicted it. And so this thought of like, don't rush it, don't try to accomplish everything in one year because at the end of the day, it's going to fall where it may, focus on the things right ahead of you. So yeah, that's a great report card. I'm sure you have like a more specific framework for that. I don't know if we have a link or something we could throw in for people to like understand what those categories are, but we can do that. So so that's that's the psychology behind it. But I want to go dig one more one more level deep into when you're talking to, especially men, about these issues. I think there's a phrase you use, normative male alexithemia.

  Mitchell Osmond: 12:01

  Alexithymia, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 12:02

  Alexithymia, so yeah, yeah. And it's it's like men who can't talk or don't have the vocabulary for their emotions. Like, how does that connect to these discussions? And even if it's the self-talk, honestly, going through the rapport card, how does that connect with this?

  Mitchell Osmond: 12:15

  Yeah, I love it. You did your research, man. I love that. Yeah. So, dude, the reason why I talk about that is, you know, I I only work with men, and and that's because I'm a man, but I understand men and men for the most part, and I know probably the women listening may not agree with this. Men for the most part are fairly simplistic creatures in the sense that we have two or three basic needs. We're all driven by the same desires, we all wrestle with very similar challenges. One of the biggest challenges that we struggle with is our emotions. Number one, our emotional intelligence, but also the communication of our emotions, right? And so you're talking about normative male alexothomia, which I'll unpack for you in a moment. But the reason why I talk about this and the reason why I think my work is so important is because in the US today, we know that 70% of all divorces are initiated by the women in the relationship. Okay, now when you dig into the data, it the number jumps even more. So in situations where the wife is a high earner or has a high degree of education, that number jumps to 90% of divorces are initiated by women. Now, for men, that should be a huge eye-opener. But here's another crazy statistic. Of all those divorces that are initiated, approximately 79 to 80% of the time, the main reason cited for the divorce is not sex, is not money, is not abuse, is not cheating, like everyone thinks it is, it's emotional disconnection. My husband, like, I feel like I'm married a robot. He's not present, he doesn't connect with me emotionally. And so it's really important to understand that for men because that is the need. She doesn't need a bigger paycheck, she doesn't need, you know, a bigger company. She doesn't need you to have, I mean, she needs you to be healthy, but she doesn't need you to have a six-pack and you know, 7,000-inch biceps. What she wants is for you to show up and hold space for her emotionally. Now let's get back to that term you just mentioned. Um, because on the flip side, is women look at men and say, Well, what's wrong with you? Why can't you talk to me? Why can't you talk about your feelings? Why are you so closed up? So, normative male alexithymia, if you actually break down that that term from the Greek, it it means normative, which is pretty straightforward, but male alexithymia is a lexus thymos, which literally means to be without words for emotions. Okay, so if you put it all together, it means it's normative, it's normal for a male to be without words for his emotions. This is a term psychologists have coined. Okay, this is this is well known in the world of psychology that men universally wrestle, I mean, not all of them, but we wrestle with talking about our feelings and talking about our emotions. Now, why is that a problem? Well, if 80% of the divorces that happen are because they feel there a lack of emotional disconnection, it's probably important for us to understand that, right? And so what happens is men, they'll come home and then they the wife will maybe have a conversation about maybe she got a fight with a sister or the kids are driving her crazy or something going on at work, and men go to solving mode, they go to fix it mode, right? Because for the most part, men go to work and they get paid well to solve problems for eight, 10, 12 hours a day. And so they come home and it's like, well, this is I'm great at this. I do it all day. Well, here's a solution. And they start shoving strategies down their wife's throat, right? Treating them like an employee or a colleague, where she's like, I don't need you to fix this. I just want you to listen and say that I'm not crazy, right? But for a guy, I say this all the time, for a guy to listen to his partner and not offer a solution, it literally feels on the inside like we like me and you are like sitting in front of my house and it's up in flames, and I'm looking at you and I'm like, Phil, I could turn on the hose and and then I could put it out. And you're like, no, man, keep it off. We're just gonna watch it burn. That's literally when frustrating it is, right? And so it's important for us as men to understand that, but it's also important for women to understand that it's normal, that's part of the male expression. And so, what do we do? Well, we develop those skills, we have those conversations, and that's largely what I do with men is help increase their emotional intelligence, which then helps them connect with their wives on a far deeper emotional level, because men and women are wired opposite. We women need to be engaged emotionally to become physically engaged. Men, after they become physically engaged, then they can become emotional, like the pillow talk, you know, all that stuff. They can just open up about their feelings. So actually, we're wired completely different, right? It's important to understand that.

  Philip Pape: 16:56

  It is. And as a husband of almost 20 years this year, actually, we it it, you know, I think about that and it creates a sense of, okay, we're talking about stress here. When you're not resolving those issues, you as a man can can sense it. Like, as much as we don't aren't given credit for having like that intuition, there is a level of you sense the energy, right? You sense the energy with your spouse and in the house, and like things are are on this path you don't like, and all of a sudden things get closed, start to get closed off and the disconnection starts to go up. You know, I've I've been through bouts of this in my marriage. Fortunately, I'm at a place now where I it took a lot of hard knocks and years of like experimentation and and listening to to figure out a little bit of what you're talking about, which is you do have to talk through things and not try to fix everything. But then for those men who are in that state right now listening, or women listening who feel their husbands are doing this, it creates a stewing brew inside you of like, you know, in the pit of your stomach, at least is my personal experience of you know there's there's there's something that's bothering you. And then you think about it while you sleep, or it could keep you up. You think about it at work and you're like, am I gonna address this and fix it? And then it, of course, a lot of situations is no, and it leads to divorce, like you said. So let's talk about that connection, how how it connects back to someone's like internal stressors, this unnamed emotional stress, and then how you know, because again, again, we want to connect it to the physical manifestations of that.

  Mitchell Osmond: 18:20

  Yeah, well, well, I think, you know, the drift happens. I like that you use that word, and that's what happens in marriage, right? And and when you don't, when you don't have those those communication skills, not only does it affect you, you know, relationally, but like you said, it you know, there's physical impacts as well. But let me bring it back to the relationship for a quick moment, because this this is going to be very simple, very practical for your listeners. Every every woman, for the most part, has three core needs, right? And and I've been in the space for a while, and I've never heard a woman disagree with me on it. Not to say that you know it's it's the ultimate truth, but for the most part, women have three needs. Number one, to feel seen, number two, to feel heard, number three is to feel safe. Now, there's actually multiple breakdowns of those three needs in different aspects. But if she feels seen, if she feels heard, if she feels safe, for example, safe, it can be broken down into four quadrants emotionally safe, relationally safe, like that you're not gonna step out on her, you know, whatever, um, financially safe, and physically safe, right? So, but you think about it if a woman doesn't feel safe with you or around you, she's not gonna be physically intimate with you, obviously, right? If she doesn't feel seen, if she doesn't feel heard, she's not gonna want to connect with you in any other way. Now that's a that's a woman's basic needs. A man's basic needs is for typically we have two the the need to feel respected and the need to feel competent. Okay, so if you want to crush a man's spirit, make him feel incompetent, right? Challenge his competency, disrespect him. You want you wanna you want to break him down? And here's the crazy thing: I've done this before. You get into a room of 500 men, 1,000 men, whatever, and you ask these men, would you rather hear the words I love you or I respect you from your wife? Which one would you rather hear? And 95% of the room would be like, I respect you. They would rather know that their wife respects them, that they think they're the best husband, worker, career, you know, whatever provider in the world, than say, I love you. Now, why is this important? Because I say to women all the time, and it used to you, you know, women say I love you a lot, and that's great because that's a need that they're craving. But the most powerful thing you can say to your husband is, I believe in you. I think you can do anything. You're such an incredible leader. I see how you handle the kids, you're an incredible dad. That kind of language, man, a man can live on one of those compliments for six months. So let me bring it back. Here's how to come to the middle is having that conversation, having a husband say, Hey honey, what does it look like for me to help you or for me to make you feel seen, heard, and safe in our home and in this relationship? And for a woman to look at her husband and say, How have I disrespected you in the past? How have I made you feel incompetent in the past? What does it look like for me to respect you in your different roles? Or what does it look like for me to make you feel competent? Right. And if you can both genuinely have that posture, your marriage can transform like overnight if you are seeking to meet those needs. Now, what happens if we're not meeting those needs? Well, that's that's when the drift happens, right? And we go, you know, we sort of drift away because what happens when a man's need for respect or competence is not met, where does he go? He finds it in other places where he feels respect and competence. AKA work. Philip, I've had guys call me 10 o'clock at night on the phone and be like, I'm sitting in a dark office and I'd much rather sit here than go home because at least here I know what I'm doing. At least here my my colleagues appreciate me, my boss respects me, whatever. So what does he do? He digs into his work. What does the wife do or the woman do when she's not getting her need to feel loved and cherished? She finds it elsewhere in the children. And so that relationship, she gets those needs met that way. Then the husband plays, becomes the becomes second fiddle, you know, to the kids. So what happens is we spiral, we go away and away and away and away, and we drift and we drift and we drift, and we never have the conversation. And then that affects us physically as well, right? Not just to mention physical intimacy, but physically, like your stress levels increase, your your anxiety increases, potentially depression, you know, different things that come up. And we all know how those, I mean, I'm sure your listeners, I'm sure you've talked about how that affects you physically. Like when your cortisol spikes and how your body, you know, preserves fat, you know, your metabolism lowers fight or flight mode, your like conservation mode. You're not that's why your metabolism isn't skyrocketing when you're going through situations like that. So, and not to mention you're not going to be motivated to go go for a PR in the gym if like your personal life is a disaster, right? So I went on a ramble, but uh hopefully that will connect with your listeners.

  Philip Pape: 23:24

  No, it no, it all connects. And you know, I'm not, I don't want to force like going down a specific route for this topic because I think everything you're talking about is super powerful and important anyway for the listener. And if it ultimately can help resolve some things and unload some of that stress and make you feel more confident and respected as men and also help women understand their husband better because the ladies listening, it affects our relationship too, of course, and it affects their, you know, physical manifestation. All of them are trying to work out as well and do all the things we talk about in this show. What you know, if we then connect that to some of these escape mechanisms you mentioned, like work, is would you say is going to the gym also an escape for some guys?

  Mitchell Osmond: 24:01

  Absolutely. Yeah. Because remember, when I go to the gym, especially if I'm in great shape and I know what I'm doing in the gym, and it's a bit of an ego boost when I go because I'm already kind of jacked and I feel great about myself when I'm there. Yeah, I'm gonna go to the gym because at least I know what I'm doing there. Right? People, I got buddies there, women, I catch women glancing at me there, right? Versus at home when I I come through the door, my wife doesn't even look up from her phone, right? Or or even a woman could do that too. Well, hey, I'm gonna put on a nice outfit, I'm gonna do my hair, go to the gym, you know, if these guys hitting on me, fits it fills that need, right? Versus coming home and and my husband's just scrolling on his phone all day or he's snapping at the kids or whatever. So why would I why would I spend my time here? Let me take the kids and go on a on a you know on a hike and you just stay home. You're you're you're grumpy anyways, you know? And so we call this the crazy cycle when we're not getting these needs met. Because when a man isn't doesn't feel competent, doesn't feel respected, he becomes unloving, right? And when a wife doesn't feel loved and cherished, she begins to say things or you know, may say things that might make him feel incompetent as a husband. And so that you get that caught in that cycle and it goes around and around. And so, yeah, the fitness piece can absolutely be a distraction. It can become an addiction. I've seen that as well. Where guys they're making a ton of money, they're in the best shape of the life, and the wife is about to walk out. She's literally packing her bags, and everyone thinks on the outside the dude's crushing it. He's got a six-pack, he's making, you know, six multiple six figures, but he does the but they don't see what's going on behind closed doors, right? So you gotta be careful because you can let that take priority over your marriage, you can let that take priority over your kids. So it's definitely a fine line because I would also say on the counter, you have to make space for each other to take care of yourselves. Like a husband to say, come, hey babe, I'm gonna grab the kids, you know, for an hour. Why don't you go grab a workout? You know, and or uh or a wife to say the same thing. I'm gonna take the kids this morning, why don't you head to the gym? I know that means a lot to you, right? So we got to make space for that for sure, but not let it get to the point where it becomes a an escape for sure.

  Philip Pape: 26:08

  Yeah, so a couple things came to mind when you talked about the supporting of each other. What are your thoughts on two things that come to mind? One is working out together, because I know that's that could be polarizing, that could be a that could be a not a great idea, depending. And also going back to the men being competent and feeling respected and wanting to fix everything. Some men get into trouble trying to coach their wives. So kind of though those two topics are interesting.

  Mitchell Osmond: 26:38

  I get this question all the time. Because remember, no, listen, ladies, no disrespect. I only work with men, so I only hear from men for the most part. I see, how do I how do I get my wife to go to the gym? All right, how do I get my wife to eat better? I'm like, who, brother, please tell me you did not ask her that question. Please tell me you did not tell her to go to the gym. Here's how you do it you model it, all right? You be the example. Same thing with your kids. If you want your wife to exercise, you want her to become make that a part of her life, you you have to do that because you're leading the way. If you want your kids to follow, you want your kids to work out and go to the gym and be and and eat great, but you're crushing donuts and you're never hitting the gym, why would why in the world would they ever do that? They're gonna follow you. Um, you are their blueprint. And so for me, on that question of of you know working out and then women, men and all that stuff, I think the best way you can do that is to inspire them by how you live. And if you're a wife, your your best chance at inspiring your husband to do the same is is to do that, right? It's to exercise, to prioritize your health, get your kids involved, and he's gonna feel it pretty quickly, right? Um, it is it particularly works in the inverse, like when a husband, when a man takes starts to take his health seriously, the tone of the home totally changes. Now, to your to your other question, should people work out together? You know what, dude? To each their own, I would say, you know, me and my wife didn't for years. It was just not our thing. I'm like, hey, you and we didn't even go to the same gym, but if we did, we're like, hey, you uh you go to that side, I'm gonna go to this side. It's just like my personal thing for me. I go, I go there, it's like my sanctuary, you know. I get in my head, I'm thinking, I I don't want distractions, right? And she's the same way, she gets after it. And so for us, it didn't really work. Also, I just I was pretty insecure, so I felt like she was like critiquing my form. But once we had a kid, now we both value we both value fitness, but it's like we want to model this for our kids, and so we have a workout uh centered uh little thing down in the basement, a gym, and we train down there with our with our kid, and he he watches and mom's showing him how to do a little squad, and you know, I'm just you know whatever, doing a bench press, and he's sitting on my chest or whatever. And it's like we do it together because not only do we want him to see us together, we also want him to see us doing things we love together, but we also want him to see us actually lifting weights because we are going to be the model for him. So, you know, it depends on your motives, right? And it's been both for us in different seasons.

  Philip Pape: 29:28

  I think that's that's the best answer. You honestly answered the parenting question in general. I think you did an episode, it might have been as far back as 2024, and it was about fat loss and nutrition and everything. And you had a segment in there about how do you get your kids to eat better, and it's like you have to model for your kids, but also that kids' connection with emotional eating, binge eating, and things like that come from the connections you make when they're young, like giving them a cookie for comfort and things like that. And let me tell you, we h we homeschool our kids. And again, you said to each his own, which is great. Everybody has their different things that they can and want to do for their children. And I will say, every little thing that I see my 12 and 14-year-old doing now, I could trace it back to something we did when they were one or three or five when I when I compare to say someone else's kids or different, you know, nature versus nurture, it's almost all nurture. I mean, you know, we have two kids that have very different personalities that would have gone on very different tracks with different parenting. I'm not trying to say I'm an amazing parent, but like what you say resonates with me. And I hope anybody listening, this is not a parenting podcast, but man, if you want your kids to be fit and eating well and doing all the things and not have emotional eating issues when they get older and go on lots of diets and try to be skinny all the time and all those things, it starts when they're kids. Okay. Very powerful, man. So modeling. The thing about the wife and the husband working out also agree. Like we have a gym, we work out separately. Just because she wants to work out for 10 minutes, I want to work out for an hour and a half. You know, like the kids, she wants to get out before me, and I don't want to get up that early, right? But the kids are in there with us. So when you're coaching clients, you mentioned that, you know, it starts with fitness. Like, how do you unpack all this stuff in a very, I'll say kind of simple way for listeners now or listening saying, look, I don't have all this together right now. Maybe my fitness isn't totally on point.

  Mitchell Osmond: 31:27

  Yeah, so when it comes to uh so when it comes to fitness species, are you asking for fitness specifically or like the whole thing? Good question. I don't know what I'm asking, man.

  Philip Pape: 31:38

  You know what I'm saying? I'll answer for both.

  Mitchell Osmond: 31:40

  Yeah, I'll answer for both. So for the fitness piece, a lot of guys come in and they're like, okay, uh uh what what do you want me to do? You want me to go six times a week? You want me to train 90 minutes? You want me to eat chicken and broccoli and rice? I'm like, no, man. No. Maybe maybe let's just maybe let's just cut out potato chips. And they're like, what? What do you mean? Just that's it? Like, we're gonna add maybe two liters of water a day, and we're gonna cut out potato chips. You know, or like they'll be like, if if I'm training a local guy, they're like, okay, man, uh when do you want to meet to meet me at the gym? You know, I'll show up and and it'll be like they're they're ready to go, and we'll park in the parking lot. I'm like, amazing, dude. You made it. Here we are. Okay, let's jump back in a car, let's go home, I'll see you tomorrow. And they're like, what? We're not gonna work out. I'm like, no, we are going to form these behaviors and these behavioral patterns slowly and gradually. And then the next day we get to the parking lot, it's like, all right, let's go in. We could change, we'll do one or two exercises, we'll leave. Right? Because if I go and I take him to the gym and I just destroy this guy, you know, over 90 minutes, he walks out feeling crippled like he needs a wheelchair. What are the chances that he's gonna have a good association with fitness, right? So, what I'm trying to say is we go very simple and we change the behaviors, right? Because that's what this is about. You talk about emotional relationship, it was a learned behavior. My mom fed me chocolate chip cookies when I was bullied in in elementary school. I didn't realize this, but as a grown man, I was stuffing my face with chocolate chip cookies when I had a bad day at work. I had no idea why, right? And it was our good intentions, but it was a learned behavior. And so it could be something as simple as like, hey man, we're gonna cut out, we're gonna cut out, you know, soda, we're gonna cut out whatever. So it less of the taking things out and more of the adding things in, we're gonna add in protein, we're gonna add in 30 grams of protein every meal. That's it. I have a simple rule with food. If the these guys are like really rudimentary, I'm like, put three colors on your plate. That's it. Just make sure every time you eat, there's three colors. And if there is, then you're in the right direction. But if you look down and all you see is brown, chicken fingers, French fries, cornbread, whatever, there's a problem. But if you look down, you see orange carrots, green broccoli, red steak. All right, now we're in the right direction. So if you just eat three colors, that's a great place to get started, right? So I'm hoping you're seeing what I do what I take do is like a slow process and simple, sustainable changes. Then over time we start cutting out and but we make achievable goals. What do we do in the in the overall? You know, this is a really fun exercise that I do with my clients, which sounds a little bit morbid, but we actually start with a eulogy riding exercise. I don't know if you've ever heard of this before, but my transformation moment, dude, and we didn't talk about this, but uh when I hit my rock bottom moment, I got let go of a senior leadership position. Me and my wife got in a massive fight. I was out of work and I was coming home every day wondering is this the day that I'm gonna see the ring on the counter? You know, I was 60 pounds overweight, we were 100 grand in debt. I was medicating every day with alcohol and drugs to cope. My turning point came when I was asked to sing at a funeral. And it was the this philanthropist, there was a couple thousand people in the room, and the minister asked the question after he talked about all the things that this man had done. He said, Are you living a life worthy of imitation? And for me, he said, Would you be proud of the legacy that you left? And for me, as I grabbed my guitar and I was getting ready to sing the last song, staring at the casket of this man, I was faced with my mortality. If this were my funeral today, what would people say? Would they want to imitate my life? Would they be saying, Man, I want to have the marriage that Mitch had, I want to have the bank account Mitch had, I want to have the body Mitch had. No, at that point, they would have said, he died early, he had a tough life, and he and he died too soon before he had a chance to turn it around. You know, so for me, beginning with the end in mind, I mean, Stephen Covey talks about that, Napoleon Hill talks about that. So many thought leaders of our time say, you gotta know where you're going. And so what I do is I'll I'll have my clients write that eulogy exercise. If you're if your life were to end today, you're gonna you're gonna write this eulogy from the perspective of your wife and your kids. What would they say? Well, Philip was a blank man. He was, he did this, he cared about this, and would you be happy with what they said? Now, number two is you're gonna you're gonna dream about who what that what that life would like if you were 100% the man that you were called to be. What would she say about you at that point as she stood over your casket? You know, and then we we take those and we draw the comparison. We we because the gap between who you are and who you want to be, that's where your anxiety is, that's where your frustration is, that's where your tension is, because you're living short of your purpose, you're living short of your potential. And so what we do is find all the things in that gap and we take care of it and we create men, you know, to be the men that they know they could be.

  Philip Pape: 37:02

  Does that make sense? Makes sense. Begin with the end in mind, begin with the and then draw the comparison because that gap is where the anxiety lives between where you are now and your ultimate purpose and your potential. I think that's super powerful, man.

  Mitchell Osmond: 37:15

  Well, you think about it, right? Like, I'm not happy in my marriage. Well, why? What was your expectation? Well, if my marriage looked like this, okay, that's the expectation. Well, here's where I am in my marriage. Well, that's your reality. Expectation versus reality. That's your your your marriage that doesn't look like what you wanted it to be. Well, let's fix that. If your body doesn't look like what expectation versus reality, there's the gap, right? So it's true, it translates in every aspect of your life.

  Philip Pape: 37:41

  And it's consistent with what you said before about looking out 10 years instead of just one, in that you're not going to solve all those and put all those behaviors in place tomorrow, but eventually you're going to express that identity, let's call it, with your behaviors by gradually building up to them. And that's a sustainable way to do it. We love sustainability here. So, Mitchell, I know we're uh we're running out of time here. I want to let folks find you and reach out to you. Where can they look you up?

  Mitchell Osmond: 38:06

  Yeah, honestly, if you just Google the Dad Nation, you'll find me. My face is plastered around to the because of the podcast. But yeah, check out the show, the Dad Nation Podcast. You can check out my website, dadnationcode.com. But listen, I'd love to give your listeners a free gift if you're okay with that. Let's do it. What do we have for them? So we talked about this idea that men, you know, struggle to talk about their emotions. They struggle to connect with their wives on an emotional level. Excuse me. Well, I've created something called the connection code, and it's 50 questions that you can ask your wife that think that will spark the fun and get the fire back in your relationship. Because a lot of times as we go on date nights or we put down the kids, and it's like we ask the same boring, dead end questions. How was work? How are the kids? How'd you sleep? Blah, blah, blah. Right. And we wonder why conversation didn't go anywhere. And so 50 of these questions, these 50 questions, sorry, uh, are strategically designed to connect with your wife and to to draw her in on an emotional level to make her feel seen, heard, and safe. It's a free download. And I, dude, I've had people, I've had wives email me, be like, who was that man that took me out last night? Because he was asking me questions he hadn't asked me since we were dating 30 years ago. You know, so it doesn't matter. You can you can pull a few questions off the page and take her out, or maybe you want to put the kids down, pour up a glass of wine, and you know, as long as it's not above your caloric intake for that day, Philip. I got to say that. And pull a couple questions off the page and ask her. And I tell you, it'll have a tremendous impact.

  Philip Pape: 39:36

  The connection code. I'm gonna get that myself. I haven't gotten it yet, so I'm gonna download that myself. I'm a husband, I want to check it out. I love like table topics and those kinds of fun, fun games. So it sounds like a great resource. We're gonna share that in the show notes, as well as the Dad Nation podcast. Definitely follow that, guys, dadnationco.com. Mitchell, it's been a pleasure. This is awesome. Thank you for coming on Wits and Weights.

  Mitchell Osmond: 39:57

  Thank you, Philip. I'm so glad to be here. It's been a privilege and an honor, brother.

5 Training Mistakes That Make Lifting and Cardio Work Against Each Other | Ep 447

If you do both lifting and cardio, is your program optimizing for both without undermining each other?

It's not that combining them is bad, but that most people struggle to arrange their training week.

Philip walks through the 5 programming mistakes that create interference between your strength training and your conditioning, using the new Velocity 5-day Hybrid program from Physique University as the example of what it looks like when you fix all five.

You'll learn when to program your heaviest lifts, which days your sprint intervals should go on, how and when to use a dedicated "active recovery" day, and when to skip the extra conditioning work instead of pushing through it.

If you've been trying to build muscle and improve your cardio fitness at the same time and feel like neither one is progressing, this episode will show you where to look first.

Cozy Earth bamboo pajamas and blankets | Your training is only as good as your recovery. Cozy Earth's temperature-regulating bamboo pajamas and Classic Cuddle Blanket help you actually rest when you're done for the day. 100-night sleep trial, 10-year warranty. Go to witsandweights.com/cozyearth and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for up to 20% off.

Join Physique University (Velocity + 10 other training templates): physique.witsandweights.com

Episodes Mentioned

• Strength Training and Endurance Together (Without Killing Your Gains)

• Are Your Fitness Goals in Conflict?

Timestamps

0:00 - Lifting vs. cardio (does hybrid training create interference?) 
4:55 - Mistake 1: Timing of cardio vs. heavy lifts
6:51 - Mistake 2: Superset pairings and muscle fatigue
8:28 - Mistake 3: Putting sprint intervals on the wrong days
10:27 - Mistake 4: To "active recovery" or not?
14:18 - Mistake 5: Doing THIS with every conditioning session
15:45 - Recovery starts with better sleep
17:00 - How the full training week fits together
19:33 - Sequencing vs. exercise selection
20:44 - Velocity 5-Day Hybrid Training program
22:32 - The 60-second hybrid program audit

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If you are both lifting weights and doing cardio, there is a chance that your program is not quite optimal. And it's not because combining them is a bad idea, but because most programs make these five structural mistakes that create unnecessary interference between the two. So today I'm going to walk you through all five using a hybrid program that we just built for Physique University as the example of what it looks like when you get these right. We talked about whether your fitness goals are in conflict with each other and covered how to combine strength training and endurance without killing your gains. And that came from some listener questions, Richard, Gerwin, a few others who wanted to know how to do both together. Today I'm getting a little more specific. Instead of whether you can combine lifting and cardio, we are looking at why most people who try to do these oftentimes don't get it quite right or suboptimally, or they get frustrated because it's not working for them, and then they get no results from either one. And it usually comes down to five programming mistakes. And you know, we're all about teaching you how to adjust your own programming and your nutrition. And that's what we're gonna do today. So to make this really concrete, I love stories, I love examples. So I'm gonna use a hybrid program that we just built for Physique University. It's called Velocity, and it's a five-day program. We're gonna use the principles from that program to walk you through these five mistakes so you can avoid them yourself, whether you jump in and use it, or you're creating your own program or evaluating someone else's program. If you want the full program, it is available inside Physique University. Go to witsandweights.com/slash physique. I'll tell you more about that later. But for now, I'm gonna show you the thinking behind it so you can spot these mistakes for yourself. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a 60-second audit that you can run on your current program to find out if your conditioning work is incorporated with your strength training in the right way. So here's what we're gonna cover. First, the five mistakes and why each one creates interference between your lifting and your cardio. Second, what the fix looks like in a real program structure. And third, how to evaluate your own setup without having to overhaul everything. All right, let me paint you a picture of what most people's combined training looks like. I've looked at a lot of people's programs or they've suggested, hey, can I do this? Can I do that? And they might have a lifting program, a training program that's push-pull, leg split, or an upper lower split. And then they have goals for cardio. It could be conditioning for a sport, even with some teenagers I've worked with who are in baseball or basketball or football. It could be cardiovascular health, it could be for fat loss. And so they kind of fill in the gaps. Okay, they start with lifting, which I'm a big fan of prioritizing your lifting, but then they kind of try to fill in the gaps randomly. They, you know, they run on their off days or they tack a 30-minute jog or a sprint or whatever onto the end of leg day, and maybe they do hit classes or boot camp classes or whatever, whenever they feel like it, and kind of just throw it in there. And on paper, it seems uh reasonable, right? You're training both systems and you've got a schedule for your lifting, and then somehow you're getting your cardio in there. But the problem is that the approaches most people have are splitting up the recovery buckets and they're not thinking of it as a system. In other words, they have one for strength and one for cardio, and they're not thinking about the interplay between them, kind of the long tail between them, because that's a little bit more complex. It's it, or at least it seems complex, but we're gonna simplify it for you. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between Tuesday and Wednesday, right? You have one recovery pool, one capacity pool. And when you drain the pool on, for example, a hard run the day before a heavy squat session, well, your squat session is going to suffer. And it's not because cardio causes interference, but because of the interaction between the two, the way you set it up is actually causing the interference. And that's the interference effect we talked about in episode 443, which looked at there was a study that looked at thousands of athletes that saw that the actual muscle building interference from concurrent training, okay, we're gonna use the term hybrid or concurrent training to mean both lifting and cardio, that the interference actually is close to zero when you set up your variables correctly, which is pretty cool. So if we've actually studied this and said, you know what, the interference effect really isn't much of a big deal when you set up your whole training program for the week up correctly. So let's go through those five mistakes. And if you avoid these, you're probably gonna be in pretty good shape. Mistake number one, doing conditioning before your heavy lifts. So if you run, if you bike, if you do even like a conditioning circuit before your heavy compound lifts, right? That's before your squat, your deadlift, your pressing, even variants of those lifts, like you know, strong lifts that require a good amount of energy and glycogen and everything else. If you do that, your force production on those lifts is going to drop. And we've seen that it could drop by 10 to 15% if you do a hard cardio session right before that. And that's a big number. That's not a small number. I mean, that's the difference between I'm gonna hit a new PR or I'm gonna grind through what I barely got last time. Right. So if you're trying to increase your weight, your heaviest work, especially the barbell work, the compound lists, things like that, need to come first in the session when you have a fresh nervous system, when your glycogen are full stores are full, when you're mentally ready to go too, because there is a little bit of a safety aspect we got to watch out for when we're fatigued. And so in our velocity training template, every lower body day opens with a barbell compound. It's either squat or deadlift. We do a three set of five in there. It's a pretty cool program, actually, because it's a it's a hybrid hybrid. It's actually a combo of heavy lifts, more like bodybuilding work, finishers, and cardio. It's pretty cool how we put it together. Coach Carol helped come up with the overall structure. I mean, she did most of the work. I'm gonna give her credit for that. So, Carol, if you're listening, all you, you get the credit, and that's why we love her. So when you look at the lower body day, it starts with the compound lift. Every upper body day opens with bench or overhead. Again, three sets of five. And then there's actually a fifth day in there because this is a five-day program. The fifth day is more of a true endurance conditioning core type of day. So those are your highest priority movements. Every everything else follows after. So that's mistake number one is doing your cardio first before you lift. Mistake number two is I'll say random pairings of usually supersets that we're doing, but even if they're not supersets, random pairings that fatigue the wrong things. So if you, for example, pair exercises that compete for the same stabilizers or grip strength that you need for your main lifts, you could be degrading performance across the session. And what I'm what I mean by this is you would rather pair movements that target different muscle groups or antagonist muscle groups, but different or antagonist, either one. Like antagonist would be biceps and triceps, different would be just completely different parts of your body. And that way one can recover while you do the other in the finish or in the, what do you call it, the superset? So in velocity, after the main compound, you're gonna see multiple superset pairings because we're trying to save you time in the gym so that you could fit in this cardio work, but also have a decent amount of you know, recovery and and time. I just said time three times. Uh, you're gonna see things like split squats paired with lying leg curls or incline bench paired with cable rows, right? Opposite or non-competing patterns. And that lets you get a decent amount of volume while saving time. So that's really all we're trying to do is get the volume in while saving time. But if you're trying to pair things up randomly, you may overfatigue things that then don't allow you to perform in the rest of the set or that end up taking longer, if that all makes sense. Okay, so that's that's mistake number two. Mistake number three is putting high intensity intervals on the wrong days of the week. And and this is where it gets tricky with hybrid programs because they might put like hit work or sprint work or something like that on a separate day, like an off day, until you realize that those also create some significant nervous system and metabolic fatigue. And that could carry over into the next day. So then it gets a little tricky, right? If you do a tough sprint session on Wednesday and then you try to deadlift on Thursday, that could give you a little bit more fatigue than you want going into Thursday. And you know, we had Steph Mager on the show. She's a power, she's an elite power lifter, and she talks about spacing apart where you hit your nervous system, and you have to be really smart about it. So in our program in Velocity, the sprint intervals appear on upper body days. That's that's really the key variable here, instead of the lower body days, because then after your upper body lifting and your supersets, you could do, let's say, your sprinting protocol, either flat ground sprinting or on a bike, rower elliptical, something like that. And the we've talked about this protocol before that I originally stole from Brad Kearns. 10 to 20 seconds all out, six to one rest to work ratio, four to eight sets. So about 10 to 20 minutes total. So when you do that, right on your upper body days, your legs are getting this relative break because you're upper doing the upper body. So the sprints are fresh for your legs, and then the sprint intervals are short enough that they help you develop, you know, that that anaerobic power, but they don't create so much stress that it carries over to the next lower body day, if that makes sense. So that's why we do lower upper, the cardio, kind of pure cardio day, and then lower upper. So you kind of get your upper before you get some rest from your legs instead of before your big leg days, if that makes sense. So again, the sequencing can really matter with a hybrid program. Mistake number four is skipping dedicated recovery days or smashing in more training into those days. Guys, you love, I know you love to go to the gym seven days a week, or you like to work on. Stop doing that. Okay. Zone to work, for example, the which is kind of that low intensity cardio where you can hold a conversation barely. I mean, it's it's it's tough. It's not like an easy walk, an easy breeze, but it's also not hit or super intense cardio. I would say it, it's it's kind of an underused tool. I don't talk about it a lot a lot because I don't usually train with the zones in mind. But when you're trying to add in some steady state cardio, it can be a helpful metric where if if you're not using the metric, you run the risk of just super easy cardio, which isn't getting you to the stress and the even the calorie burn that you're trying to get, or you run the risk of going too hard and overstressing yourself, right? So in in our program Velocity, the zone two shows up as, for example, we throw in incline walking after certain lifting sessions for like 20 to 30 minutes. And we give you the option, we say, look, you can incline walk, you can throw in a rucksack, you can go faster. The point is to progress in one of those variables over time, make it more difficult, or make it faster. And even though it's not there to burn calories, it will, it's really there to promote blood flow, it aids recovery, it builds your aerobic base, you know, your work capacity, but really without adding meaningful fatigue on top of the lifting fatigue and the stress, right? Because the aerobic system, right, the oxygen using system is what fuels your recovery between heavy sets. So if you have a better cardio base, then the faster you recover between sets and between sessions and between training weeks, which by the way is also why we have all these finishers and supersets in here. The whole thing is geared toward improving your cardiovascular fitness and conditioning, but in a really cool, structured, balanced way that lifters tend to enjoy, right? Let lifters tend to enjoy, as opposed to, say, CrossFitters. So when you look at day three of our five days, it's dedicated entirely to that zone two type movement, to some ab work. We actually have some loaded, some really good loaded ab work in kind of a superset fashion to get it done quickly. And a little bit of mobility, which to me is just kind of stretching and limbering up. It's nothing special. But if you have specific mobility protocols or yoga or whatever you like, go for and put it in there. Um, I just like I personally, you know, I have the shoulder where I had surgery. So doing some stretching for that is helpful. You know, there's actually no heavy lifting, there's no sprinting, but it's also not a rest day. It's more like what you would call active recovery. And there's a difference between all of that, right? You know, rest is doing nothing, which has its place for sure. In fact, it's a five-day program. So the idea is you have two days off. It doesn't have to be Saturday, Sunday. You have flexibility, and that's another variable that you can choose on your own that makes sense based on your work schedule, your sleep needs, your fueling, right? How you recover from one to the next. You can kind of mix it up a little bit. You can even stretch it out if you have to. Like if you're a little on the older side and you can't handle all that work, you can always stretch it out. But recovery is doing the things that actively help your body repair and adapt, you know, and that's where the the that day in the middle is kind of like we're gonna keep you moving forward and staying conditioned, stay active. We're gonna give you structure and something to do, but it's not gonna be slamming your fatigue level up further from another really, really heavy, hard session. And so that's kind of the stuff that a lot of lifters will skip, which is why we program it in. And one of my themes lately with a lot of personal clients, one-on-one clients, has been let's program in some of your conditioning and cardio because you're not gonna do it otherwise, even if that's just walks, even if it's just walks. So this can really be helpful to limber up, to work on those joints. And then mistake number five is treating every conditioning session as mandatory, regardless of how you feel. I I when as I was coming up with five mistakes, you know, I was wondering which one really floats up high here. And I would say this one is super powerful. So our program, again, Velocity, it has finishers at the end of lower body days. So this is like a four to five minute prescribed block of your dealer's choice, sled push, sled or prowler pushes, they're called, kettlebell swings, farmers' carries, things like that, just for a little bit of conditioning. You know, they're light. The program says, hey, these are optional. You can skip them if the energy is low, add them if you're well recovered, if you're, you know, trying to add a little bit more of the conditioning volume, you know, a little bit of extra calorie burn as long as you can do them. And I love programs that have that kind of flexibility built in. And it might be the most important mistake to avoid because your recovery capacity is going to change week to week, especially if you're like in fat loss or you have a high sleep stress situation or you're lacking on sleep or you're not fueling enough for nutrition, whether it's on purpose or not. And also accumulated training load, right? You start to build up fatigue over weeks and weeks doing a program. And a program that doesn't account for that's not a smart program, right? And that doesn't always mean D-loads, by the way, right? I the way I do this program, it doesn't even have a D load. You can program them in if you want, but it's just really a schedule, right? It's a schedule that's smart, that that balances your training, your conditioning, your finishers, all of that stuff. So the mindset where you're always pushing and never adapting is the problem when it comes to this mistake, treating treating like these full-on sessions as is exactly what you have to do all the time. You have to have a little bit of auto-regulation or optionality already built in so that you don't feel like, oh, I failed or because I didn't do that. Right? I'd rather have extra things that are optional than too many things that you have to cut out randomly and then you feel like you're not doing enough for doing what you're supposed to do. Now, I just said that your recovery capacity changes week to week based on your sleep, your stress, and your nutrition. And we do spend a lot of time talking about training and nutrition, but sleep is the one people I say most underinvest in, and it's the one that controls everything else. And I'm a huge fan of one company in particular. They sponsor this show. They're called Cozy Earth. And I have several of their products. One of those are pajamas. I never wore pajamas before. I thought they were pointless, they were always too hot, uncomfortable. And then I tried their bamboo-derived pajamas, and I wear them now. I wear them now because they are lightweight, they're cool, they don't make me overheat, and I feel like I'm recovering and relaxing. And it's great to just have something luxurious to relax in. And then another luxurious thing that I've been using of theirs lately is the cuddle blanket. They call it the classic cuddle blanket, and it is super, super, super thick. My kids love it. It's super soft, feels like they're hamsters or even softer than that. We throw it on the couch, it's big enough to share, right? You can use it just for yourself and kind of really cuddle in and get warm, or you can share it with somebody else. And again, another good way to relax. So I like little elements of luxury in the in the home. If you have, if you want to splurge, if you want to buy a gift for someone, I think it's great. Go to witsandweights.com/slash cozy earth. Really good company. I'm into very stand-up companies who back their stuff up. Cozy Earth has a hundred night sleep trial. They have a 10-year warranty. So you don't have to stress about it. If it doesn't work, you can return it. You know, no harm, no foul. Just get comfortable. Work on that recovery, work on that sleep. This is one way to do it. Support the podcast by checking out witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. The code will show up. It's wits and weights for 20% off. It'll show up when you go to the website. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth and just take care of yourself, guys. All right. So now you've seen the five mistakes. I'm going to zoom out and show you what it looks like when you fix all five and everything clicks together. What does that look like? All right, so I mentioned our program Velocity. It runs five days. Days one and four are lower body. They open with a barbell, compound lift. So you've got squats and deads. Then you have a couple superset blocks for accessory work, the optional finisher that I mentioned, and then some zone two work like incline walking or however you want to make the walking harder. And again, that's a good way to structure in your walking. So that's days one and four. We have a couple upper bodies in day there as well, days two and five. Same logic, heavy compound first. So you've got bench and overhead. And by the way, you could always have variations on these. So whether it's a close grip or maybe an incline shoulder press or whatever. And then two superset blocks and then sprint intervals on those days. And then day three in the middle is your active recovery and movement day where we throw in some of the zone two, some of the loaded ab work, and then some mobility in there. And if you think of the rhythm, you know, heavy lower, heavy upper recovery, heavy lower, heavy upper, it's a logical sequence where you never have two lower body days back to back. You never do sprints the day before squats or deadlift. So it's intentional. And that's what I mean when I say programming is about the relationships between training stimuli. It's not just the stimuli themselves, and I like the word stimuli. Every individual session in velocity is fine on its own. That's fine. But what makes a system is how each day sets up the next day and accumulated fatigue and stress and adaptations. So the upper body day creates relative lower body recovery while still training your anaerobic system, your work capacity through the sprinting. The recovery day sits in the middle, so you sit the second half of the week, or you hit the second half of the week as freshly as the first. It's almost like two mini weeks within a week. So you're always recovering in between. And then that zone two walking after lifting doubles as active recovery that, let's be honest, you're not going to do otherwise if I don't tell you to do it. So that's why it's in there. If you look at your own training week right now, how you're training, if you're assuming you're trying to get in conditioning, work capacity, cardio, things like that, regardless, if it doesn't have intentional sequencing, that's probably your biggest ROI. That's probably where the biggest gains are hiding in your program. And just because you got a program from a coach or an app or whatever, doesn't mean it's optimized for those things. A lot of programs are not structured very well. And you can just rearrange it to make it work better for you. All right, before we wrap up, I promised you a 60-second program audit that you can do right now on your own training setup. I'm gonna share that in just a moment. But if this episode has you looking at your training week differently, then I wanna just remind you that there is a ready-made turnkey program in Physique University called Velocity. It's one of our 10 plus training templates we've got for you that are super flexible. They cover a lot of different scenarios. And Velocity specifically is a five-day hybrid template built from the ground up, and it avoids every one of the mistakes we covered today. I'm not going to go through it again because we just went through the structure a couple times, but Velocity is one of over 10 customizable templates we have. Whether you train three, four, five days a week, whether you have a full gym or a garage setup or you're traveling, every template can be adjusted for the equipment and preferences using a built-in substitution lookup that we have. Also, every one of our programs is in Boost Camp. So if you want to use an app, once you're in, you can go in, click the link, import it, and immediately run it in the app. I've set them all up in the app for you, including Velocity. And then there's of course a library of lessons, short modules on everything from how to breathe and brace under a barbell, what rest periods to use for different goals, what equipment to put in your gym bag. Like there's so many things. If you want to go deeper on the cardio side, we also have something called. The adaptive cardio workshop in there, the replay, the guide are in there. In other words, there's plenty of resources to learn from and then apply with our help in Physique University. And you get access to me and Coach Carol for questions. Yes, from real human beings who we can help with your programming. We can do form checks, all of that. Just go to wits and weights.com slash physique. That's witsandweights.com slash physique. All right, here's a quick way to tell if your current program is set up for hybrid training correctly or it's working against yourself. All right. I want you to answer three questions. Look at your program and answer three questions. Question one, do your heaviest compound lifts come first in every session? If not, your strength work is probably at a little bit of a disadvantage. Number two, are your high intensity conditioning sessions, maybe that's sprints, hit, whatever you do, are they separated from your heavy lower body days by at least 24 hours? So, like if you're sprinting the day before heavy squats or deadlifts, that could be an issue, could be an issue for you. Number three, do you have at least one day per week that's dedicated to low intensity recovery work? All right. And this is more of the active recovery. And this is mainly just for you guys who are not walking enough or you're not moving enough to think of this as training. I don't care if it's zone two or mobility or core work. I don't care. None of that, it doesn't, it's just having something in there that you're doing to get you moving, right? And that can really help with the blood flow and the recovery and the joints and all of the other stuff to kind of keep your overall week fairly active while you still have a couple true rest days in there. So if you said no to any of those three questions, then you just have to rearrange the program you already have. You don't necessarily need a new one. Just go through this episode, listen to the mistakes and the tips that I gave you and try to rearrange it, or jump into physique university, witsandweights.com slash physique, and we'll help you do that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, sometimes the biggest gains come from rearranging your current training plan, not adding more. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How to Become an Intuitive Eater (Without Ignoring Data) | Ep 446

"Just listen to your body" is the most popular nutrition advice for anyone tired of tracking. 

The problem is, your hunger signals may be giving you bad data.

Chronic dieting, sleep disruption, hormonal shifts in perimenopause and menopause, and ultra-processed foods all degrade your appetite signals. A 2013 study found that intuitive eating only regulates weight when those signals are accurate. If they're off, the whole system breaks down.

Philip walks through what the intuitive eating research actually measures (psychological health, not body composition), four factors that wreck your hunger signals after 40, and a step-by-step framework for building real food freedom through structured skill-building, not by skipping straight to "eat by vibes." You'll also get a 3-question self-test to check whether your signals are calibrated enough to ditch the app.

Join the Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist to get first access and founder pricing on a 26-week coached program that builds your nutrition and strength training skills in sequence so you can build muscle and lose fat efficiently:
https://witsandweights.com/eatmore

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why "just listen to your body" fails
0:31 - What intuitive eating actually is
3:30 - What the research shows (and doesn't)
6:15 - The body composition blind spot
8:30 - Interoceptive accuracy explained
9:45 - 4 factors that wreck hunger signals
13:15 - Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist
15:00 - 4 stages of nutritional competence
18:17 - Self-determination theory and tracking
20:00 - Diet autoregulation vs. intuitive eating
22:34 - Flexible vs. rigid structure
26:00 - 3-question hunger signal self-test 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  You probably heard this advice. Stop tracking, stop counting, just listen to your body. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. And it sounds liberating, doesn't it? Except for a lot of you, it has not worked. And today I'm going to show you why your body's hunger signals are likely giving you bad information, why the research on intuitive eating has a massive blind spot that nobody talks about, and what you need to do first before eating intuitively will ever work for you. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and I've been hearing from a lot of you lately. And the question comes up in different forms, but it's basically the same thing, and that is, Philip, I just don't want to track forever. When can I stop? When do I get to just eat normally? And I definitely get that because nobody wants to log every meal or weigh all their food for the rest of their life. Many people think that is kind of ridiculous that you would have to do that. And I don't want you to do that either. Now, if you like doing it, if you want to collect data, nobody's stopping you. I do it myself, but you don't have to. There is this idea floating around though, and it is everywhere now, that the answer is quote unquote intuitive eating, that you should trust your body, that you just ditch the data, you eat by feels, by vibes. I'm being a little bit facetious, but I think that is often how it's portrayed as this free, free loving thing that's just easy to do. And I think that kind of advice is actively harmful to a lot of people. It's almost the worst case advice for a lot of people, especially when you've been through multiple rounds of dieting, you've done a lot of the things like calorie counting, your body composition goals are serious, right? They go, they go beyond just like not having an eating disorder, right? That's a separate topic. We're not addressing that. They go to, hey, I wanna, I want to conquer the things I've had trouble with in the past. And I actually want to lose fat and look great and feel great and understand how to eat in a way that works for me. So today we are gonna look at what the intuitive eating research shows and what it doesn't show. We're gonna talk about why your hunger signals may not be trustworthy. They may be lying to you right now, which is why it's hard to go right into something like intuitive eating, especially as your body changes, especially as we get over 40, perimenopause, postmenopause, testosterone, all those hormonal changes that also affect your hunger, especially as life changes and gets more stressful. And then I wanna give you a framework for how to graduate to intuitive eating the right way. And I think that's a good way to think about it. You graduate into it by building those skills, by earning, earning it through that structured skill building first. And stick around to the end because as you know, I'm gonna have a really good tip for you, like I always do. It's a three-question self-test that you can do today to find out whether your hunger signals are calibrated well enough to eat intuitively. So it's it's kind of like you could test out of it and say, look, I'm an intuitive eater, or no, I've got a little more work to do. And here's what you're gonna walk away with today. First, the specific research gap in intuitive eating that should make you skeptical of anyone who says, Hey, just stop tracking, listen to me, buy my intuitive eating program. Second, the three things that wreck your hunger signals and why they hit harder as your body changes, especially after 40. And third, a step-by-step progression from structured eating with tracking to genuine food freedom, where you may not need that app anymore because you've internalized the skills. All right, let's get into it and put this popular advice under the microscope like we do. The advice is just stop tracking calories, stop counting macros, and eat intuitively. Listen to your body. And I want to give it fair treatment, right? In any good debate or any good argument, you have to acknowledge the, I'll say the other side and understand what is going on. Where is the truth here? There is a real framework behind this when we look at the history of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating was developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elise Resch. Have no idea if I pronounced those correct. And this is back in 1995. So it's not even that old of a concept. You know, what is that, 30 years? And there are 10 principles behind the formal framework. It's been very much studied, a lot of good research behind it. And if we go forward in time to much more recently, there's a 2021 meta-analysis that looked at 97 studies and found that intuitive eating is associated with better body appreciation, higher self-esteem, lower depression and anxiety, and less binge eating. Okay, you're intrigued. I'm sure you're intrigued. Because like, okay, well, it sounds like intuitive eating is a good thing, right? So why am I pushing back? Why's Philip doing here on wits and weights? Because of how we frame it and the language that we use and what we mean. When most people hear eat intuitively, they don't go read the research and those 10 principles and those frameworks and put them in place, which in and of itself requires structure. They hear, hey, I have permission to stop trying all these other things like tracking. Tracking's bad, data's obsessive, and I could wing it, and I could be sick, and I could be successful. And actually, I hear this a lot uh when it comes to diets that are not intuitive eating, but that are, they they make the claim that it's all you have to do is eat certain foods, right? Like keto, carnivore, all of those are attractive in many ways because of how they simplify and tell you you don't need to track. The Instagram version of intuitive eating is what I'm gonna call it, the one that gets shared as a meme, right? Like every food fits and listen to your body and all that, all of those, whatever flavor that is, is very different from the actual intuitive eating framework. Even Tribole or Triboli, again, I don't know how to pronounce her name. I apologize. She has said that using intuitive eating as a weight loss strategy is a misrepresentation of her work. That the framework, guess what it was designed for? To heal disordered eating relationships. It wasn't designed for, let's say, a healthy mind state without eating disorders who are trying to achieve body recomposition. It was not designed to help you build muscle or lose fat in a strategic targeted way, for example. And this is where the research gets interesting. Or where the research kind of drops off because there is a big blind spot in the research. So I want to talk about that next because the what I want you to know is that there's a single major intuitive eating study has never ever measured body composition, at least with anything objective, like I don't know, DEXA scans, body fat testing, things like that. The body weight data that you might see in intuitive eating studies is usually self-reported height and weight. We know a lot of that can be inaccurate, or maybe you just don't know. Regardless, the outcome they're offering measuring is BMI. BMI. And that tells you nothing about gaining muscle, losing fat, changing body composition. It's really more about general population health on the BMI scale. We're thinking about overweight and obesity. So when someone says, hey, no, the research supports intuitive eating, what they mean is the research shows that intuitive eating improves your psychological relationship with food. And that is valuable, but it doesn't tell you anything about whether it helps you build the physique you want or eat in a healthy way for sustainability long term to achieve your goals. Right? The evidence for that claim just doesn't exist. It's never been tested. And that's the case with a lot of this stuff in the world that we inhabit. It's very, it's either difficult to test these things or there's just not enough incentive or money to do so. The studies in the meta-analysis that I mentioned, the vast majority of them, like 89% of them, are cross-sectional. And so what that means is they took a snapshot at one point in time. And they can tell you that people who score high on intuitive eating scales tend to have lower BMI. They can't tell you that intuitive eating caused it, or you know, whether people who are already leaner find it easier to eat intuitively. And you're like, okay, but if it improves my mental health and it improves my relationship with food, isn't that worth it? And I would say, yes, 100% yes. I am not anti-intuitive eating when defined in the proper way. What I am is anti-skipping steps, trying to take shortcuts to get to something you think is intuitive eating that really isn't. And the step that most people skip is the one that determines whether intuitive eating will work for them. Okay, now we're now we're building on the logic here. So here's the question nobody asks. If intuitive eating means listen to your hunger and fullness signals, okay, I think I think maybe you would agree that's a decent definition. How do we know those signals are accurate? So there is a term in the research called interoceptive accuracy. Interoceptive accuracy. It's just a fancy way, or my kids would say, fancy Nancy would say, it's a fancy way of saying how well you can actually perceive what's happening inside your body. You might have heard the term proprioception. This is interoception inside your body. A 2013 study found that interoceptive sensitivity fully quote unquote mediates, okay, mediates the relationship between intuitive eating and BMI. What that means is that intuitive eating only works to regulate your weight when your hunger and fold signals are accurate. And when they're not, it doesn't. So here's the problem. For a lot of you, those signals are what? They're not accurate. Multiple things are happening that degrade those signals. All right, and I'm gonna share four things right now that have degraded them, just so you can get the context. The first one, of course, is chronic dieting and restriction. If you spent years cycling between restrictive diets and falling off the wagon, okay, yo-yo dieting, we call it, then your hunger regulation system has been disrupted over and over again. And we know the extreme of this is individuals with eating disorder histories and also chronic restriction have very large deficits in their interoceptive awareness compared to control groups that don't have such a history. So you've disrupted it already just by lots and lots of restriction in dieting. And most women in my audience here that are listening, you will have tried a hundred diets or more in your lifetime. Second is sleep. And this is brutal for anyone dealing with, for example, symptoms as we age, perimenopausal symptoms are a big one that I hear about all the time, where it just poor sleep leads to symptoms, symptoms lead to poor sleep, and it's a vicious cycle. People with sleep apnea, right? People with a lot of stress, the men with dealing with lots of stress and relationship issues, like the list goes on. We know that two nights of poor sleep, where you're getting, say, four or five hours instead of seven or eight, can produce a massive decrease in leptin, which is your satiety hormone, a massive increase, about 28% in ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone, and a 24% increase in subjective hunger. This is based on the study that I've talked about a few times in the past when we discussed appetite. And that's just from two nights of poor sleep. And these effects tend to be a little more pronounced in women as well. So that's the second one is sleep. And we know we as we get older, our sleep tends to get worse, not better, unless we do something about it. The third factor for degrading your signals is your food environment. There was a landmark NIH study. This was a randomized controlled trial. So it's it's one of the highest quality pieces of evidence we get. And it showed that people eating ultra-processed foods consumed 508 extra calories per day compared to unprocessed foods, even when the diets were matched for calories, macros, sugar, sodium, and fiber. This is a classic study that shows that we tend to overconsume, we overconsume when we are eating a higher percentage of ultra-processed foods because those foods literally override your satiety signals. You eat them faster, you feel full later, you consume more before your body catches up. It's essentially what happens. You just don't get full and you eat more. We all know this. A bag of chips is really easy to eat compared to a whole bunch of potatoes. And then the last one here is for women in perimetopause and menopause specifically, there's a hormonal compounding effect. As estradiol declines, ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down, or becomes a little more resistant, and GLP1 goes down as well. And then your hunger signals increase at the same time that your caloric needs are decreasing a bit by, say, two to 250 calories a day because of your declining metabolism from a loss of muscle mass and from less movement. And telling someone in this situation, okay, listen, you 25-year-old Instagrammers, to just listen to your body is like telling them to trust a, I don't know, let me give you a nerd reference. If you had a compass that's been demagnetized in the apocalypse, you're gonna, you're not gonna survive very long. Okay. So I don't know if that's a good reference or not, but that's what came to mind. So if you're hearing this, if you're recognizing yourself in what I've been talking about, maybe you've been stuck in a cycle of restriction. And then you give up and you eat by feel and by vibes, and then you restrict again, and nothing seems to stick. I want to tell you about something really cool that I've been building over the last few months. I'm putting together a structured coaching program. I say it that way intentionally, it's structured and it's designed for this progression from building your measurement system, right? The tracking measurement awareness system so that you can stop guessing through the real work of eating more food and lifting heavy with real human beings, coaches watching all of this data along the way, all the way to trusting yourself and making decisions independently, of you know, graduating or at least becoming very, very skilled. And so to me, that's the way it's done a beginning, a middle, and end to develop those skills. It's called Eat More, Lift Heavy. That's right, eat more, lift heavy. And it launches at the end of this month. If you want to be first in line and lock in the best pricing we're ever gonna have, go to witsandweights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. That is witsandweights.com slash eatmore. The link will be in the show notes. I'll have more details soon. If you're on the list, you'll hear them first. And it's something that I wished existed years ago because I do love having week by week. Tell me what to do to develop these skills so I can learn them in a very achievable fashion, given that I'm super busy and stressed and I don't have a lot of time. And I think that's many of you. All right, witsandweights.com slash eat more. Okay, let's keep going. So, what is the fix? You you can't just flip a switch and eat intuitively, right? If you can't trust your hunger signals. So, what do you do? Well, first you have to calibrate things, your signals. You have to build the skills that make intuitive eating reliable based on reliable inputs, based on reliable hunger signals. And then you graduate into the ability to sustain intuitive eating. I think of this as the four stages of nutritional competence. All right. Four stages of nutritional competence. And you might recognize this from learning theory. I love to borrow from different frameworks and theories out there, not just engineering. Stage one is you don't know what you don't know. You think that you're eating pretty healthy, or some of you use words like clean or good or whatever that the word is, but you're never actually looking at the data, or at least not sufficiently enough, to really understand what's going on. And this might be the person, if you're listening, eating 1100 calories with 40 grams of protein, who thinks she's doing fine because she's eating clean. So that's stage one. You don't know what you don't know. Stage two is you start tracking, sorry, you start tracking, and you realize that, oh, I had no freaking idea. I am way under on my protein. I am under eating by 500 calories. My fiber is a measly 10 grams. This is where tracking is a diagnostic tool. It is not a punishment, it is not meant to make you feel guilty or judge yourself. You are simply gathering information. It is a very powerful reframe. Stage three, all right, now you can hit your targets, but it takes attention. It takes some work. You are logging, you're making adjustments, you're learning what a 40 gram protein meal looks like on your plate, not just 40 grams for the day, right? But in one meal. And this is the conscious competence stage. Conscious competence. You are building pattern recognition. This is a crucial part of that, you know, 45-day window for a habit to stick, for example. And then stage four is hey, you don't need the tracking sheet or the app anymore. You naturally know how to portion and select foods, again, almost by feel and by vibes at this point, but it's really a skill that's been trained into your brain because you've done it enough times it's become automatic. And if you shift your goals, you know how to shift those selections accordingly. And this is what real intuitive eating actually looks like, right? It's not that you are ditching the data or getting rid of tracking your data, it's that you've internalized the data into your own brain. Your brain has become the data crunching and data gathering tool. And it will never be perfect. This is why people often, who I work with and myself included, will go back to a higher, more precise level of tracking at times, sometimes for long stretches, to retrain the brain or to level up that information. It also depends on how aggressive your goal is. If your goal requires a higher level of precision, you might need more data. But this is all a far cry from what the Instagram crowd talks about when they say intuitive eating. And look, I've had I've had people on my show who they don't use calories and macros with their clients, but they use another form of tracking. Even if it's a piece of paper of portions and what's on your plate and how much fiber, it's still tracking data. And that's the important piece. Now, everything I've just told you is supported by multiple lines of research. I wouldn't just be telling you out of out of my butt for kicks, okay? I I love I love connecting psychology and engineering and self-determination theory, which we're gonna talk about right now, into a system that really, really works for you and makes this all easier than it ever than you ever thought possible. It's never completely easy, and it's never really about discipline either. It's just a system. So self-determination theory, which has been studied a lot across, especially weight loss or weight management studies, shows that autonomous motivation is one of the strongest predictors of long-term success. Autonomous motivation. But this is the key part relying on like a rigid external prescription, somebody telling you this is the way you have to eat or this is the diet you follow, it can work temporarily, but then it undermines the development of your own motivational resources. So it undermines that very piece that shows long-term success. And that's why people fall off when they do stuff like that. And so the goal of structure is to build your internal competence, right? That conscious competence we talked about. You don't want to create a permanent dependence on the structure. You want to help internalize, learn from it, and then you move beyond it and you can always come back to it. Now, we had Dr. Eric Helms on the show several times, and on one of those episodes, he described this progression from a form of tracking to a form of much less tracking, being that he is an elite competitive, you know, award-winning bodybuilder. Okay. He's professional. He calls it diet autoregulation, kind of like training autoregulation, but this is for your diet. And he's he says, look, this is not really the same thing as intuitive eating. So this is where we can start to evolve our terminology, perhaps, in this industry for this nuance. He calls it diet autoregulation. It is goal-directed eating. So you have a goal that's directing what you do, and it's built on three trainable skills: nutritional competence, introsceptive awareness, and self-regulation, which we've kind of touched on all of these. You know, nutritional competence, right? So that's knowledge of nutrition science, interoceptive awareness, that's the awareness of your inside of your body, what it's doing, what we've talked about, the hunger signals, and then self-regulation, the ability to regulate your own behaviors. And his point is that these are not innate things. You have to train them. You train them, you build them through structured intention and practice. And then and only then does that structure become optional. And again, research on tracking supports this thought as well. There is consistently in the research a positive relationship between dietary self-monitoring and managing your weight. Dietary self-monitoring, what is that? That's tracking. People who track, it's not that they just lose weight, they actually develop the literacy around their nutrition. They learn what portions look like, they learn what their body needs because they're tracking and able to validate the reality of the situation as they go. There was one study that specifically tested this. They found that training in calorie estimation. So, in other words, training yourself to estimate calories significantly improved portion size accuracy. And then those skills transferred beyond that point. Now, here's the part that matters the most for this conversation. The research on flexible versus rigid restraint. Okay. Flexible dieting or flexible eating versus rigid restraint consistently shows that how you approach structure determines the outcome. What do I mean by that? Well, the structure itself can't be too rigid. Rigid control, all or nothing rule. Forbidden food lists, clean versus dirty, good versus bad, all of those correlate with higher binge eating, more food cravings, and higher BMI. Like you just don't get the result, even if you do in the short term, not for the long term. Whereas flexible control, having a moderate structure. So I like to say structure with flexibility, not having a list of forbidden foods. Okay, you might have your own personal rules for yourself, but not a big prescriptive list of forbidden foods that don't have a reason behind them. Things that have a graduated approach, like a system where you learn more and more till you don't need it anymore. All of those things correlate with lower binge eating, fewer cravings, lower BMI, and this is the best part, better long-term adherence. So tracking is not the problem. Obsessive, fear-based, rigid tracking is the problem. Flexible, I'll say curiosity-driven, time-limited tracking, right? When we do fat loss phases, we set a limit, not necessarily that you have to lose a certain amount of weight by certain time, but that we're not going to diet for longer than this amount of time, regardless of the outcome. These, this kind of approach is the single most evidence-based tool that we have for building the skills that eventually make tracking unnecessary. Now, I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming here because nuance always gets lost. I am not saying that intuitive eating is bad. As mentioned earlier in the episode, the framework has psychological benefits and aspects like removing food guilt and recognizing and learning about your hunger and fullness and rejecting the diet mentality are super, super valuable. I'm also not saying that you should track forever. I think I think I've been clear in this episode, that's not what I'm saying. Because tracking is a temporary scaffold, and temporary is as long as you define it. If you want to track for days, weeks, months, or years, that is totally on you. And for many people, that's a helpful thing they want to do and cool. But you build skills when you do that regardless. And then when you take that scaffolding down, you'll find that you have a lot more capability than you did before. I'm also not saying that your hunger signals are worthless. I'm saying they could be degraded from years of doing these other things and they have to be recalibrated. And that's totally, totally doable. You're not lost, you're not broken, it's doable. If you've been a dieter for many years, if you have sleep issues, if you have the hormonal changes, then there's going to be some intention and effort and structure behind it to do this. The last thing I'm not saying is that the popular version, the Instagram version of intuitive eating can't work for some people. I guess if you've never had a disorder relationship with food, you've never dieted multiple times, you have very solid interoceptive awareness already, your goals don't include specific body composition changes, okay, then eating intuitively from the start might work. And again, I'm a little bit sarcastic in how I delivered that, but that's because most of those things are not the things that you listening to this podcast, dear listener, have in place already. Like you don't have all of them in place necessarily. We want to build those skills. So then what I am saying is for most people, especially as we age over 40 who have specific physique goals, and you've been through years of dieting, and your hunger signals are disrupted by hormones, by sleep, stress, the food environment, the path to food freedom runs through structured awareness first. You have to test the system before you let it run. Now remember, I promised you a three-question self-test to check whether your hunger signals are actually calibrated. I'm gonna share that in just a moment. But first, if today's episode hit hard with you. If you're nodding your head throughout this episode and realizing what you need is not another diet, it's not more willpower, but simply a system with a structured process that builds real skills and then graduates you to independence. That's exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to do. You stop guessing, you do the real work, eat more lift heavy, and you trust yourself. It is a coached 26 week arc. That's six months. It's a 26-week arc planned out for you with a beginning, middle, and a defined end. Go to witsandwaits.com slash eat more to get on the wait list. You'll lock in founder pricing that way as well. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more and enrollment is opening very soon. All right, here is the quick way to test whether your hunger signals are reliable enough to guide you forward without needing the tracking or the data anymore. Question one. If you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between actual stomach hunger and just feeling tired, bored, or stressed? All right. We know that research shows hunger has at least 11 distinct dimensions to them, to it. And most people are confusing one for another, like fatigue or irritability for hunger. If they feel the same to you, then your signals do need some work. Okay, so again, if you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between real physiological stomach hunger and one of these many other things and these emotions? Question two When you sit down to eat, can you stop at about 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later? Or do you consistently either overeat past fullness or under-eat and feel starving an hour later? All right, if your enough detector, like I've eaten enough and I can tell, it's if if if that doesn't exist or it's off in either direction, again, that's a calibration issue. So can you stop at 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later, or are you always overeating or even under-eating and then you're hungry later? All right, question three. If I asked you to create a plate, if I asked you to get a plate and create a meal with about 30 to 40 grams of protein and a couple of servings of vegetables, and you don't have to look anything up or go into an app or anything, could you do it and be within 20%? Could you have 30 to 40 grams of protein and and two servings of vegetables within 20% if we then log it in a food log and compare? If the answer is no, then you haven't built the pattern recognition that makes data free eating reliable. And I say 20% because that is roughly the error that experienced nutritionists and dietitians have versus the general population, which is just massive 40, 50, 60, 80% error. So that's the interesting thing is once you develop the skill, you're still gonna be off by 20%, but that's okay. Like that's close enough. If you answered no to any one of these, you're not, you're not broken. Just keep that in mind. That's all what I'm saying. I'm saying that you have some calibration to do first. That's a problem to be solved, and that's okay, right? That is exactly what structure tracking is for. So again, if you want to get on the list for eat more lift heavy, witsandweights.com slash eatmore. Until next time, guys, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, real food freedom is not the absence of structure. It's what you earn on the other side of that structure when you internalize it. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Are Toxins Disrupting Your Metabolism? (Michele Scarlet) | Ep 445

Are environmental toxins quietly slowing your body recomp? Or is the wellness industry selling you fear about things that barely matter?

Functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner Michele Scarlet joins me to separate science from hype around metabolism, hormone health, and detox culture. We unpack what the research actually says about pesticides, plastics, cosmetics, and endocrine disruptors, and whether they truly impact weight loss, muscle building, and strength training results.

We challenge extreme clean-eating rules, the fear around fruit and sugar, and the obsession with trendy detox protocols. Instead, we focus on practical, evidence-based nutrition and fitness strategies that support metabolism, liver function, and long-term body recomp.

If you’re lifting weights, dialing in your macros, and still struggling to lose fat or build muscle, this adds the missing layer.

Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the #1 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance. 

Timestamps:

0:01 – Fear-based marketing in wellness
5:43 – Accumulation versus dosage
8:48– Ingestion versus exposure
11:15 – Cosmetics and chronic absorption
13:48 – Endocrine disruption and fat storage
21:35 – Breast implants and immune activation
28:58 – Why fruit is not the enemy
32:39 – When functional lab testing makes sense
35:15 – Detox support through nutrition
40:02 – How liver detox and bile really work
47:48 – When functional lab testing makes sense

Episode resources:

• The 3 Lab Tests That Changed My Life on True Health Podcast

• Instagram: @michelescarlet_ 

• Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/213894783148245 

• YouTube: @michelescarlet_ 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  You've probably seen the headlines, toxins in your water, chemicals in your food, plastics destroying your hormones. And then someone tells you, just buy organic, do a detox, you'll be fine. But what if both sides of this are wrong? What if the mainstream is ignoring real evidence that certain chemicals mess with your metabolism? While the wellness industry is selling you fear about things that barely matter. Today I'm talking to a functional health practitioner who went through her own metabolic crisis. And we are going to sort the science from the noise. Which environmental exposures actually affect your metabolism? Which ones are overhyped? And what are the few practical changes worth making? Welcome to Wits and Waits, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and I'm joined by Michelle Scarlett to discuss environmental factors and metabolism. Now, Michelle, she and I have touched base recently on each other's podcast, and I really appreciate her work because she is a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner with a ton of experience over 15 years in fitness before she has had personal experience with a health crisis that made her look at what is happening inside my body, not just the training and the nutrition and the things, but what is actually going on, what are the signals that my body is telling me I need to look at. And she now helps women identify metabolic dysfunction and environmental factors and other signals so that they can uncover root causes behind things like low energy, hormonal imbalances, weight loss struggles, all the things that you guys care about as well. So today we're discussing toxins, the evidence versus the hype. There is a growing body of research on chemicals called obesogens and endocrine disruptors that can interfere with how your body stores fat, produces hormones, manages energy. The problem, I think, is that the science gets filtered through two equally unhelpful lenses. You've got doctors that often ignore it, and then you have the social media wellness industry that catastrophizes everything. So today you're going to learn which environmental exposures have the strongest evidence for affecting metabolism, where the detox and clean living messaging crosses into hype and a handful of practical, low effort tips and changes you can make right now if you're already doing the other things right, like training and eating well. Welcome to the show, Michelle.

  Michele Scarlet: 2:35

  Thank you so much, Philip. I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to just like give your audience the truth because there is so much hype, there is so much ignorance, and there's just so much misinformation out there.

  Philip Pape: 2:48

  Yeah. And a lot of it comes down to how can I scare you the most as a consumer to buy my product? Right. And so let's start there. Like, should the listener or the viewer be worried to some extent about what's in their food and water? I mean, let's start there.

  Michele Scarlet: 3:03

  Yeah, I mean, okay. So, first of all, let's navigate this whole thing on social media about like clickbait and rage bait and correction bait and all this marketing tactics, if you will, to get you to prey on women. So I work with women mostly uh in its entirety. So I'll speak to women. They prey on women who feel desperate, right, to lose weight. They prey on this is no different than regular fitness for the last three decades, you know, that I've been alive. They prey on women by scare tactics and saying buzzwords like we talked about yesterday, the cortisol, the blood sugar, the da-da-da-da, whatever it might be. And, you know, I don't want to say that I don't talk about toxins or the need to detox because I certainly do believe in it and we'll talk about it more. But if you think everything in your world is an emergency, right, you are gonna do more damage to your body, to your nervous system. Like in my head, your nervous system is like another toxin that you need to kind of evaluate. Do you know what I mean?

  Philip Pape: 4:09

  Yeah, yeah. The internally derived toxins from how we live. Yes.

  Michele Scarlet: 4:12

  Right, right. So, anyway, food and water. Should people be worried about what they're eating and drinking? A little bit. Should they be worried? Should they be aware? Maybe two different things. I certainly see every single day looking at lab tests, and I know you'll ask me about lab tests in a second, but looking at my own, do we need to be aware that we are ingesting far more toxins, far more pesticides, far more uh genetically modified foods than we have ever been? Yes, I think that we should be aware of those things. Do I think that every time we go out to a restaurant to eat, you have to know that, first of all, restaurants are like the worst business model in history. So, meaning they don't make a lot of money, right? And they need to keep things as cheap as possible. Are they going to use the cheapest ingredients? Probably, right? So if you think about it like that, you can understand why they would do that. What are those cheap ingredients doing to your body? What are those pesticides doing to your body? It doesn't necessarily automatically mean obesity, but does it mean metabolic friction? Does it mean that the foundations, the working out, the strength training, the sleep recovery, all the things that you're doing to try to better your life, does it cause a little bit of friction or a little bit of issues with responsiveness, especially in metabolically fragile people or vulnerable people? Absolutely it can.

  Philip Pape: 5:44

  All right, good. We have a few directions to go in here, right? Because when I think of the word toxin, you know, the obvious things that can come to anybody's minds would be like alcohol and tobacco, right? Like there's no question that those are toxins, right? You mentioned restaurant food, you know, probably ultra-processed food. I also wonder about the dosage and how much these things matter. And again, this is this this can all connect together. And my I guess my question thinking about this is for someone who is doing the lifestyle things you just mentioned, who's got maybe they're getting lab work, maybe they're on medication or hormone therapy or something, you know, they're eating as best they can, they're managing their body fat, they're doing all the things, sleep and everything. How much does do these things move the needle? And is it how much of it is a function of the doses and the exposure?

  Michele Scarlet: 6:34

  Sure. So I would say less about the dosage necessarily, because I mean, for instance, formaldehyde, okay, as a chemical, is a carcinogen, known carcinogen. It is likely in every single piece of furniture you have in your house. Okay. So are you sort of being dosed with it all day, every day? Yeah, we are, right? But we are not ingesting it, hopefully. So there is a bit of dosage. Now, I think where the trouble starts to happen is not actually dosage, it's accumulation. So it has been found that I mean, okay, we could go down a million different ways here, but it has been found that fetus in the womb are being exposed to things like forever chemicals, microplastics, BPAs from that point in their life, if you want to call it that. And then they grow up, and now we have a more toxic world than we've ever had. And now we are starting to see not only chronic disease, we're starting to see autoimmune disease, we're starting to see cancers, we're starting to see diabetes, heart disease, all of these things affect younger and younger and younger people. So, how can we say that if our world is not more toxic, how can it not cause this metabolic friction? You know what I mean? How can it not affect us metabolic? And again, I know we're not trying to fear monger here, and I'm not trying to fear monger. This is about awareness.

  Philip Pape: 8:05

  I totally appreciate that, right? And I love the nuance. And there is a toxic load or burden, and you kind of alluded to already how other things we don't think of as toxins, like the stress that are that's on our body from how we live, is also a burden. And the way I think of it is physiologically is there's a load. There's an input coming in that you have to deal with in some way. Your liver deals with it, you know, your cognitive function deals with it, like a lot of things. So it's it's a load. And what I want to get to by the time we're done with this conversation today is like, do people have to be worried about mold and scented candles and birth control? And and and and or is it can we simplify what to do and really what the big hitters are to look out for? But we're trying to get to why first. That that's where I'm going at. So do we care most about a specific type of toxin? We want to dig into like obesogens, right? Endocrine disruptors, like there is there a class of toxins that are really the most important to be aware of?

  Michele Scarlet: 9:00

  So I feel less about the type of chemical, and I feel more about how we're exposed to it.

  Philip Pape: 9:06

  Okay.

  Michele Scarlet: 9:06

  So I feel more about are you ingesting? Like number one thing, are you ingesting this chemical? So is it pesticides, forever chemicals, BPAs? Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of some more things that we might be ingesting. Our our water quality, maybe it's dead water. You know what I mean? Maybe we've filtered it out so much there's just no nutrients left in it. Are we remineralizing to help ourselves? Our pollution, right? We're inhaling that. I would call that ingesting, right? And then to the point of endocrine disruptors, our moisturizer, our makeup, shampoo, conditioner, even though those might be on our face or on our bodies for a shorter period of time, I look at it as our body is absorbing those things. And so that is like a constant exposure, a big accumulation. Whereas I think of things like receipts. There's like a whole thing about receipts. And yeah, sure, you don't really want to be exposed to the chemicals on receipt paper.

  Philip Pape: 10:07

  You're talking about the ink?

  Michele Scarlet: 10:08

  Yeah. Or like just the paper in general. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to be exposed to it, of course. But like for me to like pull it from the, you know, the little ticket thing for two seconds. Yes. Like that's such a minimal exposure, right? That I wouldn't like you don't need to worry yourself if the cashier is handing you a receipt and you're like, oh my God, don't throw that at me. You know, people can get a little bit overzealous about that kind of thing. When really, if we just looked at the big hitters, like you said, your body can be resilient to toxins, obviously.

  Philip Pape: 10:41

  Okay, so the ingesting absorbing piece is a good frame for that, right? Because you mentioned pesticides, which is something that my own family has thought about over the years with things like oatmeal, because we love oatmeal, protein, the taste, everything about it, and the carbs. But when they tested all the oatmeals in the world, even organic oatmeals had Roundup, right? Glyphosate. And so I remember looking at the results, and it was like one brand from Whole Foods seemed to have no detectable level, and that's what we started buying, right? Because, you know, the amount of oatmeal we were consuming was like gallons of it. And then things like, you know, I did a couple episodes in the past on cookware. Because again, I agree, like my wife will not use nonstick cookware. And there's a certain brand I like that's ceramic and it's done in a different way where it doesn't have the toxic chemicals. So, like, you have to make those decisions. Cosmetics, though, let's talk about that because a lot of our audience is women, you talk to women all the time. I feel like this is one of those industry incentive or industry things like restaurants, right? Like, it's a big marketing push, and I bet there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes nefarious over the decades to like hide hide some of the reality. I'm guessing. And then women themselves like are so pressured in society to want to use these things, just like in our conversation on on your show about the dye culture and the pressure to be skinny and all that. So that seems like a big one. Like that seems like one that's everywhere.

  Michele Scarlet: 12:03

  Yes. Um, okay. So I have makeup on my face right now. I'm very lucky that I work from home and on days that I don't have to be camera facing, I don't have to have makeup on. And I've never been somebody who's been like, you know, a ton of makeup like all over my skin. So for me personally, I don't feel like it is my big hitter. Okay. For me personally. Do I try to source out the cleanest version that I can? Sure. But not only for me at this point. I've got two infants and a toddler. They are, you know, constantly licking my face in some way or another. And I don't want the exposure on them, not at such an early age. And that's not to say that I shouldn't be worried about me, but this is kind of part of it. Like pick your poison a little bit, right? I do try to source out the cleanest as I possibly can. It is kind of impossible for some products. And I just go, okay, I'm gonna do the best I can. And that's how I feel about makeup. I'm gonna do the best that I can. Do I go to Sephora? No, I will stay away from Sephora all day long. Everything in there is fragrance, everything in there is talc. Everything in there is just like crap makeup. They sell it for it is overpriced. Do not go there to buy it. If you want to source it out, I can I have a detox guide that I could send for you, Philip, with some of my favorite brands. They don't have everything, but they have some stuff.

  Philip Pape: 13:34

  Cool. No, and that's that's usually the best we can do because one of the trade-offs you make is the stuff just doesn't even work. Let's be honest, there's a reason these chemicals are in there and you have to make trade-offs. And like we said, it's the amount of the exposure and making those choices.

  Michele Scarlet: 13:49

  I would feel more strongly about people who do their nails weekly or every two weeks. Because that is like a constant on your body at all times, poison. Like ultimately, women are washing their face off before they go to bed. So let's even say if you put it on first thing in the morning, take it off at night, you have half of your day without it. Right. I would say sitting in a nail salon for an hour every week or every two weeks to get your feet and nails done with shellac or gel nails, I would say that that would be a bigger exposure.

  Philip Pape: 14:21

  And what is actually happening? I guess because the listener's probably thinking, okay, fine, but like because we're not trying to fear monger and we're trying to talk about awareness and making choices from a health perspective, from what's happening in your body, what is happening? Are we again, are we talking about endocrine disruption specifically or other mechanisms going on here?

  Michele Scarlet: 14:38

  Well, there's a few different things that can happen inside the body. An endocrine disruptor technically what happens is that it disrupts the receptors of your estrogen, of your progesterone, of your uh androgen hormones, and it can ultimately change the way your fat cells uh like can develop. But mold can be a disruptor too. It's almost like they can imitate like what your estrogen is supposed to be doing inside of your body. It can the other thing is what can happen is what I see in lab testing is that your liver, because everything functions through your liver or filters through your liver, um, when it is overloaded with all kinds of stuff that you are taking in all day, every day for 45 years, uh bile flow can slow. It can become thick, it can become sluggish. And now your whole body's detoxification system backs up. And so things can start to uh recirculate in the body, right? So it's not that endocrine disruptors equal obesity, right? That's not exactly what it what it does, is it kind of happens downstream. It slowly happens, which is why we tend to see it in people over the age of 40, that accumulation factor, because things start to slow, recirculate, women become estrogen dominant, we start to see declining hormones in general at that age, and it kind of uncovers what your body has been compensating for over the decades that you've been alive.

  Philip Pape: 16:11

  Okay. So you're hating on some good points, and you alluded to things that maybe the listener didn't know you'd go into like fat storage and metabolism and stuff, and they're like, why is this all uh connected? Which is why I mentioned obesogens before, because they're a little bit complicated to understand, right? But when if you're interfering with the hormones that you just mentioned, you're also gonna affect your metabolism of your lipids, the creation of fat cells, your energy balance, like your metabolism. Um, you mentioned BPA, I think, and the stuff in um what did we just talk about? Cosmetics that that do all this. And then there's a lot of complicated mechanisms. But what about fat cells and body composition and metabolism and all that? Like, does it really just is it a function of altering like your thyroid function and insulin signaling? And is that really what's happening? Or is there some other mechanism? Yep.

  Michele Scarlet: 16:59

  No, that's exactly what's happening. It's like, as your hormones, like if it's an endocrine disruptor that we're talking about, so it starts with messing up your hormones, like I just talked about. Well, that in nature is going to have a widespread effect across your body. We are constantly in feedback loops to keep our body into homeostasis, right? And so when your hormones, sex hormones are off, it's going to start signaling to thyroid. It's going to start signaling to adrenals, it's going to cascade throughout your body. And exactly that, that's when your metabolism starts to get into like adaptation mode and starts to like, I don't know what's happening here. I need to conserve this energy because something chaotic is happening. And I, what the last thing I'm going to do now is change body composition when I feel like this person is in danger.

  Philip Pape: 17:45

  So again, it circles back to this is your stress load, your allostatic load, your body trying to get back to homeostasis to undo some sort of the wrong direction. It's being pushed, it's being stressed. And the resiliency is kind of like one of the things that combats it, right? Is what we can get to eventually talking about lifestyle, but also awareness and avoidance. So since we sort of started ranking things and you put absorbable or consumable things at the top, is there like another category or two of things that we want to get into? Like cell phones come up, you know, with like, don't have your cell phone too close to your privates and stuff like that, right? For men. Um, for women too. And for women. So yeah, and breast cancer and all that. So what what would be the next big category, do you think?

  Michele Scarlet: 18:29

  Yeah, I would say things that you are like kind of just, yeah, near every day, not necessarily actually ingesting, would be my next. And things that you obviously can't control. So like if you live, it's unfortunate, but like you live next to a golf course or you live, I live next to a farmer's field. You know what I mean? I'm not necessarily going to be able to control that. So I just say things like I do the best that I can. When it comes to cell phone radiation EMFs, you know, I haven't done the research. I don't know if I want to do the research. Um I have a uh a girlfriend who believes wholeheartedly in those like EMF stickers.

  Philip Pape: 19:09

  Yeah. Yeah.

  Michele Scarlet: 19:10

  And she sends me, she sends me the research, and I I haven't really got myself to open it and I don't know why. I'm very skeptical of it. How can a sticker, like, what is the sticker? It says it gives 19 feet of, you know, whatever.

  Philip Pape: 19:23

  Protection, yeah.

  Michele Scarlet: 19:24

  Right. But then there's a part of me that's like, I have two baby monitors in my room on my nightstands, plus my cell phone and my husband's cell phone on the other side. Is it doing something that it shouldn't be doing? You know, the other day I saw my mother-in-law put on some yoga playlist that was relaxing and soothing and put it next to my baby's head to get her to fall asleep. And my brain immediately was like, Don't put that next to her head. But I don't know why. Don't know if it is overhype. I don't know if it is, you know, if it's real. It's kind of scary to think that this device that is literally attached to our bodies at all times.

  Philip Pape: 20:01

  I know, no, I hear you. Uh me too. Every time I'm laying down and the phone's sitting on my thigh, I'm like, I'm gonna move that over a little bit.

  Michele Scarlet: 20:07

  Do you, do you know? Do you have like I can't do that?

  Philip Pape: 20:10

  I really don't. I have the same skepticism as you, and like you you can't follow what influencers say. They they're all just it's like third hand information. And they're getting paid. Electromechanics. So I'm an engineer by background, and like one of the hardest courses I ever took was in electromechanics. It's very, very complicated. And you know, you think of like Faraday cages, for example, those little pouches that you can put your phone in to protect it. You'd literally have to like put your whole body in a pocket of some kind to protect it. But hey, I would never buy a house like next to a giant distribution station or a transformer or something like that. Because yeah, we don't, I don't think we have enough evidence to know because it's hard to you can't do longitudinal studies unless it's you know observational based on where people actually live and stuff. Right. So I'm I'm just I'm I'm like with you. It's just do what you can. You know, if you can help where you live or what you live by, great. If it's something like pollution or whatever, I don't know if you can wear masks and stuff, you know, there's things you could do, maybe.

  Michele Scarlet: 21:08

  Overall, my thought process is this I think that our world is incredibly toxic, like start to finish, but we cannot live in a bubble, right? Like we don't have control over everything. So control what you can control. I am a very big fan of once you are metabolically healthy, you should be supporting your detox organs. You should be supporting your liver, like through there's many ways, and we can talk about how we can support your liver, but like daily, you should be this is should be part of, in my opinion, your foundational work, right? Supporting your detox organs.

  Philip Pape: 21:47

  Yeah, I want and I want to get there, but before we do, there's a couple other areas I want to explore. And then also I do want to rule anything out that's like nonsense because I that's always a fun thing to do. Yeah. Um, but When I think of women and women's bodies, I think breast implants, I think IUDs, I mean, what else? There's so many things that are like in and on your body all the time. And I know you have personal exposure story related one of these, but tell us about those.

  Michele Scarlet: 22:12

  Yeah. So I wholeheartedly agree. So uh the personal story is that I had breast implants when I was 25 and I had them out, I want to say at like 34. And the reason I had them out was because I was struggling massively with breast implant illness. And so that has become more mainstream, has been uh, there's a lot more information about breast implant illness. But what I have learned in, you know, in the time of the research, and then being like, okay, I'll spend another $10,000 to have these out of my body, is that basically your it's like called foreign body response. And when you have something foreign in your body, regardless, like we don't even have to talk about the chemical aspect of what the makeup of those uh material actually was, your body is like, there is something that should not be here. And now my immune system is activated.

  Philip Pape: 23:04

  It's activated, yeah, yeah. Like an autoimmune response, yeah. And it is now but it's not auto, it's it's to the foreign thing. Yeah.

  Michele Scarlet: 23:11

  Yeah. And if you think about it, like it is in your body 24-7. It's warm, right? And that makes a difference. That's like heating up plastic, right, with your food on it or or uh like Teflon or whatever. So it's like a constant exposure, doesn't matter how little, but that accumulation is just like low grade inflammation for 10 full years of my life on top of, you know, our pesticide use and that kind of thing. And it was no wonder that my health had totally tanked. My hormones were post-menopausal levels at 34 years old. Right. My gut inflammation was off the charts, and I say off the charts based on lab results that I had run on myself. I had these out, went through my own protocol to help myself detox some of that inflammation, some of what was going on, did a little bit of a protocol to help uh support my hormones again and got pregnant within, I think, four to six months. I had them out in March and I was pregnant by July. So obviously, my body, you know, coming back into homeostasis when I removed that toxin or I removed that stressor.

  Philip Pape: 24:25

  Yeah. And I wonder how many people have the equivalent of that from something else. Yes, Botox. Which, which, well, well, I always even go in there, but you're right. We can talk about that. And there's a new show called The Beauty that's crazy about that goes in the extreme about this. But uh, we could talk about Botox. I was thinking even all the things we consume that you mentioned earlier, that then how the body may be responding in a similar way. But yeah, go ahead, Botox.

  Michele Scarlet: 24:49

  Yeah, no, you know, it's funny because there was a time where I, you know, when I was trying to figure out how I was shifting into the the into the business that I'm in now. And somebody suggested I like niche down into breast implant illness. And I didn't really like it because it's not that relatable for a lot of people. And so even when I tell my story, I always make the caveat that just because breast implants were the thing that kind of took me over the edge, it could be for some people the Botox, it could be for some people the wine every night, it could be for some people too much uh ultra-processed food, but literally the same thing is happening in your body that was happening to me.

  Philip Pape: 25:29

  It's a great analogy for it. It really is. It like visualizes it because you're like, this is a foreign thing that your body can't handle. And because people are different, like even things like gluten, which again, you know, my position is if you can eat it and tolerate it and enjoy it and you don't notice anything, I think it's fine. But I know there's a whole spectrum of like, no, gluten's never good for any human being for this reason or the other. But if for you whatever you're consuming is causing that and you get rid of it and it does it, well, that tells you something, right? Going back to signals like we talked about on your show.

  Michele Scarlet: 25:58

  100%. And when it comes to gluten, so my position on gluten, so I am gluten-free. I am not celiac, but I am gluten-free because I eliminated it, saw the difference, put it back in, and immediately reacted.

  Philip Pape: 26:14

  Exactly. Yep.

  Michele Scarlet: 26:15

  And I was like, nope, I'm good. Don't need to do that again. And so for me, that's my take on it. And when I work with women, we start by taking it out. Let's see what happens to your body when you take that out. And I don't just mean digestively, I mean like cognitive function. I mean like inflammation, swelling. How do your clothes fit? How do your rings fit all of a sudden? You know, are you able to carry a conversation without tripping up on your words all the time? Because you can't silo inflammation, right? It's not going to be just to your gut. It's going to be everywhere.

  Philip Pape: 26:45

  It's going to be everywhere. And, you know, here's another confusing thing because we talked about this on your show as well of like going to an extreme, like going to a carnivore diet or going to an elimination diet. I think we talked about that. And then by virtue of that, you've cut something out that is a toxin to you, but maybe a bunch of other things are not toxins and you don't know until you add them back in. Something like gluten, right? Um, I I've actually had clients who had histamine reactions. They weren't specifically gluten reactions, they were histamine reactions. Like, how do people tease that stuff apart? Because that's where it gets really confusing. Where like, okay, I started eating more food and all of a sudden my face got puffy. You're like, okay, now we need to go an interest down an interesting rabbit hole. That's your body responding in some immune reaction, isn't it?

  Michele Scarlet: 27:27

  Yeah. So 100%. That's exactly what it is. And so how I look at that is we have to take the issue out first. You can't heal in the same place you got sick, is kind of my thought process there.

  Philip Pape: 27:39

  Sure.

  Michele Scarlet: 27:40

  So, you know, gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, you know, lectins, you know, go on and on about all the things that are told that you need to take out. By the time you do that, you're eating ice all day, every day.

  Philip Pape: 27:51

  Broccoli, I've heard apparently.

  Michele Scarlet: 27:53

  Um, take out you have you take out the big ones, you start to focus on what's going on in the gut, you heal the gut. Okay. You heal the gut that you have like your tight junctions. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but like if you're if the lining of your gut, you know, is tight like this, there's nothing getting in. So your broccoli is not going to have an issue, right? You're not but if your tight junctions, because you have for the majority of your life or you have this huge accumulation of toxins over the four decades, your tight junctions in your gut might look like this. And now everything is getting in. So you are reactive to all kinds of foods that you shouldn't be reactive to. Okay. Our bodies physiologically should be able to handle a whole array of foods. And my take is if you have to go to carnivore to feel good, there is something way deeper going on that you need to look at and you need to heal because that's not your body's natural diet.

  Philip Pape: 28:58

  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. That's a great, and that's where the nuance is, and that's where the individualization is, is somewhere in that space. So when people are thinking about gluten and sugar and all this stuff, and then they also hear detox and all the other things that could kill you tomorrow, and just literally don't eat anything except what did you say, ice water? Okay. Then, and your guard goes up on this, and we know that the liver and kidneys detoxify lots of things, and like you just said, the human body can kind of act like a trash can, but only to a point, especially in today's environment. Yes. What jumps to the top of your list that you do think is overblown, that's like ridiculous, maybe not even a toxin at all, or just is disproportionately given attention?

  Michele Scarlet: 29:44

  I think fruit.

  Philip Pape: 29:46

  Oh, yes. I think fruit fruit and fructose, yes.

  Michele Scarlet: 29:49

  I think that people uh confuse fruit. Like, okay, so every morning I have a yogurt. I I have dairy. Hey guys, I healed my gut and now I have dairy and it's totally good. One of the big heavy hitters, right? So I have protein yogurt with all kinds of fruit. Like my whole thing first thing in the morning is I need to hit at least uh 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber. And I get my fiber through my fruit. I post it on my Instagram stories every single day, and without fail, people are in there being like, that's way too much sugar. That's way too much sugar. And in my head, I'm like, you have been brainwashed to think that the fructose and fruit is more harmful for you than the vitamins and the minerals and the nourishing aspects that fruit and the healing aspects that fruit actually have. And there is not a chance, and I think I said this to you yesterday, I wouldn't ever go keto because I don't want to limit myself to six blueberries, you know, if I'm gonna have if I'm gonna sit down and have some fruit. So I think fruit is probably um something that I think is demonized that absolutely should not be.

  Philip Pape: 31:01

  That's a good one. That's a good one. And the the pithy response you you sometimes hear, which I kind of agree with, is like nobody ever gets fat eating fruit. You know, that whole concept of let's put things in perspective, right? Some anybody who's worried about fruit, there's probably something else they're doing or eating that's really the problem.

  Michele Scarlet: 31:18

  Oh my goodness. The amount of people that I have said, like, okay, we need to increase your protein. So like you need a protein at your lunch, your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, and you should probably think about protein forward snacks. That literally the pushback, like that's way too much protein.

  Philip Pape: 31:31

  Oh, I'm gonna gain a bunch of weight because I'm gonna eat more, right? Yeah, yeah. That's their pushback.

  Michele Scarlet: 31:35

  That can't be good for me. But the bag of chips that you're eating at the end of the day, that's like that's not the deal breaker. You know, we do have to put it into perspective. And not yes, at the very fundamentals, calorie is a calorie, but like, what are you actually absorbing? Like, you know, what is the meat that you're eating? What is the what are the minerals and vitamins, vitamins you're taking in from your fruits, fruits, and vegetables?

  Philip Pape: 31:58

  Yeah, and even the uh the compounds in the fruits and vegetables, which is something when I first got into nutrition science fascinated me because there's this whole chemical like milieu, right? In in fruit and plants that isn't on the label. Like it's not on the label. It's chemicals, good chemicals that are in. In fact, the joke about like uh the nutrition label for a banana showing all the chemicals, how it looks like this ultra-processed food, but it's just like natural chemicals. And many of them are are great for you. And you you don't know, it's hard to go after specific ones like we do when we say eat more protein because the bot because of the microbiome and the gut that you've already mentioned, where you just need that diversity of those compounds coming in. Anyway, side tangent, but so you mentioned fruit, and then I guess tied to that is what about all the lab tests and ways that people try to sell you on figuring out that hey, you've got all these toxins in that you need to buy my protocol. Like, what's the biggest one there that people should avoid?

  Michele Scarlet: 32:56

  Lab test. Is that what you're saying?

  Philip Pape: 32:57

  Yeah, lab test, the Dutch test, GI map, like a hair mineral analysis. There's so many. Like, is there one that's jumps out as waste of time, waste of money?

  Michele Scarlet: 33:06

  Okay. So I'm gonna actually say no, but there's always nuance. I use lab testing as a contextual tool, not as a diagnosis. Okay.

  Philip Pape: 33:17

  Okay.

  Michele Scarlet: 33:18

  So I run a GI map, a Dutch, and a hair mineral analysis test on every single one of the women that come to me because the women that are coming to me have been doing all the right things foundationally for 10 plus years and cannot move the needle. And so I definitely don't think that if you are just like woke up one day and was like, I want to be healthy and you've done nothing else, do I think you need to jump to lab testing? No. Do I think you need to start with the foundations? Absolutely. You need to strength train, you need to clean up your food, you need to eat, you just need to move your body, you need to see sunlight, you need to, you know, you need to start with the foundations. If things are not shifting, then you can look deeper. And that's my take on functional lab testing. And I wish I could give you something really juicy to be like, this doesn't work for everybody. There is not a woman I've run a test on before that I haven't been able to go, oh man, like no wonder you're feeling so awful. You know, no wonder you, you know, you're not sleeping, you're not, you know, whatever. As we put it into context or as we look at the patterns to their habits, to their symptoms. And now we have real data. I am such a data freak. The more information, the better. And it just helps guide how to give them the right outcomes.

  Philip Pape: 34:42

  That's great. I mean, you answered the question because it's really more about the principle of having as much information to eliminate what might be going on versus saying, I'm going to get a lab test and that's going to tell me the answer. Because even with lab tests, the body is so complex that there's multiple things that could be moving in different directions that all work together. And it's even hard to say in isolation what any one of those things mean, right? You know, your albumin over here and your CRP over here. And it's like, and and the cool thing is today they have like machine learning and and models that are being developed to try to better link all that stuff, which I'm sure you're always looking at what the latest is in the industry. Okay, so that's the stay away from stuff or put things into context. Now let's talk about what people should do, right? So now I get to the meat of it. We've teased people long enough. For someone listening who understands they need to get the basics in, because we we're not going to make that the solution here. That should be a thing that everyone's doing. Listen to wits and weights, uh, listen to Michelle's podcast and lift your weights, move, eat your protein, you know, get enough sleep, manage your stress and everything. Where do they start?

  Michele Scarlet: 35:45

  Yeah, I mean, like the biggest thing for me is you need to start with nutrition. I mean, food is medicine. So if somebody is already kind of doing the basic things, let's say they just have like a regular balanced diet, right? So they eat their protein, they eat their veggies, like generally a whole foods diet is what somebody is already doing. So protein is phenomenal for uh increasing bile flow. So maybe start looking at increasing like denser meats. So things like steak, things like lamb, things like bison, that kind of stuff, that can really increase bile flow and um stomach acid. So those are those are things that are just like really good for your body. Uh vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli, things that really help support the liver. And then beyond, I mean, there's lots there, lemon, bitters, that kind of stuff, bitter arugula, that can all increase bile flow as well. So if we talk about the basics of food, those are where you can start. If you want to talk about more like supplementation on an herbal piece, things like milk thistle, things like nettle tea, dandelion tea, these are all things that just like help increase, again, bile flow, kidney function. I am a big fan of sauna. But if you can't, if you don't have access to sauna, get outside and go for a walk in the summertime. Like sweat, you know? Um, it doesn't need to be excessive. It doesn't need to go by, you know, the latest biohack uh sauna blanket thing. Like it can be simple, but sweating is something that's really important. I have a client right now who actually told me the you know the other day that she does not sweat like at all. Never beads, and I'm like, 40 degrees out or you know, 100 degrees out for you guys in the US, and you don't sweat. She's like, not even a little bit. I was like, something's up, something is blocked up. We need to get your lymph moving. You know what I mean? We need to get more consistent with like trying to sweat because your skin is a huge detox pathway and it'll just help push all of those toxins out. So sweating is big. I don't know how alternative your audience is.

  Philip Pape: 37:55

  Let's challenge everybody because I'm open to everything. Let's talk about it.

  Michele Scarlet: 37:59

  So if you want to go deeper into your detoxification, uh, I guess we could say protocol or program or, you know, regime, I am a big fan of castor oil packs and I'm a big fan of coffee enemas.

  Philip Pape: 38:13

  Okay, coffee enemas are are definitely one I'm I'm skeptical of. Um castor oil, maybe less so.

  Michele Scarlet: 38:19

  Okay, let's talk about the coffee enema. It's weird, and I I think I talk about it a lot because I want to normalize how weird it is because it's weird. Um, but what I have observed, what I have observed in myself, what I have observed in my clients, what I have read, I wouldn't do it. I was skeptical at it at first as well. And then I realized that I was struggling a lot with mold illness after I had my breast implants out. And so I needed a way to help increase that detoxification because I I didn't want obviously mold kind of hanging around in my body. So I introduced coffee enemas and it was life-changing. It was life-changing. The cognitive function, the digestive function, the lower inflammation, the more I read about it, it increases glutathione, which is your like master antioxidant by like a thousand percent. Right? Um, it increases bile flow. So that detoxification just happens more efficiently, a little bit faster. It's not something that I recommend to anybody who may be caffeine sensitive. You know, if we are talking about Crohn's or any kind of like ulcerative colitis, I wouldn't necessarily go down that route. Definitely not somebody who is struggling with cancer. I know that there are a lot of people out there, a lot of influencers who talk about their cancer journey and doing coffee enemas. It's not my not my scope, but I do know that detox can accelerate the cancering process. And so that's just not my not my recommendation. But overall, if you are looking for that, you know, deep detox, it has been life-changing for me and clients.

  Philip Pape: 40:03

  Okay, let's go deeper on this whole detox thing with related to bile, since you keep mentioning it, right? Because the listener wants to understand this. My very basic one-on-one understanding is the liver uh converts, conjugates, I don't know what the word, the verb is, uh, anything coming in into bile, right? And then that get allows it to go into your intestine to eliminate from your body. So I always come back to the question when it comes to the body is isn't your body, hasn't your body evolved to do all this stuff super effectively on its own? And why do we need other things coming in intentionally to help it?

  Michele Scarlet: 40:39

  Yeah, great question. So short answer is no, it hasn't evolved to be able to handle how toxic our world has accelerated to.

  Philip Pape: 40:49

  So it's overloaded. Okay, that's the premise. It's overloaded.

  Michele Scarlet: 40:52

  Yeah, big time.

  Philip Pape: 40:53

  So you're you're trying to offset the overlow with more bile.

  Michele Scarlet: 40:56

  Yes.

  Philip Pape: 40:57

  And the body does that.

  Michele Scarlet: 40:58

  I mean, do we bile, right? Like your bile can become sluggish. And that's when you start to look at like uh gallstones and that kind of stuff when things get like clumpy, right? Um, and things are not like free flowing.

  Philip Pape: 41:11

  And do we, is this measurable like through labs or through some sort of stool test or something?

  Michele Scarlet: 41:15

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are markers on both the Dutch and the GI map that taught that show you like your phase one and phase two detoxification. So it's not like, you know, on a scale of one to 10, your bile flow is a 10, but it does give sort of hints and patterns that you have like sluggish detoxification.

  Philip Pape: 41:34

  Yeah.

  Michele Scarlet: 41:34

  And then if you correlate that to symptoms, so if somebody is constipated, right? Then you can, you know, it goes like bowel, colon, liver, you know, if you want to go up the body like that. If somebody is constipated, they definitely are struggling with bile issues.

  Philip Pape: 41:50

  Got it. You see, I like the nerdy questions. I want to understand the next level deep. And okay, so I don't need an excuse to eat more steak or lamb, but I'm glad you gave me one. And Christopher's vegetables are awesome. So, like, you know, steak and broccoli for dinner is great. But so some of the things you mentioned, those the lemons and bitters, certain supplements, sweating and sauna. And I definitely see more and more evidence these days of like benefits of sauna, and there's nothing wrong with it. So if you enjoy sauna, go for it. I don't have one, but one of my friends just joined a gym that has one. I'm jealous of him. So what about like if we take it back a notch on just general grocery shopping and eating and consuming in general, or you can make an easy change, that some of the fear-mongering there as well, around organic and things that are on the label. And there's lots and lots of marketing phrases that don't mean anything. And then there are some that do. I've had a couple, I had a rancher on who was talking a lot about that. It was pretty fascinating how stuff can easily get twisted on like even fresh packages like meat in the labeling that they use. So, what are your thoughts, like the the big hitters, organic or something else that people can change when they grocery shop?

  Michele Scarlet: 42:58

  Yeah. So if you're in the grocery store, so my biggest thing would be like if you're going like I I do think you should eat organic when you can, but when is it maybe a waste of time? Things like oranges, things like bananas, things where there's like quite a thick peel.

  Philip Pape: 43:15

  Rind, yeah. Yeah.

  Michele Scarlet: 43:16

  You don't necessarily need to go organic on those things because it's just not penetrating, right? So things like apples, I would go organic, things like grapes, cherries, anything that you're just like throwing in your mouth, right? If you can't go organic with your fruits and vegetables, it is costly. Like that it sucks, but it is. Then you're gonna want to soak it in baking soda and water when you get home. And so, you know, we don't always have available organic produce. So the first thing that I do as soon as I get home from the grocery store stainless steel bowl, organic baking soda, and reverse reverse osmosis water and put all my produce in there and then just let it soak, wash it off. Then into the fridge ready to eat. So that's that's a big one.

  Philip Pape: 44:03

  What about okay? So that makes sense for produce. Like packaged foods maybe gets a little more confusing because there are a lot of plant-based products and packaged foods. I mentioned oatmeal, which is kind of packaged in a way. Is there anything else that stands out as people consume a lot of it and maybe they should look for what they're buying?

  Michele Scarlet: 44:18

  Uh so yeah, I mean, like we already kind of touched on the oatmeal piece. If you can find glyphosate-free oatmeal or oats, like go go for that, obviously. I think for meat products, you want to see grass-fed, grass finished, because just because it says grass-fed doesn't necessarily mean that it's not also fed GMO corn. Right? So yeah, grass-fed, grass-finished. Uh, same idea on eggs, right? Like free range. Um, what is the word?

  Philip Pape: 44:52

  Well, there's vegetarian, there's cage-free, there's free range.

  Michele Scarlet: 44:55

  Yeah, I feel like they say they like pasture, pasture raised. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Free range is not exactly free range. Pasture raised is like they truly are in the open.

  Philip Pape: 45:06

  They eat bugs and everything.

  Michele Scarlet: 45:08

  Yes, yeah. They have their like true diet, which would make them the most healthy ultimately.

  Philip Pape: 45:13

  And you can tell by looking at the yolks because we have chickens, but people get jealous when I say that because those eggs are so for superior. Are they orange? Are they deep orange, they're dense, like so good. And then you get grocery store eggs and they're like pale, you're like, where's the yolk? You know, the difference.

  Michele Scarlet: 45:30

  You know what? I had um, so my husband and I uh moved into the house that we're currently in. I want to say it'll be two years in July. And we had our first garden this past summer, and I was so excited about it. And we had like so many zucchinis that like took us right into the fall. It was incredible. And I'm not even like zucchini's not my favorite vegetable, but it was easy to grow and you know, it obviously produced a lot. I had a store bought zucchini the other day. It was gross, like bland, like flavorless, flavorless, like tasted like nothing. And my husband and I are big on eggs. We eat eggs all the time. Our house goes through like a carton of eggs every morning. And I last summer I was at a girlfriend's house and she made me eggs in the morning, and I was like, these are tasteless. Like there's live, they're so so pale yellow. And I looked at the package and it was just like, you know, your generic egg, you know, the cheapest one, whatever. Like she didn't put any thought into it. And I was like, wow, there is a real difference in the way things taste when you go for quality. And for me, I have, you know, a deep value that food is medicine. And so maybe not everybody has that. But like my husband and I, we have a very big budget for our food on purpose because we know what it does for our bodies, we know how it serves our bodies, and maybe we cut somewhere else and we don't go out for dinner, you know, every week or whatever. But yeah, no, having that quality food is gonna be the biggest impact on somebody's health.

  Philip Pape: 46:58

  Yeah, good. I'm glad you said that because you're right, you have to make trade-offs or decisions. And going to restaurants is very, very expensive. So that alone, like since we've had kids and we live in the Northeast where it's like freezing cold in the winter, and we we don't want to be just going out to restaurants all the time necessarily. Saves a lot of money. And then you get to have fun learning recipes and cooking and cooking in bulk, right? Like buy in bulk, buy family-sized things. You could go to the extent of finding ranchers and farmers, farms nearby if you're lucky enough, and buy like whole heads of cattle or be, you know, whole bee's and stuff.

  Michele Scarlet: 47:31

  We do that. Um buy a quarter cow, a quarter cow every, I don't know when my husband does it, but we every year we buy a quarter cow.

  Philip Pape: 47:39

  Yeah, it's another way to save money. I mean, it just takes intention. So, okay, let's wrap it all up with this is a whole topic and you cover it on your show all the time. Where can somebody who's listened to all this start? And ultimately, you know, obviously you have a whole business built around helping women with some of these areas. You know, what's the order of operations? Like, we've talked to the listener and said, okay, the basics are important. You can listen to our shows on how to do that. We talk about it all the time. We've talked about what to be aware of and simple decisions you can make today, starting today and tomorrow. What's like the next thing for someone's, okay, I want to take this seriously. What should I do?

  Michele Scarlet: 48:15

  Uh, at that point, like if you want even more optimal health, I would be going down some functional labs. I would be, I'd be like, okay, let's dig a little bit deeper. And so I have the three foundational functional labs, like I mentioned, the hair, the stool, and the urine hormone tests. But like, if you're concerned about toxic burden, like if you want to see the, you know, forever chemicals, the BPA is like what is kind of stopping things, you know, that metabolic friction from like getting you to the next level. You can do uh like total tox tests, you can do mycotoxin, which is mold, if you're if you suspect, you know, that you've had mold exposure and that might be the reason you're uh, you know, you're not progressing into that next level. But I would definitely say you go start with the foundations, get consistent, like a solid three months of foundational commitment should move the needle far.

  Philip Pape: 49:09

  Big time, yes.

  Michele Scarlet: 49:11

  You know, if things, if you are true to yourself and it has not shifted in three months, then I would be digging deeper.

  Philip Pape: 49:20

  Yeah, it's a great approach.

  Michele Scarlet: 49:21

  Yeah, that would be the functional labs for sure.

  Philip Pape: 49:23

  And is there an episode on your podcast, which is the true health podcast, by the way? If I didn't already mention it, apologies. Because I know you had one in January about lab tests, but is there one that you can think of on the top of your head about these lab tests? Or we can add it later.

  Michele Scarlet: 49:37

  Yeah, no, I do. I think one of my most recent ones um is I think it's like called like the three lab tests that changed my life. And I go into de I go, yeah, I go into deeply.

  Philip Pape: 49:46

  That's what it's called. Yeah, as I'm looking at it right now.

  Michele Scarlet: 49:48

  And it really did because I was that person. I was that person who was deeply committed for, you know, like 13 years of my life to the foundations and thought that that was the be-all end all of health. And then when I had my own health crisis, I didn't even know where to turn. And when I, you know, realized that this piece was the next piece, these were the three that I ran. And it changed literally everything. And now I run these actually every year on myself just to keep myself a baseline. But yes, there is an episode. It's called That These Three Labs Changed My Life. It's only 10 minutes long. I don't love, I didn't get into like the real deep weeds of it because I like the convenience of a 10-minute podcast. If you just like, you just want the bullet points. But if you're interested in those, go listen to that. It's a good one. And it just kind of gives you the, hmm, like, is this something that I maybe need?

  Philip Pape: 50:37

  It's a great approach. Again, I I love the nuance and the reason behind this. It makes a lot of sense. We talk about physique engineering here, and that's that's what it is. It's like gathering the data, taking the steps, doing the simple things that will move the needle the farthest and seeing what's left and continuing to dig in, dig in, dig in. Um, you know, we have something in engineering called the five Y, which is like a root cause. It's not just engineering, but where you say, why is something happening? It's because of this. Okay, why is that happening? It's because of this. That's an impossible thing to follow unless you've already gotten yourself to a good baseline, which is easy to do without all this stuff we talked about today. But then this stuff is gonna move the needle even further. So we're gonna point the listener to that episode and your podcast. Where else do you want folks to find you?

  Michele Scarlet: 51:20

  Yeah, I so podcast, that episode, and I hang out on Instagram probably all day long. You can find me at Michelle Scarlet underscore um over there on IG.

  Philip Pape: 51:29

  At Michelle Scarlet underscore on Instagram and the podcast, True Health Podcast. And by the way, she has an episode with me on there as well. So definitely check all of those out. Michelle, it's it's been so awesome recording these with you and keep doing what you're doing. It's been great to have you on the show.

  Michele Scarlet: 51:44

  Thank you, you too. Thank you so much, Philip.

You Know Enough About Nutrition and Fitness (Here's Why You're Still Stuck) | Ep 444

You track your food. You lift. You can explain why protein matters for building muscle. So why hasn't your body changed? 

The gap between knowing what to do and getting results is not a discipline problem. It's a structure problem. And more nutrition and fitness information won't fix it.

Philip breaks down what's actually missing for experienced lifters over 40 who have tried multiple programs and still feel stuck. Drawing intake data from hundreds of coaching clients, he explains why conflicting advice creates rational paralysis, why 49% of knowledgeable lifters still struggle with the basics, and the 3 specific things (sequencing, context, and feedback loops) that separate people who know what to do from people who get results. 

He also covers why this gap hits harder after 40, when hormonal shifts from perimenopause, menopause, and declining testosterone shrink the margin for error on both strength training and nutrition.

If you've been doing "all the right things" and your body composition hasn't budged, this episode will reframe what's actually standing in your way, and what an effective solution looks like.

Join the Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist to be the first to hear about a brand new structured asynchronous coaching process built for experienced lifters who have the knowledge but need sequencing, context, and feedback loops to finally close the gap between knowing and doing:
https://witsandweights.com/eatmore

Timestamps

0:00 - Knowing vs. doing (the real reason you're stuck)
2:02 - The information trap in nutrition and fitness
6:45 - Conflicting advice and analysis paralysis
11:25 - What's actually missing (it's not discipline)
14:30 - Sequencing: why 1 change per week beats 50
19:10 - Why generic plans fail lifters over 40
23:20 - Building feedback loops for your training and nutrition
27:10 - Structured asynchronous coaching
28:30 - What good coaching actually looks like
36:20 - The middle ground that barely exists in fitness

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:02

  49% of the people who come to me for coaching are struggling with getting enough protein. And it's not because they don't understand it. They know it matters. They know how much they need oftentimes. And they could explain it to a friend. They maybe listen to this podcast. They struggle because knowing and consistently doing are two different skills. And only one of them responds to more information. Today I'm going to show you what's actually missing when you know what to do, but you can't make it work, and why the answer's not just gutting it out harder, it's not motivation, and it's not another program. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where I put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. And if you've been doing all the things, you're lifting weights, you're tracking your nutrition, you're doing what you believe is all the right stuff. Maybe you're not doing all of it, but you're doing some of it, and your body still doesn't reflect any of that effort. This episode is going to explain why. And it's probably not the reason you think. After 500 episodes of this show, you would think I would have explained this by now, but it's important. It is really important because I'm working with a lot of people in their 40s and 50s. They come to me after years of trying to figure this out on their own. I did that for decades. And even now I'm still trying to figure it out, and I have coaches helping me. They are smart, they are educated, they've listened to a hundred podcast episodes, they've read the books, they've tried the programs. Does that sound like you? And they're still stuck in one way or the other. Something might be moving forward and something else is not. Or they go in this pattern where they make some progress, or then the progress unwinds itself. And it is absolutely not because they lack knowledge. The fitness industry has convinced them that more information is the answer. Podcasts like this one thrive on giving you information because I do think information is or should be free. However, information is usually not the answer after a certain point. What I mean by that is when you go from a zero level of knowledge, you need information to get started. But after you get to about a two out of 10, the information becomes less and less the actual factor that gives you success. So today we're gonna cover why learning more about nutrition, about fitness, training can actually make things worse after a certain threshold. We're gonna talk about three specific things that are missing when you know what to do, but you can't make that knowledge work for you. And we're gonna talk about what effective coaching looks like versus what most people think it means. In case you're looking for a coach or a program or an app or a tool or whatever, how can you evaluate what's out there? How do I evaluate the people I hire as coaches? And stick around to the very end because I'm gonna give you a three-question audit that you can do in 30 seconds to figure out whether you're stuck because of a knowledge gap or an implementation gap. It's quick, it's honest, right? You can be honest with yourself when you take it, and it might help you reframe the thinking about the next step. And I'm a big fan of reframing. All right, let's talk about the information trap first. The conventional wisdom in the fitness industry is if you're not getting results, you have to learn more. You gotta watch my video, you gotta read my article, you have to listen to my podcast, you have to try a different program, you have to buy this, buy that. And I totally get it. I'm an engineer, I'm also someone who has to market my own products and offers. And my instinct when something is not working is find more data, get more something, something. There's something out there that I don't know. And that's how I'm wired, and how many of you are probably wired as well. And for a long while, learning more actually does help. And by a long while, I mean when you're a kid, when you're a teenager, and maybe partway into your 20s. And then there's this thing called wisdom that starts to creep in. Um, and and by the way, I the more wise I supposedly get, the more I know what I don't know, and the more ignorant I realize I am. And I think that's true wisdom. Um, and yet ignorance implies a lack of knowledge. So I don't want to go there just yet. Now, if you've never done certain things, if you've never tracked a macro or your food, and if you've never learned about energy balance, right, if you've never learned about progressive overload, then learning that is a huge step change and can blow your mind and change the trajectory of your life. I actually do agree with that. I think there is a step change where information has real tangible value at a certain stage. For me, that was around the year 2020, the couple years leading into before I launched this podcast when I discovered starting strength and I discovered, you know, macro tracking, and I discovered recovery, and I discovered periodization of your nutrition for fat loss and all these different things. I discovered barbells, you know, how to use them effectively, all of that. And it just like blew my mind and changed the trajectory immediately for the better, but up to a point. And there is that point. Most of you are listening, maybe getting there or maybe you're past it, where more information just makes it worse. Okay, makes it worse. And the reason is simple in that the more you learn, the more conflicting advice you encounter and is swimming in your head. You have all of these quote unquote experts, and I put quotes around that because who the heck knows what an expert is today? It's even very hard to figure that out. Credentials doesn't mean you're an expert. Others calling you an expert doesn't mean you're an expert. Being a good marketer doesn't mean you're an expert. So what is it? That's a very hard thing to answer. But there are a lot of people purporting to be experts who will say one thing or another that's a complete opposite. Cut carbs for fat loss. Nope, carbs are essential. Train, you know, X number day a week days a week with these kinds of reps or high volume program for body recomp. No, you need to do, you know, two days a week with three full body movements and go for intensity. You know, all of these counter-arguments that you can't make sense of. And there's so many more. Like that's just barely scratching the surface. And the thing is, every one of those claims is polished really well, has a bunch of studies that can they can probably point to to back them up, and they sound very authoritative. So what do you do, right? What do you do? Well, what you have actually done, tell me if you're wrong. I'm wrong here. You try a little of everything. You taste a little bit of this, a little bit of that, the buffet, the buffet of the fitness industry. Right? You try this, and then two weeks later, you second guess it because it's not quite quite working. Or you hear a really compelling argument for a different method, which we call shiny object syndrome. Then you pivot to that. You hear about a new tool, a new piece of equipment. Oh, I can do BFR or I can do vibration plates without having to lift as many weights, and I could build all this muscle. Great, that sounds great. Oh, there's a new pill or a new supplement or whatever. I'm not even getting into GLP wines, it's a whole different thing. Great, I'm gonna do that. And again, it's not, it's not that you lack discipline. I see a lot of people write in or comment in, like, oh, I just lack discipline. To me, a lack of discipline is just a lack of a system or lack of a structure or lack of a plan, right? It's not really the discipline piece. It's because you are actually making what your brain thinks of as a rational response to all of this conflicting information, but without a filter, without a filter. Because if if five credible sources on YouTube and this podcast and that podcast and people you respect that you listen to in your feed tell you five different things, how do you even commit to one of those, right? Like, how do you commit to one and know what the heck is the right path? And I see this in the intake data. Okay, so here's the cool thing. I've got about a thousand pieces of client intake data that I just looked at over the last few weeks. Literal forms that I was able to put through AI and do an analysis on them. And the average person who comes to me for coaching has tried three to four different nutrition programs. Nearly half of them, so 49.2%, still struggle with protein when they come to me. And it's not because they don't know protein matters for building muscle. Of course, they know this. Everybody knows that. I mean, think about protein today, is in all the foods too. Sometimes they can even explain complex things like leucine and muscle protein synthesis, you know, they and they impress me with their knowledge. I'm like, that's pretty cool, right? But then they struggle to get enough protein. And they they struggle because knowing why something matters and that you need a certain amount of food, and even that you could split it up by each meal, say 30 grams a meal, right? Even though you know all that, you are a human being with a real schedule who has to go to the grocery store. You have a family, you have to cook, you have to plan your days, you have a stressful job, you have, you have, you have. And these are skills that you haven't built. And they're it's not, they're not gonna get built automatically, and they're not gonna get built just because you have more information. Does that make sense? The fitness industry really loves this cycle, by the way. Every month there's a new program, a new method, a new secret that promises to be the one that finally works. And every one of those products is selling you more information. In fact, a lot of the like course and curriculum stuff, education stuff, you're seeing through it now, right? We're all like seeing through that. The webinars and everything are get they're getting more and more savvy, or they're just not working in the in the industry because people don't just want more information. And yet more information is often the product, and and a lot of it's just bad marketing too. But right, it's it's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just business models. And the person who who figures that out will stop buying, and more of you have figured that out. But the people who stay confused are the ones that keep subscribing. So they're kind of like the the the patsies, if you will, or I don't know what the word I'm thinking of, right? I don't want to say suckers because even I'm a sucker if that's the case. So if you're someone who knows a lot about what we talk about on the show, and look, if you just listen to like 10 episodes of this show, your level of education is gonna go way up for free. That's cool, that's awesome. So if you know about these things, if you know about training and nutrition and you could explain like body fat versus muscle, you know, even the basic concepts, and you're still not seeing the results that reflect that knowledge, then by definition, the problem is not that you need to learn another thing or you need to learn it better. Okay. I've had clients who would ask me a billion questions to learn, but it didn't change their skills until we took that information and applied it to them. So let's let's talk about that next section now. Okay. What's actually missing? If it's not information, what is missing? Well, there's three things. Okay. Information is not a bottleneck. There's plenty of it. There's plenty of it. It's not willpower, it's not motivation, it's not discipline, not all these buzzwords. Okay. Those are all I'll call downstream effects. Those are, I'll say, symptoms. They're outcomes of the constraints. Okay. Here they are. What are those three constraints? The first one is sequencing. What do I mean? This is the big one. You know 50 things that you can improve about your nutrition and training right now. I bet you could bet if you took out a piece of paper and I said, write 50 things down that could help you become fitter, you could write them down. You know your protein could be higher, you know your sleep could be better, you know you're not periodizing your training the right way, you know you're not managing your stress, you know you're not eating enough on your training day, you know your fiber is too low, shall I go on? And all of those might be true. And knowing all of them right now is paralyzing, is it not? It's paralyzing you because you can't fix 50 things at the same time. But what you can do is you can fix one thing this week. Maybe two, at the most three. This is the human's capacity, human's capacity to change. And the question of which one to fix first and in what order, that is not a knowledge question. That is a sequencing question. Because it depends entirely on your specific situation. Okay, now we're gonna, now we're getting to some truths, aren't we? Because a lot of this is gonna be context dependent. And this is when we talk about personalization, this is what we mean. Now, a lot of programs, strength programs, nutrition programs, even yes, my physique university, which is about learning and learning to apply with some accountability and support, dump everything on you in week one. All right. Here's your meal plan, here's your training split, here's your supplement list. He track these 15 metrics, track this, use this tool, join the community, watch the onboarding videos. And I'm mentioning this because my current program kind of takes this approach, right? And and it's a slightly flawed approach. And you're like, why is Philip saying this? Is he trying to not have me join? You, you'll you'll understand in a bit because my my thinking is evolving on this. And I also had a listener that challenged me to talk about the honest truth about what I thought about coaching and the industry and my own products and offerings. So I'm doing that. So you see this big mass of stuff, of features, of things that you get, but nobody tells you which piece to focus on first, which one matters the most for your situation right now, which ones you can safely ignore for the next eight weeks. You know, in a in a better version of this program, like what I try to do in when when you join our group program is give you an onboarding ramp and a set of a sequence to go through that at least makes it a lot more manageable, and you know that you can ask for help to answer these questions as you go, right? Which is kind of the best you can do in that kind of situation without working with a one-on-one coach. And so when I do start working with someone one-on-one, and by the way, I take very few of those clients now because I'm trying to scale up what we do to more people, we spend the first several weeks doing almost nothing except building a measurement and a tracking system so that you can stop guessing and you start to think in terms of, okay, I need to collect information about myself to so that I can stop guessing. And that's where you have a baseline and you focus on just one or two things a week. And it's not because all this stuff doesn't matter, but look, you've been trying to fix all these things simultaneously or in the wrong order, and they've often made the other problems worse. You know, you might be eating low calories and exercising too much, and now you're trying to do 15 more things to optimize them. And if you're a go-getter who listens to wits and weights, if I give you 15 things, you're literally going to try to do them. And that could be the problem, right? So if you take someone who's, say, under-eating, what's the first thing she needs to do? Probably eat more, right? And and and someone needs to look at that data to make sure she's doing that, whether she's doing it for herself or a coach is doing it or an app or something like that. If she jumps into an aggressive training program and a fat loss phase, but hasn't done the the you know restoration of her metabolic rate first, she's just gonna burn out and she's gonna be in the same cycle again. So the sequence matters as much as the content in that case. So that's number one. Number two, the second constraint people have is of course context. Context. Because generic advice doesn't account for your life. It never has and never does. And even all the new tools and whizbang, AI, and everything else today has a hard time understanding you unless you can feed the information about yourself to it. That's where humans are helpful, right? Because a human can ask you a question and then get you give them an answer. And if the answer is not good enough, they can ask you a follow-up question, right? And and when we talk about personalization, by the way, I don't mean in the vague like everyone's different way, like the demographics-based differences. So, for example, you can go to a calculator online to calculate your metabolism and it's gonna ask things like your age or your weight, your training activity, like a few things like that. I don't mean that level of personalization, although that that's a start, right? Because you're telling it something about yourself. But I mean like the very complex web of things that makes you you, right? I mean, look, I have some that I mentioned data from my intake. 54.5% of people I coach report hormonal hormonal concerns affecting their nutrition and training. Now, whether it actually is that is different from the fact that they feel it's that. And I'm not gaslighting people. What I mean is a lot of what we feel or experience could be hormonal or we think it's hormonal because of age and because of how things don't work like they used to. You know, for women, that's perimenopause, menopause, thyroid changes. For men, it's the declining testosterone, slower recovery, disrupted sleep. And so that's over half my clients who deal with this variable that is very hard for a template or a generic approach to kind of address without digging an extra layer or two or three deeper. Another statistic from my intakes nearly 39% of people struggle with consistency around social situations and weekends. Okay, that's again almost half. And it's not because they're not committed to, trust me, they're committed. They they are to the verge of tears sometimes that they're not able to get this right with the weekends. And again, I'm talking about when they come to us, not once we start working with them, because that's when we can help them do this. But it's simply because their weekday strategy falls apart when something else happens, like a work dinner, or their teenager ate all the protein in the fridge, or they're traveling every third week for their job, or the weekend, hashtag weekend, right? Which which tends to be very chaotic for a lot of people. You know, I have clients who track perfectly Monday through Thursday, and everything's cool and it's just a super routine. Day, day Monday through Thursday, hit their protein, they stay in the calorie range, all that great stuff. And then the structure just falls off a cliff Friday night. And by Sunday, you've consumed some unmeasured, because you're not tracking, amount of wine and takeout. And then you try to make it up on Monday, right? And you cut a whole bunch of calories, and then the cycle repeats over and over, and then your weekly average pushes you at maintenance or maybe even a surplus, and that's why nothing changes, or you gain weight, even though you think you're eating less. And you get what I'm saying. So you don't need more information. You need a system, okay? And the system has to have this middle gear of life between perfect and screw it. It has to, it has to work with life, guys, right? Right in the middle. So context means someone or something or whatever, knowing your schedule, your stressors, your triggers, your hormonal patterns, your training history, your actual food environment. Like what does your personal life look like, your relationships, all that stuff. And then sees your plan and says, you know what, this is not going to work for you on Wednesdays. Let's adjust it, right? That's it. Now, that that's what we mean by context. But again, it gets, it gets context gets complex, doesn't it? Okay, so that's sequencing and context. Now, the third thing, and this is the one that probably holds everything together, is feedback loops. Feedback loops. I've talked about this before as a control systems engineer, the idea of inputs and outputs, feeding and outputs feeding back into the inputs. You need someone or something watching that data. You need the data to be observed in some way or tracked in some way, you know, and it's not just your scale weight, but it's a whole bunch of things like your sleep quality, your energy, your stress, your training performance, maybe your hormone patterns in your cycle. And basically being able to predict, okay, not just see what happens after the fact, but able to predict what's working now, what might not work in the near term before you spiral into the oh, nothing works for me. Just put up, you know, hands up, shrug emoji, nothing works for me. Because without that, without that feedback loop, here's what happens: you start a new plan, you start a new program, new nutrition approach, you're all excited, it's Monday. You follow it for three weeks, your scale doesn't move, maybe it goes up, and you're like, ah, it doesn't work. Doesn't work. So what do you do? You change something, right? You cut calories, maybe you add cardio, maybe you scrap the whole thing, you try something else. But what if you had the data that said, you know what? Your metabolism was exact adapting exactly as expected. And by the way, your waist held steady, but your neck and your biceps went up by an inch, right? Or your waist went down. I actually had a client recently, we looked at her data. Her weight is the same because we're keeping her at maintenance, but she actually lost like three inches on her waist. And like, look, you gained a bunch of muscle. Her body fat's down 4% without losing a weight weight, a pound on the scale, right? You wouldn't know that without the data, and then you would give up and you'd want to switch up. What if your training log showed, hey, my lifts are going up? I'm probably gaining strength and muscle. And three weeks just wasn't enough time for that to show results on the scale because the scale's a terrible indicator of what happened in those three weeks. Every other indicator, though, said it was working without having the data to be observed, read, understood, analyzed, and telling you, hey, let's stay the course. It's actually working. It's actually working. And let's let's get it away from the edge of the cliff, okay? Put bring your feet back here. Let's not fall off the cliff right now and make reactive decisions based on incomplete information. Let's not drive with our eyes closed and turn the wheel every time we feel a bump. Okay. That is the gap. It is not the knowledge gap. It is the sequencing, the context, and the feedback loops. Those three things are the difference between information and implementation, between knowing what to do and getting it done in a way that produces results for your body. Now, that's actually why I wanted to share something with you. Because if what I've described so far sounds like your situation, and it is for so many people, and it was for me. If you're someone who has the knowledge, you listen to the podcast, but you haven't had the structure. I am working on something pretty cool. It is designed to close this gap. Okay, it's not one on one coaching, and it is not the physique university. It is also not the app that I have out fitness lab. That that can do a lot of these things in a different way for a certain type of people, and it's awesome for that. But I'm not ready to share all the details. I will be soon. Sorry for the tease. However, however, if you're on my wait list, you're going to hear about it first. And if you want to be on that wait list and hear about it first, and by the way, when it comes out, you're going to get rock bottom founders pricing that will never be that low in the future. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore. Yes, you heard right. Eat more. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You know me. You know I create some pretty cool things that I believe in and I'm passionate about. This is years of coaching, knowing what works and what doesn't work. Coming soon. Eat more. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. Put your name on the list. Totally free. There's no charge to get your name on it. And then I'm going to tell you everything when it's ready very, very soon. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. Okay. Now, what does good coaching actually look like? I want to talk about it. We're going to talk about coaching because I think there's a massive misunderstanding about what the word means, like what that word means in fitness. Because if your mental model of coaching is wrong, then you're going to just avoid it altogether, like, no, I would never get a coach. Or you're going to buy the wrong thing and I want you to waste your money. Right. I hate wasting money. I hate blowing money on things that don't work. So most people think coaching is one of two things. Either it's a personal trainer standing next to you in the gym counting your reps, which is fine, right? But that's that's like a tiny piece of what a coach would do. It's not even coaching in many cases, it's supervising your training. I mean, you're lucky if that person even gives you a good program. That that's one thought. Okay. The other thought of coaching is a premium service where you pay $500 a month, $600 a month for a one-on-one coach, and someone gives you a plan, a meal plan, texts you every day, maybe creates a dependent relationship instead of helping you build skills. And a lot of you are like, well, I want that. I want somebody to tell me what to do. But it's not going to work long term because you don't know what to do after that point, unless you want to keep working with somebody for $500 a month for the rest of your life. I would say that effective coaching that actually produces change looks very different. The first thing it has is a timeline. It actually has a start point and an end point. And a lot of the coaches listening are like, why are you doing that? What about the long-term value of customers? What about, you know, you get customers a result, clients a result, and then they keep, they stay with you for the long term. Well, I love it when clients, we get them a result in three or six months. And then they're like, I want to keep working with you because I'm learning and there's another goal that I have. That doesn't preclude the fact that there's a start and an end point to the first goal. So you should be able to get a goal that you're trying to achieve. And it has to be a realistic goal, of course. But then, and then you could do another goal after. There's nothing that stops you. But it shouldn't be this like content feed that you're subscribing to forever, right? And and when I think of physique university as it is today, that's more like the it's more like the ladder in that it gives you a lot of great information and education, the ability to engage constantly and the beginning, ability to get coaching support constantly. And we do help you with your goals, but I feel like we could do a better job of having a start and end point, right? Which alludes to the thing I mentioned earlier, witswaits.com slash eat more. Stay tuned. So the goal of coaching is that at the end, you can manage your nutrition and training without a coach. You can fire the coach. I'm sorry, other coaches, if that's not the model you want me to tell people about, but it's the one that I think is super, super effective because if you get a result with me, you're gonna tell everybody about me anyway. You're gonna say, hey, Philip was a good guy. He helped me out, he didn't lie, he was honest, he had integrity, he helped me get a result that I'm happy with. It was realistic too. He didn't sugarcoat it, he didn't promise what he couldn't deliver. And hey, go check him out. Or hey, I'm gonna work with them again on my next goal, you know? So if a program doesn't have a plan for doing that, for making you independent by building skills and getting a result, ask yourself who that program is really designed to serve. Okay. Second, is it sequential? Does it build on itself and actually help you build those skills? Does each week build on the last? Right? You're not just browsing or floating around or doing, I'll say, 20 habits from day one, and now you just do those habits for the next six months. You've or you're following some sort of progression where the, you know, day one builds into week one, builds into week two, builds into month two. And it it makes logical sense and is super achievable. Like the bar is very low. So what that might look like is well, in the first phase, you're gonna build your measurement system. Then the middle phase, you're gonna execute that system, but have real-time adjustments with the feedback loops. And then maybe the final phase is I'm gonna build autonomy and maintain those results. So then I also have the skills to do this again in the future. So that's really important. Is it sequential? Does it have a process? Does it have phases, et cetera, periodization? The third thing is that there is some human or entity, I'm gonna put it that way, watching your data and helping you make decisions or make calls. All right. And I say human or entity because today we do have AI, we do have software, we do have, you know, I'll say automated systems that can do an effective job at some of this kind of thing, but not all of it. And, you know, I like the approach where if there's if you need a human involved because your situation has a little bit of complexity, having it be a combination of automated things that make it convenient for you, where like the data is easy to track, it's easy to get a quick answer on things that like are somewhat automated, and then a human can jump in for the more complex stuff so that it's convenient for you and it's fast. Like I want you to get an answer quickly. I don't want you to have to wait till the next call or like wait to get a response from your coach. Right. I I'm seeing it from both sides here. Okay. And yeah, it helps when you have a video library or education or guides or something like that. Like we all do, like all good coaches have those things. But if if someone can access your training history, your hormone context, your schedule, you know, maybe, maybe your photos, maybe your measurements, like whatever makes sense, or at least be able to get them quickly and then say, hey, based on what I'm seeing, here's what you need to change. So there's got to be some level of that. All right. Like in my app, for example, it it's doing that almost fully automated and it's really impressive. And it uses AI to do that. And yet some people want the human connection as well. And that's why I think there's a place for both in the world. The fourth thing it does is it integrates nutrition and training. Now, there's a lot of other pieces of lifestyle we talk about, sleep, stress, et cetera. But to me, the nutrition and training are the two big ones that come together. And they're not separate problems. That's the thing, they're not separate. I can't tell you how many people join my list or find the podcast and they reach out and they're like, I really want to lose weight. I really want to improve my health. I really, first question I ask is, Are you lifting weights? Oh no, I'm not doing that. Like, oh, I am so glad you met me because that is so important. It's not just the nutrition, it's the training. And some people have the opposite problem. They're like all into training and PRs and lifting weights and everything, but they eat like crap. You know, they they they just don't know how to make it work together. So they both go together. They affect each other tremendously as a system. And so I think any coaching program that addresses just one side of that is only solving half the equation. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have a program for one side if you're addressing the other side a different way. I'm not trying to criticize all the great programs out there that do like just training. I'm just saying that you have to have them both addressed in some way. Okay, now I know some of you are thinking, wow, that actually does sound like that sounds like more expensive than one-on-one coaching, what you just talked about. Like, how am I gonna find somebody or something that does all of that? I definitely can't afford, let's say, 500 a month for personalized one-on-one. And for a lot of people, honestly, that is overkill. Most experienced people, they don't, they don't need like a human texting them every day or they or constantly following up on them. But what they do need is structure, they need a sequence, and they need periodic check-ins. Like to me, that's a good balance because this isn't your life. Let's be honest. It's it's kind of my life because I'm a podcaster and I'm a coach, but it's not your life. And I get it. I don't want to be imposing on you some system where you feel overwhelmed by your coach. That's not the point. I think there's a middle ground between, you know, here's information, here's some, here's a group, here's some content, you know, like think about physique university, which is $27 a month. I mean, that's dirt cheap, right? For it, it's practically like a Netflix subscription. And that's kind of the model, right? But then the other side is, oh, full-time personal nutritionist, you know, you're like Mr. Hollywood, Will Smith, or whoever who needs the nutrition guy following you around. But there's like gotta be this middle ground, and it barely exists in the industry because I think people are going full on what they call high ticket, or they're going low tuck to low ticket where they want to upsell you to high ticket. All right. Now, let me tell you what I'm not saying here because this message always gets misread. I'm not saying the information is useless. I'm not saying podcasts and books and YouTube don't help. I have a podcast to help people. I learn an enormous amount that way myself. And I'm not saying that everyone needs a coach. Some people do figure this out on their own, and that is awesome. What I am saying is that past a certain point for a certain type of person, and you know if this is you listening, more information has diminishing returns, whereas structure has exponentially increasing returns. And the gap between knowing and doing is a real gap. It is not a flaw in your character or your discipline or something like that. Stop beating yourself up. Stop being guilty. It's not you. I mean, you can feel guilty, but I'm just telling you, it's not you. It's a problem with the design. And design problems have design solutions. Hey, hey, physique engineer here. Okay, I can help you with that. Now, I want you to stay to the end because I still have that three-question audit to tell you if your bottleneck is knowledge or implementation, so you don't go down the right path. But I do want to zoom in on why this is relevant if you're older. If you're among us older dudes and gals who are over 40, we lift, the stakes get a little bit higher now. And whether you're a man or a woman, okay, the specifics look different, but the principles are universal. Go back in time to your 20s or your early 30s. What could you do back then? Just about anything with a suboptimal approach, right? Your hormones were very forgiving and fiery, and your recovery was super fast, your joints felt great. You could out-train a bad nutrition plan, you could do gross fit terribly like I did for eight years, and you had this huge margin for error, and it was great. Life was great, okay? You do whatever. And that margin starts to shrink. It starts to shrink in your 40s and your 50s. Those are the key decades where this happens. For women, you've got perimenopause, menopause, which change hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. That affects your muscle protein synthesis, it affects your sleep, it gives you all these symptoms that affect everything. It affects your body fat distribution. For men, testosterone is declining starting at the age of 30. And by 50, you could be at like 70% of your peak, especially if you're not lifting weights. And that means slower recovery, less energy, stubborn body fat. And then the information landscape for us over 40 is a complete mess right now. It's a mess. Half of the advice says you just accept the declining strength and do all these other longevity hacks, biohacking. It's a huge thing. Or they're going to sell you a hormone-specific supplement stack, or they go right to HRT but forget all the lifestyle, or GLPs and forget the lifestyle, right? What you need is someone or something or a method or system to understand how your body is operating under all of these new constraints that didn't exist before, and then work within those constraints intelligently, not as a fear-monger, not to say you can't. No, you can absolutely thrive in the best ways this time of life. Okay. And that's just not something that a guide can do or podcast can do, including this one, including this one. I give you the principles every week. I give you lots of tips too. I bring in a lot of cool guests, but the application of those to your body and your hormones and your schedule and your data requires more than information, requires a structured process. All right, that tip is coming up in a second, but if this episode made you think, hey, that is me, that is my situation, I want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. I am building something for people who lift weights, who don't mean more need more information, who are not beginners, but you need a structured, week-by-week coaching process with a real sequence, with actual context, with someone watching your data, a human in the a human in the loop. I'm going to be sharing the details with my weight list. So to get on that list, go to with witsandweights.com slash eatmore. The link will be in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash eatmore. And I'm going to be sharing more soon. I, you know, everybody loves to be teased, right? Like, what is Philip doing here? This is not an April Fool's joke, by the way. Because I know we're getting close to that time. Witsandwaits.com slash eat more. Also, text this episode to a friend if you think they need to hear it, because a lot of people need to hear this message. Okay, here's a quick way to figure out whether you're stuck because of knowledge or implementation. It's three questions. They're yes or no questions. Question one can you explain right now what you would need to do with your nutrition and training to move toward your goal? Okay, not perfectly, but just a general approach. Okay, can you explain what you need to do with your nutrition and training generally right now to move toward your goal? If the answer is yes, knowledge is not your problem. Question two, have you followed that approach consistently for at least six weeks? Okay, that's about 45 days, six weeks without changing it. Okay, have so if question one was yes, you know what to do. Question two is have you followed that consistently for six weeks without changing it? Now, if the answer is no, well then you have a commitment or structure problem, don't you? It's not an information problem. Something is preventing you from sticking with what you already know works. And now question three Do you have a way to measure whether your approach is actually working beyond just the scale? Okay, so things like training logs, biofeedback, stuff like that. All right, if the answer is no, you are flying blind. You might be making progress or you might not be. And you just don't know. You might be stuck in a cycle and no way to catch what to do next. You just don't know. So if you answered yes, no, no, then you do not need more information. You don't need another podcast episode. I have a lot of them, I can send you, but you don't need it. You need a system that takes what you already know and turns it into a structured, measurable process. That is the gap. And remember that closing that gap is what's gonna change everything for you. That is it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the gap between knowing and doing is not discipline, it is structure. I'm Philip Hate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Strength Training and Endurance Together (Without Killing Your Gains) | Ep 443

Do you love endurance training AND want to build muscle, but you've been told you have to pick one?

The "cardio kills gains" claim has been around for decades, and if you're over 40, it can feel like an impossible tradeoff between the activities you enjoy and the strength training your body needs.

However, the "interference effect" on hypertrophy is negligible when sessions are structured correctly, and adults over 40 might have an advantage.

Philip breaks down the evidence-based programming rules that let you combine strength training and endurance without compromising either. You'll learn about the session timing strategy backed by research, why running and cycling create different types of interference, the specific protein and carbohydrate targets concurrent trainees need (especially after 40), and how to monitor recovery so you know when to push hard and when to back off. If you want to stay strong, fit, and healthy for decades through both lifting weights and endurance work, this is your roadmap.

Shoutout to listeners Richard G. (60+, cyclist) and Gerwyn (56, runner and cyclist) who both asked how to optimally balance endurance sports with strength training and nutrition.

Try the Fitness Lab app to get daily adaptive coaching that adjusts your strength training and endurance programming week to week based on your priorities and recovery. Whether you're in a strength-focused block or transitioning to endurance prep, the Coach recalibrates your training, nutrition, and recovery plan as your focus shifts. Exclusive 20% off:
https://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Ask a question for the show: witsandweights.com/question

Get your free Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint: witsandweights.com/muscle

Timestamps

0:00 - Does cardio kill your gains? 
2:07 - What the interference effect really means
5:05 - New evidence shrinks the interference effect
6:31 - Fatigue model vs. molecular myth
9:14 - 6-hour cardio scheduling rule
11:15 - Exercise order and same-day strategy
12:18 - Running vs. cycling for muscle building
15:03 - 80/20 cardio split
16:15 - How to program hybrid training
17:59 - Why over 40 benefits most
20:32 - Bone density and longevity
21:28 - Protein and carb targets for building muscle
23:10 - Creatine and sleep 
27:10 - Bonus: 10-second morning recovery check 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  Does cardio really kill your gains? You've heard it before, and if you're over 40 and you love running, you love cycling or anything endurance, that advice puts you in an impossible spot. Give up what you love or accept that you'll never build real muscle. And it turns out that neither is true. The latest research on over a thousand athletes shows that the interference effect, the idea that endurance training blocks muscle growth, is close to zero when you set up your training correctly. So today you're gonna learn the one scheduling rule that eliminates most of the interference, why running and cycling affect your strength differently, and how much protein concurrent trainees actually need. Spoiler, it is more than you think. And this episode exists because of two listeners who asked me the same question within days of each other. And the first one is Richard G. He's over 60, he's a lifetime athlete, he's a physique university member, and he wrote to me and he said, Quote, my main question is how I can optimally combine the endurance sports I'm passionate about with the weight training and nutrition optimization to get the optimal results for the years to come. And then we have Gerwin, who is 56, and asked almost the exact same thing, quote, how to balance cardio running and cycling endurance activities with strength training. And if you want to submit your question for the show, just go to witsyweights.com slash question and I'll give you a shout out just like I did today. Two people, the similar demographic, same question, same frustration. So, Richard Gurwin, this one is for you. Shout out to you. And if you're in a similar spot, if you're training for endurance and lifting together and you're wondering if one is maybe canceling out the other or you can't do both, you're gonna want to hear this. By the way, last week's, or yeah, the last solo episode I did was about handling conflicting goals. So there's some similarities here, but we're really getting into endurance specifically and how to do that with your lifting. If you stick around to the end, I'm gonna share a 10-second recovery check that can tell you whether your body can handle tomorrow's hard session or if you need to back up, it just takes 10 seconds. All right, here's what we're covering today. First, why the cardio kills gains narrative is pretty outdated at this point, and what the actual interference data looks like as of the last few years. Second, the practical programming rules that let you train both without compromising. And third, the nutrition and recovery factors that most concurrent trainees are still getting wrong, especially after 40. And we're gonna fix that today. Okay, let's start with what you've probably been told that if you want to build muscle, if you want to minimize, or if you want to build muscle, you have to minimize cardio, or do just walking, don't do too much other types of cardio, keep it short, do it on separate days. If you have to do it, whatever you do, don't run. Okay, and it might sound like some advice I've given to some extent, but again, context is everything. And the general advice where this whole, like, you know, lose fat and build muscle without cardio, it's called the interference effect, the idea that cardio interferes with building muscle. And it was first described back in 1980 by Robert Hickson. He showed that combining strength and endurance training in the same program produce smaller strength gains than strength training alone. And for about four decades, the fitness industry turned that into a blanketed rule that you have to pick one or the other. And even as I got into this space about five, seven years ago, it was still a fairly dominant narrative. And I've only recently started to see more concurrent and hybrid training philosophies take hold as we see, you know, big, strong, jacked, healthy, fit people doing both. So if you are someone who does it because you love it, you love to ride a bike, you like to run, you love to swim, you love to hike, any kind of endurance work. And yes, there are people like that. I say that a little bit jokingly because to be honest, I do love sprinting, I do love hiking, I do love riding a bike occasionally. So I so are there are modes of cardio that I enjoy. And I and I assume you as a listener, there's something you enjoy. You don't do it just because you're trying to burn calories or do exercise. There, you know, maybe it's associated with an activity like a sport. And then you also want to build or maintain muscle. Of course, we want to do that no matter what, especially as we age. And so this puts you in a little bit of a bind, right? Do you give up the activities that keep you, you know, sane and healthy and you enjoy them, or do you just accept subpar results and in the gym? And this is what I call a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose, it's not one or the other. You're not asking the right question. And the research from the last few years makes this really clear. So we are evidence-based here, meaning we want to combine research with, you know, scientific papers, with evidence, with anecdote, with coaching experience, all of it together, as well as what you found out about yourself. Let's talk about the research. A 2022 meta-analysis in sports medicine looked at 43 studies. There were over a thousand subjects, and they found the effective endurance training on hypertrophy, that's building muscle, that's muscle size, was actually close to zero. Actually, not even very small. It was pretty much zero statistically. The standardized mean difference was negative 0.01, and for maximal strength, it was 0.06. Not statistically significant. The only measurable interference was on explosive power, and even that went away when people separated their training sessions. And then really recently, just a little over a year ago, 2024, a meta analysis of 59 studies, over 1,300 participants confirmed this, but they added a little bit of nuance. In men, there were some lower body strength interference, and in women, there wasn't any. Neither group showed a meaningful interference for upper body strength or hypertrophy. So the interference effect, the way you could state this truthfully is it is real, but far smaller than people claim or think, and it's highly conditional. It's context-based. It depends on how you structure your sessions, what type of endurance work you're doing, and whether you're recovering adequately. And the recovery, I think I was I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and he said, look, recovery is the one training variable, the one goal that never goes away. So why does interference happen when it does happen? And for many years, the explanation was, I'll say, molecular. There's an enzyme called AMPK that gets activated by endurance exercise. And it was supposed to inhibit mTOR, the pathway that drives muscle protein synthesis. I mentioned this on the last episode. Endurance flips one switch, strength flips the opposite, and when you do both, they cancel out, and maybe one interferes with the other in terms of an adaptation. Nice, clean, simple model, and there's some problems with it. Okay. There's nuance, I should say, because actual human studies have failed to confirm this. One study found that 30 minutes of cycling at 70% VO2 max after a resistance training session did not reduce mTOR signaling at all. Another show that HIT combined with training elevated mTOR above resistance training alone. So, this what they call antagonism, you know, the opposite effect, the AMPAK and the mTOR antagonism that we see in like a cell culture or in, let's say, rat studies, doesn't necessarily translate cleanly to humans who are doing real-world training. And this is just a thing that we see a lot in the research. People make inferences or extrapolations based on rodent models or based on what they see in a petri dish, and it doesn't always apply at the systematic human level. And so the emerging consensus, and this is from just last year, 2025 review, is that interference is better explained by what's called a residual fatigue model. So when interference happens, it's because the accumulated fatigue from endurance work compromises the quality of your resistance training. So that's a very interesting, different way to think about it, isn't it? It's about the accumulated fatigue from the endurance work. Okay. It's where you show up to do a squat, heavy squats, after you had a hard run the day before, you know, like a 5K run or something, and your legs are kind of cooked and you can't hit those planned weights. You just have too much fatigue, and then over time, that's even more fatigue and less stimulus of strength. And so this is a reframe on this. It's very helpful because fatigue is a problem of your programming and your recovery, not the fact that you're doing strength training with cardio. And so we have solutions to this. Ah, so that leads me to the next section, which is the the the how to manage this biological thing that we can control, which is fatigue, but not the molecular thing that we can't control, which turns out to not be the cause anyway. All right, so there are three levers here that matter the most of how to manage your programming to eliminate any chance of interference. It's your timing of your sessions, it's the order of your exercises, and it's the endurance modality. So let's walk through each one, okay? First, session timing. This is the most powerful variable. And if you only take one thing from this episode, make it this. All right. So again, looking at the evidence, a 2016 study on 58 rugby players compared doing strength and endurance in the same session, separating them by six hours, and separating them by 24 hours. The six-hour group saw 12.8% greater lower body strength gains than the same session group. And then the 24-hour group did the best of all. So the takeaway is to separate your strength and endurance sessions by at least six hours if you can. If you could even put them on different days entirely, even better. And so the practical tip I have is that if you can put strength and endurance on separate days, you'll get the best outcome. Second best is on the same day, but at least six hours apart. And then the third best is the same session, but start with your strength training, then do your cardio. The worst case is the same session with endurance first. And I would say, even for endurance athletes, this is still a good approach. So that's it. That's your cheat sheet for how to schedule your training sessions. Um by the way, we are putting together, we're putting together a hybrid training program in physique university that that has the middle ground. It actually has small manageable resistance or cardio work prescribed after, right after certain training sessions, but we only do that to make it a prescribed thing. You could always put them on your rest days. It's a five-day program, so you could always put them on the other days. But sometimes for practicality, it makes more sense to put them together. So that's the timing. Now, second is exercise order. When you do have to train both in the same session, so that was a good segue after I just said that, you're gonna lift first. There have been studies that show that you have greater lower body strength gains when you start with lower body and then do cardio. And oftentimes I tell people to put the cardio on upper body days, but we don't see as big effects on hypertrophy. So strength and hypertrophy, two different things. The strength is what often gets hit, and that doesn't, it's not all like a be all end all. Depends on what your goal is. If you're somebody who's trying to do both lifting and hypertrophy and cardio, you may not be going after absolute total strength gains. But even if you are, again, it depends on the order and the and the timing. So it doesn't really have an effect on hypertrophy or static strength, what they call, or VO2 max or body composition. And if I I think the study showed that the strength first advantage was most pronounced at a twice per week frequency. So if you're only hitting the gym twice a week and adding cardio after, make sure the barbell comes first and then the cardio afterward. Now, so that's that's exercise order. I hope I was clear on that. Just basically lift first. Okay. Now, endurance, the endurance mode or modality, and this is interesting because I think it's counterintuitive. So take running and cycling, they affect your strength differently. And and I pick those two specifically because they use the legs and they're different than walking. Like we all we all know that almost intuitively a walking is a pretty relaxing, low interference type thing. But of course, if you start hiking or adding a rucksack or something, then it approaches something closer to running a little bit. But let's just take running and cycling. So, what is running? Well, running involves repetitive, eccentric loading. Every foot strike requires your muscles to absorb force, and that creates more muscle damage, which means more inflammation, which means longer time to recover. Whereas cycling is predominantly concentric. You're pushing against the pedal, against the resistance, right? Whether it's just a free bike or it's an assault bike or a spin bike or whatever, and you don't have the impact-driven damage that you have from running. So you'd expect cycling to cause less interference, correct? Okay, you know this is a trick question. At moderate intensities, that is what the data shows. Running produces a lot more, what they call decrements, right? Reduction in hypertrophy and strength. And cycling doesn't. So at moderate intensities, running is not as great. But at high intensities, it actually flips around. High intensity cycling creates significant local fatigue in your quads. And those happen to be the muscles that you test when you do legs, squats, and leg presses, like in these lower body studies. So the interference becomes muscle group specific. So if it's muscle group specific specific, what is the takeaway here? Well, the takeaway is if you can keep most of your endurance work at low intensity, you're gonna avoid this. And that's if you like zones, that's like zone two conversational pace or less, obviously. And it's Andy Galpin. He's he's actually the guy behind behind Vitality Blueprint, where we've partnered with our blood work analysis. He he the way he put it is zone two has almost no ability to block hypertrophy when you're working at a conversational pace. So it becomes just as recoverable and zero impact as walking. All right. So an easy, a long, easy ride, even a slow run might be perfectly fine, is what I'm getting at. What creates the problems is accumulating too much time in that moderate to hard middle zone, like zone three and four work, that generates significant fatigue and and doesn't produce the unique adaptations either. So about 80% easy and 20% hard for your cardio, it lines up really well with concurrent training. 80% easy cardio and 20% hard cardio. However you want to define that. It's kind of in the context of zones, the way I just put it, but a lot of that, a lot of that's gonna be very individualistic based on your biofeedback. And when you do this split, the 80-20, you get the cardiovascular benefits from the easy work, right? Because you do, you get cardiovascular benefits even from walking and from lifting, as we've talked about recently. You also get the performance stimulus from the hard session. So if you're trying to improve your endurance performance, the specificity, right? Or power or some speed or something like that, and then you're not accumulating what you might call junk fatigue in the middle. All right. So that kind of clarifies the big takeaways on what to do about it. Remember, stick around to the end because I'm I have a 10-second recovery check that's going to be super helpful. And if you're thinking, okay, how do I actually structure my week to balance both cardio and strength training? And again, a perfectly smooth segue into talking about my app Fitness Lab because a lot of you aren't sure what it even does. I actually sent out a question in my list and said, Hey, why haven't you tried checked out Fitness Lab? And a lot of people say, Well, I'm not really sure if it's going to help me. Well, here's a cool thing that it does. Very specific. Okay, very specific thing it can do. When you onboard, it asks about how you like to train and whether you have endurance priorities or not, and whether you're working with a trainer or you want the program, the app to make your training for you. But then at any time from the rest of the time you start using the app, there's a coach in the app. It's basically an AI chatbot, but it's trained on all my stuff as well as a little bit of my personality. I like to joke that I'm trying to replicate myself. It's like a replicant. And you can tell that coach at any time, hey, my priorities are changed, or I want to focus on strength versus endurance or versus cardio, or I have a run coming up, I have a competition coming up, I have a powerlifting meet coming up, and it will say, All right, let's, we're gonna tweak your activities going forward, your training, your nutrition, your recovery recommendations exactly around that thing you want to do. And so if your focus shifts right in the middle of the year or a few months from now, you know, maybe you're building strength to begin with, and then you're like, oh no, I really want to do this bike race or this ultra marathon. You could tell it, how about this is coming up on this date. Help me come up with a training plan. And it will come up with an entire training plan to do that based on the evidence, and it's gonna map it out and then start giving you those specific training protocols and activities going. I mean, literally, it'll tell you your runs, it'll tell you your lifting sessions, it'll tell you what to do. And the whole thing just recalibrates, right? That's what's really cool about the app. I really wanted to share that because I'm so passionate about how much it's helping people without they don't have to overthink it. They don't need a trainer, they don't need a lot of things that we needed in the past, and now technology allows us to do it. Anyway, check out the show notes for 20% off link that's in there for Fitness Lab. You won't regret it. Try it out. Try it out and let me know what you think. We're always making improvements, we're always fixing bugs and all that good stuff as well. All right, so we've covered the training mechanics, and now I kind of want to zoom out because this episode is specifically for people in the 40 to 60 plus range, just like our two listeners. And the case for combining strength and endurance training is actually stronger for this demographic demographic than any other. Surprise if you're surprised to hear that, let me explain. Okay, I'm gonna give you a number. A large-scale study found that people who do both resistance and aerobic exercise have a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to people who do neither. Now, from strength alone, it's 21%. From aerobic alone, cardio alone, it's 18 to 29%, but the combination produces this synergistic reduction in all-cause mortality of boom, 40%. That is huge. For preserving muscle, the stakes are really high, right? We know this. This is why we talk about strength training. You lose 3 to 8% of muscle mass per decade after age 30, it accelerates after 60. And then endurance-only athletes have it way worse because they maintain some semblance of cardiovascular fitness, but then they preferentially lose type two muscle fibers. Those are the fast twitch fibers responsible for power output and fall prevention because they're not lifting weights. And so that just exacerbates the problem as you age. And here's something to reassure the endurance athletes who are listening. Okay, I am on your side. As much as in the past, I might have poo-pooed cardio just a bit. You know, we've done lots of things in the last year alone, including physique university with our adaptive cardio workshop that we did that acknowledges how important cardio is within this context. A 2022 meta-analysis specifically looked at whether age modifies the interference effect. It doesn't. It doesn't. The over 40 subgroup had no greater interference than people in 18 to 40 group. And the probable reason is most people over 40 who are adding strength training are probably pretty new to it, and untrained individuals show virtually no interference. And there was another analysis that confirmed this untrained subjects had an interference effect close to zero. So the irony here is that the population most worried about interference, those of you over 40, over 50, even in your 60s, older endurance athletes adding lifting for the first time, that's the population least likely to experience interference. All right. So if you're over 40 and you've been doing endurance your whole life and you're now just adding strength training, don't worry about it. Do it. Go do it. The interference effect is basically not a factor for you. For bone density specifically, combining training is one of the most effective non-uh-pharmacological strategies against age-related bone loss. And this is really important for cyclists, for swimmers, because non-weight-bearing sports provide just the bare minimum of bone stimulus on their own. A lot of people think somehow like biking is gonna, you know, help maintain your bone. It's not. It's not. If cycling is your primary activity, you're not lifting, you are missing a huge piece of your skeletal health. And that's just to maintain your bone density. If you've already experienced bone loss or osteoporosis, really the only way to reverse that is a combination of strength training and some impact work, some kind of jumping and impact work, which beyond the scope of this episode, I just wanted to throw that in there. All right, so that's the training side. Separate your sessions, lift first when you can, keep most endurance, low intensity, and don't panic about this whole interference thing. But none of that is gonna work if, guess what, your nutrition and your recovery aren't supporting this dual demand. And that is where a lot of concurrent trainees are hurting themselves because the errors are very common in this population and they're often invisible. And we like to talk about those things and make them visible on this show. So, starting with, we're talking nutrition here. Starting with protein, there are some standard recommendation recommendations out there. And we talk about the like 0.7 grams per pound minimum for you know for athletes, for people who listen to the show, for people who lift weights. I would say if you're doing concurrent training, you should probably have more protein, like be closer to the one gram per pound, maybe a little more, but one at least. And that's because endurance exercise activates an enzyme that increases leucine oxidation, meaning your body burns through more amino acids during that aerobic work. So there's less available for muscle repair afterward. There was a study that showed plasma leucine dropping by 11 to 33% during or after cardio sessions. And so it's just, it's just a to be safe kind of thing. Like I would get more protein. You're just doing more overall volume and activity anyway. And then if you're in a fat loss phase, if you're in an energy deficit, I tend to recommend higher fat or higher protein in those phases anyway. For older trainees who are doing concurrent training, I would say that the per meal doses, well, the total daily intake is always the most important thing. But I would also encourage, you know, having protein at every meal anyway, not necessarily for the protein stimulus or the anabolic response, more for practicality to make sure that you get enough protein. That's more of a practical tip. So that's protein. Carbs, this is where so many people are undereating, especially if you're doing cardio. And I think it matters because glycogen depletion worsens the interference effect at the molecular level. Now, there have been some chats in our Facebook group about a recent study showing a few differences with glycogen depletion that make it seem like less of an issue than it is. But in reality, and working with clients, the energy, the recovery, the ability to build muscle, the ability to fuel up, the ability to hit long sessions, to last through your sessions, you know, all of that seems to be highly sensitive to carbohydrates for most people, such that having a lot of carbs to support your training sessions is really helpful, including your cardio training sessions. And in fact, the study I'm talking about in our Facebook group didn't actually fuel the athletes with very many carbs during the training session like you normally would. So that was one of the problems I had with the study. But you know what? Practical experience proves this out time and time again. Unless you're avoiding carbs for some legitimate reason, like you can't eat certain foods or you have intolerances or they just don't have helped you at all. Um, there's no reason to avoid them. The only other time you would eat low carb would probably be during a fat loss phase when you simply don't have as many calories to play with. So I would target quite a, you know, plenty of carbs. Like, like don't go low carb and don't go keto just for the sake of it. There's definitely no other benefits to it. If you enjoy it or whatever, that's fine. But carbs tend to be your friend in these cases for all the glycolytic activity, for the strength training, for the cardio, all of it. And eating before you train is helpful, eating after you train is helpful. You've got to experiment with it, though, to see what really helps you. And then total calories, really, it's this is the same for anybody. The risk, I think, with people doing concurrent training is you may be burning a lot more calories. You actually may have a higher expenditure, which is another reason to consider a hybrid or concurrent training mode. And it's not so much different than when we say, hey, lift weights, walk, and then add in some cardio if you need to burn some more calories. That's still a legitimate strategy. The last thing is, you know, supplement or not last, two more things. I have I have a supplement and then one more thing. So creatine, I'm just gonna mention it. Occasionally I mention it. I think creatine is great for everybody. There's a few people that don't respond to it. There's a tiny percentage of people that are allergic to it, but it's very tiny. And it's it's great because it enhances, you know, ATP, a density, adenosine triphosphate, an energy source for your cells. It enhances the resynthesis of ATP during high-intensity efforts, which, if you're doing medium to high intensity cardio or if you're doing heavy strength training, they both kind of are similar from that respect. And then it supports resynthesis of glycogen when you're taking it with carbohydrates. This is why, again, I think having carbs is helpful for most people. It ends up, and so you can enhance some of this with creatine. And there you go. Okay, and the last thing I want to mention here is sleep. Of course, you've got to get a lot of sleep. Although people doing a lot of cardio tend to need even more sleep. Let's just be honest. Like athletes, you think about it, you need like nine hours sometimes, you know, eight, nine. You shouldn't be a six hour sleeper and try to do all this necessarily. I guess the the exception would be if if you just if you just are perfectly fine at that level and you're not in a fat loss phase and you're eating plenty of food, like there could be a tiny case for certain people to be able to get away with this. But generally, you know, more sleep the better, more high quality sleep the better. If not, you can fit in some naps, potentially things like that. All right. I want to tell you really quickly what I'm not claiming here because the nuance always gets lost. And this is by the way, where the YouTubers never make it to this part of the episode. So most of the time when I comment on a YouTube comment, it's hey, I it looks like you didn't read the it looks like you didn't listen to the episode, did you? Like I don't even answer their question or their comment because it obviously they didn't listen to the episode. So I'm not saying, this is what I'm not saying. I'm not saying cardio has no impact on strength. It can definitely impact strength, especially if you're doing high volume, high intensity endurance work, especially in the same session as you're lifting, especially without adequate recovery. And a lot of you are doing all the group classes, all the spin classes, you're doing a lot of cardio beyond what I'm talking about. I am not saying that you can train like a marathoner and a power lifter at the same time and maximize both. There are trade-offs. We have had folks on the show who put in a lot of miles running and they maintain their strength. Maybe they slightly build their strength, but they're not going after massive all-time PRs until they dial back on the endurance side of things. If you're trying to run a fast race and you're trying to also PR your deadlift, then something's probably gonna give and you're not gonna get there unless you're a total beginner and those numbers are kind of low. You know, like the performance standard hasn't really been set very high yet. Now, I'm not saying that you can ignore nutrition and recovery and just train smarter. I'm not saying that either, right? The programming rules only work when you have a foundation of enough protein and carbs and sleep and all these things. And I'm not saying that you should add more training to an already packed schedule. So when you listen to wits and weights, don't think I'm telling you to do more, more, more. All right. If you're doing six days of endurance work and you want to add four days of lifting, that's 10 sessions a week. Okay. If you even have a job, a normal job, even if it's working just the bare minimum of 40 hours, and I say that because so many people are working beyond that, and you have your family and you take, you have your finances, you have all this stuff, that is a recipe for burnout. You might need to trade some endurance volume for some strength training volume, not stack things on top. You've got to make the trade-offs. But what I am saying is that, oh, by the way, if you're retired, I guess you're the one category for those of you over 60 who may be able to have some more of this in there. If you concurrently do both endurance and strength training, or you want to, and you've been worried that one is canceling out the other, the science says you're probably fine. Just separate your sessions, prioritize lifting when you're fresh, eat enough food, protein, carbs, sleep enough, and your body can adapt to both simultaneously. Believe it or not. It is more of a fatigue, recovery, and programming problem, not a biological limitation. Before I let you go, I promised you a 10-second morning recovery check. I'm gonna share it in just a second, but this entire episode happened because two listeners, Richard and Gerwin, sent me their questions. If there's something you want me to cover on the show, if you want me to give you a shout out, go to witzawaits.com slash question. And there's a very high chance that will become an episode, and there's a 100% chance that I will reply regardless. All right, if you want to know if your body is ready for a hard session, or should you swap in an easy day? Here's a check that takes 10 seconds. When you wake up before you get out of bed, ask yourself three questions. One, did I sleep through the night or was it a very broken sleep? Two, when I think about today's training, do I feel motivated or am I dreading it? Three, do I feel physically rested or does my body feel heavy? If you answer positively on all three, you're ready to train hard, don't overthink it, just go do it. If one of these are off, proceed, but be open to a tiny bit of flexibility. And by that I mean some auto-regulation in your training. I don't mean skip your training. I don't mean cut out half the exercises. I just mean be ready as you're warming up to be smart about it. If two or three of these questions are off, then seriously consider what you did the night before. I'm kind of joking. I'm kind of joking. But this is just a recovery check from a biofeedback perspective. It doesn't mean you don't do the hard things. It doesn't mean you don't try to go to the gym and get your training in. It just means you can be aware how that connects to how you might feel in the training or how you're auto-regulating or why your legs feel sluggish or why you're not able to get that last rep. Not meant to be used as an excuse, as an excuse. This is so that you know the link between your intensity and your daily readiness. And don't keep things so rigid that you, for example, hurt yourself, or so rigid that you give up because of this information. All right. And you don't even need a wearable, you just need those 10 seconds and those three questions that I just asked. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, strength and endurance are not enemies, they are partners. And the people who figure out how to train both are the ones who stay strong, fit, and healthy for decades. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why "Moderation" Fails and What Actually Stops Binge Eating (Dr. Glenn Livingston) | Ep 442

Why does “just eat in moderation” fail so often? Why do binge eating and emotional eating feel stronger than your willpower? 

I’m joined by psychologist and former food industry insider Dr. Glenn Livingston to break down what’s actually happening in your brain. 

We unpack the neuroscience of cravings and why a healthy brain can struggle in a hyperpalatable food environment. You’ll learn how food cues override hunger signals and quietly sabotage your nutrition and fitness goals. 

If you want to build muscle, lose fat, or improve body recomp, you need to understand why rigid calorie cutting and relying on willpower almost always backfire. That’s why we talk about engineering your environment instead of fighting yourself. 

We focus on structure, clear food rules, and reducing decision fatigue so you’re not negotiating with cravings all day. You’ll walk away with evidence-based strategies that make sustainable weight loss possible without constant mental friction.

Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the over 40 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance. 

Timestamps:

0:00 – What cravings really are
6:25 – What causes cravings
13:25 – Managing triggers and food cues
21:29 – Extinction bursts explained
30:45 – Rules vs willpower
39:48 – Identity and habit engineering
51:50 – Free resources to defeat cravings

Episode resources:

• Free Book (and bonuses): Defeat Your Cravings - The Back Door to Weight Loss

• Facebook: facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550719047966

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drglennlivingston 

• YouTube: @DefeatYourCravings 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you struggle with food, you eat past fullness, you often give in to your cravings, or you find yourself reaching for foods that you told yourself you wouldn't eat, this episode is for you. Today we're going to uncover why the idea of eating in moderation doesn't work for most people. How to stop binge eating and emotional eating for good by understanding the science of your brain. My guest used to consult for the food industry and spent decades researching overeating with more than 40,000 participants. He knows exactly how cravings hijack your brain, and more importantly, how to take back control without relying on willpower. Maybe you don't, but that is binge eating, emotional eating, the cravings that seem to override even your best intentions. My guest today is Dr. Glenn Livingston, who is on the show in episode 30. We're talking way back in the archives, and we're having him back because he is a psychologist. He's former CEO of a consulting firm that worked with Fortune 500 food companies. So a little inside information and author of the best-selling book, Never Binge Again, and his latest book available for free called Defeat Your Cravings: The Backdoor to Weight Loss. Glenn spent years on the inside of the food industry learning exactly how companies engineer products to be irresistible. Then he turned that knowledge around and conducted research with over 40,000 participants to figure out what actually stops overeating. Today you're going to learn why the advice to just eat in moderation often backfires, how your brain creates false survival signals around food, and a framework for building rock-solid rules about food that don't require constant willpower. So whether you've struggled with binging, emotional eating, or feeling out of control around certain foods, Glenn's here to share some practical tools grounded in psychology and neuroscience. Welcome back to the show, Glenn.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 2:15

  Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here. And hey, let me just say that the book to read, if you want to, is the The Future Cravings book. The first book is more popular, but it's 10 years old and not really updated for the science and experience with 2,000 clients and whatnot. So just wanted to clarify that. And I'm happy to be here and talk about any and all of it.

  Philip Pape: 2:35

  Well, then I'm glad I mentioned it. So listeners have context in case they do go back to our old uh episode that maybe some of that is out of date. So let's move it forward, which I appreciate too, Glenn, because I'm always skeptical and wanting to question my own knowledge of things. And I'm glad you do the same. And we've discussed hunger a lot on this show, physical hunger, emotional hunger, uh, habit-based hunger, all of that. And I invited you on specifically to discuss cravings, which can be very, very intense for some people. I'm, you know, we have clients, we have people, of course, now taking GOP1s who talk about food noise and talk about just the incessant uh voice in their head. So let's start with definitions, right? What is a craving? What do we mean by that? And then we can go from there.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 3:16

  Well, a craving is an intense motivation to go get a particular food stuff. And it could be a real food stuff or it could be uh food stuff that's faking us out from some of the, you know, processed food engineering companies. And it's usually linked to a specific trigger, a specific cue in the environment. But if you just as on a very practical basis, it's important to recognize that cravings are actually a sign of a healthy brain doing its job in a sick food environment. A hundred thousand years ago, when we, you know, there were no chocolate bars and Doritos on the savannah, and food was probably a little bit scarce. It was the people who had the strongest cravings that were going to feel most motivated to do what it took to go out and get the food to survive. So a craving brain was a surviving brain. And this is why I tell people that your brain actually thinks it's keeping you alive by binge eating. And this is why it can be so pernicious and difficult to overcome. However, it's easier to overcome once you recognize that you are dealing with health and not disease, because there's a lot of misinformation in our culture that suggests that it's a disease brain that has these overwhelming cravings, but it's it's just not true. It's the same mechanisms that develop intense cravings in the brain, are the same structures that will kill the craving or label it dormant or extinguish the craving is the term we have in the behavioral literature. So got cravings, good. You have a healthy working brain. That's the first thing you you need to know. The second thing is that it's usually linked to a specific trigger. And the reason for that is our brain was set up to efficiently find food. So a caveman, let's call him Thag, T-H-A-G, because I like the name. And say Thag 100,000 years ago runs into a monkey, and he follows that monkey to a banana tree, gets a whole bunch of bananas, his family survives a little better, he's nice and full, gets all this nutrition. So Thag's brain says, that was a good deal. I think monkeys are a good thing. Let's look for monkeys, and when we see them, let's get all excited and let's go, you know, get motivated and go find another tree. Thag follows another monkey to a tree, thag follows another monkey to a tree, it's always leading to bananas. Now Thag has a cue. The monkey is a food cue and a reward, the banana, and it's reliable. So that that saves Thag uh time, energy, and resources. It takes time, energy, and resources. And so his brain looks to automate that. The brain doesn't want Thag to be thinking, gee, maybe I should follow the monkey, maybe I shouldn't. It wants to say, monkeys, go, you know, get excited, go get the bananas. So it dumps out a whole bunch of dopamine, uh, sometimes in serotonin also. And if Thag sees a monkey and he doesn't follow that monkey to the tree, Thag's reign punishes him by dipping the dopamine and making him very uncomfortable and miserable. So that's how cravings work. And the modern-day equivalent is you are driving home and you see the donuts for a sign, and you know that signals the availability of thousands of calories of donuts for not that much money right around the corner. And so you drive into the store and you almost automatically go into the store and pick out the donuts and pay the nice lady behind the counter and get into your car, drive from the back of the parking lot, and you know, it's it's almost like you're not even there. It feels like it's all automated. That's your brain doing its job. It's having a bad impact in our sick food environment, but that's your brain doing its job. Nothing wrong with your brain for doing that. And that's good news because it means that you can extinguish that craving. So that's what a craving is. Cravings could be linked to internal events like emotions. It might be that when you felt depressed, your mother noticed and gave you a chocolate bar like mine did, right? Or, you know, when you were agitated like the women in the Golden Girls would frequently get to say, okay, I'll go get the cheesecake. Well, your brain gets used to the fact that if you're agitated or depressed, that these rewards are available, and people say, Well, they're emotionally eating. The stronger force there, there is an anesthetic force, an anesthetic impact of overloading your digestive system, it makes it difficult for the nervous system to conduct emotions. But the stronger effect, by my estimates and what I've seen, is that you've taught your body that cheesecake is available when you get agitated, and you're actually teaching your body to get more agitated so you can get more cheesecake. People think that it's a one-way relationship, but actually emotional leading goes both ways. Um, if you get really anxious and then you get sugar, then your body's going to learn to produce more anxiety to get more sugar. This kind of blows people's mind sometimes, but it's part of what's happening that goes, it gets covered over by the idea of emotional leading or eating to numb out or eating for comfort. Where that's what I tell people, we're not really eating for comfort, we're eating to get high with food.

  Philip Pape: 8:37

  I am processing. I'm listening carefully because I want the listener to take it all in. Let me just recap real quick before I get the thoughts out. It's a healthy brain doing its job. So that's what you said. It's a healthy brain doing its job in a sick food environment. And that's important, right? Because a lot of folks struggling with the food noise that again, I constantly bring up these medications today because that's where a lot of the uh marketing is around today. It is marketed as a disease, and it you're saying that's not the case, and that the same mechanism that causes that can extinguish the craving. So that's one thing. The other that it is linked to triggers and cues uh because it's more efficient for us to do so, given our the way our brain evolved, and it's an automated thing, but it's bi-directional, and it's not necessarily okay, this emotion causes this, it could go both ways. So that's a really good thing to understand. My question is like, if I go to get some gas and I walk into Cumberland Form farms, I see the bakery uh rack with the beautiful glazed donuts and the muffins, right? I have certain responses, but I see different responses in different people, kind of like a spectrum. And I see these responses change over time. And I'm sure we're gonna get into what we can do about this. What I've seen is like the response, like you said, you're literally on autopilot and you just get the thing and you can't help yourself. There's the opposite extreme of that's feels like you can't. Or feels like that. Okay, yeah, yeah. The perception of it or the expression of it, right? And then the other side is that's gross. I don't even feel like it. I have no appetite for it, whatever. And then kind of in between, you know, and I've always considered myself personally in between, where depending on how hungry I am and depending on the situation in my life, I might go for it and I might not. And there's an element of we a lot of us think willpower, right, which we want to address. So given that spectrum, I don't know if you were gonna go to a next thought before I uh stopped you here, but practical terms, right, Nat, we want to understand the actions or the interrupt, I guess we can take, given that psychology. I assume that's the next step.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 10:29

  Yeah, it would be a little more helpful if I helped if people understood how the cravings are extinguished. Great so that because most people make mistakes and they just try to go code turkey or um they they don't really understand what they're getting into when they do that. And or they'll try to moderate when they're not really able to moderate. So, but yes, I'm going to tell you how to eliminate that. And I'll I'll I'll keep an eye on the time also so that we have time to do all of the things.

  Philip Pape: 10:53

  Oh, we'll get there. No worries.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 10:54

  Um and okay. So the important thing I want people to understand is you're not powerless, it's not a disease. If you think that you are powerless and diseased, then it makes you much more prone to saying, Oh, I'll just I just give up. I just might as well be a happy fat person because there's no way to beat this, right? So there is a way to beat this, and there's a difference between something being impossible to resist and something being very difficult to resist. Like if there are there are well-worn paths up this mountain, and you still have to hike up the mountain. It's not a cakewalk to use all puns intended, but you there are well-worn paths and easy ways to get up the mountain. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you until you get there. So there's a difference between feeling impossible and something being impossible. And that's why I interrupted in the way that I did. Okay. So what's important from the food stimulus conversation is to understand that the cravings are specific to food stimuli. So if you're struggling with donuts, it's not just the donut store that's a problem. It could be that maybe you played poker with the guys and your friend's wife brought donuts over. And so you associate the poker chips and hanging out with the guys at the table with any donuts. Or it's the you know, visit to your mom's house on Saturday mornings and she was always and that's important because when you go to extinguish a craving, people will often extinguish it in the situations where the trigger occurs frequently and they forget about those other infrequent triggers. So if I decide I'm not going to stop at the donut store, whatever it takes, I'm not going to stop, I'm going to extinguish that. And I do that for 30 or 45 days, and then my brain labels it dormant, so it's not bothering me anymore. And all of a sudden, my mom invites me over and it's Saturday morning, and there are donuts on the table. Why do I have this horrendous donut craving on Saturday morning? I must have failed. This is too hard. I just give up, right? That's what happens to a lot of people. But you didn't fail. You succeeded at extinguishing the donut store sign as a stimulus for donuts. You did not extinguish your mother's house as a stimulus for donuts. You kind of have to make a list of where you're going to encounter this. And then it's a matter of having enough exposures, you know, day by day, week by week, to those stimuli and not rewarding it so that you can extinguish the problem.

  Philip Pape: 13:29

  I want to connect this to something we do talk about on the show a lot, which is having if-then strategies and knowing that everybody everyone's life has a unique set of circumstances, but those circumstances tend to be repeatable or patterns, or you do things a lot over and over again. And if you just take the mindfulness to sit down and say, what where are these situations that usually do a roadblock or friction? I can inventory them and cover 80, 90% of my life that way. That's what comes to mind for me. Yep.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 13:55

  Right. And what that might look like is okay, I know that I go into my mom's house at the end of the month on Saturday, and that's a trouble spot for me. So I'm going to send a reminder to myself. One of my favorite things to do is set a Gmail to send me an email three weeks down the road. Right. Snooze it.

  Philip Pape: 14:14

  Yeah. Schedule it. Yeah.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 14:16

  I just send a reminder to myself and I say, it's going to be tempting at mom's house for breakfast. Make sure you eat something substantial beforehand. And I might actually even plan out what I'm going to eat. And maybe even the day before that, I'll say you have to go shopping for this and make sure you have inventory on hand. Let today's Glenn take care of tomorrow's Glen.

  Philip Pape: 14:35

  Hold on, I have to laugh about that because if people saw the reminders in my phones, I've got a reminder every day for fiber and berries. You know what I mean? Like I want to be eating more berries now.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 14:43

  So these help. These help. Well, no, and this is part of what's newer in my thinking, because originally I was all about fighting it out at the moment of temptation. You know, it was me versus my inner, you called out my inner pig. It's kind of embarrassing, but that's what I called it. And I would figure out what it was saying, and then I would take a deep breath and I would say, why is that wrong? Uh, you know, my pig would say, you can just start tomorrow, have the silly chocolate today. You worked out hard enough, you're not going to gain any weight. And I'd say, wait a minute, I can't start tomorrow because the way neuroplasticity works. If I have a craving for chocolate and I eat it today, and I say I'm just going to start tomorrow, then I reinforce the craving and I reinforce the thought. So I'm more likely to say, start tomorrow, tomorrow, and I'm going to have a deeper craving tomorrow. I can only ever use the present moment to be healthy. I call that fixing your thinking or a cognitive refutation. That's what my early work was about. That's how I originally recovered and got from 300 pounds down to about 220, which is somewhere around where I hover. However, over the next 10 years working with 2,000 people, I saw that that wasn't enough for a lot of people because we got really good. We had an agency, we had 10 coaches working with us, and you know, we work with thousands of people. And within a month, we would get them down in their binge eating by about 89%, 89%, 90%. But at six months or a year, there were two groups. There was a group that'd go all the way back up and just forgot about it. And then there was another group that was down at like 70 to 80% of you know of the success that they had. And when I investigated that, what I found out was that it was because they eventually said, oh well, what the hell? I just really want to screw it, just do it. I don't have any excuses. You eliminated all my excuses, but I just really want that cheesecake. And it turned out when I investigated that, that that phenomenon seems to be driven by what I would call a fancy word is organismic dysregulation. Another word for it is stress, where you don't get enough nutrition regularly, reliably, where you don't get enough sleep, where you don't have enough social contact, where you are making too many decisions over the course of the day and wearing down your willpower. You're allowing yourself to become organismically distressed. And then this brings us back to the original conversation, which is that more and more I'm finding that the problem starts upstream. Uh Publius Cyrus said that rivers are easier to cross at their source when they're a trickle rather than a roaring stream. When you find that you can't resist having a bag of potato chips or five, probably you got dysregulated somewhere upstream. And so if you have reminders to have berries and fiber, if you develop structure and systems that make you do your food prep and food shopping on Sundays and Wednesdays, if you, you know, have a little email to yourself that says, hey, it's nine o'clock, you ought to get to bed soon, you know, and you put these structures in your life that keep you more regulated, not that it's possible to be totally regulated, but if you do that, you'll find that your brain allows you to be rational about food and stick to your best-late plans much more frequently. Our brains are also set up to seize what it believes are very scarce resources or to deal with false emergencies, what it perceives to be an emergency. And when you get dysregulated, when you don't have enough nutrition or sleep or whatever or social contact, you start to feel like you're in an emergency situation. And you know, that chocolate bar in the counter looks better and better no matter what your rules were for how and when you wanted to have chocolate. So, which is all to say that's a really big part of eliminating cravings, is developing systems and structures to keep yourself regulated and to understand that an extinction event, when you're deciding that you want to quit going to the donut store as you pass it on the way home from work, because you're developing a punch would be the word. If when you decide that you want to do that, that's actually going to put some stress on your body. You're going to have really intense cravings. The only way out is through. So look to support yourself in every other way. It takes 30 to 45 days to extinguish a regular daily habit. And during that time, you're going to feel stressed otherwise. So get some more sleep. Look at your nutrition. Don't try to lose weight during that period of time. It might happen anyway, but don't try to lose weight during that period of time. Look at your sleep, look at everything else you can do. Baby yourself by 30 to 45 days saying, look, this habit is killing me, right? This is the most important health thing that I need to change about myself. This is the most important habit that I need to engineer your habit. And so I'm going to do everything, whatever it takes, to get through that.

  Philip Pape: 19:42

  I would say, in the time since you and I last spoke, you know, my thinking has coalesced around systems and engineering. I mean, in fact, it's in my tagline for the show of having structure. And it's funny you mention all of this because we talk about avoiding calorie deficits as much as you can until you set up, you know, your strength training and your sleep and your other lifestyle habits to give you the best metabolism, firing on all fronts, but also the best mental state and also the extreme of what happens to physique competitors and how negative, you know, all the negative aspects of that on the other end of dieting. So we focus on that a lot. And also talking about upstream root causes having more costly outcomes downstream is a great concept as well, because it definitely takes a lot less friction and effort. And it's that one step at a time mentality now in small ways that pay off in big ways down the road. I was talking to somebody yesterday, he's Chinese and he loosely translated a Chinese proverb. It said something like, beware the cost of standing still or accept the cost of moving forward and beware the cost of standing still. Something like that. It's like taking one step forward. I butchered that. I butchered that. But no, no, no, but but but if you're going to be serious about it, be serious about it.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 20:57

  It requires some time and effort to build the structure to change.

  Philip Pape: 21:00

  So we love all of this. And and I'll be honest, you know, the philosophy, like you said, your your own thinking has evolved along the way, was probably a little more obtuse to get someone's head around. I don't know if you found that to be the case, or the fact that people, the recurrence rate of the binge eating, you know, increased and came back and gave you the information to say maybe this isn't the approach. What we really need is structure. I just kind of wanted to close the loop on on you. And then using the word engineer your habit, thank you for doing that. That's exactly what we want to do here. Yeah.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 21:29

  Yeah. Well, I mean, like in retrospect, if you get to the moment of temptation and you're thinking effort, then you failed before. You failed way way something failed way before then. And so all the effort at the moment of temptation, as useful as those tools can be, um, because emergencies do occur no matter how much structure you put into place, but as useful as that is, it's much more useful to put systems in place that prevent you from experiencing that in the first place.

  Philip Pape: 21:57

  So that your brain has fewer of these, what you call False emergencies.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 22:01

  Yes, exactly.

  Philip Pape: 22:02

  Exactly. Which then also makes me think of when people are wondering when they hear this, then do my cravings, by putting all this structure in place, are my cravings diminishing over time, going away? What's the risk of them coming back? What's the risk of one of my old triggers retriggering? You know, those kinds of thoughts, I'm sure, are fears that people have.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 22:22

  Your brain doesn't want to waste energy. So if you do this right and you, for example, I recently discovered that my blood pressure was going up despite eating really healthy. And I had to give up getting soup at the hot bars. It was just too salty, even though it was lenthal soup and good ingredients and vegetables and everything. I had to give that up. And man, did I have cravings. And I had a really strong habit established. I would stop at Whole Foods and I would, you know, I go in and I say, I'm, I don't think I'm going to get the soup today because it's going to be too salty. And then before I knew it, I had a not just a small container, but a big container of soup to go out in the parking lot and have it. And um, you know, and then I decided that I needed to extinguish that. And so I made myself a rule that says I never buy soup from hot bars. I just never do that. And, you know, it after just a couple of months of not doing it, it was really torture for a little while. But after a couple of months, my brain said, we are wasting our energy trying to get Glenn to go get the soup because he's obviously resolved he's not going to do it. Let's figure out how to find other caloric resources. Let's find nutrition elsewhere. You know, it's kind of like if you were to put a prisoner in jail with a life sentence, they don't really want hope after a while because they feel like hope makes them waste energy. It's just very disappointing and torturous. And your brain is like that. We don't crave things that we never do. There's one more thing that's really important about this, and then we can talk about all the practicalities that you that you want to. There's an extinction mechanism, but it doesn't fire in a straight line. So when I stop having the donuts as I'm passing the donut store, this is not what happens to my cravings. Most people think that's what it should be. The worst should be on the day that you quit, and then it should get better and better every day. But that's not what happened.

  Philip Pape: 24:18

  You're showing a straight line with your finger for listeners. Yeah.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 24:21

  Yeah, I'm showing a straight line going from the top left to the bottom right, like a mountain would go. Like a mountain, like a very geometrically appropriate mountain. Um what actually happens is there's a little bit of a honeymoon period where it seems like it's easier than you thought it was going to be. And then somewhere for a daily habit, somewhere around the four to 10 day mark, there's a bigger spike in cravings than you ever had before. If you get through that and you don't reward that, then it goes down. And then somewhere around the 21 to 30 day mark, there are a couple of little more, we call them extinction bursts. So why does the brain do that? This is really, really important. The first and primary reason that the brain does that is because it doesn't want to give up the food cue. Remember, food was scarce, it took an awful lot of energy to find food on the savannah. So when Thag found the monkey that brought him to a banana tree, just because one time a monkey doesn't lead him to a tree that has bananas, maybe it's later in the season, maybe there are other monkeys around taking the bananas, Thag's brain doesn't want to give that up. It's saying, okay, maybe the reward has become available at random. Maybe it's intermittently available at random. So I'm going to try even harder to get it because maybe we have to work a little harder. But you know what? If we could find a monkey that led us to a banana tree 40% of the time, that would be better than having no monkey at all. As a matter of fact, if we could find a monkey that led us to a banana tree 20% of the time, that would be better than just wandering around the savannah. Do bananas grow in the savannah? I always wonder if I have this metaphor wrong.

  Philip Pape: 26:04

  Uh in a jungle, I have no idea.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 26:06

  Okay. Well, well, you you you got the job.

  Philip Pape: 26:07

  I love bananas, so now you're making me hungry. That's what my cue. Sorry. Sorry, man. No, it's all good. It's all good.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 26:12

  Um and so I call this the WTF reaction or the extinction verse, like where the F are my bananas, where the F is my donut. Excuse me for being a little bit crude, but people remember it that way. And the reason that's important is that what usually happens when you get to the extinction verse, somewhere in the four to 10 day range, and you feel a worse craving than you ever had before, you think, oh, I can't, I can't deal with this. I can't deal with this. This is going to be torturous forever. And I can't go, I can't go through that. Therefore, what do you do? You give in, you have the donut. Now what have you done? You've told your brain that it's right, that when you try to extinguish something, that it only has to try harder and make you crave more, and you're going to reinforce that. So now your brain is going to have an even worse addictive response. So, what you want to remember is somewhere in the four to ten days for a daily habit, and the reason I keep qualifying that is because it's really exposures, it's not days, but most people have daily habits that are a struggle for them. All you need to do is get through. Tell yourself, this is not forever. These few weeks of pain are worth an eternity of freedom. I'm willing to go through. The only way out is through. And then what happens is when it when it goes all the way down and the brain is about to label it dormant, people think to themselves, I got this. I got this. I this is not a problem anymore. I don't know why I thought this was such a problem. I'm going to try to have one donut. I could probably just have one donut, right? And then they go back in and they reset the extinction curve and they're going through the problem all over again. So you want to make an intellectual decision. You want to kind of ignore your feelings for all this, make an intellectual decision that for the next 45 days, I am not going to stop at the donut store on the way home from work. Period. End of story. I'm going to extinguish the donut store cue from my life. And do everything that you can to support yourself through that period. And once people start doing this, they're really amazed. They, because those two little mistakes can keep you stuck forever. The third problem that people have with cravings is that they think that rules are evil. Like hard and they're very frightened of hard and fast rules. Like when I wanted to extinguish the donut store habit, I made made a rule for myself that says I will never stop at a donut store on the way home again. I have come to learn that I present things to my food monster as if it was a little kid and I present it as if it's set in stone. I could easily change that rule later on if I want to, but I tell my food monster it's forever because it's not mature enough to deal with the idea that maybe someday we're going to have more control and be able to do it. And because people are frightened of these hard and fast rules, they'll say things like, I'm just going to try to avoid the donut store on the way home. I'm going to avoid it 90% of the time. Okay, but you can do that. You can moderate in two out of three situations. Sometimes the craving is just too strong and you have to give it up. But if you're going to moderate, it has to be specifically bound in context or time, because otherwise, you have to make donut decisions all day long. Willpower is the ability to make good decisions. If every time you're passing the donut store or you're at or at the coffee cooler and there are donuts there, you have to make another donut decision, you're wearing down your willpower, wearing down your willpower, wearing down your willpower. Whereas if you were to say, I only have donuts on Saturday mornings after a good workout and no more than two, then you've context and time bound it so that your brain can interpret this is the only time that it's available. I'm not going to generate the cravings at any other time, right? Think of a casino. You all think of all the little old ladies pulling the handle, pulling the handle, pulling the handle because they gotta be there. You never know when it's gonna pay off. That's what you're doing to yourself when you say, I'm just gonna try to have less donuts, right? Because your brain says, well, I'm gonna keep pulling the handle because I don't know when it's going to be available. And if you look up in the literature, in the behavior literature, what's the most potent reinforcement schedule is something called variable ratio reinforcement. It's like a slot machine. You don't know when it's gonna pay off, so you just keep pulling the lever, pulling the lever. But if I set that slot machine to only pay off on Saturday mornings at 10 o'clock, you can bet that next month those ladies are not gonna be there on a Wednesday afternoon. Because our brains know when we interpret those contexts.

  Philip Pape: 30:46

  No, this is a very, very important point for the listener that decision fatigue and willpower is avoided when you take this intentional step to make the rule. Because I was gonna ask that. You already answered. I was gonna say, well, what are those who think, okay, go to the hot bar, but choose to replace it with a salad? And what you're telling us is the cue is still there, right? To potentially trigger you to have the lentil soup or whatever the salty soup was for you. And it's a much easier to just create a rule, an abstinence rule or an avoidance rule, than to constantly have to make the decision when you haven't created that rule, right? And that's that's a key distinction I want people to understand when we talk about that. And the the idea that the brain is seeking safety, let's just simp oversimplify a lot of what you said, makes me think of all the other ways that our brain seeks safety in our lifestyle, like eating at the same time, sleeping this, waking up at the same time every day, you know, our circadian rhythm. Like you even said the five days and the 30 days made me think of moon cycles. I'm like, I wonder how much of this evolution is deeply embedded in our the earth rotating around the sun. But that's just my nerdy brain. And so it's the same concept. So I like that. Context and time bound, very specific. Have a certain rule that takes away the trigger for at least 45 days. Okay, I think that recapped what you just said. Yeah.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 32:05

  Yeah. So then you want to evaluate you want to make a list of your cravings. Which ones are worse, which are making the most trouble for you. And after you look at all of your cravings, what you don't want to do is dive in and fix them all all at once. Like unless there's a real emergency and your doctor says you're going to die next week if you're, you know, you don't lose 20 pounds or something. I mean, I I can't override what your what your doctor tells you because I'm not a medical doctor, but what I've seen is that people do better starting with one simple rule. But like it could be um, and it doesn't have to be something that restricts your food. It could be that I never go into a restaurant without writing down what I'm going to have first, right? Or I always put my fork down between bites, or I take three deep breaths before a meal, right? Or I knew this truck driver who lost 150 pounds starting with one simple rule. He says, I tell you what, I'm not going to give up fast food. I got to eat it at fast food places three times a day, but I won't go back for seconds. And when you set the bar low like that, what happens is you start to observe yourself jumping over the bar every day. When you read a diet book and you get all motivated and you set up a whole diet for Monday morning that's, you know, so much different than what you're doing every day. That's great when you have your mojo. But I guarantee you within a week or two, you're going to wake up one day without your mojo, you're not going to want to do it. So you start with really low bars that you can execute every day. You know, I always put my gym clothes out before I go to bed. Well, you have a little, it's like a little identity function in your brain that's observing what you do and looking for shortcuts. I seem to put my gym clothes out every day before I go to bed. I must be someone who wants to go to the gym. I wonder what else people who want to go to the gym do. Maybe they drink a big glass of water before they go. Maybe they just drive to the gym and look at it before they go to work, right? And you can kind of start the behavior chain and build things on that. And it becomes automatic. It becomes not something that you're doing because there's a Nazi food policeman in your head, you know, looking over you. It becomes something that you do because it's who you are. When I ask people, could you give up chocolate forever? They go, uh, I could never do that. I say, could you become someone who doesn't eat chocolate? They go, well, maybe I could do that. Maybe I could. Because we were accustomed to having these shortcuts that, you know, relate to who we are as a matter of character. And really, all the character is, is what we habitually do at the moment of temptation. So come up with one simple rule. That's the best way to get started with all this.

  Philip Pape: 34:50

  Yeah, a simple rule and set the bar low. And the identity-based behavior change is also an important thing that I've seen in the world of psychology lately, kind of moving away. Well, James Clear in Atomic Habits, a lot of people misinterpret his system, you know, his thoughts about habits. And I think rightly so, people recognize there's actually an identity-based behavior change aspect to it, versus where a lot of people say, hey, a habit is just, you know, do this thing intentionally for X number of days and it becomes a habit. But habits, habits are like the little automated things. What you're saying are the bigger things of you are the type of person that trains every day, and therefore you eat this way, and then therefore you eat protein, and therefore you do all these things because it supports who you are. I don't know if I'm stating it the right way, but it's it's identity-based rather than forcing a habit that isn't you.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 35:34

  A good example I could give of is people are frightened of making rules because they they think they're going to break them and then feel too guilty. We'll talk about that in a second. But, you know, most people, if I ask them what would happen if they walked into a diner and there was a $10 bill on the table that the waitress didn't see. She says, I'll be right back. I just have to get your menu. And there are no customers up front, there are no video cameras, and nobody would see you take it. Would you take that $10 bill? Nine out of 100 people would say, No, I wouldn't. And tell me why you wouldn't take that $10 bill, Philip.

  Philip Pape: 36:09

  Because I'm an honest person.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 36:11

  Yeah, you're not a thief. Right. Right? You have an unwritten code of conduct that says, I never steal. Right? I will never take money that doesn't belong to me. It's the same thing. I will never have chocolate on a weekday again. It's the same thing. I'm I'm a person who doesn't have chocolate during the week.

  Philip Pape: 36:28

  Yeah.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 36:28

  And it becomes a part of you over time, and it's just so much easier to do that.

  Philip Pape: 36:32

  It does. It does to the point where not doing those things now is the part that feels unnatural and a source of friction, which is what you want, right? You want the things that you don't want to do to be things you naturally don't get pulled to do. So you you said we're going to come to this. So when someone does break a rule and then feels guilty, I that was actually going to be my next question. They've set all this up, they've gone through the 45 days and such, or are you talking about during that 45 days?

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 36:56

  Well, either during or after. Okay. Most people make mistakes along the way. The confusion that people have is they're frightened of any type of perfectionism. And there's a useful energy in perfectionism, and there's a pernicious energy in perfectionism. And you want to be able to ferret them out. And here's how you do it. I call it committing with perfection, but forgiving yourself with dignity. And if you think of an Olympic archer aiming at the bullseye, maybe the bullseye is, I will never eat chocolate on a weekday again. It's useful that that bullseye has a boundary around it, because then if the Olympic archer misses the bullseye, he knows by how much, in what direction, and how does he adjust his stance. And we are really learning organisms. So if you can make use of that feedback, then, and you keep on taking shots and standing up and taking shots and standing up and taking shots, you're going to get better and better and better. And this is why, by the way, the research shows that people who lose weight and keep it off permanently have more failed attempts behind them. Most people will say, I failed so many times. How could I possibly do this? But I'll actually say, good, good, you're more likely to be able to do this because you failed so many times. When you're aiming at the target, it's useful to be able to aim with perfection and purge your mind of doubt and insecurity. Because otherwise, if you're thinking, I'll just do the best I can, maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't. That's not really the psychology of winners. That doubt gives you a, it takes energy away from focusing on the goal. And so you ask an Olympic archer, who hits the bullseye about 40% of the time, by the way. You ask an Olympic archer what they're thinking when they let go of the arrow. It's called loosing the arrow. They'll say, Well, I can actually see the arrow going into the target before we let go of it. I'm not thinking maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't. When they do miss, they're also not saying, I'm a pathetic archer. Uh, what's wrong with me? How come I can't hit the bullseye? I might as well shoot all the rest of the arrows up into the air and off the target. There's no point, right? Or like when you accidentally touch a hot stove, you don't say, oh my God, I'm a pathetic hot stove toucher. You know, I might as well just put my whole hand down on it. You say, Oh my goodness, that was a painful mistake. How did that happen? How do I learn to make adjustments for my next shot? And the whole reason people don't learn, the whole reason people keep repeating the same mistake is because they're scared of rules, they're scared of drawing a really clear bullseye, and they don't take the time to ask themselves, what did I do right when I missed? Like, look at what you did right, how did you hit the target? How did you have five cupcakes instead of 15? How did you eat the whole pizza but not the box? And I'm only half kidding, if you ruthlessly collect evidence of success, you will tell your brain to look for evidence of success, and then you will gather that evidence and you'll get better and better and better. And so commit with perfection, but forgive yourself with dignity is the only way that I see people get better. And there are otherwise these systems out there, which are they'll say that rules are really bad. Like, you know, rules make you binge. Rules don't make you binge. They rules make you feel rebellious. The moment you say you're not going to have chocolate during the week, there's a part of you that says, you know, the heck with that. We're sure as sure as heck are going to have chocolate during the week. Where can we get get us some chocolate right away? But rebellion is just a feeling. It doesn't have to control you. Just like depression doesn't have to control you, or anxiety doesn't have to control you, or rage doesn't have to control you. It's just a feeling. You can say feelings aren't facts. And from this point forward, I am choosing to make intellectual decisions about the important food decisions in my life, the places where I've gotten in trouble before. It's like installing a stoplight or a stop sign at a dangerous intersection. You've chosen to heighten your awareness and regulate that danger with some safe behavior.

  Philip Pape: 41:01

  Yeah. I think you're making some really clear, if if subtle to some people, I don't think it's subtle myself, but it's subtle distinctions between restriction and deprivation that sometimes people associate with structure and flex and rigidity or rules, right? And there's there's got to be a clear line there because I take strength training, for example. Nobody complains or nobody says it's rigid or inflexible, or rules that I don't I'm gonna break when I'm gonna go to the gym three days a week and do my program. Like that's a very structured approach that has rules. I mean, we're trying to hit reps and sets and do these exercises. Why do we not see that as structural rules? But then telling ourselves what we want to eat. I think where the problem is, is you're telling letting other people tell you what you should eat and not eat oftentimes, or you're restricting, you know, the energy coming into your body, which then makes you stressful and all this other stuff, which may not be the solution. But the rules and the structure I think are great. I also like the, I don't know if it's optimism bias or whatever that I'm drawn to, the idea of aiming for perfection but forgiving yourself, where, you know, be positive about the future, go after it, make the attempt, and all you can, the worst that's gonna happen is you're gonna learn from it, right? That's the worst that's gonna happen. It's like when someone goes to a job interview, the worst that's gonna happen is you're gonna be where you started, not without that job. Like that's the worst that's gonna happen. Right. So I think that I think it's super empowering to say this. And I hope the listeners are really taking a lot out of it. What I think they might be interested, though, also is how do you deal with nutritional periodization strategies, which we talk about a lot here, where you're intentionally going through bulking and cutting phases, for example. You know, I don't know how if you ever work with physique competitors, athletes, or whatever, what differences might present in those situations?

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 42:41

  If you are really a binge eater, I usually ask people not to compete for six months. I dread when someone says, I'm just finishing up a competition and I need to get back to eating regularly without gaining weight. And you know what people do after a competition, right? And I believe that the binge eating mechanism is an evolutionary survival mechanism that says if we go through periods of famine where enough nutrition and calories are not available, then when they are available, we have to hoard them. And so to break the binge eating habit, I tell people to go to flood their body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit if they want to lose weight. Three meals a day, day in and day out for four to six months until you get a lot of the crap out of your system and you get a lot of the extinction curves, you know, calm down. And then we can start to introduce, you know, nutritional periodization. Is that the word for it? Yeah. We can start to introduce your bodybuilding protocols if you really want to. But that that's a serious stressor on the body with regards to binge eating urges, and um probably have about half to one quarter of the success rate. When people insist on doing that right away. So it's not the answer that most people want to hear. But if you have a long history of, you know, getting to 10% body fat and then bulking up to 25% body fat, and, you know, and you're you're really struggling to stop binging in between competitions, then maybe it would be worth a while to take six months off and really beat the binging habit and learn a lot of these tools for dealing with those intense cravings. Because if you're going to do something that's going to generate intense cravings, then you have to expect intense cravings and do the things you need that you know how to do to deal with the intense cravings. Being very specific about what your food rules are after the dining competition, for example, I don't believe in cheat days or free days. I believe you could give your pig a longer leash, but you got to keep it on the leash, right? So what that might look like is if you're eating 2,000 calories a day, you know, while you're competing, maybe afterwards you're going to have, you know, three days where you can have up to 3,000 calories, but it's got to include at least X amount of disnutrition and Y amount of that nutrition. It's very bounded. You have to be the master of your impulses. You can't just let it loose. And people think, well, you know, you need to let loose, otherwise, you're you're never giving yourself a chance to do that. But as a practical matter, I find most people, there's nothing they can't eat if they really want to, but you got to do it in a controlled and bounded way.

  Philip Pape: 45:30

  Yeah. So you're saying you have to have even more intention, most likely, and you have to go through a some sort of prep to be in the right mental state and habitual state to tackle it. I think people should really take heart of that because you do have a lot of desperation that the marketing industry feeds off of of wanting to lose weight. And the more extreme you push it, like many physique competitors who, by the way, I've met a lot of them, and I'll say anecdotally, the vast majority of them probably shouldn't have done what they're doing, right? They're not in that state to do it. And so, you know, it catches up to them, and there's the rebound binge and everything you were just alluding to. The idea of no more cheat days, too, I think that's a great tip. We did an episode a long time ago called The Freedom of No More Cheat Meals, with the philosophy that there's always structure. Even if you have refeeds, you could use fancy terms for it. We use refeed days or carb-ups or whatever. It's still structure. You're still hitting your protein, you're still getting your nutrition and fiber, but you are just change switching out the uh the balance of your foods. So, all of that said, this is really good stuff. I know you worked on the inside of the food industry for a bit. And one last thing that I guess comes up for folks is the sick food environment you alluded to at the very beginning, the hyperpalatable foods, the ultra-processed foods. Is there something you know about how products are designed that maybe consumers would benefit from or something to deal with that environment beyond everything you've talked about?

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 46:51

  Well, watch out for plausible deniability. What that is is something like these potato chips are made with avocado oil. That's the rationalization your brain wants to eat the potato chips. Less bad for you does not mean that they're good for you. But your your brain will take it as an opportunity to just go to town because wow, these are made with avocado oil, right? So health food stores are cauldrons of plausible deniability. We're going to eliminate, you know, one ingredient. So we're not going to have, you know, uh super fried oil, but we're going to ignore the fact that all the studies done on the what's what heterocyclic amines when you heat carbohydrates to that level, they produce something that's carcinogenic. And every study done on heated oil, every heated oil, suggests that they cause problems down the road, even if it's olive oil or avocado oil or something like that. So watch out for plausible deniability. Watch out for packaging that fakes you out. So for example, I don't, I think I might have talked about this in the first episode. I I apologize if I did. But I remember this food bar manufacturer who the vice president was a friend of mine, and he kind of walked over me and he said, You know what, Glenn? I'm a little embarrassed, but the most profitable thing we ever did was to take the vitamins out of the bars and make the packages shiny and diverse in colors instead. Because the shiny diverse colors in nature signal a diversity of micronutrients that are available. But this is actually a predatory thing to do because, you know, there is no nutrition in the packaging. But your brain doesn't know that. They also do things like when they're manufacturing a bag full of chips, they're usually not manufactured on a unitary assembly line, but on a multitude of assembly lines, because if they have very slight variations in flavor, your brain thinks it must have found a field of vegetables or something like that with very slight variations in micronutrients. And it keeps you eating. There are often chemicals in the packaging, which can make it harder for you to know when you're hungry and full. So a lot of people come to me and say, I want to learn how to eat when I'm hungry and then stop when I'm full. And I'll say, So do I. But we live in an environment which breaks our hungry and full meters. You do kind of learn to sense that over time, learn to sense it over time. But for the first four to six months, put objective measures on, accept that your hungry and full meter is broken. I mean, you can't you can't expect to eat these super concentrated forms of calories and excitotoxins and you know neurochemical. You just can't expect to eat that and rely on your intuition. Like we we were we did not evolve, we did not evolve to know when to stop eating potato chips. We we just didn't. Yeah. It's a super superhuman ability, and some people can do it, but um, you need to go through these extinctions first, is what I wave it to say.

  Philip Pape: 49:58

  That makes sense. That makes sense. And you're gonna love eating real food at the out of the other end, I promise you. Because I used to be a huge junk food eater myself, and you know, I just love eating whole foods.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 50:10

  There are these studies where they ask people what they think about their diet. And no matter what diet people go on, if they stick to it for two years, they love it. And why is that? We had to want what we had. We had to want what was available to us. So if we lived in a you know, fruit and vegetable-rich environment, we had to really survive on fruit and vegetables. Um, later on, when the ice ages came and we couldn't get all this fruit and vegetables, we had to learn how to fish and you know, really crave, you know, fish and meat and the things that were available. And so our brains are set up to love what's available, to provide pleasure response to what's actually available. So by continuing to have all the processed food, you're telling your brain, this is what's available, this is what you should crave. But if you take yourself off of it, your taste buds will upregulate, your neurotransmitters will upregulate, you'll get more dopamine from having an apple or having a sweet potato or having a really big salad with nice spices on it. Um I love what I eat. I'm not unhappy at all about it. I love it.

  Philip Pape: 51:15

  Agree. And if you have a really good wife who is married to you and you're a very picky husband like I was, maybe she can help you uh eat those veggies because that's that's the process I had to go through by hiding them in your food and then gradually making them bigger. Anyway, as we wrap up, I mean, this is this is a ton of great stuff, Glenn. I've really enjoyed the conversation, a lot of great techniques and understanding the reason why and how our brain works is is really, really powerful because a lot of these principles can apply to many other aspects of our behavior. Is there anything we didn't cover that you think is super crucial that that you should bring up before we uh conclude?

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 51:47

  We just ask people to read the free book. Also, I'm in the market for a good wife to help me to cook cook my vegetables if you're out there. Um, no, no, read the book. It's it's freely available. It's available for free on defeatyourcravings.com in electronic format. The traditional paperback in hardcover and audible have a traditional charge, but you can get it for Kindle Nook or PDF absolutely for free at defeatyourcravings.com. Click the big blue button. And you will also get um a set of full-length recordings of coaching demonstrations so you know how this really works in practice. That way I can focus a little more on the theory here when I talk to Philip. And a set of food plans, starter templates. This is a diet agnostic program. I will not tell you how to eat, even though I'm a whole foods plant-based person. You don't have to eat this way to extinguish your cravings. I do ask people to try to eat less processed food. It's just a whole lot easier when you do that. But um, you don't have to eat like I do. It's all at defeatyourcravings.com.

  Philip Pape: 52:44

  There we go. Defeatyourcravings.com, diet agnostic, the book, recordings, coaching demonstrations, and uh a lot of great tools and tips to be successful. So if you're struggling with binge eating cravings, any of the stuff we talked about, that's what you want to check out. And Glenn, thank you so much again for reaching out for coming on the show. I'm glad to see you know your thinking involved with the science, and that's what we're trying to do here as well, and spread the message. So thank you so much for coming on.

  Dr. Glenn Livingston: 53:07

  Lovely. Thank you so much for having me.

Are Your Fitness Goals in Conflict? (Fat Loss vs. Muscle vs. Longevity vs. Endurance) | Ep 441

Are you strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected?

The problem isn't effort. It's that your fitness goals are in conflict, physiologically fighting each other, and every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them.

Philip breaks down exactly why fat loss and muscle building require opposite nutritional environments, whether the interference effect from concurrent training can reduce your strength gains or hypertrophy, and why chasing peak performance can actually work against longevity. 

You'll learn the specific conditions where body recomp can work and the evidence-based approach that gets you to every goal faster.

Take the free Fitness Lab quiz for a custom plan built around your primary goal (20% off with the link in the show notes:
https://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Whether your priority is to build muscle, lose fat, improve your endurance, or increase your longevity over 40, this episode gives you the framework to stop stacking goals and start making real progress.

Philip also walks you through a 2-minute "Goal Audit" exercise you can do tonight to identify your primary focus for the next 12 weeks and put everything else on maintenance mode.

Upgrade your recovery with Cozy Earth's bamboo pajama set and Classic Cuddle Blanket. Recovery is the one fitness goal that never conflicts with any other. Visit witsandweights.com/cozyearth and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for up to 20% off. 100-night sleep trial, 10-year warranty.

Timestamps

0:00 - Stop chasing every fitness goal simultaneously
1:02 - The SAID principle
5:13 - Why you can't lose fat and build muscle at the same time (and when you can)
9:04 - How real is the interference effect (does endurance training blunt strength gains)?
12:03 - When strength training and longevity goals conflict
17:41 - A 12-month plan for faster results
19:58 - How little training do you need to maintain your gains?
23:59 - The compounding effect of using nutrition phases and training blocks
28:40 - How to include cardio and other goals without hurting your primary focus
32:19 - Why recovery and sustainability are "meta" goals
38:10 - When body recomp and concurrent training actually work

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:02

  You might be strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, doing all the things, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected. And the problem might not be your effort. It might be that your goals are fighting each other. And every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them. Today I'm breaking down exactly how fat loss, muscle building, endurance, and longevity conflict at the physiological level, why the popular do-it-all approach produces mediocre results and a simple sequencing method that gets you to every goal faster. If you keep stacking goals without a plan, you could spend the next 12 months working hard and ending up right where you started. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And you have probably been told, or maybe you just assumed, that a good fitness routine should cover all the bases at once. You're gonna lose fat, you're gonna build muscle, you're going to improve endurance, you're gonna live longer, and if you're eating well and training consistently, all of those should just happen together, right? And it sounds reasonable, sounds intuitive, and it tends to be wrong. Not entirely wrong, right? It puts you well above the average population doing some of those things, but wrong enough to keep you stuck or frustrated or plateaued for a pretty long amount of time, sometimes months or years, if you don't understand why. And this is one of the most common patterns I do see in people my age who are over 40, who come to me frustrated and doing all the right things, but they're just doing all the things at once. And that tends to be the problem. Their body has no idea which signal to respond best to, and they're kind of mediocre at everything. Not only are they mediocre, I think it actually sets all of it back even further. So today I'm gonna walk you through why these goals interfere with each other at the cellular and metabolic level. And then I'm gonna give you a straightforward sequencing approach that gets you to every one of those goals, just not in the exact same training block. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to walk you through a 60-second exercise I call the goal audit. You could do it tonight with a pen and paper. You'll know which goal to prioritize and which ones to put on maintenance for the next three months, but you're gonna want to listen to the whole episode to understand how to get the most out of that exercise. All right, let's get into it and talk about the advice that sounds logical, but isn't always. And that's all often the case in this fitness world, isn't it? Something that sounds like it should work doesn't necessarily work. And that is, you know, train for all the goals at the same time, eat quote unquote clean, be consistent. The results are gonna come if you just have a fitness lifestyle. And you hear it in things like the boot camp marketing, the boot camp classes or hybrid training programs, which is really are really popular right now. I hear from a lot of listeners about, you know, how do I combine endurance with lifting? And that's why I'm doing more episodes like this. By the way, our next episode is going to be about how to combine the two. But the promise is that one lifestyle or one routine that you just continue to follow is going to make you leaner, more muscular, better conditioned, healthier all at once. Now, I've used some of that messaging myself when I talk about, for example, lifting weights, which was in our last solo episode about how powerful it is for really checking off all the boxes of fitness, but it doesn't maximize specific goals depending on what those goals are. So if you're not getting results, you know, rather than hitting your head in a wall and just working harder and thinking you need more discipline or I just need to do better, it's probably more about the physics and you're not efficiently going after the right goal right now. And this brings up the concept of periodization. Your body is going to adapt specifically to the demands you place on it. Okay, this is specificity. The idea of specificity is really, really important. And I hope you understand it and really listen carefully. In exercise science, they call it the said principle: specific adaptations to impose demands. You get better at exactly what you train for, right? Heavy squats don't necessarily improve your 10K. Now, there's always little caveats relative to other variables like how much you weigh and what skill how fast you are and your muscle fiber types and all of that. But we know that people trying to maximize a long distance running outcome, their number one priority isn't heavy squats, even though squats can be helpful or helpful, especially in the offseason. Just like marathon training is not going to build your strength or your deadlift PR. Now it's obvious when you compare very different things. So that's easy. But when it gets, I think, costly for you as an individual, like the time you invest, is when your goals actually need to have opposite conditions to succeed. And then you're trying to provide both at the same time. So think about what that looks like in practice. Let's say you want to lose fat, so you're in a calorie deficit, but you also want to build muscle, which works better at maintenance or a slight surplus. That's a very simple one, right? So, you know, let's say you're lifting four days a week for strength for hypertrophy, but you're also running three days a week for endurance and heart health. And maybe you're, you know, you want to compete in endurance sport. I've worked with bikers and runners, for example. Your legs in that case may not be recovering the way they need to, which then stalls your strength and then also stalls your endurance. And then your body fat barely changes in the first scenario because the deficit is too mild to drive fat loss, but too aggressive to support muscle growth. And you kind of get this slow, wonky, half-assed body recomp, right? And by the way, listen to my other episodes on body reconp. There's there's a more efficient way to do body reconp that, in my opinion, involves the very slightest of surpluses. So most people respond to this by just doing more, doing harder, you know, stricter dieting, whatever. They think they just need to ramp up one of those dials, like that it's not strong enough, but you actually haven't addressed the root cause, right? You're pouring more effort into a system that's not working for you. So, what I want to look next is what's happening under the hood. Like, why do your goals fight each other and address the three biggest conflicts that we tend to have so that we can attack them? Okay, the first one is fat loss versus muscle gain. This is the most common one. To lose body fat, you have to have a deficit, a sustained calorie deficit. And for a lot of people, that's gonna be in the say three to five hundred calories below maintenance is a good sustainable deficit for a lot of people, right? Depends on your body weight, depends on your expenditure. And what does your body do? Okay, it doesn't have enough energy coming in, so it pulls from your stored energy, your fat cells to make up the gap, and you lose fat. To build muscle optimally, though, you need enough calories to support that new tissue that's being generated, right? The amino acids from your protein combine to form new skeletal tissue, new muscle mass or skeletal muscular tissue. And for most people, that means not being a diet, and that means being at least at maintenance, if not a little bit above that, or even more above that, right? Like 100, 200, 300 calories above. And so these are opposite nutrition environments. Now, can you do both at the same time? Yes, you can do both at the same time. It's called body recomposition. We talk about it all the time. We've seen studies that support body recomposition. A 2020 meta-analysis by Barricat, Barricat, great research source if you're looking for good citations. Barricat and colleagues found that untrained individuals can gain muscle in a deficit. A 2021 study by Campbell showed that train lifters can recomp under very tight conditions. You have to have high protein, around a gram per pound, progressive overload, and only a very, very mild deficit. And when I say mild, I mean as much as 10, 15, 20% below maintenance. It's not nothing. But the rate of change is slow, very slow in some cases. Maybe, maybe a half a pound of muscle gain a month alongside a pound or two of fat loss. Now, for someone, for many of you, that might be perfectly fine way to live. And we again we talk about that. I have a body recomp workshop in physique university where we go over all these scenarios. But once you've been lifting consistently for even a couple of years and you got to a kind of healthy body fat, then you're you're barely gonna notice these kinds of changes if you keep trying to recomp, in my opinion, from my experience. Whereas if you have a focused 12-week cut and a focused four to six months, let's say six month building phase, the visible change is gonna be more dramatic and in a shorter period of time, even though you're doing two different things and you have trade-offs that come along with that. Right. That's why I assume I'm a big fan of bulking and cutting, but it doesn't have to be extreme. It just has to be precise and focused. So that's one. The second one is strength and muscle versus endurance. Okay, a lot of you are asking about this these days. Uh hybrid training, concurrent training comes up. People are kind of getting more into cardio again. I shouldn't say again, but like lifters are more interested in cardio because they know it doesn't really interfere as much as we used to think. And this one runs really deep. It's called the interference effect. We're gonna talk about this in detail in the next episode. It was first described by Hickson in 1980. That was the year I was born, by the way. Classic days. When you combine heavy resistance training with high volume endurance training, the interference effect says you're gonna blunt your gains in both. And there's there's still some truth to it, although it's been overblown. The mechanism is that resistance training activates one pathway, it's the mTOR pathway, and that drives muscle protein synthesis. Endurance training activates the AMPK pathway, and that improves your mitochondrial density and your energy efficiency, right? These are like different energy systems and different uses of nutrients. So these pathways kind of suppress each other a little bit. A 2012 meta-analysis by Wilson and colleagues found that concurrent training reduced strength gains by about 15 to 20% and hypertrophy gains by about 28% compared to resistance training alone. Now that's an older study. In the next episode, we are actually gonna get into how to combine lifting with endurance in a way that doesn't cause that effect. Okay, so I think again, you have to take it with a grain of salt and look at how the cardio and lifting are being put together, the amounts of it, the volume, the order, all of that, there's definitely a way to have a decent amount of cardio alone with your lifting and it not be an issue. We're gonna talk about that in the next episode. But as far as the actual practical nature of this, when you have those two different goals, you're trying to build strength over here or you're trying to build for endurance over here, it's kind of a practical recovery problem. Because if you're running, say 25 or 40 or 50 miles a week on top of squatting and deadlifting, your legs might not be recovering. Okay. And again, it's it's the volume, the volume matters. Training quality will drop when that happens, then you're gonna accumulate fatigue, and then you're gonna work really, really hard. And the numbers may not go the way you want because you're trying to do two goals. Now, a few moderate cardio sessions a week, they're not gonna wreck your gains. Also, some more rigorous endurance work won't wreck your gains if you're trying to maintain, like if you're not trying to just go all out and build PRs. So that's why I think it matters like what degree to each goal you have. And we know certain modes like running is gonna cause a little more issues for people than say cycling, and it has to do with the eccentric use of your muscles, right? And the tearing and the fatigue and all that. So, again, we're gonna talk more on the next episode about that specific topic, but it is important, and I am covering it today, kind of at the goal level. The third conflict is performance versus longevity. And this is more subtle because muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and healthy aging. And so maintaining and building strength and lean tissue protects against falls, protects against metabolic disease, helps with insulin sensitivity, so it protects against resistance, protects cognitive against cognitive decline, right? So, in that sense, strength and longevity actually do align really, really well. But once you start chasing a more extreme level of performance, it could work a bit against longevity. So, for example, trying to keep very stay very shredded with a really low body fat percentage, well, you're probably causing some adaptation, if not some disruption to your hormones and your sleep, your immune function, all of that, right? We you you probably heard horror stories of physique competitors having a very unhealthy situation when they're right at around showtime, you know, and combine that with something like chronic overtraining, which is endemic in people who are trying to chase performance. You know, you think elite athletes and CrossFitters and even powerlifters and whatever, which can drive things like inflammation if you're doing it too much. Extended calorie restriction also adds stress to this whole thing. And you may be doing that because of a performance goal, but it can lower your metabolism, it can compromise things like bone density or whatnot. And so the the path to living well for decades to come is has got to include some level of, I'll say moderation and recovery or balance or whatever word you want to use as an essential variable of the whole thing. So recovery is a good word for it. I, you know, not just hard training, harder and harder training. And those of us over 40 notice this because we have a lower ability to recover and we have, you know, it's harder to come by sleep because of our lives. And also joint what joint pliability and and our synovial fluid and all that stuff seems to be less responsive. We're less resilient physically than we were when we were younger. That's no excuse not to still train and still perform and improve. But most people conflate peak performance with optimal health, and they're related, but they're not the same thing. Okay, so those are the the mechanisms and the conflicts, and they're they're pretty much physiological, right? What I just talked about, they're not psychological conflicts, they're actually physiological. What do you do about it? What do you do about it? All right. So the fastest way to reach all your goals is to stop chasing them simultaneously. And the fix to that is to sequence your goals combined with periodizing your goals. So periodization is the word I would encapsulate this whole thing with sequencing or periodization. You pick one primary goal for a defined period, let's say eight to 16 weeks. You have a set period in mind, not because you're trying to chase the scale by a certain date, but because that period of time makes sense for the goal. And then you design your training, nutrition, recovery around that one goal. Your other goals are go into a maintenance mode and then you rotate through them. So any one goal comes to the top. That's your priority. All the other goals are maintenance mode. And what's cool about this is the maintenance mode stuff is still gonna need some attention to maintain them, right? But not nearly as much as to push them forward or to improve. And then you rotate through them. And by the way, we're gonna go through this step by step right now, real quick. I'm working on a relaunch. You guys have heard me talk about physic university. I'm gonna re-launch soon something called Eat More Lift Heavy. Pretty cool. Because after all these years, I realized what people really need is this exact approach of sequencing and periodization, essentially written out for them over a six-month period. And I think even the best one-on-one coaches have trouble doing that. So I'm actually put creating a whole system for that. Stay tuned. I know it's a tease. I don't actually have there's no way to sign up or anything like that. Of course, if you're interested, you could always reach out. Or if you come into physique university now and join, I'm gonna give a really nice deal to people who are already in. So you can come in, start getting the courses and the help and support to hit your goals now, and then check that out when it comes out. Anyway, here is the step by step. All right. Step one is to pick your primary goal. Okay, sounds obvious, but it it it's it's something people skip. They just go and they assume, okay, I'm gonna get fit, and here we go. If you could only improve one thing about your body composition or fitness over the next four months, what would make the biggest difference? So answer that question right now. That's your focus. If you could only improve one thing, okay, don't say I want to build muscle and lose fat. That's two things. Say one thing. And it could be specific, it could be I want to reduce belly fat, I want to get a my first pull-up, I want to deadlift PR, I want to compete in a powerlifting meat, I want to compete in that endurance race, that 5K, 10K or ultra marathon, whatever. That's your one thing. One thing, start there. Step two, you're going to put everything else into maintenance. And this is where people resist because it feels like they're giving something up or they're gonna slow everything down, but it's not. Maintaining anything is dramatically easier than building it. And for example, research shows muscle mass can be maintained on as little as, I'll say one third is like the absolute risk-free, but I've heard as little as one eighth the volume used to build the muscle. So it's somewhere in that range, meaning a lot less, as long as you keep the intensity high, the the stimulus high, right? Like the weight on the bar, you know, you're training close to failure, you're still trying to use progressive overload. So if it normally took you 15 hard sets per muscle group per week to build, you could probably maintain that with as little as like five sets a week. And then you can switch up your training schedule accordingly to save all that time and recovery capacity for your primary goal, if if if that's not your primary goal. So if let's say fat loss is the priority, then of course you're gonna be in a moderate deficit. We're not trying to body recop, we're trying to go all out into a deficit, but keep that protein high, keep lifting to preserve the muscle, keep the cardio at like the low intensity stuff like walking, easy cycling, maybe a little sprinting that kind of is very recoverable, even if it still bumps up your calorie burn a little bit, if that's what you're going for. You are not chasing PRs on your lifts. You're not training for a race. If muscle building is a priority, uh if fat loss is the priority, you're in a deficit holding on to muscle. Now, if muscle building is a priority, you're gonna eat at maintenance or slight surplus. Train harder and with the idea to get PRs. And the cardio, you have maybe a little more capacity for some cardio, but it's still more easy type of sessions versus a ton of miles, let's say, because you're trying to be an endurance athlete, athlete. Right. And I can go through this list. I could say, okay, if you're an endurance athlete, you've got to put that number one, figure out your easy days, your medium days, your long days, if that's something you have, make it very recoverable. You got to have a build-up training plan both on the cardio side with the like miles per week and sprints and all that, as well as on the food side where you might be going a little bit lower protein and a little bit more carbs as you get closer to an event, let's say. So, but and while you're doing that, you might only train two days a week, and it might be a very minimal program to maintain your muscle and strength. So you get the idea, right? Now, the if longevity is the goal, that that gets a little trickier because really, really the thought there is to optimize everything you're doing so that it's sustainable for decades to come, which means you're not necessarily chasing PRs or huge amount of fat loss or a huge endurance output. And it's a, I think of longevity as a little bit more of a balanced approach where everything is kind of being maintained. And maybe you focus on some things like your diet and your nutrition, your nutrient sufficiency, hormones, those kinds of things, if that makes sense. All right. Step three then, once you've got your primary goal and then what's in maintenance, is to plan the sequence across your year. I like to think of a 12-month period. It's a nice bit of time to plan things out and think of it in phases. So if I were working with a client over a year and we're thinking of body composition change, I'm probably gonna plan a month or two of prep work for fat loss phase, probably 12 to 16 weeks of fat loss at most, and then like six to nine months of muscle building. Now, it might not be in that order, right? It might switch around based on what the immediate goal is, but you would plan it over the whole year. Now, if they have an endurance focus in there, well, you'd have to fit that in somewhere, maybe an eight-week block. If they have a powerlifting meet, maybe a block there, and then they're not dieting. You know, where do you put your maintenance and diet phases in there? All the phases have to be building on each other, and that's where the compounding happens because whatever you did in the last phase now gives you a higher foundation for the next phase. Now, when you, for example, build muscle in a surplus, you're probably raising your expenditure and you are also adding muscle mass. So that's gonna make your next fat loss phase easier because you can now eat more calories and you're just healthier overall. Let's say when you improve your cardiovascular fitness in an endurance phase, well, that's gonna give you bigger work capacity to recover in the gym, and now you can maybe lift heavier. You know, maybe a phase of fat loss resensitizes your body to nutrients and hunger signals and eating more fiber and eating from fullness. So when you shift back to building, you're gonna have a better time of eating and using that nutrition. See what I mean? It's pretty cool. So each focus block creates advantages for the next one, and you end up progressing faster over that year by doing one thing at a time than you would by doing three things at once. And this is a huge revelation for me when I got into learning about nutrition science and doing it the right way, because I had sort of inadvertently done these types of things on my own without realizing it. Like the time when I built a ton of strength and drank whole milk and ate a bunch of food and knew, hey, I have to gain weight while I'm doing this. I can't be trying to lose fat. I did it kind of out of control without structure, but I at least in my mind had the idea that you had to do this. And then once I got into coaching and got my certification and started learning more about the evidence and the science, I realized oh, this is this is the what we need to do. We need to specify and be very intentional and then set up structure with flexibility to get there. All right, step four is to integrate all. Of these goals without them competing. So having a primary goal doesn't mean zero attention to everything else. It doesn't mean you just drop it all. Like, okay, I have an endurance sport, come endurance race coming up, so I'm just gonna not lift weights at all. That's the worst decision you can do. It does mean that the secondary work supports or at least doesn't interfere with or like sabotage the main goal. So in a muscle building phase, the cardio is as much as it needs to be without interfering with your building muscle. And that that could be a wide range depending on your capacity, capability, and desires, and also depending to the degree which your primary goal is taking priority. You know, so in that case, you know, walking and easy cycling might come before running, let's say, and stuff that aids recovery without taxing your legs. Whereas if you are going after endurance goals, then as I mentioned before, maybe you still only live twice a week. Or if it's if it's three or four times, it's very short sessions, very little volume to maintain that muscle. Now, you may you may titrate these things, right? Where, okay, 16 weeks out, I have this bike race, and right now I'm just lifting weights for muscle mass and I'm eating. How do I transition? Well, the transition can occur as one thing slowly coming down and one thing slowly coming up. It doesn't always have to be abrupt. There could be a transition phase in between these. And that's sometimes a really smart thing to do with something like nutrition, let's say. Okay. And then the last step, step five, is keeping it sustainable, right? It always still has to be sustainable in a way. Now, there's a the caveat on that is how we define sustainable. So what is not sustainable is like a very extreme version of each thing constantly, thinking that that's like you can sustain that. Like, so I'm gonna go on a dreamer bulk, then I'm gonna go in a massive fat loss phase, it's super aggressive. And then, you know, there's a having said that, there's a certain amount of aggressiveness you can handle that's still sustainable depending on the phase. So, for example, some people can handle a big deficit really well, but only for a certain duration. And then when they go into a muscle building phase, it's very conservative. Some people go the opposite way. They want to go very aggressive on the muscle building, but then they want to go very conservative on the fat loss. So that's what I mean by sustainable. Each phase should be moderate, or the the phases that need to be more extreme, you've got to know that that you can do them at that extreme level with the appropriate trade-offs. And the trade-offs might be the duration or the recoverability in other areas or whatever, right? Okay, I hope that was clear, right? Sustainability is always a challenge and it's a very personal thing. Like when we work with our clients or members, the sustainability piece is really what comes up almost all the time. Because at the end of the day, we need to understand what the feedback is telling you, what's your body telling you, what is your data telling you, so we can keep iterating on that and find your level of sustainability. So we've been talking about how all these goals compete for the same recovery budget. At the end of the day, I really think it comes down to recovery, especially if you're over 40. And the one thing I keep coming back to is that recovery is actually the only goal that never conflicts with anything else. So this is kind of interesting. It's like a meta goal that sits on top of everything. Right? You can argue about whether I should cut or bulk, whether I should do cardio versus lifting. But nobody in the history of mankind has ever said that you should sleep more poorly to help with any of it. Now, I take that back because there has been a in business circles and like entrepreneurship and CEOs over the years, like, hey, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or I only need four hours of sleep. But I think we're finding that that's not the case, that even those people need more sleep to perform their best. Which is my very smooth segue into our sponsor today, Cozy Earth. I know, I know, hear me out, hear me out, because I am a convert, a genuine convert about this company. Um, I really like high quality products. And by high quality, sometimes it comes with a price, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends. I would say Cozy Earth is right in that sweet spot of price and quality. And last year I talked about their sheets, which we use all the time now, and I would never give those up. I bought a second pair, but right now I'm wearing their pajamas and using their blanket because thankfully, as a sponsor, I get to try these things out before I tell you about them because I don't want to sell you junk. So you think about the recovery aspects of sleep and what you sleep in and your environment and keeping it cool and dark and all of that stuff. Well, how do we help with those things? Well, sheets are one, but what you wear is another. And I don't usually give it a second thought because I tend to sleep in just shorts or underwear or whatever TMI. But then I tried the Cozy Earth Bamboo Pajama set, and now I actually like wearing them. Whether it's winter or it's warm because they keep you cool. And maybe on a super hot day, I don't know. But for now, I think they're awesome. I think they give me that signal that it's actually the nighttime and it's time to wind down and it's this weirdly effective thing for something that's just close. And so they make a lot of things like that. Cozy Earth makes things derived from bamboo that have that breathability and that temperature regulation. And that's what I like about it. Um, and so their blanket has a similar concept, but of course, a blanket you're trying to keep yourself warm. You're not trying to cool yourself down, but you want it to be comfortable. And this thing is really, really heavy. And I've been using it every morning. Before I work out, I sit on the couch, I read a book, usually fiction, usually science fiction or post-apocalyptic dystopian novel or a legal thriller. Those are the general categories I've been liking lately. Just to kind of chill out in the morning and start to wake up, relax with this very thick, soft blanket, which my kids say feels softer than their hamsters, which tells you how soft it is. And you're just not getting up once it's up. And I think that's a good thing. And then, you know, you can get recovered with a really comfortable blanket. So they back up their products, Cozy Earth does. They have a hundred night sleep trial to test it, which is a massively long amount of time to try something out. They have a 10-year warranty, and you'd be supporting me if you check out the product. So go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Code Wits and Weights will give you 20% off. When you go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth, it'll actually show you the code in case you forget it. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. All right, let's get back to this and keep talking about conflicting goals. And remember, when we get to the end, I'm gonna walk you through your goal audit that's gonna put all this together so you can actually map them out. So let's talk about quickly when doing two things at the same time can work. And I mentioned body recomp. There are specific scenarios where body recomp, losing fat, and gaining muscle at the same time is reasonable. And I I've done entire episodes about this, but just at a high level, if you're a true novice, a true beginner to strength training, your body's gonna respond rapidly to the signal from your training. Your body's gonna adapt. Neuromuscular and muscular, like physical stimulus is going to allow you to build fat, build muscle and lose fat almost at any kind of level of a deficit or surplus. So in that case, you may be fine just sitting around maintenance and doing the thing and working hard. I really wouldn't encourage just a diet right off the bat if you're strength training for the first time, because I really want you to get the most out of the training piece and be fully fueled and recovered. And then you can get in a good position for fat loss phase. You know, in all these cases of body recomp, it's going to be not too far from maintenance. It's either gonna be a slight deficit, it's gonna be at maintenance, or it's gonna be a slight surplus. And really that's it. Now, someone who doesn't really fit into that category, who maybe is an experienced lifter, you're already at a healthy body composition, and you want to do these simultaneously, it's just gonna take a lot longer and it's gonna be hard to measure the changes. They're just so slow. And I see people comment on my stuff all the time about this who are like, well, it took me, you know, 12 months to see a change. And then I ask more about the details. And, you know, either they're they're doing it in a very modest way that's going to take a long time, or they have some experience in their past and it's gonna slow it down. So the same principle applies to hybrid or concurrent training. If you want to do some running or other endurance alongside your lifting because you enjoy it, it supports your health, awesome. Two or three moderate sessions a week, if they're low impact, even better, separated from your lifting by at least six hours. Those kinds of things, those little rules that help that we're gonna talk about on the next episode. But if you're training for a marathon or ultra marathon or a big, you know, like a 10K or whatever, and you also want to get a squat PR, something has to give. Most likely, something has to give. I mean, I guess there are exceptions. You know, there's definitely people talking about trying to do both with some massive level of recovery. Maybe you're sleeping nine hours a night, you have no stress in your life. But for most of us, they're not going to happen together. And you have to go back to the steps that we went through of what's my primary goal? Can I do the secondary thing at a maintenance without it draining my recovery? And the other steps. And I guess, I guess the final thing is psychological because I think most people operate in this space with what I call a simultaneous mindset. The assumption is that, hey, I need to be progressing on everything all the time. Philip talks about all the pillars, right? Lifting and walking and eating and everything, sleeping and stress. And so I feel like I need to make progress on all these things. And then I'm failing if I'm not. And that's a very exhausting mindset and it creates guilt. It creates guilt when you're not doing enough of whatever it is, cardio, you know, your lifts aren't making progress. You get all this anxiety, you send me a message on Instagram. Why am I not building muscle? Why don't I see muscle definition? You get frustrated when your weight goes up more than you thought it would during a building phase, or you're feeling fluffy, and you're like, is this even working? You know what I'm talking about. Right now, the alternative to that would be a sequential mindset focused on the process. And that's what we've been talking about today. In any given phase, you're pushing one thing forward and maintaining everything else. And I don't want you to think of that as a compromise or a trade-off. That's actually on the net going to give you more results. That's how you solve this complex system that we're trying to work with, which is our body. You don't optimize everything at once. You identify the constraint, you focus resources on that constraint, low-hanging fruit, whatever phrase you want to use, and then you move to the next one. Even if that's constraint is deeper, like hormonal or nutrients or whatever, focus on that and go all in on it and fix it and improve it. And guess what? It's gonna help everything else anyway. And then when you truly do that, you remove the internal friction that was draining your energy and draining your willpower. Because now you know exactly what you're doing and why it actually takes the stress out of the process. And now you can measure things clearly because there's one metric that matters. Maybe there's submetrics, but you know, there's this one set of metrics that matters for the next, say, 12 weeks or six months or whatever. And that mental clarity by itself can accelerate your results more than any physical tweak. Lastly, don't forget that fitness is a lifelong project. And I mean that in the best way. I mean that in the best way because you don't have to be your leanest, strongest, fastest, most enduring self by next Tuesday. You just want to be making consistent, measurable progress on the thing that matters right now, and you're gonna feel great for it. You're gonna feel great because you're making progress and improving. And the human struggle is a process of improving until the day you die. I mean, to me, that's a positive thing. It means I can always improve. I'm never gonna hit the finish line because if I did, why be alive? Why be alive anymore? All right, before I let you go, I'm gonna walk you through that quick goal audit that I promise it'll take you two minutes. I want you to grab a pen and paper because you're gonna walk away knowing exactly what to focus on next. And instead of pausing, I'm just gonna talk quickly about something else that might be helpful while you grab that pen and paper. Because if this episode made you realize you've been stacking your goals without a clear priority, my lab, my my lab, my app fitness lab, I believe truly and honestly can fix that based on the feedback we're hearing. It's an AI coaching app that I built. I trained it. It's built on my stuff. It's not just Chat GPT giving you whatever it wants based on all human knowledge. It's very specifically trained on the evidence and what to do. And the very first thing it does is ask about your goals, your body, your lifestyle, your training history, all of this stuff in a free two-minute quiz. And then based on your answers, it gives you a custom plan around your primary goal right now, not every goal at once. And guess what? It's periodized, just like we're talking about today, because I've trained it to do that. So whether your focus is fat loss or muscle building or getting stronger or endurance even, Fitness Lab is going to adapt your nutrition and training plan, your daily activities to get to that goal specifically and forget all the rest. Not forget as in they're not important, but it's gonna help you prioritize and maximize for the thing that matters. And then as your goals shift, it's gonna shift with you and you can tell the coach in the app, hey, my goal is different now. This is what I want to do going forward. Help me out. You know what? We're gonna change our activities now to match that new goal. So go to wits and weights.com slash app to take the free quiz. And actually, depending on when this comes out, if you still want the 20% off because you follow the podcast, I'm gonna include a special link in the show notes for that in case our promotion is done for the winter. So you still get the 20% off. So use the link in the show notes to absolutely make sure you get that. All right, here is the simple exercise that takes two minutes and can save you months of wasted effort in the gym. Grab a pen and paper, write down every fitness goal you're currently working toward. Not the one, not the one you care most about. I want you to write them all down. I want you to write, hey, I want to build muscle, I want to lose fat, I want to get faster, I want to improve my heart rate, I want to live longer, I want to improve my testosterone, anything you can think about, right? Stream of consciousness, write them all down. You could even come back to it, add more later. You got it? Okay, write down every goal you're working toward. Now, circle the one that if you achieved it in the next three months would change dramatically how you feel about your body and your training the most. All right. If you achieved it in the next three months, that one thing on the page, I want you to circle and be like, yes, yes, this is the thing. And then look at all the other ones you wrote down. For each of those, write the word maintain next to it or a little M or whatever makes sense. And that means you're still gonna train for it, but at the minimum effective dose, right? Whatever that is, like we talked about, two lifting sessions to hold on to your muscle, some easy walks for cardiovascular health, whatever. Then look at the one you circled again. So you've got one circled and all the other ones say maintained. That is your primary goal for the next 12 weeks. So every decision about nutrition, training, recovery gets filtered through that goal first. First. If a choice supports it, you do it. If it competes with it, you save it for the next phase. And if you're not already doing things to maintain the other stuff, then don't worry about it yet. Don't worry about it yet. Just focus on the one thing. You're gonna build this up over time. Because the next time, three months from now or six months, whatever, you're gonna do this exercise again and switch to your next goal. All right, do it tonight. Put it somewhere you'll see it, put it on the fridge, put it on your nightstand. And when you feel that pull to add more, look at the piece of paper and don't do it. Don't do it. Focus on the thing that you circled. Your future self is gonna thank you for that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the fastest path to all your goals isn't doing everything at once, it's doing one thing at a time and trusting the sequence and process to get you there. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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How Lifting Weights Improves Cardiovascular Health (Better Than Cardio?) | Ep 440

You've been told cardio is for a healthy heart and lifting weights is for building muscle. But what if strength training is itself a form of cardio?

What if you're ignoring one of the most effective tools for lowering blood pressure, improving cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease?

Philip breaks down the evidence showing that strength training lowers blood pressure on par with first-line medication, improves HDL and LDL cholesterol, enhances insulin sensitivity, and reduces visceral fat, all independent of cardio. 

You'll learn why your muscle tissue functions as a metabolic organ that regulates blood sugar, why adults who lift have up to 17% lower cardiovascular disease risk, and how to program your lifting sessions to get a real cardiovascular training effect without adding time on the treadmill. 

Philip also answers listener Jack R.'s question comparing cardio and lifting head-to-head for fat loss, muscle building, and long-term sustainability after 40. Whether you're already strength training over 40 or still treating the weight room as optional for heart health and longevity, this episode gives you the evidence-based case for making lifting your foundation.

Try Fitness Lab to get personalized daily coaching on nutrition, training, and biofeedback that adapts to how you want to train, whether you're focused on lifting, endurance, or both. Get 20% off through February 17:
http://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why "cardio for your heart" is incomplete
1:43 - The 2023 AHA statement about lifting weights and heart health
5:28 - How strength training lowers blood pressure as much as medication
7:11 - Nitric oxide, arterial stiffness, and improved blood vessels
9:27 - Cholesterol, triglycerides, and ApoB improvements
13:17 - Why muscle is your most powerful metabolic organ for insulin and blood sugar
15:20 - Cardio vs. lifting for fat loss and building muscle after 40
18:01 - Visceral fat, inflammation, and menopause
19:47 - Can lifting weights improve VO2max?
22:01 - Longevity data and the minimum dose of strength training for heart health
23:57 - How to get cardiovascular benefits WITHOUT extra cardio
26:04 - Rest periods, compound movements, and rep ranges for heart-healthy lifting
28:59 - Weekly template combining strength training and walking
30:59 - Physical reserve and why strength protects your heart all day
33:04 - Bonus: 10-second heart rate recovery test you can do between sets

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been told that cardio is the only way to protect your heart and that lifting weights is just for building muscle looking good, you are operating on outdated science, and it could be costing you years of your life. Today I'm breaking down the research showing that strength training lowers blood pressure on par with medication, improves your cholesterol profile, and reduces your risk of dying from heart disease by up to 17%. You'll learn why your muscles are secretly your most powerful cardiovascular organ, how to structure your lifting to get a real cardio effect without stepping on a treadmill, and at the very end, a 10-second heart rate test you can do between sets that predicts cardiovascular health better than most labor. Find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna hit on conventional wisdom about cardio. Cardio is for your heart, and lifting weights is for your muscles. Two separate buckets, right? And if you're over 40 and you're thinking about longevity, the default advice is go for a walk, go for a jog, get on an elliptical, get your cardio in, do your heart healthy exercise, and then maybe lift a little on the side for bone density or whatever benefit, if it's even mentioned. I mean, I still see many, many articles that don't even mention lifting weights. They use the general term exercise. And the real problem with that framing is it is incomplete in a way that fundamentally limits your results. Because the research we have now, lots of research over the past decade, including a 2023 scientific statement from the American Heart Association, now confirms clearly that resistance training is safe, it's effective, it is an essential part of cardiovascular disease risk reduction. It's not optional, it's not secondary, it is essential. And yet, only 28% of adults meet the recommendation of strength training at least two days per week, which means that most people concerned about heart health, which we all should be, are ignoring one of the most powerful tools available. And as a side note, this tool is the most powerful for almost anything related to your health. So you kind of get the benefits regardless across the spectrum when you're lifting. The fix is almost too simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You just have to adjust how you already lift to get those benefits. And you might not even have to do that. Now, as a quick tangent, one of our upcoming episodes, in fact, it might be as early as next week, is going to get into strength training along with endurance. Because we've had quite a number of listeners write in concerned that they shouldn't be doing cardio because there's some negative to it. And that is not the case either. So stay, you know, follow the show. We're going to talk about that next week. How do you incorporate both endurance if you enjoy it or you're competitive or whatever, along with your lifting? But today, this episode was inspired by a listener, Jack R, who said, quote, I'm a huge fan of the show and I listen to it on every run I go on. So what I want to hear is the differences between cardio and lifting in the long term. Which one overall can burn more fat? Which one is good for building more muscle? And how do they hold up over time? So, Jack, that's a great question. And again, you are also gonna want to listen to the upcoming show called something like strength training and endurance, you know, putting them together, something like that, because I haven't recorded it yet. But this one is dedicated to you, Jack. So we're gonna go over that and more. I'm gonna walk you through what lifting does for your heart, your blood vessels, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your insulin sensitivity, and your longevity. We're gonna compare cardio and lifting head to head for fat loss, muscle building, and long-term sustainability, which is kind of what Jack asked about. And I'll show you how to program your training so you get the cardiovascular benefits from lifting without sacrificing your strength gains. So whether you are currently lifting or you're on the fence, I wanna change how you think about what heart healthy exercise actually means and really have lifting near the top of that list in your programming. And then if you stick around, I always have a cool tip at the end. Today I'm gonna share a simple 10-second test that you can do between your sets in the gym. And it's gonna give you a real-time snapshot of your cardiovascular fitness. You have to do it while you're working out, but then you can use it to track your heart health over time and see how it's improving. Super simple. I love stuff like that. All right, let's start with the single biggest risk factor for heart disease. And by the way, heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So it's super important. The single biggest risk factor is actually blood pressure. This is where the evidence for strength training is strong enough that I wish it changed how every doctor talks to us about exercise, but you know, that's that's wishful thinking at the moment. So blood pressure, let's talk about it. Multiple studies, and these are meta-analysis, okay, big studies of studies, now confirm that regular strength training reduces resting blood pressure. Okay, now anybody who lifts weights has seen this happen. All my clients have seen this happen. It's pretty cool. In people who have hypertension, we're looking at systolic blood pressure drops around five to 10 millimeters of mercury and diastolic, so systolics on the top, diastolics on the bottom, of I think I have that right, of two to five milligrams or millimeters of mercury. So five to ten for systolic, two to five of diastolic. And a 2022 systematic review of 14 different trials found that lifting lowered systolic blood pressure by about nine and a half and diastolic by about five in hypertensive adults. So adults who have high blood pressure already, who have a mean age around 60. So older adults around 60 with high blood pressure. Now, to put that in perspective, that is comparable to what you would expect from a first-line blood pressure medication. And then younger adults in the analysis saw even larger improvements of around 13 systolic. Right. And this, so this is meaningful. This is important because it's meaningful. This could be the difference between needing your meds and not needing it. And again, I've coached many, many a client who got to come off their blood pressure meds because they're lifting weights now. And, you know, yes, they're doing the other things, but we're talking about lifting today. And certain types of resistance exercise are especially effective. And those aren't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to incorporate them, but it could be that the way you lift efficiently includes them. And what do I mean? Isometric holds are one of the most effective methods for lowering blood pressure, but you also do isometric holds all the time when you're just lifting weights. So you don't have to do like wall sits or hand grip exercises per se if you're doing deadlifts. I mean, a deadlift is one of the most powerful isometric holds we have. And if you're using, you know, decent tempo and sometimes you're using pauses and things like that, you get plenty of isometric work. Now let's talk about blood vessels and endothelial function. All right. This is where this is the part a lot of people don't hear as much about when we talk about lifting. If you are using the way we like to lift, moderate to higher, you know, moderate rep ranges, but even up to higher rep ranges, like in a hypertrophy program, and you get this extra blood flow, it creates shear stress on the vessel wall. So your blood vessels have walls and there's stress on the walls. And that shear stress stimulates your endothelial cells to produce nitric oxide. And that causes your blood vessels to relax and dilate. And by the way, nitric oxide, you might have heard of that in the context of like pre-workouts and performance enhancers over the years as well. So this is a natural way to make your arteries more flexible and responsive, which is the opposite of arterial stiffness, right? Stiffness is one of the drivers of, again, heart disease, which the fancy term is atherosclerosis, and heart attacks. By the way, I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice. This is this is what the evidence is telling us, and I'm sharing you what those relationships are. I'm not giving you medical advice here. The American Heart Association's 2023 statement I alluded to earlier recognized that resistance training has positive effects on endothelial function. And then a couple years later, since it was last year, 2025, there was a meta-analysis on older adults that found that circuit-based resistance training significantly reduced arterial stiffness alongside improvements in blood pressure. So, putting this together, your lifting sessions, yeah, they build muscle, but they also train your blood vessels to be more compliant and more efficient, which is not a surprise because lifting is a hermetic stressor that causes a lot of adaptations, right? We know it adapts bone and muscle, but it's also adapting your blood vessels. Your cardiovascular system is adapting to those demands. And it does so the same way it does with aerobic exercise, but just through a slightly different mechanism. You know, and honestly, if you do heavy deadlifts, let's say, and watch your heart rate, you'll see that you are also getting some cardio, even though it's a much shorter bursts and small amounts of time. So that covers sort of the plumbing, the pressure, the pipes in your body. Now let's talk about what's flowing through them because strength training changes the chemistry of your blood in ways that help reduce heart disease risk. So this is pretty cool. Let's talk about that. All right. Cholesterol and lipids. So there is, there's still this perception that the only way you can improve your cholesterol is through cardio or also through food, right? And we do know that reducing saturated fat, for example, seems to be correlated with that, maintaining a healthier body weight, et cetera. But there's also evidence related to lifting. There was a systematic review in diabetes patients specifically that found that regular resistance training increased by quite a bit the what we call the protective or good cholesterol HDL. It reduced LDL, the harmful cholesterol, and then it lowered triglycerides, which is also a good result. And again, they were statistically and clinically meaningful. And we know that in older adults, which have been studied quite a bit when it comes to blood pressure, there are significant HDL increases on the order of like two to five milligrams per deciliter. Right. So that's two to five. It's not huge, but it's meaningful. And LDL drops of five to 10 after a few months of consistent training, independent of other variables. Aerobic training, so this is like what we traditionally call cardio, probably does have a slight edge in raising HDL if you do it a lot. But if you combine lifting with some cardio, that tends to produce the best overall lipid profile. So this is one of the my nods to the fact that we don't want to just not do cardio, but that lifting needs to be part of the equation. Some of the other things we find improve in studies about resistance plus resistance training plus cardio when adults are overweight is the lowering of Apo B, right? That's a marker, marker of lip light lipoproteins. And the improvement was more than either of those by themselves, either cardio or resistance training. Right. So that's cholesterol and lipids, you get a benefit. Then insulin sensitivity, we've talked about a lot in the show. And this is where lifting really, really is a huge signal. The value of having and building muscle, right? And stick with me because this one is just so important. When you think of your muscle, can when you contract skeletal muscle, it's a sink for glucose. Having the muscle is a sink for glucose. So when you lift in the gym, your muscles are pulling that sugar out of your blood, essentially, and using it for fuel. And because lifting builds more tissue over time, you're increasing your baseline capacity to handle carbohydrates. And we had a whole episode about carbs just recently. A meta-analysis found that adding resistance exercise to your routine, this was in middle-age and older adults with type 2 diabetes, led to significant drops in HBA1C. That's the long-term blood sugar marker. And that's compared to no exercise, significant drops, independent, at least partly independent of weight loss. And I say partly because a lot of these studies, the problem is once you start having lifting weights and living a better lifestyle, you end up losing some weight, oftentimes not on purpose. So it's hard to tease apart the variables sometimes. But regardless, this is a huge deal for us, especially the over 40 population, because insulin resistance is one of those things that creeps up with age. It's one of the central drivers of metabolic syndrome, right? That's like pre diabetes, where we have high blood pressure, poor cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, extra abdominal fat, and just one hour of strength training per week, even that minimum dose was associated with a 29% lower risk of developing metabolic syndrome. So again, your muscle tissue isn't just there for strength and physique, it is a metabolic organ. I love, I want you to think about that. It's a metabolic organ. It's also kind of an endocrine organ, which is hormones. It regulates your blood sugar, it regulates your insulin levels, your inflammation. The more of it you have, the more resilient your metabolism is. All right, so now all this ties into body composition and visceral fat, which is a pillar of everything we discuss on this show. And this is where we can directly answer Jack's three questions. Thank you, Jack, for the questions. Another shout out to you. The first one, which burns more fat? All right, in the short term, cardio burns a few more calories per session than lifting. In the short term, like if you just take a session in isolation of let's say 30 minutes or an hour. But resistance training changes your body composition in ways that makes fat loss more sustainable over time. And you tend to burn more calories, having more muscle, and you tend to carry a little bit more body weight with more muscle, all of which burns more calories that far exceeds what you're burning just from doing cardio. Not to mention the adaptations you could have with cardio. It's a separate topic. There was a 2024 systematic review of people with overweight and obesity that found that resistance training during a calorie deficit preserves lean mass with moderate certainty and improves fat loss with high certainty. Now, none of that's a surprise to us, but it means that when you're in a deficit, lifters lose just as much or more fat as cardio-only exercises, but they keep their muscle. And that matters massively because that is what we want to keep. We don't want to lose muscle. More muscle means all the things we talk about: higher resting metabolic rate, burning more calories, uh, better health, better everything else. And so, going back to what I said earlier, if you can combine some aerobic and resistance exercise, you're probably gonna have the best combination of fat loss and fitness gains than either alone. And when we talk cardio, by the way, we're gonna talk more about it in the next uh episode in the episode about endurance. Walking is a fantastic form of cardio. So you can be highly successful with all of this if you just move and walk a lot, which is honestly a thing that many people lose as they age. You know, it's often not hormones and perimetabas and all this other stuff. It's you're not moving enough. And I don't mean exercise or cardio, I just mean walking. Okay, so that's one question about which burns more fat. So I hope I answered that for you. So over the long term, you're probably gonna burn more fat having muscle, but doing both training and endurance. All right, now which builds more muscle? That one's really straightforward. Obvious answer resistance training, of course. Just cardio does not provide mechanical tension. It doesn't provide stress on your muscle skeletal system and beyond, you know, beyond a beginner doing it for the first week who doesn't move or something like that. It doesn't provide progressive overload, nothing that you need to stimulate muscle growth. All right. So a cardio-only approach, you are going to lose lean mass, and that is just not good. So never ever would I recommend cardio only. I do recommend lifting predominantly with complementary cardio, which is strategic and it depends on your goals and what you like. The other question Jack asked is how do they hold up over time? And this is more of a sustainability thing, and it looks like lifting does have an advantage. There was some research in Harvard that found men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training gain less abdominal fat over a multi-year period than men who did the same amount of cardio exercise. And that's because lifting prevents the loss of muscle, which helps keep your fat gain at bay. It dampens your fat gain and it maintains your metabolic rate as you age. So then when you look over five, 10, or 20 years, strength training helps build a body that's easier to maintain. That's what I mean by sustainability. When we think long-term, the best exercise routine is the one you can follow for life. And because lifting builds such compounding returns, we often see people stick with it for life as part of their identity. Whereas cardio kind of ebbs and flows and it depends. It depends. Even walking, I find some people struggle to do that and make it part of their identity as easily, I'll say, as lifting. But of course, it depends on the person. So, Jack, the short answer for fat loss, you want to combine both, but definitely make sure you're lifting. For muscle, you want to lift. And for the long game, you want to lift as the foundation, but be always moving to keep your health. So, doing both is obviously an important conclusion here. Now, we often associate fat loss with cardio, but resistance training is really effective at improving your body composition and helping with your visceral fat, the abdominal fat, that's the dangerous fat around your organs, that also tends to drive inflammation and insulin resistance. And many of us don't like it visually either. There's a study in midlife women that found that 15 weeks of strength training curbed the increase in visceral fat that would come with perimenopause and menopause. That's pretty cool. All right. So when you can reduce your visceral fat, you're gonna lower the inflammatory cytokines that are circulating in your body. That's worse one source of inflammation. You're also gonna reduce free fatty acids that then damage your blood vessel walls. And now you improve the metabolic markers we've been discussing. All right, so we've covered blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, all improved by lifting. But what about actual cardiovascular fitness? What about VO2max, the metric that predicts how long you live, supposedly? Can weights improve that? And the answer is yes. Yes. But how you program your sessions determines how much. And of course, it depends on why you're trying to increase your VO2 max, because a lot of people think you have to increase it way more than you do necessarily to get the benefits. And there's some issues with VO2 Max on the calculation side that we can get into. Now, speaking of programming, if you're trying to prioritize lifting or add in endurance work or combine both, or even prioritize endurance but still lift, and you're doing it for whatever reason heart health, body composition, longevity, enjoyment, that's exactly what Fitness Lab is designed to handle. Fitness Lab is my AI-powered coaching app. It gives you personalized daily guidance. Like it tells you what to do every day under your nutrition, your training, your biofeedback, your sleep, your movement, all of that adapted to your goals and what is happening to your body. And what I mean by that, this is super powerful. The app adjusts to how you want to train and what you want to train. So if you want to add circuit style sessions or endurance or runs aside alongside your lifting, it can account for that and it can create activities for you. If you're recovering from an illness or surgery or you just want to focus on building strength, it will meet you at where you are and change your program mid-stride for that. And right now, through February 17th, the day after this episode is out, I believe, you can still get 20% off with our winter sale at witsandweights.com slash app. After that, it goes back to full price. That's witsandweights.com slash app. The link is in the show notes. Check it out. All right, I want to talk about now cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness. Here, this is this is like the true cardio fitness that we often talk about. And before we do, just a reminder, I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you real quick heart rate recovery tests. It takes 10 seconds that you can do starting with your next gym session and start tracking that, in my opinion, is going to help you assess your cardiovascular health. And you won't even need a lot of what we're going to talk about in this section anyway. But some of you really like a lot of data, and I get it, I'm a nerd like that too. So let's do it. All right. VO2 Max. VO2 Max, this is your body's maximum oxygen uptake. And it it is, it does seem to be a very strong predictor of heart health and all-cause mortality. And yes, aerobic training cardio is still the most, I'll say, efficient way to improve it, especially if you want to get a really high number. And and I've done a VO2 max test and it's brutal. So I know you have to have really good cardiovascular fitness. A 2024 meta-analysis of 38 RCTs, that's randomized controlled trials, in middle-aged and older adults, showed that aerobic training raised VO2 max by about 1.8 milliliter per kilogram per minute. That's the unit. Okay. It's if you want to dissect that, it's the volume relative to your weight, relative to time, more than resistance training. So 1.8. Okay. So if you're trying to maximize VO2 max, then classic endurance training does have the edge. There's no argument there, and I'm gonna give Cardio a point on that one. But resistance training improves VO2 max in a way that we don't often hear about. A meta analysis in adults over 60 found an average VO2 max increase of about 1.9 from resistance training alone. And in middle-aged diabetic patients, resistance training significantly improved VO2 peak alongside other health markers. And this is mainly because when you are doing a moderate amount of volume, maybe shorter rest periods, you're working on that work capacity, you're getting your heart rate up as you lift, you're still lifting your heart rate. You're still placing intermittent cardio demand on your body. And over time, that repeated stimulus is going to enhance your heart, its ability to pump efficiently, your muscles' ability to use oxygen, your VO2 max is going to go up. Period. The clear winner, though, and you're going to hear me repeat myself on this, is combining both. A randomized control trial in overweight adults found that 12 weeks of combined aerobic and resistance exercise improved VO2 max by 13%, way more than either alone. And it concluded that a combination of aerobic and resistance training is probably optimal for comprehensive fitness and body composition improvements in aging populations. So again, no surprise there that a hybrid approach could be helpful. Now, some people are doing it without even realizing it, like some of the circuit weight training where you do exercises sequentially with minimal rest, that ends up being like an endurance exercise, right? It ends up being a form of cardio and then it boosts VO2 max. So it doesn't matter how you're doing it, is the point. If you're building strength as a priority and holding muscle as a priority, there are ways that you can work out and things you incorporate in your lifting sessions that will already boost your cardio fitness and your VO2 max when combined with walking that are more than you ever need, but not necessarily as much as you want if your goal is to get that number even higher. So that's the nuance. Now, for longevity, all right, the big picture on this, if blood pressure and cholesterol improve, and that's super convincing that we've already talked about. We also see just the big number of mortality that adults who do strength train have a 15% lower risk of dying from any cause. That's all cause mortality, and a 17% lower risk of cardiovascular disease events compared to those who do not use resistance training. And much of that reduction kicks in at as little as 30 minutes of lifting per week. So there is a minimum effective dose that is like a step change versus not lifting at all. That's why it's so powerful to just start where you're at and do it, right? Just because you're not lifting two or three or four days a week, lift 30 minutes a week versus nothing, you're gonna get a lot of benefits. And then when you combine that with aerobic exercise, it's additive. It's additive. So there was an NIH study where older adults who did both had more than 40% lower 10-year mortality than those who did neither. And then they outperformed those who only did one or the other as well. And the reason is the two forms of exercise, they affect your health through some overlapping but distinct pathways. It's kind of like a Venn diagram where you have two circles slightly overlapping. So there's different mechanisms, and the thing in the middle benefits from both. Well, cardio builds your cardiac efficiency and your ability to transport oxygen. Lifting, of course, preserves muscle mass, strength, and functional independence. And that's independently linked to survival. And then muscle strength is a predictive mortality as well, sometimes more than aerobic fitness. And the only way to increase that, of course, is resistance training. So now the question becomes practical. How do you set up your lifting to capture these benefits in the most efficient way? So you don't feel like, oh my God, I have to lift four days a week and I have to do four sessions of cardio week or something like that. Because that is not the case. Or else I'd have no clients and I myself would not enjoy this. So we've spent three segments putting the Cardios King advice under the microscope, showing you the ways that lifting improves your cardiovascular system, your blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, VO2 max, mortality, just such overwhelming evidence. All right. Share this episode with anybody who needs to hear this, by the way. The fix is almost annoyingly simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You don't. And I say need because there's want is a different thing. You don't need to add 45 minutes on the treadmill after your lifting session. You have to adjust how you lift and make sure you walk. And then beyond that, it's kind of a bonus, or depending on what your goals are. And I'm an engineer. I think of it as like you've got one system, that's your body. You could either run two or three programs to improve it, which takes two or three times the amount of time, or you can modify one thing to hit everything simultaneously. So we're gonna do that. So the first and simplest lever is honestly rest periods. Now, this is interesting because I I have two, I'm of two minds. All right. I would say traditional strength programs where you're purely trying to build strength with big compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, you're gonna want to rest enough to get all those reps. We're talking three to five minutes per set between sets. And sometimes you don't get much of a cardiovascular stimulus doing that, doing it that way in terms of total volume of cardiostimulus, right? You you might, your heart rate might spike when you do the rep, the reps, but then it drops. So one of the hacks is once you're going to a more of a hybrid like strength and hypertrophy program, getting some exercises in there that limit your rest intervals to a shorter time period, like 60 seconds, or even using supersets and rest pause and things like that. Now, you don't want to do with everything, but what I'm suggesting is that for some of your exercises in a workout, usually more the isolation stuff toward the end, using short rest periods could be a way to jack up your heart rate and get a little bit of endurance and cardio in while you're lifting weights. Why not? Right? It's super efficient. It's super efficient. Now, we've talked about conjugate on this program before, where you have two of your four days are dynamic effort. And when I've done conjugate before without bands or chains, but just with a bar, the the way that you do it is through very explosive, concentric movements and very short rest periods. So, and and you, so and part of it is because you're trying to build work capacity, right? So even powerlifters do do this. Powerlifters do want to have higher work capacity as well. And powerlifters today are much more fit that I'll say than they used to be, and a little bit leaner, right? They don't carry as much excess weight, et cetera. Um, and there have been studies that look at like the circuit protocols with short rest, and they they definitely improve VO2 max. And of course, it's kind of obvious now based on what we talked about, because it becomes an aerobic exercise. Now you know what you're thinking, right? If I cut my rest periods, my strength will suffer. And that is kind of true if you're doing heavy compound work near your max, but that even then you can periodize. You can have days for heavy work and you can have lighter, I'll say circuit style or superset style or hypertrophy style work. In fact, I have a program or two in physics university that's designed on that rotational structure. You might have a strength and a hypertrophy and kind of a hybrid day all in one week, which kind of serves these other goals at the same time. They're very efficient. And then you're not choosing between strength and cardio, you're scheduling them both in pretty efficiently. So rest periods is definitely an easy hack to think about. The second thing is actually compound movements themselves, right? The big squat, deadlift, press, rows, exercises that use large muscle groups and multiple joints are going to spike your heart rate the most. They just are. I mean, I used to do CrossFit and my heart rate would get way up, you know, like to 160s, 170s, whatever. The spikes came down over time as I got more fit, of course. But when I do really heavy deadlifts at 80% of my max, same thing happens. Same thing happens. Now, I might not be doing 20 of them for 10 minutes, like in CrossFit, right? And that's the difference of the volume, but you get a spike. If just look at your next, do a heavy set of squats and measure your heart rate and see what kind of demand you're getting for that. It's massive. And anybody who's done a decent amount of reps on heavy squats knows what the heck I'm talking about. In fact, it's why we sometimes fear doing like a set of eight when you get really strong and you're using heavy weights. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'd rather do eight than five. No, no, no, you wouldn't. Not always, trust me. Right? And then you're gasping, your heart's pounding, and you're you haven't even done any cardio, but it feels like it. So you definitely build work capacity that way because of the mechanisms we talked about, it we talked about. So if you're just lifting in a sort of traditional way with the big movements and then using isolation exercises to complement it with the dynamic work, with the superset stuff, with the short rest periods, you're gonna get a really big benefit for that. All right, the next one I want to mention is kind of related to what we already talked about, and this is more of the rep range. So if you use moderate or higher rep ranges, you're just naturally going to have a little bit more endurance training built in. That's just what it comes down to. It doesn't have to be a circuit training or superset per se, but just the fact that you're doing a little bit lighter work for, let's say, 15 or 20 reps. I mean, if you're leg pressing for 15 to 20 reps, you're gonna get a cardio benefit as you do that. And then you could add finishers to that. You can add, I don't care, kettlebell swings or sled pushes, farmer carries, those kinds of things people like to do, rather than a separate quote unquote cardio session. If you've never done a 50-yard sled push, I recommend it. It will feel like a sprint and your quads are gonna remind you about it the next day for sure. Okay. Then we have frequency. You don't have to just start going to the gym way more than you do to get the heart benefits. I still am a firm believer of find the minimum effective dose, increase the volume a little bit if you can fit it in. And, you know, not much more than that. In other words, for the most of us that have regular lives with busy lives, and we're not trying to compete or anything like that, I would say three full body or four or five split style program, you know, uh sessions a week for most people are gonna work and where you mix in some of the elements we've already talked about. Okay. When you do have off days, that is where extra walking or cycling or some form of cardio like that, or even sprinting, can add to your cardiovascular load without competing with your lifting. We're gonna do a whole episode about this coming up very, very soon. So remember to follow this show so you get that episode. So a very practical template would be three days of training a week, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that have this built-in cardio stimulus, two to three days of longer walks. You're you should be walking every day anyway, but I'm saying, like on the days when you don't lift, have something more intentional built in. It could be rucking with a rucksack, could be going for a hike, could be going for a bike ride, things like that. Could be putting a sprint or two in there as well. And that will cover your strength, your cardio, your daily movement, and you don't even have to add extra cardio per se, right? Like even in the off days, it could just be walking. So if you're time constrained, this is a really efficient approach. So I want to kind of wrap up here by talking about a concept called physical reserve. I want you to think of it like the gap between your maximal capacity and the effort required by your daily activities. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, playing with your kids or grandkids, getting off the floor. Right. When you have a low physical reserve, those everyday tasks are gonna be closer to your max. And that's where, and you look, some of you that are listening that are heavier, that are overweight, or maybe used to be, maybe you aren't GOP1s, it doesn't matter if you how you've lost weight, but you know what it is, right? You just out of breath, your heart rate spikes, your blood pressure goes up, you're just under stress from basic living. I don't want to see you living that way. I don't want to see people living that way. It's it's very sad. I see it all the time. It's it's a huge percentage of our population. And that is a cardiovascular risk factor that is just right there hiding in plain sight. And it's visible, it's visible, right? I'm not judging somebody because they're overweight. I am sad for them because I know that they care about their own their ability to do the things they want to do in life. And I think this all correlates with each other. And and what we talk about on the show will absolutely get you there. When you build muscle and strength through lifting, you expand that reserve. Right? That's why I think it's so important. It's not the cardio loan, isn't necessarily gonna do that. The things that used to tack your system, tax your system that are physical become easier. And your heart then isn't working as hard during your daily life, your blood pressure stays lower throughout the day. You're giving your heart system more margin. Okay, it's like over-engineering your body so it handles loads without the stress. That's what we want. And so, and then this matters more as we get older. Once you hit 40, 45, 50, you're the default, the default is losing muscle and losing strength and gaining fat and gaining belly fat, watching that reserve shrink until normal activities then are constantly stressing your heart, which is why people get heart disease and why heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So the investment you make in training isn't just about the superficial things or the time in the gym. It's one of the most important investments in your life. So, whatever time it takes, which it shouldn't take very long if you listen to this show, we want you to be efficient about it, it could be the most important time you invest, other than say, though, the time in your relationships and maybe your sleep. Right? So then your heart doesn't have to work as hard to support you through everything else you do. And that is, I'll say, the real argument for lifting as cardiovascular medicine, along with the other forms of movement we talked about. All right, so that's like the main thrust of this episode. Now I'm right after this, I'm gonna share that 10-second heart rate recovery test I mentioned. It's a really practical tool to give you immediate feedback. You could start tracking it as you train. If you want to put that into practice, anything we talked about today, with personalized guidance, but without hiring a one-on-one coach, check out Fitness Lab. This app is so powerful, guys. We're getting amazing feedback on how it listens to you, helps you through hard times, adapts to your goals. What whether that's building strength, losing fat, improving your blood markers, all of the above, it gives you tasks to do every day and it gives you coaching on exactly what's going on so you don't guess. And it pulls in your data to help with that. So it's 20% off now through February 17th. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app for 20% off. All right, here's the 10-second heart rate recovery test. Here's a simple test. It takes 10 seconds and tells you more about your cardiovascular fitness than your resting heart rate does. At the end of your heartest set in the gym, that set that leaves you breathing really heavy, check your heart rate. So if you have a wearable, you could do that, or you can do it manually by counting your pulse for six seconds and multiplying it by 10. Then I want you to be totally still. Sit or stand still for one minute and check it again. So check your heart rate right after the heavy set, check it again a minute later. That difference is your heart rate recovery, your HR. So if your heart rate drops by 12 or more beats in that minute, that's considered normal. If it's less than 12, then based on research, this is a marker of reduced cardiovascular fitness and increased mortality risk. So you want it to be at least 12. And then over time, as your fitness improves from lifting and moving and being, you know, having this lifestyle, you're you should see that number go up. You might start at 15 and eventually get to 25 or maybe 30. It is one of the most responsive fitness markers available. I don't think I've ever talked about it on the show. It's so easy. You don't need equipment, you don't need blood work. It's called heart rate recovery. Just try it at your next session. Pick the most demanding set, measure your peak heart rate, wait a minute, measure how much it dropped, write it down, do it again every few weeks and see what the trend looks like. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, every rep you do isn't just building muscle. It is building a stronger heart, healthier blood vessels, a longer life. I'm Philip Cape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

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Does HRT Cause Weight Gain or Help Fat Loss After 40? (Dr. Maria Sophocles) | Ep 439

Are hormones making you gain belly fat? 

Is menopause really breaking your metabolism, or is something else going on? And does hormone replacement therapy help or hurt body recomp after 40?

Body recomp, weight loss, hormone health, and women’s fitness all collide in this conversation with Dr. Maria Sophocles, a board-certified OBGYN and nationally recognized menopause expert with 30 years of clinical experience. 

We break down why women lose muscle, gain abdominal fat, and struggle with metabolism during perimenopause and menopause even when nutrition, macros, and strength training are dialed in.

We unpack what estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone actually do for fat distribution, muscle building, insulin sensitivity, and longevity. We also tackle the biggest fear head-on: does HRT cause weight gain?

If you care about lifting weights, strength training over 40, and sustainable weight loss, this episode brings clarity instead of confusion.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Menopause and weight fears
5:33 – Why belly fat increases
9:15 – Hormones vs metabolism myths
13:56 – Muscle loss and calorie needs
20:18 – Does HRT cause weight gain
27:13 – Estrogen and fat distribution
28:24 – Progesterone and sleep effects
31:24 – Testosterone and muscle building
34:16 – Labs and doses
38:31 – Health risks and best time to start HRT
45:30 – Four HRT takeaways

Episode resources:

• Instagram: @mariasophoclesmd 

• Website: mariasophoclesmd.com 

• Book: The Bedroom Gap: Rewrite the Rules and Roles of Sex in Midlife

• TED Talk: What happens to sex in midlife? A look at the "bedroom gap"

• YouTube: @drmariasophocles 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're a woman approaching and going through menopause, who's been afraid to consider hormone replacement therapy because you've heard it causes weight gain and you've been watching your body composition shift, more belly fat, less muscle, a metabolism that feels broken, wondering if hormones are part of the problem or part of the solution, this episode's for you. Today I invited on a board-certified OPGYN, nationally recognized menopause specialist with 30 years of clinical experience to separate fat from fiction on HRT and body composition. When you understand what the research shows about estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, their effects on fat distribution, metabolism, and muscle preservation, then you can make an informed decision about your health and physique. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're going to tackle one of the most common fears that women have about hormone replacement therapy, and that is weight gain. Dr. Maria Sophocles is a board-certified OBGYN and certified menopause practitioner. I'm thrilled to have her on the show. She's been a visiting professor and NIH researcher. She spent three decades helping women navigate perimenopause and menopause. She's a TED speaker, author of the upcoming book, The Bedroom Gap: Rewrite the Rules and Roles of Sex in Midlife. Today you're going to learn what the latest research says about HRT and things like body weight, estrogen in your metabolism, fat distribution. We might get into testosterone therapy and muscle preservation and just how to think about hormones as part of an evidence-based approach to body composition and health after 40. Maria, thank you so much for joining me here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 1:56

  Philip, I am so glad to be here. This is so much more fun than what I've been doing all morning.

  Philip Pape: 2:01

  Oh, glad. I love it. I love it. Let's bring the energy. And our listeners are going to love this too because they know I like to frame these discussions with like the basics and stepping back a bit. And what I would love to explore a little bit is we think of perimenopause into the menopause transition and postmenopause starting as early as mid-30s, you know, all the way through when that time occurs. And there's a lot of misconceptions about weight gain and body fat distribution. Now, I've talked on this show about some of the under our understanding of expenditure and metabolic rate, how most people on average have the quote unquote same metabolism from their 20s to their 60s. And yet women are experiencing all of these issues with weight gain and body fat into as early as their 40s and 50s. And so let's reconcile what's actually happening, even when there's no HRT involved with the average population, knowing many of them are not resistance training and a lot of our audience are, but let's just talk about the average to start.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 3:01

  Yeah, of course. I think that the first thing to know is let's let's do a super basic definition of what menopause is. It's our ovaries age more quickly than other organs in our body. That's how we're built as humans. And there's a lot of cool biotech companies looking into actually slowing or stopping ovarian aging, which is just mind-blowing if you think about it, because it means potentially women would be fertile for their whole lives. Uh also means you could have periods your whole lives, but it also means that you wouldn't have this aging out. You wouldn't have this loss of what we call ovarian sex steroids, which we know are worth a lot of gold. They're a lot more than just being able to be pregnant. Keeping estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in your body affects bone health, brain health, heart health. We call it preservation of function. And all of those functions take a big hit when menopause occurs. So if menopauses, if that definition is sort of the cessation of function of the ovary, what that really means in terms of hormone production is you get a drop in estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, those three big ones. I'm sure your listeners are smart and they all know that because they've been listening to your 400 episodes and you've got a whole following of bright, informed people. But for anyone who isn't sure, that's what menopause is. It's from when that happens, the average age in the United States, about 51 and a half. But women are living longer. So now you are gonna live as a woman if you're healthy and you do things right, a third of your life without the benefit of those ovarian hormones. And yep, you can get around that somewhat with uh strength training and you know, all kinds of exercise and and being perfect diet and all kinds of stuff. But the bottom line is those effects are going to begin. The effects on bone, on heart, on brain, on muscle. And we know that estrogen has effects on all of those things, plus joints, plus the synovial fluid that keeps our joints, you know, lubricated, plus our skin, plus our hair. I I could go on and on.

  Philip Pape: 5:12

  Pretty much every muscle mass plus muscle, right?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 5:15

  Uh and and and the unsexy stuff too, like eyes and teeth, dental health, gums, ears, it's pretty hard to find something that isn't impacted. Our heart, our heart rhythm. Um, so it's um it probably our gut microbiome, our vaginal microbiome, our bladder. Like I could go on and on. And I don't, I'm not being Debbie Downer. I'm just saying, you know, if you're a woman out there and you haven't had a urinary tract infection since you were a teenager and now you're getting two, three a year, don't kid yourself. It's because there's not as much estrogen making blood vessels around the bladder to keep things clean and healthy, and and making the vagina keep bacteria that keeps the bad bacteria out. So it's all very related. So that's kind of what menopause is. And people ask me pretty much every day, because I run a menopause practice that's virtual. So patients from different states call in, we have consults. They say, What why am I gaining weight and why is it all in my belly? Those are probably the two most common questions I get. Because everyone knows why they're getting hot flashes. There's not a woman in America that doesn't know that a hush is related to menopause, but they didn't expect the weight gain. And this really makes people frustrated when they are already health conscious and they're already doing all the things well. Yes. They're like, they they literally put their hand up and go, Don't tell me to stop going to Burger King because I don't. Don't tell me to stop eating cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, because I don't, you know, and I'm like, I'm sorry.

  Philip Pape: 6:45

  This is where you see the comments on Instagram under like some 25-year-old, you know, male uh personal trainer, right? And you see the comments like, Don't talk to me about this. I'm doing all these things already.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 6:56

  Yeah, but for midlife women, it is super frustrating because they they often truly are eating and drinking correctly and they've done their reading and they're listening to all the right podcasts, like wits and weights. So people always say, Why? Why? What did I do wrong? Why? Well, first of all, it's not like just you. 85% of all midlife women get have unexplained and undesired weight gain in menopause. 85%. So if you're gaining a little men know tummy, you're actually in the norm. Not that we want it. And society does not is not very forgiving. You know, no Hollywood directors like, I'd really like to cast someone with a belly hanging out over the bikini. I mean, we live in a society that doesn't accept that that's the norm and we don't want it. I don't want it either myself. So I feel you, is what I'm saying. But 85% will have undesired and unexplained weight gain in the abdomen. So if you want to understand the science behind why, because I do think, Philip, you and your followers seem to really want to know the science. This is a one I've I'm on zillions of podcasts, and some people actually don't want to know. Yours is pretty brainy, I find your followers kind of know. Yeah. So let me explain why. When those ovaries go to sleep in menopause, both the estrogen and the testosterone are decreasing, and but it's oversimplification to think they both just shut off and go to zero. They don't. The ovary stays alive and keeps making hormones, but a tiny little amount. And for most women, the estrogen drops more than the testosterone does. So if you look at my hands and they're both dropping, the testosterone drops less, so that metabolism sees something it hadn't seen before, which is a relative up of prevalence of testosterone relative to estrogen. And you haven't seen that as a woman your whole life. That's part of being a woman. That's why we don't have super high testosterone in your mom's uterus when you're a fetus growing, all these little things happened uh when you had two X chromosomes that quieted the testosterone. Whereas if you were an XY fetus becoming a male, you had a whole lot more testosterone made. So since you were as a female fetus, you've had this testosterone pretty suppressed. There, we've all made it. We make it for sure. But the estrogen kind of zoomed ahead and was sort of the dominant hormone. Now you're in menopause, they both drop, but the estrogen drops way more. So suddenly your body sees testosterone. Well, what does it do metabolically with that? Metabolically, with that picture, where fat is deposited is what changes. It doesn't make you fat, it changes where the fat goes. So it is preferentially deposited on the abdomen. How do we know this is the case? This isn't a Maria Sophocles idea. This is people way smarter than me who figured this out. They looked at male fat deposition. And if you look at a male who gains weight, they don't get heavy thighs and a big bottom. They don't get it on their hips, they get it on their belly.

  Philip Pape: 10:13

  That's right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 10:13

  You know, look at those like German guys at Oktoberfest, right? Their little butts and their legs are skinny, but their bellies are huge.

  Philip Pape: 10:20

  And we kind of accept it, right? Like, okay, you expect men to have big bellies, even in their 20s and 30s. Yeah, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 10:25

  Yeah, I'm a male. This is where it's gonna go. And you and I know it doesn't have to be that way, and we know you can be more fit than that. But if you just leave it to wherever your metabolism wants to put fat, and you give it enough fat or calories, it's gonna put it on your belly preferentially as a male. And as a menopausal female, there is this shift. It doesn't mean you can't gain weight in your butt and your legs, but there's a shift towards a preference or uh to deposit in the belly. And man, does this piss women off to be living the same life you've lived for the last 10 years as a woman and suddenly you're getting a belly? And I think there's shame behind it, Philip. I think women see the belly and they think, man, everyone's gonna think I sit up all night and eat Cheetos, binging Netflix, and I'm not. I'm going to Pilates, I'm doing yoga. You know, there's a lot of psychology behind this belly fat that is devastating to women. I mean, you know, it's easy to be like, oh, come on, you're only 10 pounds overweight. But it really bothers them because they're trying to do the right thing. Their own metabolism is betraying them based on what's happening in the ovaries.

  Philip Pape: 11:32

  Does that make sense? It makes total sense because I hear it from women who are in that age and they're asking for like training advice where they've already gotten pretty lean and now they're like, my triceps and my abdomen, and they still, you know, want to work on the butt, right? That's always there. But it's like the uh the abdomen, you know, the belly area and the triceps and some odd areas that I hear over and over again. I don't again, I don't know where the try the arms come into it, if that's related as well. But definitely.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 11:57

  I think it's that we see it. Like the reason people women care about the triceps, because they all ask me the same thing. Like, how do I do this? It's because when we wear a sleeveless top, right, we know that if any fat deposits there, it's seen. You can see it. And so it's limiting, it's wardrobe limiting. I know that sounds so vain, but it it is wardrobe limiting, you've got something jiggling there. Whether you have a nice bicep or not, if you've got something jiggle there, that's it, it's like, oh, rats, you know. So midlife weight changes. So let's also do a real basic statement that menopause itself doesn't cause the weight gain, it causes a redistribution and a change in body composition. So weight changes are driven by I'm gonna give you like four or five points that we could list or we could, you know, declining estrogen, loss of muscle mass, because we need that muscle mass, because muscle mass requires more calories than fat does to maintain. So if we lose muscle mass, it's simple math, and keep the same calories, we're gonna gain weight. So you either have to really cut those calories down, which no one tells you, or you need to build muscle mass. Ideally, you actually do both, you know, and and this is why the GLP ones work so well. But GLP ones work well if you combine them with building muscle mass. You know, I didn't want to, I don't work for the GLP one company.

  Philip Pape: 13:18

  So don't worry, we talk about it a lot.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 13:20

  Okay, good, good, good. So I've been I've been prescribing them for 10 years, so I'm I'm in it's old hat in my office. So declining estrogen, loss of muscle mass, reduced resting metabolic rate. Our metabolic rate does drop down. Another reason why menopausal women need about 250 calories less a day, which by the way, Philip, no one tells you that. You know, there is no such thing as, you know, we have sex ed for teens. Well, in my opinion, we need a sex ed for menopause, but we also need a health and fitness ed for menopausal women. And there isn't that. So they're thank goodness they're learning it from people like you and me.

  Philip Pape: 13:57

  Can we hit on that one real quick? Because that's the one that I think has a lot of confusion, right? There's like all the new research from Herman Ponser about the constrain versus the additive model of expenditure. And there's, you know, we look at population studies that show pretty stable RMR, but then when it counted for body composition, we see the differences. And so I'm wondering if number two and three are just kind of linked, or is this specific to the hormones, you know, as an independent variable?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:24

  I think it's specific to hormones as an independent variable because if we take away any hormone factor, then what I said, it flies in the face of what you said. They're opposite, and they're not opposite. They're right, if resting metabolic rate stays the same, none of this should happen. But is that reminds some change?

  Philip Pape: 14:40

  Yeah, what I'm saying is the RMR dropping by 250 calories, is it part of the loss of muscle mass causing that?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:48

  Yes, yes.

  Philip Pape: 14:49

  They're all right as well as like, I mean, I always wonder how how often we're teasing out things like uh chronic stress in that population and stuff like that, because that also exacerbates.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 14:59

  I mean, you know, I'm making these big, giant generalizations. You understand that, right? There's individual variation and a lecture I gave this week on wellness. Uh, so cool. If any of your listeners uh belong to the Noom app, they can find the live stream of Noom's first Art of Wellness Summit that was done in Princeton, New Jersey day before yesterday. Incredible lectures on that. And one of the things we talked about, um, this is a little tangent, but then I'll come back, was that loneliness and not being socialized decreases your oxytocin even oxytocin decreases with age, but if you're lonely and isolated, it decreases even more. And the the kind of mic drop thing I brought to the lecture was that oxytocin actually relates to our ability to build and maintain muscle. So when you get old people living alone, their muscle wasting is even faster than old people who live in groups or go to church or a bowling league or whatever their book group, they're socialized, their oxytocin goes up, and we see they're better at building and maintaining muscle. Isn't that wild?

  Philip Pape: 16:07

  Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 16:08

  You know, so don't be alone. Go join a book group or something. Get your oxytocin.

  Philip Pape: 16:13

  I think it's also correlated with it's like the with happiness, like you know, social uh connection is the number one rated correlation with happiness and well-being, and you know, meaning in life.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 16:23

  Totally, totally. And my lecture was on sex and longevity and health and why being sexually active releases dopamine, releases oxytocin, you know, and actually is part of a pillar of health because when you're releasing those, you feel more pumped to exercise, to tackle your life, to go out and socialize. So kind of cool how it's all related, right?

  Philip Pape: 16:44

  It is all related. It's funny. I know we're not going to get into, well, we could talk about sex because I know it's an area of expertise, but like that also is a big frustration with women. You know, I work with a lot of clients one-on-one and we get into these more private conversations, but it's like, now you don't have your libido, now you don't have the desire, now you feel like you're not desired, and then that all exacerbates not having sex. Exactly.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:03

  Mike, tell them what Google TED Talk Maria Sophocles, and they'll see the TED Talk. We'll throw it in there.

  Philip Pape: 17:08

  We'll put that in there.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:09

  We'll throw it in there. So let's go back. Midlife weight changes. I kind of wrote this down so I wouldn't forget them. Driven by declining estrogen, loss of muscle, reduced RMR, resting metabolic rate. And there's also an increased insulin resistance. So so many factors. And again, I think that's also why, you know, people gain and they feel like they're not doing anything different. The same uh few snacks of licorice, which, you know, okay, we're all allowed to cheat and have something, uh, and and they're gaining weight and they feel like I'm not sinning any more than I used to. But if you have increased insulin resistance, you this is a different metabolic picture, you know.

  Philip Pape: 17:48

  Do we know if like things like leptin resistance are also part of the equation, which causes worsening in appetite from like usually it's from chronic dieting, but yes, but I think I gotta check that.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 17:58

  I don't want to misspeak. Oh man, you caught me. I gotta check that. And I got asked that a few months ago and I had to look it up. And my my poor little menopause brain, it leaked out. But that's a great question. And now I'm not gonna forget because I've been asked twice. But don't forget about lifestyle factors too. Midlife for men and women is often a time of sleep deprivation. People are peaking in their careers, you know. I need this report, I need this. Their parents are aging, their kids are older. They they tend there tends to be sleep deprivation and sleep sleep disruption because we know that hormonal changes cause sleep disruption. Lack of estrogen really affects sleep in multiple ways. So women are sleeping less, they're not going to bed at the same time every night, and their sleep is very disrupted, a lot of light sleep. So that massively affects. There's a study out that showed that women with sleep disruption consume 350 calories a day more than women who have, you know, perfect steady sleep. So that is such a bummer because the sleep disruption is so common. So you're getting all this stuff stacked against you. So I just want women out there to know this isn't just you. You're not just lazy or overeating cheetahs, or you know, this is really a lot of cards stacked against you. And it doesn't mean we can't help them. It just means it's not something you're necessarily doing wrong. During the menopausal transition, women gain on average, I think, five to ten pounds. But you know, the average height of a American woman's five, four. So I'm five, two. I can tell you five to ten pounds on me, it's a big deal. For sure. And sadly, some women saying it's 30, you know. Um, and that's also because of COVID.

  Philip Pape: 19:44

  Remember, we're coming off COVID where they might have gained, and then that I was wondering how far does that weight gain outpace male weight gain during the same age range? I'm curious about that. I'm guessing men gain weight just in general. Everybody gains weight as they get older because they're not doing certain things.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 20:02

  They gain waist circumference for sure, because remember, it's all getting deposited in the waist, but I know that women catch up in the waist circumference. They they start getting the waist circumference ads, but I don't know the absolute, like how many pounds men, because I don't treat men.

  Philip Pape: 20:18

  Oh, yeah, I was just curious the relative in terms of relative body weight, because I definitely know what you mean with the great question. Yeah. Okay, so that so this is good because you you listed some major factors. Fortunately, we we do discuss a lot of that here, and so it's very relevant, but it's also bidirectional, right? Because number one, you listed was the estrogen, and we started this conversation with framing around hormones, and we don't want to say like hormones are the root of every problem, right? Like any of these things, it's nuanced and multifactorial, and yeah, one supports the other. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 20:48

  No, it's exactly stress, sleep, you know, a lot of things, uh, self-esteem, you know, a lot of these things, sexually active. I mean, all those things. We know that women who are sexually active actually have fewer menopausal symptoms. That doesn't mean they gain less weight, just means fewer and more mild menopausal symptoms. But estrogen therapy, can we switch to that for a sec?

  Philip Pape: 21:07

  Yes, because we're gonna talk about HRT and like there's fears of weight gain on HRT, which I actually didn't realize that was a big fear personally, because I'm in a different population where like people have heard good things about HRT. But yeah, we want to address this.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 21:22

  Well, anything that could be weight gain is a fear for women. They really hate it. Any med, if I put someone on medication that has nothing to do with weight or whatever, people's first question is like, Am I gonna gain weight?

  Philip Pape: 21:32

  Does it cause weight gain? Yes.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 21:33

  Don't you want to know if it like causes cancer or something? No, they just want to know if it causes weight gain. So, no estrogen therapy does not cause weight gain. Okay, that's happy. So, anyone out there who's staying off estrogen because they worried it causes weight gain, that's not. Does it mean we all don't know someone? Sure, there's always someone who says, Well, my aunt gained 30 pounds. We don't know. Was she gonna gain those 30 pounds? Was she did she quit smoking? Which can, you know, I'm glad she quit smoking. It's healthier, but some people who quit smoking start snacking. And so it's you know, who knows if it's the if it's the estrogen therapy. No, estrogen therapy itself, it also doesn't cause weight loss. So I don't want to mix that up, but it does reduce visceral fat. It does reduce, I mean it does improve insulin sensitivity, and it does preserve lean muscle mass. So those are all good things, and it may slightly increase resting energy expenditure. So I I don't want to sound like an estrogen salesman, but that's I but I also don't want people to think, okay, I'll go on estrogen therapy and I better lose all this weight. No, that's that's not why you go on. You go on estrogen therapy either to control menopause symptoms or to preserve function of brain, heart, bone, or both.

  Philip Pape: 22:49

  Yeah, but that's not sexy, Maria. I know, but no, no, that's I'm speaking for my listener, right? They're like, Yeah, yeah, okay, that's fine, but you know, I really need need a good reason to go. And and those are good reasons. I'm just joking.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 23:00

  Yeah, no, I know. Sexy is take this and you'll melt away all the fat, your legs will get longer and all your wrinkles are go away. And that that's a mistake, you know. I mean, even now women put estrogen on their face, and there's, you know, they're as long as you're not overdoing it, it's probably not dangerous. But we don't really have great data to say that if you put estrogen on your skin, the wrinkles are gonna go away. We know that the best thing that you can put on your face to is sunblock to prevent wrinkles, or retinoids, which uh have been shown to create new collagen. And there are some small studies that do look promising for estrogen on the face. So, you know, you're welcome to buy it and do it. I'm never gonna tell you not to, but you know, even things like that, we we don't have 10-year studies or anything. So, buyer beware. There's a lot of stuff out there, you know, it's it's probably it's probably harmless, but we, you know, and same thing with systemic estrogen therapy. We have tons of data on that, on cancer reduction risk. We know that's very strong. Dementia prevention, a little weaker, uh, cardiovascular benefit, pretty strong. Bone health, super strong, super strong. The best thing you can do to be a strong 75 to 95-year-old woman is regular exercise and using estrogen in your 50s and 60s systemically to slow the decline of the loss of bone.

  Philip Pape: 24:25

  So let's talk about then that who should be using it. If if you had a thousand women walk in your office, you know, taking out any conflict of interest for services, or like obviously, and they were in their 40s and 50s, like, are we saying 100% of women would benefit at some point because you're gonna lose it no matter what? You live till you're 80 or 90?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 24:43

  Close to 100%. Uh, the only women who absolutely should not are women who currently have a cancer that is dependent on estrogen, a breast cancer or an ovarian cancer. That said, that's stating the obvious, but I better state it. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to find a woman. Uh, we used to say no women with heart attacks or strokes because estrogen can make clots, but that was the old formulations that were oral. Now we don't use oral, we use transdermal gel, patch, spray. Because it goes through the skin, it doesn't go through the liver, and you don't have the clotting issues, you don't get the cholesterol bump, and they're so, so much safer. So now it's very rare that I have to look a woman who wants it in the eye and say, I'm sorry, you just can't do it. And it's usually someone who already has a cancer. We know the genetics of that cancer. And of course, those are the women that come in with a million hot flashes saying, please, please put me on it. But we do have non-hormonal things for those women, FDA-approved non-hormonal things. We have we have herbal supplements that actually work quite well. So we have non-prescription and prescription things. We have devices like this little bracelet, the ember wave. This was invented at MIT by two scientists. It goes on your wrist. The little bracelet part goes on the inside. It actually senses hot flashes in the brain and it cools the wrist in this funky uh on-off kind of pattern, and it stops the hot flashes. So plenty of things that are not estrogen if you need help.

  Philip Pape: 26:14

  Okay, I know I know some women that would like to know about that lot, that uh that jewelry there.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:19

  EMBR wave, embr wave.

  Philip Pape: 26:23

  Ember, like like on a fire. That's cool. Okay, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:25

  It also heats. Like if you're someone who's always cold, it's a different button you push and it'll warm you. So it's pretty cool. Ember Labs is the company. And uh I think I love it, it's interesting. Yeah, I love tech too. I mean, look at all the cool data we can get now, right?

  Philip Pape: 26:40

  It's right, that's right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 26:41

  I think it's gonna help us be able to be better patients because we can advocate for what we have. And I hope that the medical education system will catch up. So when you walk in with an aura ring or whoop, your doctor will have it downloaded and your doctor will be able to say, Hey, right now, no, they're behind.

  Philip Pape: 26:59

  Right now, my two doctors a mile apart can't even get the same information.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:02

  So you know that we're embarrassed by where it is now. That's why people like you and I have to kind of own it ourselves. I think.

  Philip Pape: 27:10

  Yeah, I think it's great.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:12

  That's okay, it's just where we are. Um, but on the central fat accumulation kind of one last thing. Yeah, no, for sure. Women who are on estrogen therapy tend to have less central abdominal fat accumulation compared with those not on HRT. So that is a kind of sexy thing to say.

  Philip Pape: 27:33

  That's good.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:34

  That's as sexy as I might be able to get today. I don't know.

  Philip Pape: 27:36

  No, I mean we've established that most women probably could benefit other than via a specific population that that just can't. We've established that it helps with a lot of these things you talked about before, including maybe a resting metabolic rate, definitely your the symptoms, and gives you resistance, and gives them resistance, resistance, gives you physiological replacement, all of that. Uh and then like and the root, the root matters.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 27:59

  The transdermal A is safer, B, it's good for everyone, and C, you get less fluid retention, which is what a lot of people perceived as weight gain from the olden days when it was oral, and you get less impact on cholesterol and triglycerides in a negative way. And so if you prefer if weight gain's an issue for you or metabolic concerns, you want to make sure you're transdermal.

  Philip Pape: 28:23

  Transdermal. And then that segues into the other two hormones you mentioned. And I know there are others, there maybe thyroid and DHAA, but let's just focus progesterone and testosterone. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 28:33

  Yeah. So progesterone is weight neutral. There's no effect on weight from progesterone. I have had patients tell me, I swear to you, I gained weight on progesterone. I I believe them because I believe my patients. But if you look at a thousand women and you look at the science, it's it does, it's not supposed to put any weight on you. I think if you treat enough people, you're gonna have someone for whom that's not true. But in general, weight neutral and progesterone, I call it proslee because it can have positive effects on sleep. If you take it orally, it releases something called GABA in the brain, which is almost like a whiteboard for your brain. So when you've got too much, your brain's gonna explode. It helps you sleep. And so what we said before counts. If you sleep better, you eat better, you exercise better, your outlook for the day is better. So I would say progesterone, if you have a uterus, you need progesterone. Remember, if you've had a hysterectomy, you do not need progesterone. You could take it if you wanted, but you don't need it. When we give it as hormone replacement therapy, we give estrogen for symptoms and preservation of function, and progesterone to protect the uterus from estrogen growing tissue. And you know, estrogen has great effects everywhere except the breast if you have cancer. Uh, if you don't have cancer, it doesn't have negative effects on the breast and on the uterus where it'll cause tissue to grow. And after menopause, you don't want any tissue growing there. That's why we give the progesterone. As far as weight, there are different types of progesterone. Okay. There's a micronized progesterone, and that is the most natural progesterone we have. The brand of that, I don't know if we're allowed to say brands, is called Prometrium, P-R-O-M-E-T-R-I-U-M. That is probably the best one in terms of no issues for weight. It's very natural. The more synthetic stuff, when you get into synthetic progesterones like MPA, madroxy, progesterone, acetate, those are more likely to cause an increased appetite. So now it may not be weight neutral, more likely to cause fluid retention, more likely even to cause mood changes. So let's just say the flavor. The flavor of progesterone you are given matters. Um, so do ask for micronized progesterone.

  Philip Pape: 30:50

  Micronized.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 30:51

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be made by a fancy compounding pharmacy. You can pick it up at CVS or Walgreens, but the type of progesterone matters much more than whether it's used or not.

  Philip Pape: 31:01

  Is that a cream as well?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 31:03

  Uh no, there are progesterone suppositories and creams, but those creams on the market are not FDA approved or anything. I'm not saying they don't work. I'm saying if you want to go with something with a lot of nice data behind it that's safe, you want a prescription for the prometrium or the generic of prometrium called micronized progesterone. Okay. Um testosterone. I want to do test progesterone because it's kind of short and sweet.

  Philip Pape: 31:29

  Right. I like it.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 31:31

  Yeah. So testosterone is kind of all the rage. I've been using it in women for 20 years. So I'm like, oh, everyone's just figuring this out. But it is made in women, as I said, even in little babies and young girls make testosterone. When the ovaries stop making it, we do have a deficiency in it. This can affect our libido. This can affect our ability to build lean muscle mass. So low dose testosterone in women. And I have to use the word may because it's not because there aren't studies or data, because again, we live in a country where we have to discern between something that's FDA approved or not. And we do not have an FDA-approved testosterone for women. We do for men. So I'll say may. It may increase lean muscle mass and improve insulin sensitivity, and it may enhance energy and motivation. So that's my textbook. If you were my med student, how I would teach you. What do I see with my patients? I see that in the right ranges, it definitely improves energy, outlook, lean muscle mass. It's been phenomenal and libido. The kicker is the levels, right? The levels in a postmenopausal woman are pretty low. They're close to zero. The levels in a pre-menopausal woman, 30 to 40. If I just give you enough, Philip, if you're my female patient and I give you enough to get you back to your pre-menopausal level, most of my patients don't feel much of anything. I have to really get a little higher than that. And that's where we're walking a little tightrope of we have data from trans women. You know, that's where the data comes from. Because when trans women choose to take testosterone to get a beard and stuff, they're taking huge doses.

  Philip Pape: 33:20

  To masculinize, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 33:21

  Yeah, to masculinize. So, and they're pretty safe. So, so I feel comfortable sneaking up a little above that normal range, uh, into like the 90 to 100, 120 range. And at that range, women come in and they're like, first of all, I want sex again, which is fun. I initiate, which is fun. I go to the gym and work and work and work and get nothing. But now that I'm taking the testosterone, I actually see some definition and that feels good and it makes me feel happy. One woman told me, My world is like, uh, what did she say? It's like a rainbow now or something. It was some corny phrase, but I knew what she meant. She had energy and a good outlook. And so I, you know, I use it. It does not cause weight gain, you know, when we dose it correctly. I never have anyone come in and say the testosterone caused weight gain. Um, so I think, you know, those those are your three. Um, but I want to hear what you want your listeners to hear more about.

  Philip Pape: 34:21

  I mean, two questions on testosterone. One, you mentioned earlier the ratio of testosterone to estrogen increases uh naturally. And so are you doing them in conjunction or is it just you get the labs and the testosterone is just really low. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 34:34

  Well, let's talk about the labs, okay? I use labs for testosterone because I treat people all according to their symptoms. How do you feel? But also with testosterone, I follow the labs because I don't have an FDA-approved thing where I know this has been tested on 10,000 women and we don't need to check the labs. It's always between X and Y. So, and women metabolize it differently. They have a protein in their blood called sex hormone binding globulin. So, if anybody out there is getting testosterone therapy, your clinician should be checking your total testosterone and your sex hormone binding globulin, because if it's super well, I don't want to overkill it, but that that's important. So I treat according to subjective needs, but also within the parameters of safe levels for testosterone. For estrogen and progesterone, we actually don't treat levels, we treat symptoms, right? So if Mrs. Smith is on an estradiol patch and her hot flashes are totally gone away and she feels great, I don't need to increase her estrogen dose. If she comes in and says, Wow, you put me on this patch and my breasts feel huge and swollen and tender and I'm miserable and I'm spotting now, well, I probably aimed a little too high and we need to go down. It's kind of that simple. So a lot of clinicians who get money from labs are now charging a lot to do a lot of labs. And I would urge people to be very cautious about anyone who's ordering a hundred estrogen labs on you. Same with breaking the estrogen down into estrone and estradiol and estriol. Estradiol is the dominant estrogen. It's what we replace, it's bioidentical, even though you can get it at CVS and Walgreens, and you don't need it from a fancy compounded pharmacy. You don't need it in pellets. You can use the patch or the gel safely. It's been well vetted. The doses are very consistent and it's covered by your insurance. Um, and it's all you need. The others just morph into estradiol anyway. So people have made entire careers off of this many labs, stacks and stacks of labs, convincing people they're estrogen dominant or they need some weird form of estrogen. It's really you're spending money, you don't need to spend.

  Philip Pape: 36:50

  Yeah, it's kind of a wild west with functional medicine out there today.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 36:54

  And some of it's great. I'm not, but some people have taken it to such an extreme that patients come in with 50 pages of lab work and they say, I am so confused. I don't know what I'm on, I don't know what I need. And we usually can really simplify it down. So they're getting the true health benefits without eight different things.

  Philip Pape: 37:15

  Okay. And then the testosterone is also transdermal. I know you caution against like the pellets. I've never heard good things about those, but I'm not sure.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 37:22

  Oops, I caution against them, but but because they can be super, super high doses, but in the right hands, people tracking them, that's okay. You know, I just caution against um when people are having you know crazy high stuff and then their voice changes or the clitoris enlarges. Some of those things don't reverse.

  Philip Pape: 37:42

  And you can't do anything about it because the pellet is there, right?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 37:45

  Yeah, and it's stuck for the next few months. So I just I think at least I would say maybe baby step and start with the lower dose and come in and have a good clinician where you can face to face say, Hey, I know you're trying to be safe with me, but I don't feel any benefit. Okay, all right, we'll go up. But if you start wham, high and you've got acne and chin hair, and you're moody and you're raging and you have road rage, because I've had people come in with that and they say, get the pellet out of me. Somebody put that in, and I want to kill my husband, and I'm screaming at everyone, and I have acne. And I'm like, I I can't do anything for you, you know. Um, go to go to Bali for three months and do meditation. Like, so you gotta, you just gotta be careful of who's treating you and what's their ethos and stuff. I I think safety is a great place to start, you know. But I also have testosterone be so helpful for women.

  Philip Pape: 38:38

  I think this is great the way you're simplifying it today. And I know speaking of safety, maybe we should just put to bed in case anybody isn't already the any cancer risks, you know, from like the women's health initiative, you know, and also the synthetic versus the natural, if there's any differences there, yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 38:54

  Yeah, yeah. So cancerous, that's so smart. And it it we could say it a hundred times. We could do a hundred episodes of it because in case anybody misses it, it's one of the single biggest sadnesses in women's health for the last 25 years. 23 years ago, a study came out and they evaluated the data incorrectly and they announced at the FDA hormones, estrogen causes cancer. It increases the risk of cancer. The whole world went crazy. Everyone stopped using it. When the data was redone and properly statistically analyzed, the fearful stuff did not make statistical significance. It didn't, it's like if I'm in the NCAA championships and it's tied and there's one second left, and I throw a three-pointer and it hits the rim and then falls out. I don't get a point for that. I lose. You only get it if it goes in the hoop. And this the data did not meet, did not go through the hoop, but they announced that it did because they kind of thought it was trending that way. And that oops has cost, we believe, 150,000 lives, premature deaths of women. Isn't that stunning? Wow. Stunning. Yeah, we've a Yale study now showed how many women have died prematurely because of that incorrect news because they got their estrogen prescription and then got scared and threw it out. The data since then, and there's a ton, has shown quite the opposite. Women on HRT, which is estrogen if you have no uterus, or estrogen and progesterone if you have a uterus, have a reduced rate of cancer. When they use that HRT between 50 and 60, probably even early 60s, it's a in the 30%, 30-something percent reduction in breast cancer, about a 40% reduction in colon cancer. I mean, there isn't enough fiber on the planet to lower your colon cancer risk that much. Massive reduction in osteoporosis development, which women my age, you know, 25, just kidding, I'm much older than that, don't think about osteoporosis yet. But believe me, when you're 70 and 75 and 80 and all your friends are falling and going to assisted living, you wish someone had told you this. So the best thing you can do to be a healthy 75, 85, 90-year-old is to slow the bone loss now. The most rapid loss of bone is in the first five years after menopause. That's your magic window. And so to get estrogen then and put the breaks on the bone loss then pays you dividends. It's like putting money in a savings account when you're young. It grows so much by the time you're old. So I think the WHI, by telling people it was dangerous, it caused a lot of harm. Now we recommend uh HRT for all women, with the tiny exceptions I mentioned, immediately when they become menopausal. In some women, we start in perimenopause just to relieve the symptoms they're having. But for bone health, we want everybody on it, you know, for 10 years. And some of us, like myself, I will stay on it forever because I have really strong family history of heart disease. So I don't want those plaques in my arteries to get a chance, you know, to grow. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women. So if you have extra risk for that, just like if you have extra risk for osteoporosis, let's say you're on chronic steroid use or your mom and aunts all had osteoporosis, you may want to stay on estrogen for the long duration. Because guess what? Once you come off it, the bone health starts to deteriorate. So the key thing is to individualize it, is to go to a good menopause, educated, and trained clinician. And you can find them on menopause.org and put your zip code in and find someone and say, Hi, here, here's my life. Here are my risk factors. I smoke or I'm omit osteoporosis or breast cancer, whatever it is, and let them tell you, oh, I would, I think, you know, but they're if you're 50 to 60, they're gonna mostly suggest you be on it because the benefits so far outweigh the risks.

  Philip Pape: 43:02

  Yeah. And so that I guess the last question then related to that, when to go on it, what about women who are early perimenopause and the really only recourse they go to right now is maybe their GP or OBGYN? And I hear stories almost every day, Maria, about like I went to my OBGYN and she said, you know, some silly thing. No, there's no way you need to consider hormones ever. You know, it's like these blanket sandings you still get. Yeah.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 43:26

  So the other bad news, and in in my book, I talk about how we have to revamp sex ed for kids to be more inclusive and updated, but we also have to revamp medical education. Those doctors were not trained in menopause at all. I mean, you realize I got no menopause training in medical school. I did. And so if I got no menopause training and one of the country's top menopause experts, you know, all the rest of the doctors got nothing. And what did they read in 2008, 2010? The WHI. So If your doctor says boo poo-hoo on menopause HRT, you just thank them and you go find another doctor. Now, what you can do for yourself if you're in perimenopause and you're having symptoms, a boring old birth control pill is a wonderful gap closer. We used to sell, oh, you can't be on the pill after 35. That myth is old and disproven. We use the pill now from age like 40 to 50, just like uh I'm a Philadelphia girl, like the Phillies would use their eighth inning closer to bring in for the eighth and the ninth inning. You know, you need a change of picture. And same thing. The pill will smooth the fluctuations of perimenopause. Perimenopause is almost harder than menopause because the hormones are there, but they're going like this. And it makes crazy mood stuff. Periods go crazy. Women get really frustrated, and their doctors are like, You're not in menopause because you're still having a period. Maybe uh you need wine at night. You know, they get dismissed, really badly dismissed. But a simple little low-dose birth control pill can do a lot. Don't think of it as a birth control. Think of it as a, here's what I call it, a perimenopausal smoother, right? And if you're doing that from 47 to 50 or something, and then periods stop altogether, okay, you're probably in menopause now. You can get your blood drawn, look and see if your FSH is elevated. Yep, you're in menopause. Or no periods for a year, yep, you're in menopause. Now change from the birth control pill to the little patch and you're good to go.

  Philip Pape: 45:33

  All right, great. This has been a really good, you know, tour of the the big relevant. No, I I don't think so at all. No, this is perfect because I feel like you've simplified some things. We've definitely had some functional folks, and I've talked to a lot of people who are hormone experts, and sometimes it does get overly confusing or complicated. So it's really nice, you know, you you narrowed down how these relate to the symptoms we wanted to talk about, as well as uh sources and and testing and kind of how to take them. And I think this will be great for the listeners.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:02

  So I'm so glad. I I actually put I honed it down to four take-home points for your listeners. Want to hear them?

  Philip Pape: 46:08

  Yeah, let's hear them. There we go.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:10

  Number one, HRT does not cause fat gain itself, it changes where the fats uh well, HRT, if you get on it, you're not causing gain with weight gain. Number two, estrogen therapy often improves body composition. Number three, weight gain during menopause is driven by a hormonal decline, not driven by the HRT itself. So some people confuse that. They think the HRT is causing the weight gain. It's actually the decline in hormones that's causing it. And number four, transdermal through the skin, estrogen, and micronized progesterone is the most weight neutral approach to HRT.

  Philip Pape: 46:54

  Perfect. All right.

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 46:56

  Yeah, four Thomas. You can you can punch them out or you know, whatever you want.

  Philip Pape: 47:01

  But yeah, no, those are great. Um, yeah, listeners, I hope you really enjoyed this one with Dr. Maria Sophocles. We're gonna include, you know, her TED Talk, the menopause.org website, her website. But where do you want people to reach out to you?

  Dr. Maria Sophocles: 47:14

  Um, I think Instagram's easiest. Maria SophoclesMD.com. Um uh or website, same website, Maria SophoclesMD.com is the website at Maria SophoclesMD is the Instagram. I got it backwards. Um so it's all the same. And um yeah, and to check out the book, I think the book deals with all this so nicely, and then it delves into uh sex and sleep and health and oh, all so much in there people will will love. And that's um, that's actually it's already on Amazon if and other places, uh, The Bedroom Gap by Maria Sophocles. I I think they'll get a kick out of it. And Philip, thank you so much for giving me this time.

  Philip Pape: 47:55

  Thanks so much for coming on. We're gonna include all that for the listeners, and uh, I learned a lot, so I know they did as well. I really appreciate your time on Wits and Weights.

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7 Natural Testosterone Boosters That Actually Work (Evidence-Based) | Ep 438

Struggling with low T?

The testosterone supplement industry wants you to believe your T levels require exotic herbs, pills, and "testosterone booster" powders.

The TRT industry wants you to believe your hormones are the root cause.

Many men over 40 with suboptimal testosterone don't have (primarily) a hormone problem.

They have a lifestyle problem. Chronic under-sleeping, chronic dieting, and chronic stress suppress testosterone far more than you might think.

Learn the 7 evidence-based lifestyle factors that affect testosterone levels in men, why strength training is non-negotiable for hormone health, how chronic calorie restriction backfires (even if you're trying to lose fat), and the BIGGEST factor that is lowering your testosterone by 10 to 15 percent.

You'll also discover why popular supplements like ashwagandha and tongkat ali are the last thing to focus on, and how to reframe testosterone optimization as a natural byproduct of doing the fundamentals right for building muscle and losing fat after 40.

Get your free 14-Day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide to set up a sustainable approach that protects your testosterone and performance instead of the chronic restriction that tanks your hormones. Go to:
https://witsandweights.com/fatloss

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why testosterone boosters fail and what actually works
3:39 - Testosterone as a signal of how you treat your body
7:19 - How the HPG axis regulates hormone production
9:31 - 7 natural, evidence-based testosterone boosters
11:31 - Strength training as the foundation for hormone health
15:30 - Chronic dieting vs. strategic fat loss for men over 40
19:11 - Sleep deprivation and the testosterone crash study
22:23 - My 14-day rapid start fat loss approach
23:12 - Body fat, aromatization, and when losing fat helps vs. hurts
26:19 - Stress, cortisol, and the recovery connection

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've ever Googled testosterone boosters, you might have seen the landmine of pills, potions, powders promising to skyrocket your T levels. Most of it is expensive, worthless garbage, but your testosterone levels can actually be influenced and significantly by specific behaviors you control. Today you'll learn the seven evidence-based factors that genuinely affect your tea levels, why the supplements you're probably considering are the last thing to focus on, and one common habit that can slash your tea by 10 to 15%, which you want to avoid. Plus, stick around to the end because I'm going to share a counterintuitive insight about dietary fat and testosterone. That's a simple fix you can make today. Ironically, as I recorded, as I record this, just recently was an episode on Mind Pump about natural testosterone boosters. And I had prepared this episode a few weeks ago. I didn't listen to that episode. I have no idea how ours compares to theirs, but I'm just mentioning it in case you guys think I ripped it off because I did. Here's the uncomfortable truth. Most of us, especially men, but you know, testosterone affects women as well, who are over 40, who are walking around with suboptimal testosterone. We often don't actually have a problem with the hormone itself. It's an input problem. How many times have we talked about on the show? It's the behaviors, it's the inputs that affect the hormones downstream. And rather than try to put a band-aid on the downstream effect, we have to look upstream and say, what's going on? Are we chronically undersleeping, chronically dieting, chronically stressed, and then wondering, oh, why don't we have the energy and the recovery and the strength gains and the libido and all these things that we want? You know, why am I having trouble building muscle, et cetera? And so the testosterone supplement industry takes advantage of this. It's a multi-billion dollar machine. It's built on that confusion, just like many things in the fitness industry. And they want you to believe your T levels require intervention as a default. And some of the best people in the industry, you know, we had Ali Gilbert on, and I've spoken to folks that are in the HRT space, will even they will say, look, get your life in order as you take TRT if needed, but let's look at the symptoms, let's look at the blood work, let's look at all that. But if your lifestyle is not there, that alone could be the main issue. Your testosterone is a downstream signal of how you treat your body. That's what it is. So that's where I'm starting from from this podcast, hence the episode title about natural testosterone boosters. And I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter. Testosterone is absolutely critical for muscle protein synthesis, for bone density, for body composition, energy, mental clarity, sex drive, obviously all of that. But the path to healthy testosterone isn't through definitely any of these supplements, most, if not all of them, and also isn't necessarily through TRT if you don't also address these issues. And in fact, I know many men and the evidence will demonstrate this that just because you're on TRT doesn't mean all of these other issues go away if they're not supported. So we're gonna talk about that today, and I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to share an insight about a food pattern that a lot of people are talking to me about, thinking it's gonna help with testosterone, and it might be an easy fix for you to implement. So let's start with a quick overview of testosterone, what it is, how it works in your body. You have something called the hypothalamic pituitary gonatal axis, the HPG axis. And it responds to signals from the environment, from your training, your nutrition, your stress, your sleep. And so when those conditions are all favorable, your testosterone production goes up. When your body perceives some sort of load or stress or energy scarcity, it goes down. And this is just deeply programmed into our survival programming, like many of our other things, just like with food cravings, you know, our brain-related cravings for food in an environment that doesn't really support it too well because of how food is manufactured, et cetera. And the reason that most quote unquote testosterone boosters don't work very well, usually on the supplement side, is because they don't contain bioactive compounds. Some of them do, but they're trying to override a highly stressed system that you cannot supplement your way out of. You just can't. So if you want to take the lazy approach and give them a shot, who am I to tell you not to? But I hope you're here because you want to do it the right way. Think of testosterone less like a tank that you fill up and more like a thermostat. Okay, that's my engineer brain. I go to control systems. If your body has threat signals like you're not eating enough or you're not sleeping enough, or you have all this stress, it's gonna dial the thermostat down. If you want to dial it up, you have to change those signals. That's all it is. That's what I'm saying. It's like a control system, like anything else with our lifestyle. So today I'm gonna give you seven factors with the strongest evidence for affecting that thermostat. And I wanted to pick ones that are supported by recent research, that have decent effect sizes, right? That can sometimes far outpace and dwarf anything you can get from a supplement. They all stack as well. So if you can implement multiple factors, it's gonna create a compounding effect. And I'm going to cover them in order of impact. I'm gonna tell you what quote unquote boosters you could probably ignore and not waste money on. And I'm gonna give you a few honorable mentions that could be helpful. So let's start. Lever number one, the first natural testosterone booster, is no surprise, progressive resistance training, strength training, especially compound multi-joint lifts at moderate to heavy loads. This creates one of the best acute and chronic testosterone response. The acute response, that temporary spike during and after your training, it doesn't matter as much as you think. And some people can overblow it, okay? What matters is the adaptation to that that occurs as you sleep, and then you train again and then you sleep again. So then it's the consistent resistance training over time, which increases your insulin sensitivity. It reduces your body fat, which is a huge impact on testosterone. It helps you build that beautiful metabolic active tissue we call muscle, and it improves your body to regulate hormones across the board. When you regularly tell your body, hey, I need to lift heavy things, I need to be strong and capable, I need to be functional for what out what's out there in the real world, it adapts by providing or improving the hormonal environment that supports adaptation. That is it. This is a foundational first principle. If you're not resistance training at least three days a week in general, I mean, it could be two, but three, if not four, with progressive overload, then you're leaving a lot of that testosterone growth on the table. And you might be living with suppressed testosterone. Here's the thing, the thing about today's episode: it's not all about increasing testosterone as much as eliminating things suppressing your testosterone, which is amazing. Um, and I know since I've started lifting weights, you know, just to share some numbers, I'm now 45 years old. My total testosterone is somewhere in the 600s. So it's not like gloriously amazing, you know, super anabolic, but it's quite healthy and in a decent range for my age. But it used to be down close to 400. And the only thing I changed was getting healthier and lifting weights over those years and doing some of the other things we talked about today. The thing that a lot of people overlook is that train resistance training seems to blunt the natural age-related decline in testosterone. So we can't stop the clock, but we can kind of slow it down, right? So it strength training is not optional. It's not optional, optional, no matter your age. And if you're not doing it, start now, it's gonna make a big difference, including for your testosterone. Okay, number two, the second testosterone booster, is not undereating. Stop the chronic dieting. I talk about this so much now that I am of the mind most people over 40 should be rarely dieting. Should be rarely dieting. By the time you're going into a fat loss phase and an intentional deficit, you should have checked all the other boxes for supporting your lifestyle and be lifting weights and maybe even build some muscle. Okay. There are some edge cases of people who have a lot of weight to lose, and that's a different thing. But for the vast majority of you listening to the show, health conscious, wanting to get in shape and all that, this is a big one. This is a big one. Now, you would think, okay, I get leaner though when I go in a deficit, so that's going to improve my testosterone, right? And actually to some extent, it does, especially if you have excess body fat, and that's where that edge case comes in. But if it's a chronic, if you're chronically dieting, if you're always in a deficit, prolonged energy deficits all the time, well, your body is suppressing a bunch of things. It's suppressing your LH, that's your luteinizing hormone, that signals testosterone production. And that's something you can see in blood work. Your body is saying, hey, now is not the time for things that require a lot of energy, like building muscle or reproduction. And this is we see this in athletes and chronic dieters and physique competitors and people who are, you know, older men, especially who are like always cut and shredded, they don't have great testosterone, right? And so if you've been in a version of a calorie deficit for many, many months or years, and really years, you know, a few months here or there is not a big deal, probably. But if your recovery is a problem, you you can't get stronger, you feel like you're running on empty, just look at that. Are you just under-eating? And this is men and women, but yes, even men for testosterone this is a big deal, right? So your testosterone also is gonna adapt downward, even in a short dieting phase. But again, that's more temporary, and that's where a recovery, a recovery diet to come out of it is gonna be the best thing you can do for your hormones if you don't need to diet anymore. Okay. Number three natural testosterone booster is sleep. Now, I'm going through this list, and you guys are probably like, snore, we hear this all the time, we know these other things. But if you're not doing any of these things, don't go to the supplements and the necessarily TRT. Again, TRT, it depends on your medical professional and where you are in life and all that. I'm not telling you not to do that. I'm just saying that's not the be-all-end-all solution. You have to do both. So I've got some really cool data here. A University of Chicago study found that sleep restriction of five hours a night for just one week reduced T by 10 to 15%. And this was in young, healthy men. That's in young, healthy men. And when we look at the curve of what happens with T over age, that's like aging them by 10 to 15 years, right? So one week of poor sleep can make your testosterone look like a much older person. And if you're always getting poor sleep for years and decades, ah, that there you go. That could be a very simple solution, even though it takes effort to change your behavior, I get it, to address testosterone. The majority of our testosterone secretion, this is, and I say our as in men, occurs during sleep. And it especially occurs during slow wave sleep, which occurs in the first half of the night. So if you're fragmenting that sleep, if it's interrupted, if you've got a racing mind with lots of stress and anxiety, if you've got insomnia, if you've got sleep apnea, the list goes on and on, and then you just really don't get enough hours of that kind of sleep, you're cutting short that window for hormone production. And then sleep fragmentation is very important. If you are getting enough hours, but you're waking up a bunch, you're you're also getting less of the benefits. And I mentioned sleep apnea briefly, but that has a major testosterone suppressor. And I would say that it is massively undiagnosed or underdiagnosed in men over 40. So if you snore heavily, I mean, ask your ask your significant other if you have a partner and ask them if you snore all the time. You probably know by now. If you wake up tired all the time despite having enough quote unquote hours in bed, if you have headaches in the morning, all of those, you might want to do a sleep study. Just consider a sleep study. And then the target is that seven to nine hours of quality sleep. We're not gonna go through all the sleep hacks today, but this is another non-negotiable that could be a big lever for you. Now, as we go through this, you're gonna be wondering, okay, how do I get started with some of this stuff? If you're looking to dial in the first couple behaviors that it really takes to kickstart your journey, if your goal is fat loss, but you also want to preserve your hormonal health and your performance, grab my free 14-day rapid start fat loss guide. Go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. Now I have other guides. I have one for muscle as well. You can go to wits and weights.com slash muscle if you're in the muscle building mode. But either of those are gonna walk you through how to set up your nutrition, your training, your next steps to get started. So again, go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss for the 14-day rapid start fat loss guide, or wits and weights.com slash muscle if you want the muscle building nutrition guide. Now, we're gonna get to number four here. And this is body fat reduction if you are what's considered over fat. And I know you don't might not like that term, but that's like the technical scientific term. So if you before you think I'm contradicting myself, right, I just recently said chronic dieting suppresses testosterone, and now I'm telling you fat laws can increase it. I want to clarify if you're carrying excess body fat, especially visceral fat around the midsection, so that's belly fat, the adipose tissue, that actively converts testosterone into estrogen in a process called aromatization. And this is why overweight men often have lower T and higher estrogen levels and things like man boobs and all the other stuff that come with it, then losing body fat from that perspective, especially visceral fat, can very meaningfully increase both your total and your free testosterone. It has, however, it has diminishing returns once you get to a healthy body fat range. And that's a pretty wide range. It's up to you know 15 to 20 percent. We're not talking about being cut or shredded, just a healthy body fat range. Then the benefit of getting leaner on on getting leaner for testosterone is minimal. And then it could backfire because now you're aggressively dieting and stressing yourself out. Which you know what computes the idea that we should be living in a healthy state of body composition, not super shredded, not over fat. And that's generally a good place to sustain things. So my guidance is this if you're significantly over fat, then a moderate, time-limited fat loss phase is probably gonna help you with your testosterone quite a bit. And then if you're reasonably lean, say you you've gotten under 25%, maybe you're in that 15 to 20 percent, I wouldn't chase lower body fat just for tea, right? It's it's the chronic restriction might actually suppress it. And I've again experienced that myself, kind of maintaining around that 15 to 20 percent is a really nice place to be. All right, step number five to boost testosterone naturally is to manage a chronic stress and your cortisol, right? And again, you knew this would come up on the list. And this one always often gets dismissed, you know, as the woo kind of advice with the stress and the mindfulness and everything, but physiology very highly backs this up. Cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship. That means they move in opposite directions. If you have chronic psychological stress, chronic psychological stress, so that could even be perceived stress, it suppresses the HPG axis we talked about, the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. And so when cortisol, a stress hormone, is chronically elevated, and that could be your work stress, relationship, conflict, financial pressure, lack of recovery, maybe overtraining, your body downregulates testosterone production. So, you guys that are just living stressful lives, you executives, I had a lot of clients like this, we've got to get that stress off your system at least a little bit. Every little bit helps. And if you don't, you're just making a trade-off. You are basically prioritizing the short-term survival from these stressors, right? Your body trying to be in this fight or flight mode over the long-term benefits of not having that state. So, do you want long-term health, longevity, strength, function? You want to be a strong, healthy man far into your golden years, or do you want to just keep chasing what you're chasing today and then see that decline and maybe a heart attack, maybe some sort of issue down the road? You know, I don't mean to be a fearmonger, but that is the reality of it for many men. So I'm not asking you to be a Zen monk. I couldn't do anything like that. It's recognizing that this unmanaged, crazy stress in your life is physiologically affecting your endocrine system. It is disrupting you. All right, way more than any quote unquote toxins in the environment or EMI waves or any of this nonsense you hear on social media about these minor things. And nothing against, you know, there are toxins in, you know, there are microplastics and all that stuff. But this is chronic stress is dwarfs a lot of those for most guys. The practical tip that I have is get outside, move, make sure you're resting between your training, make sure you spend good time with people you love and care about. Make sure you set boundaries on your work hours. I have a client who has been stressed out of his mind all year, runs a business with his wife. And as much as he wanted to like get more steps and do a few of the things we talked about, he just literally had no time. And I'm talking about you guys know what I'm talking about. It's like 100 plus hour work weeks, go, go, go, go, go, go, go with kids, trying to help out with everything. And there was just no time. And he finally realized, you know what, something's got to give. I've got to jettison some things for my life. I've got to delegate, I've got to hire some people, I've got to just accept, you know, maybe less business over here or doing things in a different way. If I'm going to salvage my health, salvage my relationship with my wife, not salvage, I mean, in his case, it's not a bad relationship, it's just prioritizing them, right? Prioritizing them. And so if you're working 12 hour days, and then on top of that, maybe you're training six days a week because you love being in the gym, and then you're sleeping poorly and you're like, I wonder why my tea is still low. It's not a testosterone problem. It's it's a recovery problem with your stress. All right, lever number six, and this one, this one is a favorite of mine because low carb and keto are so popular still for some crazy reason. But we know clearly by now from the research that low carb diets, chronically low carb diets, not just low carb during a deficit for a short while, but chronically, can reduce testosterone levels in resistance strained men. So carbs have to be under consideration here, guys. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that low-carb diets were associated with lower testosterone compared to high carb, period. And they proposed the mechanisms include elevated cortisol that comes with carb restriction, and impaired recovery that comes with carb restriction. Two of the biggest topics I always talk about when it comes to eating more carbs is let's recover, let's perform, let's reduce our stress by increasing our carbs. I did a whole episode on carbs and stress. So it's so important. Now, does that mean you have to eat four or five, six hundred grams of carbs? No. But if you're training hard and you're trying to get your sleep and you're trying to stay, keep that stress low, like we just talked about, and you want more higher testosterone, your body needs carbohydrates to fuel your training, to manage your stress, to support testosterone production. And I'm just saying don't go down into the sub-100s or the low 100s for a long stretch of time. And I say, you know, the numbers change based on your size, but that's generally the threshold for the vast majority of men. So if you're getting on its lowest end, 100, 150 in a diet, but then up to maybe in the 200s, 300s, 400s when you're not dieting, you're probably fine. It's where you are deliberately just cutting out all carbs because you think it's somehow helpful and it's not gonna be helpful. It's just not. All right. So I have a lot of episodes that talk about it. Just type in carbs into my library and you'll probably find it. All right. So carbs are your friend for testosterone. That could be the thing you're missing. Number seven is alcohol reduction. Oh, yes. I'm not gonna lecture you on drinking, guys. I'm not, I know I see it every day. Oh, I love my bourbon. Oh, I love my IPAs, whatever. If we're talking about what the evidence says on testosterone, then alcohol is one of the clearest dose-dependent suppressors of testosterone. And we also know it creates a lot of visceral adipose tissue and belly fat. So there's probably a correlation there too. Alcohol is directly toxic to your testes, to your testicular tissue at higher intakes. I mean, alcohol is a toxin, but if you flood your body with it, it's going to get to other areas of your body we don't want. Even moderate regular consumption can matter if you already have borderline low testosterone. If you're consuming alcohol multiple nights a week, you've got to consider this as a factor. And the relationship is pretty linear. The more alcohol, the more it gets suppressed. So if your testosterone is a priority for you and your health is a priority for you, reduce or eliminate regular alcohol consumption. And that's the way I'm gonna put it reduce or eliminate regular alcohol consumption. I'm not saying don't occasionally have a beer or mixed drink or at a party have a glass of champagne. Whatever. Okay, that's that's that's not gonna hurt you. As much as I know alcohol is a toxin and has no benefits, having it once every three, four, five months here or there, not gonna be a problem. It's the regular consumption that's really the big problem. Just to give you a little bit of wiggle room, okay? And I know this isn't what people want to hear sometimes, right? But sometimes we have to have this level of structure and commitment when things are just not helping us out. And if you're spending a bunch of money, by the way, on supplements and then you're drinking four nights a week, well, you're just offsetting things. So we've covered all the seven natural testosterone boosters. Stick around. Because I'm gonna share something about dietary fat and testosterone that I hear. There's popular advice that's getting around. I don't know if it's on TikTok or where, because I'm not on TikTok, but I want to address it. Before we do, some honorable mentions. All right. There are some compounds that have legitimate evidence, but only if you are deficient. Only if you are deficient in these supplements, in these compounds or in these nutrients, that might be why you have some lower testosterone. So vitamin D is huge. Vitamin D, it's on my short list of pretty much everyone should consider taking vitamin D, get your levels tested. There is correlational. There's also interventional evidence that links vitamin D deficiency to lower testosterone. And many of us, myself included, are in northern latitudes or we work indoors. And I take it, I take it because if I didn't, it would be low, right? And so maybe that has also contributed to a decent testosterone level. All right. But if you already get enough, well, supplementing is not going to help. Zinc. Zinc is the next one. Same principle. Um, zinc deficiency clearly lowers testosterone. And so you can supplement if you eat enough protein from animal sources, you might probably get you're probably getting enough zinc, which a lot of men are. Obviously, if you're not omnivorous, that could be something to look into. If you restrict a lot or you have a lot of training and stressed out, that could be have less zinc in your body. So get that checked. Sleep apnea, we already mentioned, believe it or not, like having a CPAP and not obstructing your sleep anymore, and you get treated for it. This is a massively underappreciated for men over 40. Get a sleep study and figure it out. So the the frame I want you to adopt is not that these are testosterone boosters per se. We already talked about the seven boosters. These are things to prevent suppression when you are deficient. Now, what can you what's a waste of money potentially for testosterone? All right. Ashwaganda, very popular. I think there's benefits for certain symptoms like stress and anxiety, for example. Um, I take Legion's Triumph, men's multivariate. It has it in there. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking it, although I have heard some people reference like long-term use could be an issue in some in a study here or there. But I think the effect size is pretty small, regardless, and it's likely mediated by the stress reduction of the ashwagandha. That could then help with the testosterone, but you don't want to rely on that. And I've seen people get build up a tolerance to it as well. Then there's Tongat Ali, which is very popularly mentioned. And the data is that weak there, I think. I think there's a lot of issues with dosing as well and quality control depending on where you purchase it. Uh fenogreek is another one, mild effects, mixed quality. I wouldn't rely on it. Diaspartic acid, tribulus, boron, you've probably seen those as well. I again, I wouldn't say there's any meaningful data. A lot of these are just a waste of money, I'm gonna be honest. And then there's all the multi-ingredient test booster blends, right? And most of these are complete garbage. There was actually a study that looked at these in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition. It found that less than 25% of the ingredients in the most popular testosterone boosters had any supporting evidence at all. So that's less than 25% of the ingredients in all of them. And about 10% had evidence of decrease testosterone. So be very careful with those. If they'd worked, I would love it. I would tell people to use it, I'd be telling my clients to use it, and they don't. The seven boosters we talked about before are your biggest lovers. And then fixing any of these important deficiencies that are evidence-based. So we want to reframe the fact that you may not have a testosterone problem. You may have a problem with the inputs, and your testosterone is low because you're not training, or you're not eating enough, or you're not sleeping, or your stress needs to be fixed, or you're drinking too much. And if you know this is the thing for you, acknowledge it right now. Admit it to yourself, be honest with yourself and say, hey, I've got something to go after. That's a positive thing I just learned about myself. Okay. That is, I don't need to chase supplements. I may not need TRT. Again, I'm not telling you one way or another on that, because that's gonna depend on you know, physiological levels versus where you should be given your lifestyle. I would fix the lifestyle stuff and do some before and afters on your labs, though. I think that's a great way to look at it. And that's it. So uh before we wrap up, I rem I told you I'm gonna share this thing about dietary fat. So I'm gonna do that in a bit. I do want to remind you again, grab my either fat loss guide at wits and weights.com slash fat loss or my muscle building guide, wits and weights.com slash muscle. If you're looking for a way to jumpstart some of this stuff on a practical level, because we didn't have time in this episode to get into all of it, these are free. Wits and weights.com slash fat loss or wits and weights.com slash muscle. All right, here we go. One of the most common pieces of testosterone advice you're going to hear is you should eat more fat. And I've heard it more with especially the carnivore crowd and the keto crowd, and maybe just low carb in general. And it is it is true that extremely low fat diets where you've got well under 20% of your calories from fat, can test they can suppress testosterone. But I think the type of fat matters less than the adequacy of fat. And there's no evidence that loading up on extra fat beyond adequate levels does anything for testosterone. So, for example, if you as long as you're getting at least, let's say 20, 25%, closer to 30 is the the default that I use with people from fat, you're getting everything you need. And going beyond that, like the 35, 40, or 45% fat, like you might see in carnivore or keto, up to 50% fat, isn't going to move the tea anymore. It should, I mean, you can prove it to yourself, but that's what we understand from the evidence. And and what's nice about that is you don't then need a high-fat diet. You don't have to be on carnivore or keto or something like that for your testosterone, right? You also don't have to be on an extremely low-fat diet. So guess where that leaves us? A reasonable balanced diet with plenty of protein, all the great protein sources we like: eggs, meat, fish, dairy, nuts, olive oil. Well, olive oil is not protein, but olive oil has a fat source, nuts as a fat source. I'm mixing the two, but a balanced diet, right? And not trying to increase your tea by just eating more and more fat or thinking the carnivore crowd has some sort of advantage for testosterone. And I think hopefully the the liver king situation and the fraud that that that was exposed there, when the fraud with Saladino and all those crackpot crazies out there is has has settled this kind of nonsense once and for all. And not like I have a strong opinion on it, do I? All right. So if you're tracking your macros, if you're around 20 to 35% of your calories from fat, that's fine. That's it. That's fine. Focus on your energy, focus your energy on the seven levers we talked about already. Focus on those. All right, you don't have to fix everything today, guys. Just pick one or two to get started. Just pick one thing. Pick one thing to get started on, commit to the next 45 days to move the needle just a little bit, one step at a time, in an achievable way. Set the bar low, right? Set the bar low. Reach out for help, use my resources, and that's it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember your hormones work for you when you give them the right symbols. I'm Philip Pape, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

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Carbs Spike Your Insulin (But That's IDEAL for Muscle Growth) | Ep 437

Do carbs make you fat?

Are spikes in blood sugar and insulin a problem for health or weight loss?

Maybe you've been cutting carbs or tried keto or carnivore, yet your strength training progress has stalled, your recovery feels sluggish, and you're still not seeing the body composition results you want. 

The problem isn't your discipline. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what insulin actually does (especially if you lift weights).

Insulin is not a "fat-storage hormone" but a nutrient-partitioning hormone whose effects depend entirely on context: your training status, muscle mass, and energy balance. 

Learn how resistance training changes the way your body handles carbs, why lifters over 40 actually benefit from strategic insulin spikes, and how muscle tissue acts as a "sink" for glucose that determines where your nutrients go. 

It's not about eating unlimited carbs but understanding why carb tolerance is built through strength training and how to use that to your advantage, and to stop fearing spikes in blood sugar.

Whether you want body recomp, trying to build muscle while losing fat, or wondering why your low-carb diet isn't working despite consistent strength training, this episode gives you an evidence-based framework to rethink your nutrition strategy. 

Plus, get a simple post-workout protocol that can improve your next-day training performance.

Download my FREE macros guide: Nutrition 101 for Body Composition. Learn exactly how to set your protein, carbs, and fats for muscle building and fat loss using a flexible approach that works long-term: witsandweights.com/macros

Timestamps

0:00 - Why carbs and insulin don't automatically cause fat gain
3:20 - How training context changes what insulin does with your food
7:25 - The real reason lifters fear carbs (and why it's misguided)
11:55 - What insulin actually does (nutrient partitioning explained)
18:40 - How carbs support muscle building, recovery, and strength training performance
24:20 - Fat loss and insulin (why energy balance matters more than spikes)
29:20 - Acute insulin spikes vs. chronic dysfunction (the critical difference for body recomp)

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you've been told that carbs spike insulin, and insulin makes you fat, and you've been restricting carbs because of it, even though you're resistance training and trying to build muscle, this episode is going to change how you think about food. Today I'm gonna show you why insulin spikes, spikes in blood sugar, are not the problem, and why, if you're lifting weights, they're actually part of the solution. You'll learn why chronic dieters get this wrong at the metabolic level, why muscle changes what insulin does with your food, and a post-training carb strategy that can improve your recovery within just one day. Carbs spike blood sugar, increase your insulin, that those occur and that they automatically cause fat gain is still one of the most persistent myths in fitness. And it's costing a lot of people, a lot of people, especially those over 40, a lot of women I talked to, peri postmenopause, it's costing you a lot of real progress, healthy living, thriving, longevity, all the things that you're trying to seek by doing it, and you're just cutting into those benefits because we can benefit tremendously from carbs depending on the lifestyle. And the lifestyle that you were talking about is the one that we espouse here in Wits and Weights. Now, you've probably heard that keeping insulin low is the key to staying lean. And maybe you've tried low carb, maybe you've tried keto, maybe you're still restricting carbs, even while resistance training three or four days a week, and you wonder why you don't have the energy or your performance feels flat or you're not building muscle or recovery is taking longer. The reality is that insulin is not a fat storage hormone. Let me repeat that. Insulin is not a fat storage hormone, it is a nutrient partitioning hormone. And what that means for you and for your body composition and for your muscle building depends entirely on ta-da context. Context, guys, what is so sorely missing from short form reels on Instagram. Context. Your training, your muscle mass, your energy balance, your goals, your lifestyle. When these variables are aligned, then insulin becomes an ally. Now, I shouldn't have to say that any hormone in your body becomes an ally because we are it's a natural part of our human existence. And if we are all living our natural human lives as we should, as opposed to in today's, you know, Western world, with the food supply we have and with the sedentary lifestyle and lack of any form of hard work or heavy lifting, then you know the discussion would go away. But we need to understand how to leverage our bodies here and support our muscle development and our energy and our recovery and all of the things that carbs are great for that do not inherently drive fat gain. Now, I want you to also stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to tie this all together into a post-workout carb timing strategy that I think can noticeably improve your next day's training performance. One of the most common problems I see with clients, I'm going to share it with you. Takes about 60 seconds to explain, and then you can start using it after your very next training session. But really, let's get into the myth and why it persists. Why is this misconception about carbs and insulin and fat gain so sticky, right? That's the word sticky. I don't think people are scared of insulin itself. Most people don't even use the word necessarily in these discussions. They're scared of losing control and gaining weight, and they've never been able to successfully lose weight or lose fat. And maybe cutting carbs has worked for them, and maybe the fitness industry has given them a really convenient villain that is very convincing in terms of how it is portrayed. Here's what I hear in the industry, and I many of these things I believe them myself, and I know now not to be true. Insulin spikes automatically cause fat storage. Wrong. Carbs shut off fat burning. Kind of wrong. And it's wrong and right for the reasons that we need to understand. Low insulin equals better body composition. Carbs are fine for athletes, but not for regular people. There's some truth there too. So again, we're gonna get into nuance. Notice I didn't just shut all these down. There's some truths in these, but you have to understand what they mean and context. And I think these beliefs persist because of some things that stick out at me as I was reviewing why, right? First, there's this framing around metabolic health, metabolism, type 2 diabetes, diseases of aging, all of that that has bled into the general advice and insulin resistance. And most people have heard the term insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity, but usually we're talking about the negative side. And in a clinical setting, this insulin resistance is generally correlated with really bad things. You know, high insulin is correlated with really bad things, but we're looking at people who have chronic metabolic dysfunction rather than necessarily the acute post-meal response in healthy people. And I've had several discussions with folks on this, and most notably, Ben Ziel came on. He's a type 1 diabetic, and he all but said, look, if you don't have type 1 diabetes, or if you don't have diabetes, you don't have to worry about this stuff if you're lifting weights and you're eating well and you're active, right? It's not a problem. So again, we have to look at what population is being studied when we look at some of this data. Second, the keto and low carb narratives have just so ridiculously oversimplified the role of insulin and treat it as a villain, kind of like people treat cortisol as a villain or no, not or that those are the two that come to mind. I'm not thinking of another one off the top of my head. But those two people treat as these like boogeymen that we have to just crush and put in their place. So that's the second one. Keto, low carb, that whole narrative. The third thing is that people conflate or confuse acute insulin spikes, right? These are the normal, transient, necessary spikes of insulin that are short-term, like when you eat food and particularly carbs, with, and they conflate that with chronic versions of this, which is called hyperinsulinemia. And that's a different thing entirely when you have chronic spikes in insulin, which again tie to insulin sensitivity and eventually diabetes. And we're going to come back to that distinction because it is critical. And then fourth, fat storage gets blamed on insulin or hormones or carbs or whatever, instead of the context those hormones operate in. And that's because people want to scape goat. They want to scape goat that maybe relieves them of their responsibility to make better choices in their life. Let's just put it that way. And I'm not saying it's just about calories in, calories out, even though mathematically it is. There's a lot of upstream choices and influences on those choices, including, yes, genetics, appetite, hormones, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't look at it in a vacuum. Okay. We can't look at it in a vacuum and say, well, so always carbs are going to spike insulin, which is going to cause you to gain weight or fat. So I want to reframe this today. You see, I'm trying to dance around this in a nuanced way because I also do not want to make simplified blanket claims because that is not what we're all about. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Boom. That's the thing you need to remember. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Another way to put that is the only way you gain fat is with a calorie surplus. Fat gain requires excess energy, repeated overfeeding, overconsumption, potentially a poor use of those nutrients, right? How we partition the nutrients because of your lifestyle. And then how, and then low muscle mass or inactivity, right? So it really does all come down to the excess energy, but it's the excess energy in all of that context. And that context tends to produce the excess energy. Insulin just determines where nutrients go, it doesn't create energy out of nowhere. So that's that's my thoughts on where the Smith comes from. Now, let's do a little detour into insulin 101. What does it do in your body? And I'm not gonna dumb it down, I'm gonna simplify it in a way that I can understand it so you can understand it. Because I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but I do self-study all this stuff and I talk to lots of experts and I work with clients on a daily basis. So I consider myself quite educated from spending the time to think about and look into this stuff and also looking at what the actual evidence says. So when you eat, especially carbohydrates and protein, your blood glucose goes up, right? Your blood sugars go up. And then your pancreas releases insulin. Boom. Then insulin does a few things. Insulin shuttles glucose and amino acids into your cells, right? The glucose from the carbs, amino acids from the protein. This is how your muscles get their fuel and the building blocks to grow. Also, insulin suppresses fat oxidation temporarily. This is your fat burning, not fat loss, just the burning of fat. And even the word burn is kind of a layman's term, right? This is where the fear I think comes from, though. And we're gonna get to why this isn't the problem people think it is at all. This is not a problem at all, guys. Insulin also signals to your body that energy is available. Because remember, insulin is a hormone, so it's a signaling messenger, chemical signaling messenger. It tells your body energy. Hey, hey, body, energy is available. And then that affects other hormones downstream and other metabolic processes downstream. Insulin also reduces muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein breakdown. That's the opposite of muscle protein synthesis. So muscle protein breakdown, which we don't like when our muscles break down, even though it does always happen, right? We're always synthesizing and breaking down muscle tissue, but insulin reduces it. And this is huge for us as lifters. You know, we talk a lot about stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but reducing breakdown is the other half. And then insulin also enables glycogen resynthesis. So that means after you train, your muscles have to replenish their glycogen stores, and insulin facilitates that process. Now, your your brain is like working, like, okay, I see where this is all gonna come together, at least for the most part. Some of this stuff needs more explanation, I think. Now, here's a clarification about insulin. It does not cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Have you heard that before? You probably did a few minutes ago because I said it twice or three times. And I'm gonna say it again because it needs to land. For you to actually store body fat, you need excess energy, meaning more calories than you burn over time. That's it. Insulin might determine whether those excess calories go more toward fat or muscle. That is true. But if there is no excess, there's nothing extra to store. Okay? So think of insulin as like a traffic cop that's directing nutrients to different destinations. It's not the person loading the trucks, right? If the trucks have your calories, have your energy in them, I'm like waving my hand as if you can see me. This is audio only. If you don't have extra trucks, insulin has nothing to direct toward fat storage. So that's insulin 101. Now, why is insulin so great for us? Why do we love insulin as a muscle-friendly hormone? Okay, this is the heart of today's episode. Because if you have any designs on improving your health and body composition, you absolutely must lift weights. And assuming you're gonna lift weights and have that kind of lifestyle, especially as we get older, okay, insulin is working for you under those conditions. And the conditions have to be the right conditions. We're gonna talk about it. You can't just, you know, lift for 30 minutes twice a week and then have a completely terrible lifestyle other way, other than that. There's a whole bunch of things. But the first big thing we want to talk about is that insulin is what we call permissive for muscle protein synthesis. It doesn't alone like maximally stimulate muscle synthesis. That that's what your protein does. Okay, and that's why we eat protein plus the lifting itself. But it it plays a supportive role by reducing breakdown, as we already mentioned. That's why it's permissive. In other words, it kind of like unlocks or makes the road a little bit bigger. So protein's like building the uh the muscle, insulin's preventing it from being broken down. That net muscle balance is what determines how much and whether you're gaining tissue over time. So you can see already how insulin is helpful for building muscle. Second, carbs and insulin improve your training performance. Okay, resistance training is what we call glycolytic. I haven't used that term in a while, but it simply means that your muscles run on stored glycogen when you're lifting heavy or when you're doing high volume work. Just like some forms of cardio are also glycolytic, like CrossFit, for example. When you have enough carbs, okay, and we can define what enough means, and it's gonna be highly variable. Excuse me. When you have enough carbs, you increase your training volume capacity as a result because training is glycolytic. And you improve your bar speed and you improve your power output, and you get better repeat set performance, you know, performance across sets where you don't have as big of a drop-off, you know, as many drop-off in reps. And then you would you reduce the how much exertion you perceive, so the same work feels easier. And why does that matter? Well, that matters because mechanical tension and volume are what drive hypertrophy, the building of muscle. It's not the insulin itself, it's that the insulin unlocks this higher level of performance and supports those inputs. Okay. So if you have reduced perceived exertion, higher bar speed, higher power power output, greater capacity, just think about how all that comes together to a lot more volume and intensity in the gym. Third, the glycogen replenishment from insulin means you have better recovery and better signaling of your recovery, which is like an adaptive process. You become a better recovery machine. So after you're done training, then you eat it carbs as well, because I'm a huge fan of post-workout carbs, and you get a blood sugar spike, an insulin spike from carbs, that's gonna drive the glucose back into your muscles from your bloodstream. That's gonna restore your glycogen. That's also then gonna reduce cortisol and improve your readiness for your next session, which by the way, side tangent, this is why I like working out in the morning for a lot of people, because it kind of sucks down some of that stress right at the beginning of the day. This is especially relevant if you are a higher volume lifter, which it's all relative. Like many of you are probably in that quote unquote high volume realm, even if you're like doing starting strength or something, because it's still, when you take the overall amount you're lifting, it's still pretty darn high volume. You know, if you're older, if you're over 40 and your recovery is just less than it was when you're younger, all of these things help. It helps to have more glycogen, period, which come from carbs. And then fourth, this is the one that is maybe the most important for some of you and it affects health and longevity and everything else. And that is insulin sensitivity. In your now insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, because you lift weights and muscle is insulin, increases your insulin sensitivity, glucose is going to preferentially enter your muscle. And that means less of the glucose spills over into fat tissue, and now your nutrient partition partitioning favors lean mass. This is really powerful because this means that even from the same overall, say calories, you're able to more efficiently shuttle those nutrients, that glucose, toward muscle rather than fat, right? And so that's where that's where when you get under the hood, it really does sometimes become more about calories in, calories out at some level. And the powerful thing is that resistance training itself, not just the muscle mass, not just the muscle mass resulting from it, but the actual training act of training increases insulin sensitivity as well. I talked about on the, oh, I was on a podcast recently, we talked about this, and I said the research shows 24 to 48 hours you after you lift, you're much more insulin sensitive. Like that it, so you're if you're lifting three or four days a week, you're constantly keeping that insulin sensitivity higher. And you're improving something called GLUT4 translocation. GLUT4 is G L U T all caps-4, if you want to Google it. This is like little doors that allow glucose to go into your muscle cells. And they get triggered by your training. They also get triggered by walking, by the way. This is why I'm a big fan of being active throughout the day. And this happens independent of fat loss. So the more you train, the more you move, the more active you are. And I don't mean high-intensity stressful chronic cardio. I mean just good low-grade chronic movement, chronic in a good way. The more you train, the better you move, the better your body handles carbs. Period. That's what that's my point. And so this aligns perfectly with what I've been teaching for years on this podcast. Muscle makes carbs even more attractive, quote unquote, safer, if I even need to use that term. Like you don't have to worry about them making you gain fat or worsen your health. They're actually an accelerate, accelerator, right? The more muscle you have, then the more muscles you can eat. And there are not going to be negative consequences. In fact, they're positive. Okay. Because you can tolerate them, you have better insulin sensitivity and everything else we just talked about. Now remember, I want to remind you, I'm going to share a specific post-workout carb strategy at the end that can improve your performance the very next day that ties all this together. So I do want you to stick around so you get the full picture, guys. All right, now if you're hearing this and you're thinking, okay, how do I actually figure out my carb intake? How do I set up my macros for this? I do have something for you I put together a while back. It's a free guide called Nutrition 101 for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting and setting up your protein, carbs, fats based on your goals, whether you're building muscle, losing fat, doing both. It's the same framework I use with my coaching clients. You're gonna love it. It's gonna teach you, even at the mindset level, how to think about food, but also the tactical level, how to calculate your macros. Go to wits and weights.com slash macros or click the link in the show note. I put the link in there. That's witsandweights.com slash macros. Now I know what some of you are thinking, okay, Philip, I'm trying to lose fat. So I heard you briefly say maybe maybe insulin does increase fat oxidation. And don't I want to keep the insulin low to do that? Right? Like, or you know what I'm saying? Low insulin and low carb will increase fat oxidation. So people get tripped on the up on this. I did a whole episode on this in the past. I don't have it with me, unfortunately, but it I've done several. You can look up lose fat versus burn fat. It's something like that. But number one, yes, insulin does suppress fat oxidation so that when insulin is higher, you're not burning as much fat in that moment. That is true. But okay, this is a critical, but that is a temporary effect. It lasts a few hours after a meal, and it has nothing to do with your overall energy usage and your energy system and whether you gain or lose fat. Whether you gain or lose fat has to do with energy balance, not whether you spiked insulin from your meal. Okay, I want you to remember this. You don't lose fat minute to minute. You lose it over days and weeks based on energy balance, not based on insulin in the short term and fat oxidation in the short term. Because guess what? If you're not oxidizing fat and your body needs energy, it's going to use glucose instead. So it's either going to use carbs or fat, whatever you have available for it. And the keto folks and the low carb folks are like, oh, all right, but that means we don't have any carbs in our system and we're just burning fat. Well, yeah, guess what? You're eating a lot more fat. You're eating a lot more fat. So the equation actually nets out. And there's actually some studies that show people who eat more carbs tend to burn. A few more calories from eating more carbs and people eat more fat, but that's a separate topic. I'm just gonna leave that to side, just fruit food for thought. So if you eat in a deficit, you're gonna lose fat. Doesn't matter if insulin spiked after every single meal and by how much. Once it drops, fat oxidation resumes, and your body can use carbs in the meantime. It doesn't matter. The body is constantly switching between fuel sources as it needs, and all that matters are the calories. Fat loss fails when calories are too high. It also fails when muscle mass is low, when your training stimulus is weak or you're not training, or when your diet is chronically stressful, not because you had rice or fruit. Okay. And that's when we say carbs, by the way, that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about pizza and donuts and muffins, even though they contain carbs. Those are processed carbs that also contain fats. Totally different things. All right, so let's talk about one of the other myths that I mentioned, and that is, you know, the acute spikes versus the chronic, the chronic spikes, which is called chronic hyperinsulinemia insulinemia. Insulinemia. Okay. And this is where we don't want to conflate these things because this is also causing confusion, let alone the ability to pronounce the word. Acute insulin spikes that we've been talking about. These are normal. They are transient, they're temporary, they're necessary for nutrient uptake. We see them in healthy, active people all the time. If you wear a continuous glucose monitor, you'll see your blood sugar spike when you eat carbs. Totally normal. Nothing wrong with it at all. The amount it spikes is nothing compared to the amount it would spike in a diabetic. You don't have to worry about it. Every time you eat a meal with carbs or protein, you're going to get an insulin spike. That's your body doing what it's supposed to do. That's why I don't even recommend CGMs for the vast majority of people, almost anybody, really. Even if you're trying to get your A1C down, if you start lifting weights, walking more, and eating balanced meals, you're probably going to solve the problem. So chronic hyperinsulinemia is different. That is when insulin stays elevated most of the time. And that is often a precursor to diabetes, or that's, you know, pre-diabetes seen in prediabatic patients. Driven by chronic overnutrition, which is a fancy word of a way of saying you overeat, okay? A sedentary lifestyle, a loss of muscle mass, or you know, you never built muscle mass in the first place, but as you get older, especially in your 40s and 50s, you've lost a ton of muscle mass, poor sleep, high stress, high intake of ultra-processed foods, we see it as well. There's some corollary factors there that have nothing to do with, you know, necessarily the food itself, so much as the correlation with that and the lifestyle. And so the difference here is kind of obvious at this point that one of these things, the the acute spikes as a normal physiological response, the chronic insulinemia is a metabolic dysfunction. It's a disease driven by lifestyle factors. All right. So what you have to understand is that the problem is not insulin spikes. The problem is not blood sugar spikes. The problem is living in a chronic surplus of metabolic dysfunction without a sink for those nutrients. Muscle is the sink. You see that? You see how we come full circle? Muscle is the sink. If you have adequate muscle mass and you're training regularly, your body has somewhere productive to send those nutrients. And then the insulin spike just becomes a feature of your life. You don't have to worry about it, it's not a problem. Now, real practical, I do like to make things actionable for you guys. Who does benefit the most from embracing carbs and everything that comes with it, including this insulin response? Okay, people who lift weights. So resistance trained people like those of you listening to this podcast aspire to be or are doing this already. People prioritizing muscle gain or body recomp, lifters who train regularly three to five days a week, midlife adults trying to preserve lean mass, anyone stuck in the uh under-recovering trap and now needs to recover better and eat more carbs. I would also put you in the camp of, hey, you should do it. You know, you're lifting, but you're under recovering. Let's get those carbs in. And maybe stop dieting for a while. When are carbs most useful? Before your training to fuel your training session, after your training for recovery. And people get confused on that. So we're going to touch on that one more time in our little technique I have at the very end of the episode. Higher volume training days for some people. Some people do like carb cycling, some people don't notice a difference because you're taking it away from your recovery days. So that's a little caveat on that one, but you can you may experiment with it. During maintenance or a slight surplus, absolutely, right? Like if you have a refeed or you're on a diet break, that's where the carbs come way up, and it's hugely beneficial for recovery and all the things we talked about. And then even during fat loss phases to try to keep some of that training quality and recovery in there. I just talked to someone in physics university today, and I said I looked at her fats and carbs in her fat loss phase and I said, why don't we dial the fats down even more to give it to carbs initially so you can really maintain some of that recovery early on? I don't like, even though, even though calories and carbs come down for fat loss, nothing says you have to like follow the book and follow carbs all the way down to an abyss. You can find you can find ways to get more carbs in. Sometimes lowering fats, sometimes lowering protein even is a worthwhile trade. Sometimes it's adding more fiber into your diet, so then you could eat more non-fibrous carbs because you have the extra calories now to work with, things like that. Now, when might carbs be reduced? All right. Well, if you're gonna have a bunch of sedentary days or you know, go on a trip or something like that, you're not training for a while, that might be a time to shift to a little bit of a lower carb diet. Not a low carb diet, just you don't need as much. So low activity periods, sedentary periods, you could do it for short-term appetite management sometimes. You know, when you're in a fat loss phase, they're gonna come down. Obviously, people are sedentary, not resistance training, I guess, need to keep their carbs down. And I feel sad for them because they need to be not living that way. But if that's the case, yeah, then carbs are probably gonna make you fat because you're just overconsuming calories. All right. The key theme here is that you're you gain carb tolerance through training and you use them. You use them well, and there we go. All right. All right, now I want to tell you what I'm not claiming here because the nuance just always gets lost in the arguments back and forth online. Okay, I don't want you walking away with a straw man version of this message. And by the way, if you heard this on YouTube and you're commenting already because you're a low-carb zealot or a keto zealot, you didn't listen to the episode and you didn't get to this point. This episode is not saying that more carbs automatically equal more muscle. No, you have to lift, you have to eat protein, you have to track your metrics. It's not saying that insulin is the only growth signal. Remember, insulin is a helper. It is not saying calories don't matter. Actually, the opposite, I've said it multiple times. Calories are the main thing at the end of the day that matter when it comes to your change in body mass. It's not saying that everyone should eat high carb all the time. And it's not saying that diabetics should ignore their medical advice because diabetics are a whole different population, not being addressed by what I'm talking about today, even though they definitely benefit from the lifestyle factors we talked about today. What I am saying is that insulin works with your training, your protein, your calories, your lifestyle to support muscle growth. Okay? They all have to be in place. And this is consistent with something I talk about constantly, which is the muscle first philosophy. When you prioritize building muscle, it's not just changing how you look, it's changing your metabolic system for the better for life, for a long, wonderful life. You're increasing your glycogen storage, you're improving insulin sensitivity, you're creating a bigger metabolic buffer. So you can eat more food. Come on, raise your hand, you want that. Eat more food, you can recover better, you could diet less often. Yes, raise your hand, you want that too. Building muscle is not just about aesthetics, it's a great, great side effect of it, but it's building a body that handles nutrition more efficiently. And then nutrition comes along for the ride, and you want to eat better and you want to use more carbs because they're fuel, and on and on and on. And then you have less restriction, more flexibility, and it just all flips that mindset from restriction and carbs are the enemy to hey, carbs are a tool that I've I'm using for my training and for my muscle, and I love them, and we're gonna eat them and enjoy them. And then you stop fighting all this and nonsense, fighting all this and listening to all this nonsense. All right, so I want to tell you that post workout carb strategy. Remember, if you do want to dial in your macros and understand how to structure your nutrition for any phase that you're in, go ahead and grab my free guide at witzawaits.com slash macros. That's the nutrition one on one for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting. Go to witzawaits.com slash macros. All right, here is that post workout carb strategy that I promise. It's very simple, but within about an hour and a half to two hours after your resistance training session. Okay, it doesn't have to be 10 minutes. You have a buffer here of an hour to two hours. Consume a meal or shake that includes both protein and what I call fast digesting carbs. Okay. And I'm talking for many people, this is 30 to 50 grams of carbs, depends on your size and how many calories you have. Sometimes this is like a one to one to three to one carb to protein ratio. Honestly, the protein's a little bit less important, even though it's helpful because you'll probably need a lot of protein throughout the day anyway. But I like all these carbs because, oh, let me let me tell you how to get it. You could do like a protein shake with banana and oats, right? You could do chicken and rice. You could do Greek yogurt with fruit and honey. Like that's what I mean by fast digesting. I love bananas before and after workouts, to be honest. And the reason that this works is that we talked about how your muscles are primed to absorb glucose after training, where insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue is at its highest. It gets really jacked up and then it starts to fall gradually over the next 24 to 48 hours. Of course, it's still much higher than baseline because you lifted weights. The carbs you eat around the first couple hours after you work out, though, are going to go toward replenishing your glycogen primarily. And you might get a little bit of an edge on that versus fat storage, and it improves your body composition. This is great if you're trying to body recomp as well, because you'll probably notice better performance in your next session the next day or two days later. I mean, it depends on your split. If you're doing like, you know, four days a week or whatever, you have back to back, you're gonna have less fatigue, better work capacity, improved recovery because you ate carbs not too long after your last workout. It sounds counterintuitive, like, oh, that's crazy that the carbs then affect the next day. But try it, try it. By the way, this is also why I think it's good not to carb cycle as a first resort because your recovery day carbs can help your next day's training carbs, but not in the same way we're talking about here. That's just a side tangent. I want you to try after your next training session, have protein and a decent amount of fast digesting carbs within an hour or two of your workout and compare how you feel the following day versus, say, when you skipped the carbs or you delayed them by a lot more or didn't even eat at all. Right? Compare the two and see if there's a difference. All right, that's it for today. This was one of those episodes where I'm just trying to shift your perspective and challenge those deep-seated beliefs about carbs and insulin you may still have. If you're lifting, if you're building muscle, if you're eating appropriately for your goals, insulin is your friend. You don't have to fear blood sugar spikes, you don't have to worry about CGMs, any of that stuff. It's only gonna help you. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the next time someone says they've embraced a low carb lifestyle, I want you to share wits and weights with them. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

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She SMASHED the Raw Squat World Record at 515 lb with THIS Training Program (Steph Mager) | Ep 436

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How does someone smash a 515-pound raw squat at 181 pounds bodyweight? 

What separates elite strength training from the way most people lift weights? And are deloads quietly sabotaging your body recomp progress?

Body recomp, strength training, and lifting weights look very different when world-record powerlifter Steph Mager joins me on this episode. Steph holds the all-time raw squat world record at 181 pounds bodyweight, and she breaks down how a personalized conjugate system helped her build muscle, protect her metabolism, and avoid burnout. 

We unpack why most lifters misunderstand deloads, how evidence-based training balances max effort with volume, and how nutrition and macros shift between off-season and meet prep.

We also dig into women’s fitness, hypertrophy, recovery, and mindset, including how elite lifters manage stress, fuel muscle building, and approach weight loss without sacrificing performance. 

Tune in to learn more.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – World record squat context
2:35 – Athlete mindset and ego
9:02– Conjugate training explained
11:58 – Max effort vs dynamic work
26:01 – Deloads most lifters misuse
38:53 – Nutrition and protein targets
50:39 – Learning from failed meets
54:06 – Developing an athlete mindset

Episode resources:

• Instagram: @stephm.fit

Elite strength looks effortless from the outside—a perfect squat, smooth lockout, white lights—but the real story lives in structure, recovery, and restraint. Steph Mager’s world-record raw squat at 181 pounds didn’t come from random hard work; it came from targeted hard work, guided by a personalized conjugate system and a mindset that treats failure like feedback. The conjugate method can sound cryptic, but it’s straightforward when you watch it done well: rotate variations to attack weak links, train max effort for intensity, and use dynamic effort for speed, volume, and technical practice. Steph cycles rack pull heights, swaps specialty bars, and layers bands and chains for overload, making each week a precise exposure rather than a repeat of last week. That variety keeps progress moving while protecting joints and building skill under different constraints, a crucial advantage as you advance and need new stimuli to grow.

Max effort days are the backbone but not the whole body. Steph spaces heavy upper and lower days across the week to respect nervous system fatigue, fueling bigger lifts with sleep, food, and intention. Dynamic effort work bridges the gap: more sets, crisp reps, strict technique, and a pace that builds power without frying recovery. If you don’t have chains, bands, or a Duffalo bar, you can still win the day with tempo work, pauses, long isometric holds, and smart substitutions. Heavy holds at the top of a squat or bench, deficit deadlifts for speed off the floor, and simple barbell variations will carry most lifters farther than chasing the perfect tool. The point is exposure—frequent, high-quality practice that grooves the movement and teaches your body to be efficient.

The most misunderstood piece might be deloads. Many lifters “deload” at 75 to 80 percent and wonder why they feel wrecked. Steph’s approach is clearer: protect the CNS, move away from the barbell, and let your body heal while keeping muscle active. That can look like dumbbell work in the 8 to 10 range, mobility, and low-impact conditioning like the StairMaster, with intensity capped around 60 percent effort. Nutrition shifts with it—more protein, steady calories, hydration, and sleep to rebuild. A good deload isn’t a retreat; it’s a bridge to the next productive block. Program it before you feel destroyed, keep communication open with a coach or training partner, and come back hungry.

Peaking for a meet brings it all together. Steph runs a 10-week prep that reduces band tension over time, rehearses openers, and includes reverse bands for strategic overload without trashing recovery. Personalization is everything: deficits if you’re slow off the floor, raw work if you need confidence under a straight bar, rotation based on what moves your numbers. Weight class strategy is practical, not extreme—small, gradual cuts in early summer; maintenance through prep; no risky water manipulation. That keeps performance reliable and training quality high. Crash cuts, severe dehydration, and rushed peaking might look hardcore, but they gut your performance when it counts.

Underpinning all of it is mindset. Steph doesn’t chase wins; she chases better. She treats “ego” as conviction—bold goals, clean execution, and the right to clap for yourself after months of work. When she missed a world record, she didn’t spiral; she signed up for the next meet, tightened habits, and focused on what she could control: showing up, sleeping, eating, lifting, reviewing. You don’t need a lifetime of sport to build that mindset. You need a crew, accountability, and goals that “build themselves” as your skill grows. Train hard and smart, recover like it matters, and fuel like progress is a choice you make daily. That’s the quiet system behind loud lifts.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  A 515-pound raw squat at 181 pounds body weight. That's the all-time world record for women. And my guest today hit that lift using a personalized version of the conjugate method, which many people have heard of, but may not understand why or how to apply it to their training. She also thinks D loads are one of the most misunderstood aspects of training, and most of you are doing them wrong. So we're gonna break down exactly how conjugate training works, what she does for recovery given the massive stress from her training, and how her nutrition shifts from off-season to meat day. Whether you compete or you just want to get stronger without overtraining, this one's for you. 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 Hape, and today I'm excited to be joined by Steph Mager, a power lifter who squatted 515 pounds raw at 181 pounds body weight, an all-time world record. She trains at Hellbent Barbell, right here in Connecticut. So we're in the same state. Funny story about how we connected, we'll get to that. And she uses a conjugate style system. If you guys are familiar with Westside, uh Louis Simmons and some of that, or even Andy Baker, who I've talked about. And she's competed across multiple federations, including USAPL, IPA, PLU. And we're gonna get into the conjugate method, what it actually is, how it differs from, say, a percentage-based or traditional split-based program, what a D-load should look like for lifters and strength athletes, how her nutrition changes between meat prep and off season, which could be relevant for anybody who's trying to use periodization, and what she's learned from bombing out of meats and coming back stronger. Steph, it's great to meet you and welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Steph Mager: 1:54

  Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

  Philip Pape: 1:57

  So there is a little funny story about how we met. Your mother is a healthcare professional who is helping me with my MRI. Yes. And somehow we got talking about powerlifting. She said, Well, my daughter is a power lifter and she has the world record for squad. I'm like, what? I gotta look that up and reach out to her. So, and I'm glad you didn't see like who's this creep contacting me.

  Steph Mager: 2:18

  Seems like she told me right away. She like called me and she's like, Oh my god, I have this networking thing that I'm just doing. I'm just talking. Like her thing is like she just likes to ask people what they do for a living, and then we'll bring us up, any of her children up in any conversation where it flows.

  Philip Pape: 2:36

  She's a great mom. That's looking and it led to this opportunity for both of us. So exactly. Yeah, so I mean, you're like, I would say among the elite now in terms of the world record. And I think what I'd like to know, most of my questions come from a selfish perspective because I know the listener is thinking the same thing, is what like what does it mean to train to win at that level versus just train for fun or train to get stronger? You know, are the what are the differences?

  Steph Mager: 3:00

  That's a good question. It's not really training to like win, it was more of like I have goals for every single meat that I do. And that's just something that I have as like an athlete mentality. I was a gymnast growing up. So all through, you know, middle school, high school, and I competed at the collegiate level for gymnastics. And it wasn't really thinking about winning, it's what we can do better from meet to meet. And I knew I was in the range of getting the world record. And the meet before, I actually didn't do my best. And it's just kind of like gauging where you're at and making goals for each and every meet that you do. I feel like I didn't fully answer that question, but no, no, you did.

  Philip Pape: 3:46

  And I'm glad you reframed, like you, you challenged me on how I worded it, which is great because I always ask the leading questions, and you're like, well, it's not really to win, it's to to beat myself and to get better and learn. Do you feel like if you went back in time, if you if you weren't in spitting distance of like actually being competitive, would it have made a difference?

  Steph Mager: 4:03

  I think, yeah, I think it would have. If I wasn't competitive and I didn't have that mindset, I think that is like the biggest thing you can have as an athlete, as like a competitor, is just mindset is over everything. And if I wasn't close or if I didn't have the eagerness and the ego that I have, I don't think I would have even tried or attempted. And I have tempted it twice.

  Philip Pape: 4:28

  So and the eagerness or ego, oh, I I like to pull on that string uh because you know, the word ego is an interesting one we can unpack. Eagerness, I could totally understand, like passion and desire. And, you know, some people when we talk about lifting weights to when people are trying to improve their fitness. One of the questions I get is like, well, how how do you get into lifting if you don't enjoy it? Right. Like, and I feel like there is an eagerness you have to have, even if it's cultivated. Did you love this from like the young, like really young age, or did you have to cultivate it?

  Steph Mager: 4:58

  Um, we didn't really do any of like like compound movements in college for gymnastics. It was mainly like calisthenics, like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, certain things like that, um, which makes sense, right? I wish we did a little bit more compound movements. I wish we squatted more. I wish we did certain things, but I kind of just got into it and I was just naturally strong. I worked at the edge and a couple people were like, oh, you should do a powerlifting meet. Like you're really strong. Like I was like squatting like 315, but I had like really terrible form. I like had no idea what I was doing. I was like, yeah, it's fine. I'm just lifting with the boys. Like, I don't know. It kind of just fell into my lab because I was a personal trainer. And then I lifted every day, and I just started to like it more and more. And I had these like goals. Okay, like if I can do three plates, I'm gonna do three and a quarter, and then okay, I want to do four plates. Like, there are certain things that like it just builds like goals for you, if that makes sense. Like I didn't love it at first, and then I was like, oh my god, I like this is great. Like, I'm good at it, and like I'm gonna continue to like take this home.

  Philip Pape: 6:04

  Okay, this is this is genius. Let me tell you why. You just said something, build goals for you. It builds goals for you. And what made what that made me think of is you know how so many people are trying to force their behavior change, they're trying to like force force a new habit as opposed to be a person who then the behavior is an expression of that. And and what you just said is like, you know, as you get better at it, because you're doing it, you're doing things that are achievable in the moment that maybe you fell into, like you said, uh, but then it you start to see the success as like evidence of your ability, and then you do it more and more, and now you start to believe it. Exactly, exactly, and then you put funnel that into a goal, which then pushes you even more. So you mentioned ego, though. I do want to touch on that piece of it. What do you mean by that?

  Steph Mager: 6:48

  So I feel like as soon as you get to like a higher level, you know, everyone says like if you lift heavy, like you're ego lifting, and it's not it's not that's not what I'm talking about. It's more of like the form of like I want to hit a certain number and I want to do it well enough where it's like I can not shut people up, but kind of do that and be like, hey, like listen, like I did it, like this is my number, and I achieved it. And it's more of like a like a proud statement rather than like ego. It's I'm not trying to be egotistical with it. I'm trying to be like, I'm bold and I'm gonna tell you how it is. And it just that's how I feel like my lifting comes across.

  Philip Pape: 7:28

  Yeah, I think that I think that's great. I think, you know, we use the term external validation sometimes. I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day, and some people seem to be motivated by external validation as they go. Like they're doing it to please somebody. Others do it to please themselves, but then are proud of it and like shout it to the rooftops when they're done. Is that is that kind of what you're getting at?

  Steph Mager: 7:49

  Um, yeah, I mean, kind of, like, right? Like you, and that's exactly kind of how I felt. But it wasn't even for like everybody else. It was once you hit something like that extraordinary, I feel like people don't realize like you hit a world record and people are like, Are you gonna be in the Guinness World of Records? And I'm like, no, it's just like I wish, that would be cool. But it's an extraordinary feeling. You know, like you're you did it for yourself, and it's that's an internal, you know, validation that I needed. And like it's like an ego for myself. Like it's not like, yes, I posted it and I was very proud of myself. And I'm clapping for myself. Like a lot of I don't know if you saw, I'm gonna go into a tangent. I don't know if you saw the new rules for the new federation, like the very I am not an expert in those rules, trust me. Well, you can't like clap for yourself now and certain things like that. And I'm like, that's like so it's just like so backwards to me because like you should want to clap for yourself. Like you just did like 12 weeks of like prep plus whatever you did to build all of that.

  Philip Pape: 8:50

  So you can't even like like just involuntarily when you get a lift, be like, all right, you know, just a couple of things.

  Steph Mager: 8:55

  Like you can't you can't even clap. Like it like that's certain federation, but anyways, that's like the most popular savvy one. But um, hell no, I'm gonna clap for myself and I'm gonna be proud of what I did.

  Philip Pape: 9:07

  Yeah, we won't even get into like federation rules and and and like white white light white light rules and form rules on barbell, because there's a lot of criticism on some of that. And I get it, I get it. They're trying to be objective, but okay, so so this is a good, like we've we framed, you know, the mental side of it, and I think people are like, okay, Steph, let's talk about how you got there. Like, you know, what are the nuts and bolts of how you got there? And maybe we start with the your training programming and you know, talk about conjugate a little bit because I'm a big fan of that, the max effort, dynamic effort days. Um, one of my coaches is Andy Baker, who co-wrote uh practical programming, you know, the sequel to starting strength. And and he's a big fan of that. And then Louis Simmons and the West Side guys, that's like old school, you know, equipped lifters, you know, it was a whole different beast back then. And I know you personalize and you work with a coach. So let's start. How would you explain conjugate training in layman's terms to the listener?

  Steph Mager: 9:59

  Yeah, so it's different than obviously linear. Linear, you're progressing like week by week, and you're like you're changing a percent and you're going up and probably going down in reps. Um, conjugate, for an example, where I'm doing it right now, I'm rat pulling at like um like above my knee, like this week, and then the next week I'm going a little bit lower, and then eventually I'll pull from the ground. Like so week by week, like what we're doing is changing. It like the form of um the compound movement itself is changing a little bit, but there's certain like he does it in a way where it's conjugate but linear at the same time. So it's kind of a crossover, which I really enjoy, but I think it works better and like my body responds to it well. He'll throw in different movements week by week. So if we're doing like SSB, like safety squat bar, like the next week it might change or transition to something else the week later and attack a different muscle move or um muscle group. I did notice like your body, it's very taxing. It's very taxing on your body, but it helps build and I think it helps grow from a linear periodization. I think that's completely different because your body's already used to those kinds of movements and then just changing those movements week to week. I think you're just exposing yourself to more muscle growth. And I think it's super beneficial. I also train with a lot of equipped lifters as well, and they all do that similar. Um they do conjugate as well. And I'm with like thousand-pound squatters and I'm like side by side with them, which is like crazy to even say. And they're like benefiting from it too. So it's kind of wild to see, you know, people who do equipped lifting, and then I do raw lifting, and we have similar program, and obviously not the same, but we're both growing. So like I think it works either way.

  Philip Pape: 11:59

  All right. There's a couple things I want to ask about because just to simplify for the listener, the conjugate method, there's upper or lower upper max effort and lower upper dynamic effort. So it's a four-day split, right? Just so they know. Sorry. No, no, it's okay. It's okay. And we did do an episode a couple in the past about conjugate, so you guys can search the feed for that word and you'll probably find them. Uh, but what I like that you mentioned, so where I've seen one version of conjugate I've seen is kind of the traditional you rotate over like four, six, eight, ten weeks, whatever, through different variations of, let's say, the squat or the deadlift. What you're telling me is there might be one variation of the deadlift, in this case the rack pole, right? Again, which for the listener, just in case they're a little bit newer, is you have pins or spotter arms or pads or boxes or whatever, and and it's it's a partial range of motion uh deadlift from some height off the floor, right? And you're saying that you will do a certain height and then a lower height and then a lower height, and that's the way you rotate through instead of totally different variations of the deadlift.

  Steph Mager: 12:58

  Yes, yeah. So he'll go in, like these are just different weeks and splits and everything like that. But sometimes like that's just an example for what I have going on this week. Um, and that's kind of the end game of just um having more load at the top. But yeah, we do do a max effort and dynamic um effort as well just to get the volume in. But I've noticed that my body responds better to those max effort days.

  Philip Pape: 13:27

  Um honestly.

  Steph Mager: 13:30

  I mean, because I'm looking at it low reps.

  Philip Pape: 13:33

  Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 13:34

  Yeah. And low reps, it's either like you're doing a one RM, two RM, like a three RM, whatever it might might be, and you're just training at like a high intensity. So like those days before you're gonna have to eat better, like just really focus on what you're um doing for your body, like the night of, like a couple days before, um, and just mentally prepare um as well. And you can't have those two days back to back. So if you're doing a like a uh max effort bench day, you're not gonna want to do a max effort deadlift day, let's say the next day. Like you those have to be spaced out in the week. And a lot of times um people don't realize like, yes, there are two different body parts, but you're also like you're taxing your CNS to like the max. So like they have to be like completely like three, four days apart.

  Philip Pape: 14:22

  So oh, that's interesting. Okay, great. Let's let's talk about that. Because you mentioned a few things about really being intentional preparing for these days, how you eat, how you sleep, right? Which is probably why like a Monday is a good day for some people. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, yeah. So what are so you do up upper first or lower first for the max?

  Steph Mager: 14:40

  Um, usually I do upper and then because I I squat with the crew on Friday. So usually I do a max upper day on either Monday or Tuesday, um, usually Monday, and then Friday I'll do my max lower day, um, and then go from there. But the nights before, like I have to really prioritize my sleep, what I'm eating the night before, what I'm eating beforehand. Otherwise, you're not going to set yourself up for success there. And sometimes it really does show during those days. And then I get frustrated.

  Philip Pape: 15:14

  So yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right? Because like you said, it's so stressful taxing on the nervous system, and people don't realize that. I do like the split we're talking about, though, because I'm more familiar with like a traditional Monday, Tuesday max effort, and then Thursday, Friday dynamic, and the way you're doing it. Again, we're talking elite level, super heavy. You space those apart. So when do the dynamic effort days fall?

  Steph Mager: 15:34

  Yeah. So either I'll go Monday, Tuesday, so I'll go max effort, and then I'll do a dynamic like lower, and then Wednesday, Thursday, I'll be off. And then Friday, I'll do my another max effort day for my legs and go from there. And then Saturday or Sunday will be my other, my other day. Um so it it just is, I mean, obviously I travel for work. I I'm a gymnastics coach. So I really do have to like strategically place all these different days. Um, but yeah, he definitely does not want me to go back to back with max effort days just because like if I'm banging up my body on Monday, like I'm not gonna be prepared and ready to go for, you know, deadlift on or whatever I'm doing, squat the next day. It's just not gonna, it's not feasible. So you're just doing so much. And maybe a novice definitely could do that. I just definitely don't think that I could do that with just the weight that I'm moving.

  Philip Pape: 16:29

  Let's go on a tangent. You said a novice, right? And there's always confusion about how we define novice, beginner, early, intermediate, intermediate, advanced. And I know it's it's very dependent and sometimes it's lift dependent, even not even just your overall. What are your what are your thoughts on that?

  Steph Mager: 16:44

  Um, I yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's different categories. Um, novice meaning you're newer to the sport, you're newer to like one to two years in. Um intermediate, yeah, I think you've done a couple meets under your belt. If we're talking about powerlifting in general, not just like the average person that goes to the gym and is on a powerlifting split or whatever. Intermediate, I think you've done, you know, a couple meets you have under your belt. Advanced side would say that like you put, you know, years under your belt with powerlifting, you kind of have a good, you have experience, you know what you're doing. Not to say that you are handheld as a novice, like some certain things that I still need to be handheld. Um, but that's just, you know, I like to learn, I like to absorb whatever my coach is telling me and then making sure that I'm understanding his feedback. So when people say, yes, I'm an elite lifter, I I am, but I I still, there's so much, so much to learn. And then it's it's not a bad thing ever to be a novice or intermediate. And I think that's where people are like, they're intimidated or whatever. And it's like, there's so much things that I don't even know. And I wish like I just keep going because you know, Hellbent is great because you you learn something new every day. You know, you learn how to, you know, put someone into briefs, you learn how to hold a board, you learn how to, you know, properly do an overload. Like there's just certain things that I'm like, wow, like wouldn't have thought of that. So I've learned so much.

  Philip Pape: 18:14

  And that's what that's what it's about. I love I love that you said that, right? That wherever you are, wherever you are, listener in your journey, like you're both a novice and you're advanced at some things, and you're always gonna be learning. And and I like stuff you're I I could just sense your energy of like you could teach some of this stuff, but you have a humility of I don't know everything and I want to learn more, and I want to learn more, and it's great. And I'm not and I could also sense that you're not like closed-minded, like even when you've learned something, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the only way there could be other ways to no, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 18:41

  I think there's so many ways. I think I think um if me and you were to work out, like we would if like you're taller than me, if you know, I don't know how tall you are, but like do you know what I'm saying? Like there are certain things that would be like nine and a quarter of your strength.

  Philip Pape: 18:57

  Let's go with that.

  Steph Mager: 18:58

  There would be things that were more beneficial and catered to me rather than you know, some things might look different in your program. And I think that's just how it's going to have to be for the person. It's for the lifter.

  Philip Pape: 19:11

  Yeah, that is true. It's highly personalized, which is one of the things you mentioned when we first connected is you know, how you you take what it is, but you've been successful at personalizing. And personalized isn't just like a coach saying, Here's a personal program. It's actually having to learn about you as you go and see how you react, right? And see how you uh respond. We we talked, we touched a little bit on the max effort stuff. I just want to talk about the dynamic effort really quick because there's confusion about the purpose of it, right? Is it to build like speed and power is to keep the volume in and just like maintain strength? Like, what are your thoughts on the main purpose of dynamic work?

  Steph Mager: 19:45

  I mean, I think it's more for like the volume purpose for sure. I I think it it could be go both ways, but like I look at as it as more volume and getting more reps done. Um making sure that I'm maintaining that same technique that I'm doing for the max effort. Like they go hand in hand. Right. Because like you want to make sure that your technique, yes, let's say we're benching like 135 or whatever, and we're doing it with good form, we're pausing, we're doing all that on like a dynamic day, and then max effort, they should really look this like very similar. So just making sure that we're staying with the same technique, and it's just to build more muscle, and I think speed and power for sure, but um, I think it's just more volume.

  Philip Pape: 20:31

  And that's important. I think sometimes volume is like a bad word for some rip people, even when you talk powerlifting, which is which is so weird because you see the best of the best, like know how to maximize that volume. And you know Alex Bromley? He's good uh he's got a YouTube channel, he's he's really nerdy kind of uh powerlifting guy. He's like a more strong man. He has a program called Bull Mastiff that I ran like last year, and the principle is lots and lots of exposure to the lifts and lots and lots of set-based progression, and you're almost you're almost always submaximal in the program until you peek out later on, as if you're if you're gonna do a meet, right? Just which I'm sure is similar to what you do. We could talk about peaking and tapering, but uh until I did that personally, I didn't realize the val how valued just the skill exposure is because it's neuromuscular, even if you're well past newbie gains, you still keep reinforcing that more and more. And I think some of the strength comes from your body's ability to just be efficient. Do you like what are your thoughts on that?

  Steph Mager: 21:28

  Yeah, I mean, we're you know, I I think you're like you're you hit the nail on the head there. Like, I just think that's like totally accurate. You're you want to make sure that you're hitting, you know, volume. You can't just hit max effort days and expect growth. That's especially for a female, like we've learned, and um, there's been a lot of studies with um volume for bench. Um, and my coach has kind of like digged a little bit deeper into that, where we usually, if I'm on an off season, I might do five days where I Three upper days and two lower days just to hit a little bit more and gain a little bit more strength, especially like triceps and back. But just the more volume you're doing and the more exposure to like the technique, the compound movement itself, like the better you are going to be and you're setting yourself up for success on those next ever days.

  Philip Pape: 22:20

  And do you use uh like accommodating resistance or do you more just do it with the the set sets and rep scheme? Like do you use chains and bands? Sorry. I love to use the big words. Yeah, I'm like the technical terms, I know. I know.

  Steph Mager: 22:35

  Um yeah, no, we use chains, um, chains, bands, um, we do deficits, we do, we do like every everything you know, West Side has done. We do that. Um, like right now, I'm going into like just recently I hit um with 80 pounds of chains. We do that on per bench. Um trying to think what else I do. Yeah, I'm using like the Mars bars today. Like there's just certain things that um, you know, it's terrible torture, but it's fine. Um yeah, I think those help with just like the overload at the top. Um, a lot of people sometimes are against that. I personally think that it's helped me, especially going into prep. Um, and we do a lot of reverse bands um as well going into prep and in prep as well. So if we're doing like a max, you I think it's three or four weeks out, we do um like what we were supposed to hit at the meet. So if I was supposed to hit 515, I would hit it with a reverse band just for a little bit less um strain. Um, so you're not killing your CNF.

  Philip Pape: 23:45

  And that's and that's where the bands hanging from the top. Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 23:49

  I mean, they really don't take that much off, you know, because you're it's a band with 500 pounds on it. You know what I'm saying? Like it's like a little micro band, like the little orange ones. Like they're really not doing much, but it gives you a little bit of leeway. Uh yeah, and at the top, like it's giving you the most. So once you hit it at the bottom, it's it you can't feel anything.

  Philip Pape: 24:10

  So that's interesting. And what would you recommend to people who have either a home gym or a you know, kind of a typical gym where they maybe don't have all the bells and whistles for dynamic? Like what's you know, should should they should they use the tempo, like just slow eccentric expenses?

  Steph Mager: 24:26

  I mean, yeah, tempo, pause squats. I think I I think tempo is a great, great one. Um, just to build up that. It's very similar. Um, a lot of the time I honestly bought my own bands when I went to like the edge and stuff, and you can just buy that off of the lead. And I did that. So I and you can usually hook them up just fine with any other bench. Um, but I think tempo, pausing, um, and a lot of these gyms don't have like specialty bars, so like you won't have like the duffalo bar or anything like that. But you can still do heavy overloads at the top, even if you're just holding, like if you're benching and you're, you know, let's say you're 225 bencher, if you you know, overload 285, 275 at the top and just do heavy holds. That's a good one too that I've done. Um, and same thing with you're doing like back squat heavy holds as well.

  Philip Pape: 25:19

  Nice, nice. No, this is good because uh we we we always want to give people options because otherwise they'll make excuses like, oh, I have to, you know, Steph said this is the way you do it, right? And I don't know. Yeah, right.

  Steph Mager: 25:28

  No, yeah, there's definitely like you've got you gotta get creative.

  Philip Pape: 25:31

  Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 25:32

  Um, and you know, especially with like if I'm going on, you know, travel, travel gyms and I'm going down to Vegas this weekend. Um, so it's like, how am I gonna get my my lift done if it's not my home gym? Um, you gotta get creative. So certain things like that, I'll I'll ask my coach and be like, and he usually is the brainst behind it, and he's like, okay, do this instead, or like, let's sub this for this. So if I don't have like an SSB, like I'll I'll be doing something else, probably a front squat, whatever.

  Philip Pape: 26:02

  Yeah, and I encourage everyone listening. If you have a it's good to have a training partner, if you don't have a coach, having a training partner who's kind of right around your level of knowledge, who can like challenge you to think creatively, right? I've got a I've got a friend we could message each other and he's like, Okay, I got a pec deck revert, and I'm doing reverse rear delts. I'm like, well, try it this way, you know? And okay, you know.

  Steph Mager: 26:22

  Absolutely. I think well, it just makes it easier, and you're like, oh yeah, I wouldn't have thought of that. Like, okay, and maybe I can add this. So it just it it makes it easier because I mean, he'll he can just come up with things on the fly, and I'm like, I don't know how you thought of that.

  Philip Pape: 26:36

  I know, I know.

  Steph Mager: 26:37

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 26:39

  All right, so I know D-loads is one thing we wanted to talk about as well that you know have a lot of misunderstanding around it. And maybe just start maybe we start by what aren't people doing wrong with D loads, and then how do you use D-Loads?

  Steph Mager: 26:52

  Yeah. Okay, so my D load I think looks a little bit different than a f a regular power lifting person. Um, I think it's just I it works better for me, so I don't touch a barbell during a D load. I don't do any like thing that's like he wants to completely like make sure that my CNS is recovered. So when I do go back, and I think that's when I go go back to lifting the next week, I think that goes hand in hand with like those max effort days. Like he wants to make sure that I'm prioritizing how I feel, how my body's, you know, handling all of this stress. But that's that's my way of deloading. I think a lot of deloads I've seen, people are still struggling and doing like 75%, 80% of their max and calling it a D load. And I'm like, I don't know what we're doing here. Um, like you're still you're you're still struggling. Like that's it, you're you're not doing what your body needs you to do. If you continuously stress and stress and tax your body repeatedly for, you know, eight weeks, however long your program is for, like there's you're doing yourself a disservice, basically. And by week seven or eight, like the end of your program, you're really not gonna see a lot of change because you didn't have you know a fresh CNS to like be like, okay, like a D-load supposed to help you, and you're supposed to like it's like it's not like a band-aid, but it's something to help you get prepared for the next week to come. And a lot of people abuse their D-loads and don't take it seriously. And I'm like, no, it's it's like I love my D-Load week. I'm like, let's go. I can I don't feel you know, sometimes I do feel still sore because the program changes in itself. So it's if I'm not doing barbell movement, I'm still pushing heavy weights, just more dumbbell. So I still feel a little bit sore, but it's not a sore where I'm not squatting 500 pounds.

  Philip Pape: 29:01

  Okay, I love this, right? Because it is true there's a lot of confusion about D loads. For some people, it's like, okay, I'm gonna drop everything by 10% load. Okay, but you're still doing everything. Or I cut out some exercises or cut out some movements, or go down from four days to two days, or whatever. And and and granted, if it's less than you were doing before, it is some less stress, but it may not be enough to over to recover everything from the accumulation of fatigue. I like that you said I don't touch a barbell, I do some heavy dumbbell work, and people abuse their deloads. Like right there, you just hit on all the myths of D-Loads. So, what does it look like for somebody, just the average person principle-wise, they don't have to be like give specific protocol, but like if they're doing traditional powerlifting style or strength style lifting, what would they change to during a deload for lifting? But and then also maybe for their lifestyle and or nutrition.

  Steph Mager: 29:50

  Yeah, I mean, I think the you're saying what would what does it tip?

  Philip Pape: 29:55

  What are your principles? What are your rules of a good deal d a good deload for somebody?

  Steph Mager: 29:59

  Well, I think it should be 60% is like the highest. I'm almost positive that's what it is, and lower. And I'm not seeing that being relayed on the social media platforms that I follow. So a lot of people kind of just go into the gym and I think coaches get confused or they are. I think a lot of it has to do with not with ego lifting, but if they're trying to hit a max, let's say by the end of the program, they're trying to hit like a 600-pound squat or whatever, and they're just increasing their number. So I think a lot of that is just miscommunication between athlete and coach, where they're um not doing the numbers they're being prescribed. And maybe that's where like the D-load is like not being translated well, and they're doing a heavier D load than the coach anticipated it. But that's that's my hope is that they're like they're not being like the coach isn't providing them with like a 75% or 80% um deload. I think personally that the way that I do it, I think it's the best way for my body could be, you know, like my husband has like still does deloads, he's a power lifter as well, but he still trains with a barbell. That's like the very typical um way to do it. And you just go down to a certain percentage. And I think your your nutrition does change, I think, during that time. Um, it's kind of like a recovery, but you're still I I personally eat a little bit more during that time. And amen.

  Philip Pape: 31:38

  That's uh listen up, people. It's not the time to be dieting more just because you're taking off a little bit of a break. You gotta recover. Yes.

  Steph Mager: 31:46

  Yeah, you have to recover. And um, so yeah, my maintenance calories is like at 2,000 or something like that. I try to up it a little bit. I up my protein. I'm really more focused on, you know, my water intake during this time. And like instead of switching it over to powerlifting, you know, on the lifting side, I'm more focused and geared towards what I'm eating, what I'm putting in my body, how I'm stretching, how I'm like the just mobility at that, at the end, at the core of it all.

  Philip Pape: 32:14

  So and do you do you do any more of anything? Like, do you do more walking or anything like that?

  Steph Mager: 32:19

  Yeah, we he does, yeah. He makes me do um, yeah. Uh he makes me do a stare master like three times um during that week. So certain things like that. Yeah, a little bit. And then the when I say heavy dumbbells, it's not like I'm not doing for like max effort. It's usually like for 10s, like it's like, you know, three by ten, you know, during that time, but enough where I'm like kind of straining at 10, but not like I'm not just using 20s. Do you know what I'm saying?

  Philip Pape: 32:48

  So like of course, yeah, and you're still hitting that um sub-max, but still heavy load. Yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 32:53

  Right.

  Philip Pape: 32:54

  Yeah, cool. No, no, that's good. It's funny because I I'll be recording an episode, a solo episode about D loads. I think it'll come out around the time this comes out. Um, and and uh probably address our conversation here because you know, you're obviously you're a pro at this and you're trying to recover maybe more than some because you are constantly peaking and you're not just trying to slow roll it like many, like many of us might be. And it's important to understand that because myths are like uh how do I eat? I I know some people complain who who have like not body image issues, but like that could be weird changes during a deal of the week. Like, do you notice anything with your fluid retention or your physique or anything like that, or do you not care about that stuff?

  Steph Mager: 33:32

  Um, I don't really see a huge difference with any of that. Maybe I like I feel a little bit different and I just think that your bot your body's constantly changing, I feel like, especially in how especially for me at least. Maybe I feel a little bit more bloated during a D-load week, but that's because I'm just trying to, you know, pound in as much water as I possibly can and just to recover. But I'm not really like analyzing it, you know, every day. I just am like, this is this is the step to be successful and the next week I'll feel better. So yeah, I try to kind of ignore that um and just kind of know that it's it's the process of the process.

  Philip Pape: 34:14

  Yeah. And do you uh program in the D loads or are they dependent kind of on certain biofeedback or like how you feel or anything?

  Steph Mager: 34:22

  He's I mean, he still programs what I'm supposed to be doing. I definitely if there's something that's like hurting me more, or if I'm like really, like really abused, like something's like really not feeling great, he says, okay, like let's nix that and let's sub zit for this. Like we just kind of it's basically communicating with your coach and just kind of figuring out what you know works best. So I think feedback between one another is like oh in open communication is like super beneficial.

  Philip Pape: 34:53

  Cool. And is there um because some people say, you know, only use a D load when you think you need it, but then I think that's sometimes too late, you know? So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 35:02

  No, no, no. It's definitely programmed in. Um usually the D load is like every four weeks or um, usually, and I usually get one in every eight week span. So like usually the fourth week is my D-load week. Same with meet prep as well. Like we'll have a you know, a D-load week going into meet prep in meat prep as well. So before I get into meet prep, it's usually the week before, and then during meat prep, there's at least one or two.

  Philip Pape: 35:29

  Cool. So when you back when you reverse engineer from the meat all the way back, is there a certain set of uh a couple different cycles in there, like building the volume and then peaking? Uh, how does that look like for you?

  Steph Mager: 35:42

  So he yeah, he has a whole we have a usually it's a 10-week meat prep, and it's we I follow the same ones that like the equip lifters are using right now. So like, and obviously it works, right? Like the system works. And so we do like a what do they call it? Um basically you're just doing like a it's called a circumax, and you're doing like heavy overloads, you're doing um, and every week it looks a little bit different. You're either going heavier, you're reducing band tension, you're and then you're eventually going into like openers, and then like last final warm-up, and then a deload, kind of just doing mobility, and then you're at meat.

  Philip Pape: 36:27

  Okay, yeah, just as easy as that, and then you get a world record.

  Steph Mager: 36:30

  And then you get a world record. No, uh no, it just, I mean, I've been doing that kind of that style for I don't know, I've been with him for three or four years now. So I think every meet it looks a little bit different. There are certain things that he's like, okay, like you benefit a little bit more from like deficit deadlifts than you do from the floor. And honestly, the last meet prep I've I did only did deficits to like just help build it and be faster off the floor. And I didn't even, I think maybe at my opener I used, I didn't use the deficit, but there are certain things that I use that was a little bit different from like other athletes and other clients that he had.

  Philip Pape: 37:10

  So and that's the personalization, right? You find out what helps you move. Um, and that you know, encourage the listener, right, to be able to finally understand your body, but also look at the numbers, right? I know Steph, you're you're bigot probably into measuring everything and understanding, you know, how things progress. I mean, how did you determine that specific one, for example, that you responded better to the deficits?

  Steph Mager: 37:33

  I mean, they're just they're just faster off the floor. Um, he even said he was like, wow, you're like, it's weird that you're like so good at like in a deficit then. And I'm like, everyone says that. Um, but off the floor, I think that it's just like a little bit harder. You have to be a little bit more patient rather than deficits, like it's just a little bit easier. I can get into the position a little bit better. But like rack pulls, I'm like terrible at. And like people would think that's like easier for you know anybody because you have more overload. You're already like, you're already above the above the knee, like you have to stand up with it. And it's like, nope, it's not that simple for me. I'd rather just take it lower than it has to be.

  Philip Pape: 38:13

  I know I've seen that. I've seen some people where their rack pull can't even exceed their deadlift. And I don't know if you know, and people, oh no, that's not possible. It should, because here are the biomechanics, and it's like you said, overloading. Everybody's biology is a little different, your ratios are different, where you're stronger is different, right?

  Steph Mager: 38:27

  Yeah. So I think he just kind of sees what works, what doesn't, um, how I respond better to it. Even when I so I didn't do my best meet, I think it was six weeks before, and I was planning to hit the world record at that meet, and I obviously didn't, I didn't do very well at that meet. Um, and I signed up that night for the one in October. And the way that he programmed, he was like, Okay, we're gonna change this, we're gonna change. Like, I don't like, I don't think we did a lot of reverse band stuff. He wanted me to just like make sure that I was hitting like a raw squat without any bands, just so I could kind of mentally and physically feel what 500 pounds feels like on my back and just like hit it and be confident. So I think there are certain things that we did in those six weeks where it was like, okay, let's let's game change, let's like fix what's you know, what's the issue and let's go and attack it.

  Philip Pape: 39:26

  So attack it. All right. And as you're attacking all this stuff, you need to fuel to do that attacking. I think that's a segue into nutrition because I think where we can start maybe start from stuff is like what your schedule looks like, periodization, like what you know, you have your meat, you have the 10-week prep. Is it is your off-season right before that? And you meet you do like three meets a year, or how many meets a year do you use?

  Steph Mager: 39:49

  Usually I only do one meeting. Oh, just one meet a year. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes I mean more novice lifters will do more. My body can only really handle one meet. Um, you're just building so much. And if whenever you really feel strong enough for you, you're like, okay, like I I'm at my strongest peak, I can I can handle it. And usually I compete around September, October. For some reason, that's where my body feels like the most strong. Um, you're coming, you're coming off of like summer where you're, you know, I feel like in the summer, especially for for women, I think we lean out a little bit and you're eating more fruits for more vegetables. Everything is a little bit more, it's just easier. I feel like in the summer or the winter, it's kind of the opposite, especially with the holidays, we're we're not um as mindful, I guess. Um, food's everywhere.

  Philip Pape: 40:38

  Yeah, it's a good time to bulk.

  Steph Mager: 40:40

  So it's a great time to bulk, yeah. Um, but yeah, no, I mainly focus on um, especially when it comes to nutrition, at eating over 185 grams of protein a day. And that's like my main, if I'm not really I eat basically the same thing every day just to keep it easy. Um, I know that's boring, but it's what it what's what works. And if we're just maintaining like it's just super easy, and then I cut back on like certain certain things going into meat season. So if I am, let's say if I'm 184 or 185, like I know how to easily transition that to 181. So I'm I can weigh in and it not be a problem. So yeah, usually in the summer though, I'm it's not a problem. Usually I'm weighing at 175, anyways. Um but the more that I eat and like especially protein, the more full I am anyways. So and I don't ever have a problem with feeling hungry or wanting to I I don't know, I'm not trying to cheat or doing anything like crazy. It's not like I'm I'm not against like eating ice cream any other day, like whatever. It's just being mindful of like, okay, where are we at with my protein? And like that's my main concern. I'm not concerned with like the calories as much until we're in meat prep. Yeah. And then it's just mostly like how, how am I benefiting myself every day? How am I setting myself up for success every day? If especially if I don't hit what I'm supposed to hit for my protein goals, like I I feel like I'm doing myself like a disservice because I'm not growing my muscle. I'm not, you know, that's just how I feel.

  Philip Pape: 42:25

  And it makes sense. And and at your weight, like, so funny thing is, I'm I'm about your weight, but with way less, you know, muscle and strength. Uh but hey, I'm 45. I started this when I was 40, I'm working on it. Um but and and I try to get around 180 protein a day, too. And we talk about the target of like, you know, 0.701 grams per pound is kind of your minimum for most people. And the so two questions I have that came to mind. One is you mentioned hunger. We just did a whole series on hunger, and the most recent, one of the most recent episodes was about how strength training helps with your hunger signals, and also having muscle mass helps with your hunger signals. Do you find that that is partly what's going on here because you're athlete an athlete? Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 43:06

  Yeah, I'm sure. I'm I can't like I ate probably at like nine or ten this morning. I had probably 50 to 60 grams in my breakfast alone, and I'm like, I'm ready to go. I'm gonna probably fuel up, have like a yogurt um and something before the gym today, but like I'm not like overly hungry. I'm not like, oh my God, like I I could eat, but I'm not, I'm not starving to the point where I don't know, I like I need food. And I think that just comes alone with like fueling your body right. If you're fueling it with like fast food and things that aren't very nutritious, like I think that it's very easier, it's easy to be more hungry. And that's just how your body I think works. If you're eating full and nutrient dense foods, you're you're setting yourself up for success, but you're also like your body handles it better.

  Philip Pape: 43:55

  And how have you noticed your metabolism change? Like, so you're 28, is that right? And so let's say from the time you were 18 to now, have you noticed?

  Steph Mager: 44:03

  Oh my god, it's so much different.

  Philip Pape: 44:05

  How is it different?

  Steph Mager: 44:07

  Um, I think as an athlete, I think, especially when I was 18, like I was eating whatever I wanted and I just thought it was like fine. I was like, I'm gonna burn it off. Like I would eat like Nutella and a banana before practice. And I was like, yeah, this is fine. Um, and I but I would eat like a lot. And um I think once I was like 22, I was like, wow, like I'm not, I'm not handling this well. I'm very tired or like going into practice. I was, I I felt like I was crashing like during practice. Um and I was like, okay, like I have to change what I'm eating. And as soon as I changed a little bit of what I was eating, I didn't feel as tired. I felt like I was I had more energy. I my skin looked better. There, there's so many benefits to eating better and healthier that I wish I, you know, realized when I was an athlete in college, because probably would have helped. But um, you know, especially like the dining hall food there, like there's just, you know, certain things that I couldn't even, I couldn't buy food if I wanted to. So um it was limited, but I could have made like healthier choices. So I wasn't crashing out during practice. So are you saying that now that you're eating better being older, your metabolism seems more efficient or um, I I think my metabolism obviously slows like slowed down. Like I think it's harder for me to get back on track. I think that's just women in general. I think if we we hold on to like a lot, like a lot of fat, and especially after the holidays, I think it's really hard for our bodies to like continuously work the way that they used to when we were younger. So it's it's definitely hard. So I that's why I eat the same thing every day. So I don't have to worry about that. Um and it's just I've noticed that my metabolism works better the way if I'm just at this the same maintenance calories and I'm doing everything the same. Um, otherwise, if I kind of change that, I do notice a little bit more fat or I notice like the, you know, my weights going up, certain things like that. And even though I am lifting heavy, uh, it's not a huge difference, but I I notice it. So I think it's still hard, but it's not something that you can't dial back, you know.

  Philip Pape: 46:20

  So yeah, no, we want to be realistic about it. And I know there's a lot of listeners, especially women who they've they've done a lot of dieting, right, in their life and and probably haven't had the same exact trajectory as you. Maybe they want to get into lifting and building muscle. And I'm and I ask these questions to kind of balance like the benefits of it as well as the realities of it, right? And it's you still have to be intentional and strike, it's not like it solves every problem, but you still have to Right, yeah.

  Steph Mager: 46:44

  I mean, lifting's not gonna solve all your problems. Like you can't eat like a McDonald's cheeseburger and then go lift 400 pounds and expect to be like skinny and fit or have abs or whatever. It's really about what you're eating in the kitchen and how you're setting yourself up, and it actually helps you lift better as well. So it kind of goes hand in hand.

  Philip Pape: 47:04

  That and that's important, right? Going back to the identity thing we started with, it's like you eat well because you want to and it feels good and like helps you. It's not that you're forcing yourself very miserable, and like you said, you can still enjoy indulgences like like flexibility. Yep.

  Steph Mager: 47:18

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape: 47:19

  So then what about your periodization? Like you mentioned, you mainly focus on protein and then you kind of maintain your weight. Do you do intentional building or cutting phases at all, or is it just kind of in that window?

  Steph Mager: 47:30

  Um, it's I'm mostly in that window of where if I'm I'm not really bulking or cutting, I feel like I'm I like a maintenance, and then if I have to cut a little bit, May, June, July is kind of the time where one of those months I'll you know be more focused in on, okay, let's cut back here. There's a little bit like and it's not like a huge cutback, which like a lot of people, like if you're at a 2,000, you know, maintenance calorie, some people think you have to make these major jumps and go and cut down to 1,500. That's not how that's not realistic. And you're you're hurting yourself by doing that. So it's just small, like very small, um, like 50 to 100 calories a week is what we're working with if we're chipping things away. And that might look like just reducing the amount of rice intake at lunch or dinner, just certain things like that. So yeah, I would say my resting weight is usually 185. And then going into meat season, if I'm if I'm heavier than I'm, you know, anticipating, I'll definitely be a little bit more um just measuring a little bit better and being more focused and dialed into what I'm eating so that you know it reflects that I'm I'm losing a little bit more each week. And after just doing those small little tweaks, it works.

  Philip Pape: 48:53

  And then for the listener, if we put this on your calendar, you're saying you do that around the summer months and then your meets usually in the fall. So now you're set up to kind of maintain or even slightly build and support your peaking, right?

  Steph Mager: 49:06

  So exactly. And that's and that's the main thing too. It's not like I'm not rushing and I'm not doing this in a in a crazy way.

  Philip Pape: 49:12

  Water water cuts and stuff like that, right? Yeah.

  Steph Mager: 49:14

  And and people do do that. And it's but certain people who I've I've noticed if you're water cutting, you know, 10 to 15 pounds, like I was at a I was at a meet in Chicago and we're on weigh-ins. I just had like a burrito bowl before I before I weighed in because I was at 175. So I'm like, I can handle this. Like I I have like six pounds. I'll eat a burrito. I'm ready to go. There's people shaking, there's people looking like pale. And like John Hack was there, and he was like, you couldn't even recognize like him at all. Like, even my husband was like, who, like, he does not look like well at all. And then the refeed he did, so like, you know, there was you know, IV bags and like the lobby and stuff. It was crazy. It was wild. I was like, I can't believe this is real life right now. But I'm like glad it really can deteriorate performance too. Like if you're taking all of that weight off and then you know, refeeding the next day, it can alter how you're, you know, you perform. And I don't want to even, you know, think about that. So I I just make sure that I'm, you know, doing it week by week, losing whatever I need to, the four or five pounds that might alter my performance. So uh week to week I just make sure that I'm prioritizing it in May, June, or July. And so I guess I'm set for September.

  Philip Pape: 50:39

  Yeah, I'm glad you're doing it the right way, because we do hear a lot of stories these days, like both in powerlifting and in uh physique, you know, competitors with like sodium manipulation and you know, deaths from people like just putting their body to the extreme limit that's not healthy. It's good that you do it that way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, so I I did want to ask you right before we wrap up, is like I'm sure you've had some difficult times, and you know, you've talked about bombing out of a meat. Like, I guess what what's the hardest moment you had, but then also what did you learn from it?

  Steph Mager: 51:10

  I would say the hardest moment I had uh was not hitting the world record the first time, and that was in September. So that was, I don't know, six months ago now. I I oh I was I was a mess. I was crying, I was, but I was I wasn't mad about how I did. It was it was more like I built this up in my head, like, oh, I I had it, you know, I was so confident I was gonna hit it. And I think it needed to happen because, you know, there are certain things in training that I could have done better. I wasn't prioritizing certain things, um, like sleep and how I was eating. There was a lot of mental warfare going on in my head as well. And I constantly kept thinking, like, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if I let this person down? And I think once I shifted how I was feeling and being like, okay, I failed, like it, it just wasn't there that day. I signed up that day and I said, I'm not finished. There's I'm going to get it. And, you know, I had this conversation with my coach and he was like, Are you sure? Like, is this something that you like? He's like, I don't know if it's a great idea, you know, to, you know, go from one meet and then six weeks later, like go into another. He's like, but if you're if you're sure, then I said, I'm 100% sure. I'm 100% locked in. And I was like, you just like I was dialed in. I I showed up to the gym on time. I I didn't leave until I was finished. Like there were certain things that I was just, I was hungry for to win. And that's I think, you know, losing and feeling some, not something being taken away from me, but like there was a opportunity that I didn't I didn't hit. And I kind of left it out there for others to take. And I was like, no, like that's mine, I'm gonna take it. And so just being dialed in, I think, and that locked in for those six weeks, I think just made me more competitive. And um I definitely learned a lot from that experience. And I am going to take what I learned and build it for the next, you know, world record or um the next attempt.

  Philip Pape: 53:21

  So I think that's awesome because when you said six months ago, the listeners like, oh, that's that's nothing, right? It's only six months ago, right? And and yet it was this devastating moment. And I think I think of the the analogy of like when you fall on your face, you're still moving forward or something, or like you know, failing forward, I think you you call it. Uh the idea that you're just you're hungry. And even though you said you do one meat a year, I like that you're like, no, this this time I'm doing the second one as soon as I can, because I can't wait, right?

  Steph Mager: 53:47

  Yeah, I I was I was so dead set. I was like, nope, like you're not taking this away from me. I'm signing up. I just knew I had it within me, and it was just like a like a mental game for myself. And I think losing and and failing just taught me how to be more resilient and to come back.

  Philip Pape: 54:06

  So resilient, yeah. And I bet just doing all the hard things you do every day, also making resilient stuff. We we are inspired by that. So, anybody listening, like, think about some of these lessons, you know, not just doing the hard things, but maybe setting for yourself a goal, setting for yourself up if it is competitive and if it's a meet, but even if it's just something else that's like, all right, now I gotta make it happen, right? Six weeks from now, ten weeks from now, whatever it is, as as long as it's not like unrealistic extreme, you know, like trying to lose 50 pounds or something.

  Steph Mager: 54:33

  Yeah, exactly.

  Philip Pape: 54:35

  All right, so this has been awesome. I I always like to ask this of some of our guests, and that is, is there anything you wish I had asked? And if so, what's your answer?

  Steph Mager: 54:44

  I don't think there's anything specific that I think you do. I think we kind of hit on all of the topics. I think maybe the only thing is having an athlete mindset going into like a sport like powerlifting, let's say bodybuilding or anything like that. I think just having that mentality kind of drives the sport a little bit harder. So, you know, my coach is was a former baseball player, I was a gymnast. There are certain mentalities that, you know, coexist from how we played as an athlete, and we're like, okay, we're gonna take that same mindset and like of winning and of just prioritizing the sport itself. And I think that's like a little bit different compared to someone that didn't have that growing up. But you can still have that same mindset. It's just a little bit harder because I think there's things that we've learned as like athletes and growing up and like just failures and all of those things, um, failures, winnings that have can kind of just made us successful and just who we are as athletes. So I think that just the mindset thing.

  Philip Pape: 55:57

  The mindset thing of being an athlete. So if somebody isn't doesn't have the athlete background, like you said, is any thoughts on how they could start to cultivate that?

  Steph Mager: 56:05

  Yeah, I mean, I think um being in a group setting. So especially in like the gym, if like you have someone that is like you rely on like a gym partner, a coach, I think just being in a group setting is like the best thing that you can rely on one another, you can push each other. You're there for each other when you know one's having a great day, you're not having a great day, you kind of lift each other out and you equal each other out. Um, I always lift with either my coach or like the team, and like we just cultivate this energy to make sure we're pushing each other harder.

  Philip Pape: 56:38

  I love that. Uh, no truer words have been spoken. I mean, guys, I wouldn't be where I am without coaches, mentors, teachers, um, therapists, uh, doctors, like like the whole team behind you, training partners, groups, Facebook groups, whatever, seek it out. Be among people that are like eager and have a positive ego, like Steph. Yes. Bring it full circle for whatever your goal is. So, all right, love it. So, Steph, uh, where can people find you, look you up, or reach out to you?

  Steph Mager: 57:08

  Yeah, they can look me up on my Instagram. It's um Steph M Fit. Yeah, but I mean, I Facebook doesn't have, I'm not like as updated on my Facebook, but um my Instagram for sure.

  Philip Pape: 57:22

  At Stephm.fit. And with that, Steph, this has been awesome. Like it was a surprise even meeting you, so it was great to have you on the show to talk about your training. And I'm wishing you the best with everything to come. I know you're gonna continue to be successful.

  Steph Mager: 57:37

  Thank you so much for having me.

5 Signs You're Building Muscle (Even When the Mirror Says Otherwise) | Ep 435

Upgrade your sleep and recovery with Cozy Earth's bamboo pajamas and blankets. Temperature-regulating, lightweight, and designed to help you fall asleep faster. Go to witsandweights.com/cozyearth

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You're training consistently, eating enough protein, doing everything you're supposed to, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, nothing seems to be changing.

Or worse, you look softer than last week. What's going on?

The mirror and scale are terrible short-term indicators of muscle growth. 

They're influenced by glycogen levels, water retention, inflammation, and your nervous system, none of which reflect actual changes in muscle or fat tissue. If you're judging progress by how you looked this morning vs. last week, you're setting yourself up for frustration and bad decisions.

Learn the 5 reliable signs that you're actually building muscle. You'll also hear the common scenarios where feedback gets confusing (deloads, building phases, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance) and exactly what to expect during each one.

Plus, we answer a listener question about what to track during a deload week.

Whether you're focused on strength training over 40, working on body recomp, or just trying to build muscle without the mental games, you'll get a framework to trust your process.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why the mirror and scale are misleading when building muscle
3:28 – How glycogen and water create short-term visual fluctuations
5:32 – 5 reliable signs you're building muscle
10:48 – Strength progression and recovery as leading indicators
14:32 – Changes in your clothes and performance
18:10 – Biofeedback markers (sleep, energy, hunger)
20:29 – Sleep and recovery tools for better adaptation
23:07 – What to expect during a deload week
28:20 – Reading your data correctly early in a building phase
31:23 – Body recomp and post-diet maintenance pitfalls

Many lifters grind for weeks, step on the scale, and feel deflated by numbers that swing like a weather report. The truth is that visual changes and daily body weight are lagging, noisy signals. Glycogen shifts, water retention, inflammation from training, and even your nervous system state can make you look fuller one day and “flat” the next with no real change in fat or muscle. That’s why progress often hides in plain sight. Instead of chasing the mirror, you need reliable leading indicators that coaches use to guide programming and reassure athletes they’re on track even when short-term feedback is confusing.

The first leading indicator is strength. If you’re adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same load, or performing better within your core lifts over training cycles, your muscles are adapting. Strength and hypertrophy are not identical twins, but they’re close companions; sustained strength gains demand tissue growth. Track a handful of key lifts consistently and evaluate progress over four to twelve weeks, not days. Advanced trainees will see slower trends, but trends nonetheless. Think of this as your financial ledger: a steady rise confirms your deposits of effort are compounding, even if the mirror statement hasn’t arrived yet.

Recovery quality is the second signal, and it flips a common myth. Less soreness does not mean less progress; it usually means your body has adapted to the stress and is repairing more efficiently. When you notice fewer nagging aches, faster bounce-back between sessions, and more stable joints after similar or slightly increased training, growth is underway. During a deload, you may even feel “softer” as inflammation drops and glycogen shifts, but improved sleep, calmer nerves, and renewed motivation to train mark a successful reset. Resist the urge to cut calories during this week; fueling recovery accelerates the return to productive training.

Third, examine performance beyond raw strength. Can you handle more total work in a session without feeling wrecked? Are you hitting the top of your rep ranges more often, keeping rest tight without losing quality, and maintaining bar speed deeper into sets? Those are hallmarks of improving work capacity and neural efficiency supported by more contractile tissue and better energy system function. These changes often appear sooner than dramatic physique shifts and set the stage for future hypertrophy by allowing you to tolerate greater training volumes safely.

Fourth, consider how your clothes fit, not just whether your waist shrinks. Body recomposition often shows up as shirts getting snug in the shoulders and sleeves while pants loosen at the waist yet tighten through the thighs. Early in a building phase, the waist may tick up slightly from glycogen and a small surplus, which is normal and productive. Interpreting these signals requires context: phase, nutrition, and training volume. A tighter chest and sleeves paired with stable or modest waist change is classic recomposition—even when the mirror looks unconvincing on any single day.

Finally, watch biofeedback: sleep depth, energy, mood, libido, digestion, and hunger signals. When these stabilize or improve, your system is handling stress and adapting. Poor sleep, brain fog, erratic appetite, and constant fatigue point to recovery or nutrition gaps. Biofeedback is the dashboard for your physiology; if the lights are green, push. If they’re flashing red, adjust volume, calories, or protein and carb timing. This matters during transitions like deloads, early surpluses, refeed weekends, body recomp, and post-diet maintenance when visual cues get especially messy.

Misreading short-term feedback leads to three costly mistakes: slashing calories because you “look soft,” adding reactive cardio to chase water weight spikes, and program hopping before a plan has time to work. All three undermine adaptation and stall gains. Instead, commit to cycles of six to twelve weeks, fuel recovery, and let strength, recovery, performance, clothing fit, and biofeedback guide you. The mirror will catch up. Treat these leading indicators as your compass, and your physique will become the inevitable byproduct of consistent, focused work.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  You might be training hard and eating right, but when you look in the mirror or step on the scale, it feels like nothing's happening, or worse, like you're going backward. If you've ever thought, I'm doing everything right, so why don't I look like it? This episode is for you. Today I'm breaking down five signs that you're actually building muscle that have nothing to do with how you look. These are the markers that experienced coaches track, that research supports, and that most people are ignoring while they obsess over the scale or over the mirror. By the end, you'll know exactly what to pay attention to and what to stop letting mess with your head. She is in a coaching program, she's doing all the right things, and her coach had her take a deload week, which is a planned reduction in training volume, which is which is to let your body recover. And she wrote me this quote, I'm used to being rewarded for consistency and effort and pressure, so my nervous system is like scanning for threats because I'm not getting immediate feedback. I look softer, my veins are almost gone, and I feel like something's wrong, even though I know intellectually that this is supposed to happen, end quote. And actually, she sent me a lot more details behind that. And the message really stuck with me because this is a microcosm of a bigger challenge that I hear from a lot of people, right? She isn't alone. I hear versions of this all the time, whether you're in a building phase or a fat loss phase, but oftentimes it's you're trying to build muscle and you're watching the scale climb up, you might be panicking, people doing body recomp, wondering if anything's happening, people in maintenance after a diet who feel like they're losing their progress. And I think the common thread here is that you're relying on feedback that's either delayed, it's like lagging indicators, or it's misleading, or it's the wrong feedback for the phase that you're in. So today I'm gonna give you five reliable signs that you are building muscle and making progress that do not depend on the mirror or the scale doing what you want. And I'm gonna answer Aaron's specific question a little bit later as well about what to actually expect during a D-load, because I don't think many people talk about that either. Then stick around to the end because I'm gonna share three of the most common ways that people blow up their own progress by misreading short-term feedback. And you've probably done at least one of them for, so stick around for that. Now, before we get into the five signs, I want to explain why the two metrics that everyone is obsessing over, the mirror and the scale, are rather terrible indicators, especially of short-term progress. How you look on any given day depends on a bunch of factors that have nothing to do with actual muscle or fat changes. We've got to think short-term versus long term. So, short-term, what is happening way overrides the long term, and this is where it throws us off mentally. So you've got your glycogen levels. This is the carbs stored in your muscles. Those are gonna fluctuate a lot based on your training, your carb intake, your hydration status. When glycogen is high, you're gonna look fuller and tighter. And when it's low, you tend to look flatter and softer. And this is one of the reasons why if I take someone through a fat loss phase for a specific event, I actually want them to refill with their glycogen a few weeks before so they look fuller and tighter. And neither of these reflects actual change in fat loss or fat gain either way. So that's glycogen. Then we have our hydration and water. Water distribution shifts all the time. After you train hard, like a heavy leg day, you're gonna hold water from the inflammation. If you're in a D-load or you're in a rest period or vacation, sometimes that inflammation drops away, and now you look less, look less lean, even though you might be recovering and growing. So it really messes with your mind, and the body can change how hydrated or dehydrated it is as like an adaptive response to a lot of things like alcohol and fluid intake and stuff like that. Then there's your nervous system, which affects how you look as well, believe it or not, right? When you're in a stressed, ramped up state from even if it's from a good thing, like a heavy training session, you carry yourself differently physically in response to that. Your blood flow is a little different, your muscle tone might look a little different. And then when you recover, that changes, you might look softer. So all of that affects how you look on a short-term basis. And then the scale is even worse for short-term tracking, guys. It measures the gravity pulling you down to earth. That's it. How much mass you have, that's your muscle, your fat, your water, your glycogen, organs and skeleton, food in your gut, everything in your body. And so day-to-day swings of between, say, two to four or even five pounds are extremely normal and also meaningless. Even though I encourage people to weigh every day, actually using that daily point is meaningless. So if you're judging your progress by how you look this morning versus last week, you're just trying to read the tea leaves. It's it's it's meaningless, guys. These metrics matter only over at least weeks, but more likely months when we're talking about building muscle and body recomposition, not days or just a few weeks. So, what should you track instead? That is what the rest of this episode is about. Let's go over the five signs that you're building muscle. So if you know these signs, then you know what to track. So, sign number one is that your strength is going up. It's as simple as that. This is the most reliable indicator that muscle growth is happening. Muscle is strength, strength is muscle. If you're getting stronger over time, adding weight to the bar, getting more reps at the same weight, progressing on your lifts overall, your muscles are adapting to give you that extra strength, and therefore your muscles are getting bigger. Strength and muscle size, they're not perfectly correlated. It's not a one-to-one, but they're closely linked. You can't keep getting stronger forever without building muscle tissue. And then, and the muscle has to grow to support the increased force production. So tracking your key lifts, and these could be as simple as the big three or big four, like the powerlifting moves, deadlift, squat, press, overhead, or and or it could be a whole bunch of other lifts that are part of your programming. And you want to track them over your cycle, or not, you know, over your uh training cycle. Maybe that's four weeks, maybe that's six, eight, twelve, whatever. Are you progressing, even if it's slow, right? The more advanced you are, the more slowly it might progress, but that is the signal in the noise, not what you see or the weight on the scale. So sign number one is that if you're not doing that, that's a big game changer. Sign number two is that your recovery is getting better. And it kind of trips people up because it feels counterintuitive. As your body adapts to training, you often recover faster being between sessions. This is where when I start working with people and they express that they don't have much soreness and they're surprised about that, I have to have that conversation that, you know, because we're progressing using the same lifts, your body adapts, you're not gonna have soreness. It's not like those YouTube workouts or the F-45 or the Pilates, whatever, where you're just doing random stuff and a lot of eccentric work, and it's really not producing any gain in muscle and you feel beat up. But if you are actually adapting to your training, you're gonna feel more recovered in some ways and less beat up day to day and bounce back quicker, which is incredible, which is an incredible extra side benefit. A lot of you start to realize. Now, a lot of people think this means their training isn't working because they're not as sore. And that's backward. It means your body's getting better at handling the stress and repairing the tissue, which is which is literally what adaptation is. All right. Pay attention to how you feel about 24 to 48 hours after you train. If you're recovering better than you were two months ago, that's a really good sign that you are adapting and getting stronger. Interesting, right? And you're getting more athletic, you're getting, you're just getting better and stronger. Sign number three is that your performance is improving. So this is beyond just strength, just those numbers. I want you to look at your overall training quality. Can you do more total work in a session? That's your work capacity. Is your endurance within the sets getting better? And mind you, this could occur without having extra cardio. This is why I love lifting weights. It checks so many boxes. Are you hitting the higher end of your rep ranges more consistently? Are you more efficient, which means now you can express even more strength and grow even more? These performance markers reflect your body's increased capacity overall, not just muscle, but your energy system, your neural efficiency, and of course, more muscle tissue supporting the work. So if your training's getting better, your body's adapting. Sign number four is that your clothes fit differently. Now that's the key word, differently, not just that your pants are looser, because again, it depends on what phase you're in. You might be gaining weight and your waist might be going up on purpose because you're gaining some fat with the muscle. We're not talking about this. This is about where body recomp kind of shows up before the mirror tells you that it's there. And you might notice that like your shirt's a little bit tighter in the shoulders or chest and your arms in a good way. Your pants fit a little looser in the waist, but maybe tighter in the thighs. And maybe they're not looser in the waist, maybe they're the same, but it you've got to understand how to put all the data together. And this happens because you're gaining muscle and you're either losing fat at the same time if your waist is going down, or you're not really gaining that much fat, but the muscular areas of your body are outpacing the fat gain areas of your body, if that makes sense. And again, this can be very difficult psychologically because if your waist is going up, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. It definitely can happen. But if you're doing like a lean gain or aggressive maintenance or body recomp, generally you wouldn't expect much change on your waist, but you would expect bigger circumference in other areas, maybe your neck, your biceps, your chest, your, what am I trying to say, your thigh, your hip thighs, not necessarily your hips, but your thighs. So if your clothes are fitting in this slightly different way, again, trust those before you would necessarily look at the scale or even the mirror, because the mirror could be a very cruel mistress because of the subjective interpretation. Sign number five is that your biofeedback is solid. All right. And this is another one people, a lot of people I meet who haven't listened to this podcast or are very much into you know evidence-based fitness, aren't aware that, hey, all these physiological expressions of your body give you really good information. How's your sleep? How's your energy level? How's your mood, your libido, your digestion, your hunger? Right. There's like a good list of between six and eight measures that are helpful for most people. For some of you, you may have other things that that are helpful as well, but but that's those are the big ones. When your body's adapting well to training and nutrition, these also tend to be stable or improving, right? You tend to sleep a little better, a little more energy for your workouts. You're not constantly starving or battling cravings either, because you're managing your hunger sick hunger signals better, probably because you're also fueling better. And conversely, if you have poor biofeedback, right? Your energy is constantly low, your sleep is inconsistent or bad or just disruptive, you're always hungry or you have just erratic hunger, brain fog, all of this kind of stuff, then there's something off with your recovery, maybe your nutrition, your calories, protein, carbs, maybe your training load, your volume, your approach, how much cardio you're doing, et cetera. So good biofeedback means your system is handling the stress and adapting. And notice not all of these are direct measures of hypertrophy, but they're corollary measures of a body that is thriving, growing, building, getting more functional, and performing better. All right, so quick reminder at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share the three most common mistakes people make when they misread their short-term feedback. And these tend to stop people from making progress. And we're gonna help you not do that. Now, we've been talking about biofeedback. All right, these are the markers that tell your you your body is adapting well. And I would put sleep by far at the top of that list. And what helps recovery happen even faster is if you can have a really cozy, indulgent, helpful, calm environment for sleep. Not just more hours, but better quality sleep, deeper REM sleep, deeper deep sleep. And I want to talk about today's sponsor because this is super aligned. Cozy Earth came to me a while back. I wanted to sponsor the show. I said, I need to start using your products for a while, and I did, and I love these guys. The quality is extremely high. You get what you pay for, but you also get the recovery. I have talked before about their bamboo derived sheet set, but now I want to tell you about their pajamas that I've been wearing for a while. I'm not a pajama person, and usually because they're too hot and they're they're not comfortable. These, like their sheets, are extremely lightweight. They regulate temperature because of the material. And I've joked before that I wear box, I wear briefs that are made from a similar material, and and I can't, I would wear everything bamboo-derived if I could, probably. And now I fall asleep faster. I just am super comfortable when I get under the sheets because I normally run hot and they just don't trap heat. So that combined with the sheets is great, but even just the pajamas are awesome. And then another product I've been using because we love throws in blankets in our house, and my wife basically took this for her own. It's called the classic cuddle blanket, and it lives on our couch. Now, this is a super heavy blanket in a good way. It's it's I you could almost call it a weighted blanket, but it's got like a very plush, soft feel. My kids fight over it because they say it's like as soft as their hamsters or softer than that. And we kind of fight over it because it's really, really warm. Even when we have the fire going or the heat on, it keeps you warm. So those are the kind of things I really like. I love Cozy Earth. They have a ton of products, they're all super high quality. If you like to support the podcast, this is a great way to do it, right? We don't bring in much income from the podcast itself. So it really helps us make more of these episodes. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth and you'll get 20% off. Now, if you don't see the 20% off, use our code Wits and Weights, but it should auto-apply. Go to wins and weights.com slash cozy earth because it's it's just another tool in the toolbox and they back up their products. They have a hundred night sleep trial. And I've talked to people who have gotten nicks and scratches on their own fault, and they'll still return and give you a replacement. Uh, they have a 10-year warranty. So if you don't love it, you can send it back and I think you will. I love it. I I need to get more sheets and I need to get more pajamas so I have enough to rotate through. Go to witzawaits.com slash cozy earth, support the podcast, check out Cozy Earth's amazing products to help with your sleep and comfort. Witzawaits.com slash cozy earth. All right, let me walk you through some specific situations where the mirror and the scale can be misleading. And then they you can recognize when they happen to you. All right, scenario number one is during a deload or rest week. Now, this is what listener Erin H, who wrote the original question that spurred this episode, this is what she was experiencing that during a deload, you're reducing your training volume. You're doing this on purpose to try to recover and get rid of some of the fatigue. And so a lot of things will happen. This is like a transitionary period, just like when you start on a diet or get out of a diet, or you start a new training program, you're effectively turning a big switch down on your training. And so the turnover, turnover in your like glycogen will slow down, inflammation should go down. Your nervous system, nervous system, your CNS, should be far less stimulated. In fact, I I spoke to all-time world record holder in the 181 women's raw squat, Steph Mager, here on the podcast. And she said for her D-Load, she doesn't even use a barbell that week in to deliberately force her from being able to stimulate your nervous system too much. She switches to dumbbells, it's still pretty heavy, but she reduces the overall volume. So during a D-load, you might look a little flatter, softer, less pumped because you don't have that constant stimulus coming in, especially if you've got a hypertrophy program going on. And this doesn't mean you're regressing. It's just you're recovering, you know, your muscles aren't shrinking away. You're not gonna lose your gains. We want this, we want to do this. You're still gonna train that week, right? You're not just taking it off altogether. And even if you were, that's not gonna set you back. You're getting a better chance to repair and grow and reduce some of that fatigue, that nervous system stress. And so there could be visual changes that you don't like during a delo. And guess what? They're gonna reverse within a session or two once you resume normal training. So, since Aaron asked a very specific question that nobody ever talks about on these podcasts, I want to address it today. And that is what should you expect during a deload week? What metrics matter? What feedback's normal? How do you know it's working? Just gonna take like a couple minutes to answer this real quick and then we get back to the main topic. But here's your answer, Aaron. Okay. What you'll probably see is that the scale weight might go up a little bit because of water distribution, or it might go down from reduced inflammation, could go either way, right? Because you've disrupted your training patterns. I'm not gonna read into that because I never read into a few days or a week or even two weeks anyway. I always say think about a three-week average when you think of scale weight. Visually, you might look a little softer, flatter, less pumped. Your veins might not be there if you normally look vascular, right? Some people don't have that, you know, that look anyway, but depends. And this is all the glycogen and water shifts we talked about. And then probably some reduced muscles tone, you don't have the same pump, your nervous system's calmed down. And this is temporary, it's gonna reverse within one or two sessions. So I would forget the mirror. I would pay attention to your recovery markers during that week as the most important thing that you care about. That's all that matters. Is your sleep getting better? Are those nagging aches in your joints, like your low back or shoulders or knees or wherever that is, starting to go away? Are they fading away? That to me is really important, especially for those of us over 40, achy joints. You want to listen to that. Is your digestion a little better? Do you feel less mentally fried? Because that's also very important. And then I guess here's the big one because by the end of the deload, you should start feeling a genuine desire, like psyched up to train hard again. Like, okay, I missed training, I gotta get back to it next week, right? Real eagerness to do it, that pull toward the gym. And that tells you that's a really good message to tell you you're recovered. And don't forget the food side of this. During a deload is not the time to go into a deficit if you weren't to begin with. I mean, if you're already dieting and you just want to continue diet, great. But I would say a delo, if anything, you want to increase calories. And even if you're dieting, this might be a great week to take a maintenance break because you're trying to help the recovery, and that's only going to accelerate it. So a successful deload, I would say doesn't always feel productive in the moment. It kind of feels lazy to some of us, right? Like so, like you and me, Aaron, who wire to think that like our effort means we're making progress and you don't want to rest on your laurels. So you're not going to get the same feedback. You know, the pump isn't there, the mirror may not look like you want. But if you feel better by the end of the week than you did at the start, you're sleeping well, aches are gone, you're looking forward to training more than you were before, those are good signs. And then when you come back to normal training, you'll know the D load work. That's the other thing. You have to have that feedback of okay, the weights might feel a little lighter, uh, you're Pumps are going to come back immediately if you care about that. Your motivation should be a little higher. So there's all of these aspects that we get from a D-Lo, whether they're programmed in or done a little bit more auto-regulated fashion. That's a whole other episode. Like, how do we do Doads? All right. So sometimes, Aaron and everyone listening, you do have to change what you measure based on the phase, even if it's a week-long special phase like this. Same thing goes for when you travel, same thing goes for if you take a diet break or a refeed or anything else, just has to change. I'm on my refeed weekend in the middle of a fat loss phase. So during the weekend, I'm tracking things a little different than I do during the week. I know my weight is gonna pop a little bit and then it's gonna drop back down, but I kind of ignore it for a few days, knowing that happens. I take it, I measure it, but I ignore I ignore it mentally more than I would otherwise. So that's that's the first scenario is the is a D load of rest week. The second scenario for when feedback gets a little bit confusing is early in a building phase. So when you go into a building phase, you're gonna eat more than you were before, probably in a small surplus. And I know there's more info now about how big of a surplus do you have to be. Maybe you don't have to be in that much of a surplus. Doesn't matter. You're eating more, you're eating enough to build muscle. The scale is probably gonna go up a little bit. And you might look a little softer in the midsection, and then you might panic. Okay. And you might stop. And this is this is a lot of my clients and those of you in physique university or using my app. It's like you have to commit to it and understand what's happening. What is actually happening is you're holding on to more glycogen and water from the increased food and training. That's it. You're gonna gain some weight just from that. You might even gain a little bloating initially because your body's not used to the extra fluid, has to adapt before it releases some of it. And there might be a tiny bit of fat gain as you go along during the building phase because most of what you're trying to gain is muscle. But to gain that muscle, you're in a little bit of a surplus, and therefore you might gain a little bit of fat. Now we do it in a very efficient way these days. I often don't push people too hard on the amount of a surplus. More with men than women tends to be the case. And if you're open to adding gaining a little more fat, but you might gain even more muscle, you've got to see what works for you in that regard. I've been through very, very aggressive phases and very, very lean phases. And now I know what works well for me. For me, it is somewhere in the middle. For some people, it might be on either end. All right. So early on, your muscles are gonna fill out with fuel. It's kind of like when you start taking creatine, people are like, oh my God, I gain weight on creatine and I feel bloated and this and that. Well, it's usually a good sign your muscles are filling up with more fuel. That's what allows you to perform better. And then your body adapts to the fluid change and will look better once it adapts. And so I would I say, I say wait eight to 12 weeks, like like two to three months into a building phase before you really judge anything. Because the building side is slower than the fat loss side. So everything's just kind of stretched out. It's a process, guys, but it's a process that's so worth it. So that's scenario two is the early building phase. Scenario three, where the feedback gets a little weird, is body recomp. In fact, all of it. Now, I recently had a whole episode devoted to body recomp. I've had several of those. And a lot of people want to do it, but a lot of people don't want to accept how the measurement gets a little wonky and precise and difficult. Okay, you're eating around maintenance, maybe a little higher, maybe lower. You're still training, you're doing all the things, but a lot thing a lot is not going to change. The scale is probably not going to change that much. Even what you see in the mirror, it's going to take time to change. And that's the hard part about body recomp. As much as everyone thinks it's a holy grail, it's slow and it's hard to see week to week. And yeah, you might be losing fat, gaining muscle at the same rate, and your weight stays sable. So that kind of throws you off. So the signs show up, and guess what? The five signs we talked about earlier: strength progression, how your clothes fit, those kinds of things. Now you can take things like photos and compare them. You don't want to look at your mirror every day or any day, really, and try to compare that because you just, it's not possible for our human brain to comprehend from you know three weeks ago in the mirror to today in the mirror. Our brains just don't work well with that kind of memory. Photos, though, are a more objective way to do that, especially if you're if you get to share that with a coach or even in our community, if you were to share the photos in appropriate clothing, and we can help you identify before and after. And then scenario four where it gets confusing is post-diet maintenance. So after a fat loss phase and you bump your calories back up to maintenance, a lot of things can like look worse, quote unquote, qualitatively in the short term because you're going to gain several pounds of fluid, glycogen, water. You're losing the inflammation-driven hardness that dieting creates. Dieting creates this kind of hardness, if you will, that some people like, I have to, I have to say, but it also is counter to performance and building muscle and everything. So all these changes are transitionary. A lot of them stabilize or the body adapts and return to a normal state instead of a depleted one. And then we'll start, you know, kind of looking quote unquote normal again. So these are the things you have to deal with. In all these scenarios, the five signs I gave you earlier, five signs you're actually building muscle, still apply. And so I want you to check those as you go. So I want to leave you with something that I think matters here about visible progress and transformation, because we think that if we're working hard, we should see it, that the mirror and the scale should tell it. And the whole fitness, wellness, dieting, weight loss industry is built on quote unquote transformations that are visual, before and after photos, right? Before and after photos. And even I have to use that sometimes in my marketing materials because it's the only thing people see to kind of get them in the door before you're like, no, it's not really about that. But those of us who are experienced doing this, or those of you listening who are experienced, coaches, things like that, visible progress is at best a lagging indicator. It shows up after the real work has been done. And even then, it may not be what you expect because we all have different body types, different goals, different genetics, et cetera. The gain in strength, recovery, performance markers, these are the leading indicators, right? Leading versus lagging. They tell you progress is happening before you can see it. It's like tracking your bank account as you go is your financial leading indicator versus the bank statement at the end of the month is the lagging indicator, right? The person who can trust the leading indicator without needing constant validation of the visual progress is the person who stays consistent long enough to get the visual progress and results they want. Ah, that's that's the gold right there. So when you're a little bit frustrated with what you see in the mirror, ask yourself Am I getting stronger? Am I recovering better? Is my performance improving? Do my clothes fit better differently? Is my biofeedback solid? If the answer to most of them is yes, you're probably building muscle, the mirror is gonna catch up with you. All right. Remember, I promise you those three common mistakes people make when they misread short-term feedback that's coming up in a second. Quick message though, if you want help tracking these metrics and knowing what to actually pay attention to, check out my Fitness Lab app. It tracks your biofeedback and your training data and your recovery markers. If you have iPhone, it now connects to Apple Health. And then it gives you a simple set of daily tasks, including an educational briefing based on what is happening. So the briefing you get is based on you. If you had trouble sleep, it'll say, Hey, I just saw from your sleep data you only got five and a half hours of sleep. Let's talk about it. I'm gonna help you out in a very low stress way. All right, so whether you use the data integration or not, it works that way. It adapts to you. You can chat with it. It's like having a coach in your pocket. And as always, podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off using the link in my show notes. You've got to go to that link. You'll take a free quiz, learn what it's all about, get a custom plan before you even buy the app to see if it's right for you. Again, that's Fitness Lab. Go to the link in the show notes. All right, here are the three mistakes I promised. These are the things people do when they misread short-term feedback, and then it holds you back even more. Mistake number one is cutting calories because you look soft. If you're in a building phase or you're in a delo, which is usually like a week, you look, you know, you might look less lean than last week. And so you drop your food, you drop your calories. And this could be a gut reaction because you feel like you're getting fat in a building phase, or it could be because what you talked about about a deload. Oh, I'm deloading and I'm not working out, so I'm not burning as many calories, so I need to drop my food. Well, you're just killed, you killed your recovery right there, and you killed your muscle building potential for no reason, just because water flu is fluctuating in your body. That's it. Don't do it. Don't just cut calories reactively, ever, ever, ever, ever. Mistake number two is adding cardio to try to fix whatever issue you think is there. Okay. And I say it that way because if you've listened to this whole episode, you know there may not be an issue. If the scale went up three pounds and then you throw in extra cardio to burn off that, then you're in a very dysfunctional, unhealthy mental state of mind. I am telling you that right now. Because that weight of three pounds is absolutely 100% glycogen and water, not fat, because the only way to gain three pounds of fat is to overconsume by well over 10,000 calories in one day. And I know you're not doing that. So you just added more stress and fatigue to your body by adding cardio just for that purpose. And if you're doing it just like as a one-time thing, it's it's just gonna be kind of useless unless you're doing it because you like it and it's part of your training and you're doing it in a non-stressful way, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the reactive, I need to do cardio to burn off calories. Mistake number three is program hopping. Okay, program hopping is one of the most common things I see. And people will do a program for two weeks, they don't see the changes they want, they think it doesn't work, and they change, right? For whatever reason, they make an excuse. I'm bored, I wanted to do something different, whatever. But you never gave it enough time to produce results. All right, building muscle takes months, not weeks. I usually recommend people follow a program for at least six weeks minimum, but ideally eight, 10, 12, and you can have deloads in there, or you can just run the same program several times, or you can run the same program and swap out some of the exercises. So, all three of these mistakes cutting calories, adding cardio, program hopping, really they come from the same place. And that is that you're giving too much trust to the short-term visual feedback as if it means anything, and that could be the scale as well, instead of the leading indicators that matter that we already talked about. All right, that's it for today. The core message is very simple. The mirror, the scale are generally terrible short-term progress indicators, and they lag as well. They lag behind what you're really working on and focused on. So if you want to know whether you're building muscle, look at strength, recovery, performance, close, and biofeedback, and those will help you a lot more than the mirror or the scale. Thanks to Aaron H for the message. Shout out to Aaron for your message on Instagram. You guys can reach me on Instagram at Wits and Weights if you have a question, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash question. Easy way to do that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember progress is happening even when you can't see it. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Stop Blaming Menopause for Muscle Loss (Here's What's Really Happening) | Ep 434

If what worked in your 30s isn't working anymore, it's not your fault. Your body and life have changed. The Fitness Lab app adapts to your sleep, recovery, and stress so you can actually build muscle and lose fat over 40. It also now syncs with Apple Health (iPhone version only).

Podcast listeners get 20% off at bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

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Does menopause cause muscle loss or make it harder to build muscle?

The fitness industry loves to blame hormones for everything. Wellness gurus want to sell you special programs, protocols, and supplements for perimenopause and postmenopause.

But the research shows that postmenopausal women build muscle and gain strength with resistance training just as effectively as younger women. The stimulus-response relationship doesn't break after 50 (or 40).

So what's really happening? 

Learn why the "menopause steals muscle" narrative is mostly a timing coincidence, and what's actually driving the decline. 

We break down the 5 factors that "drift" during midlife, where hormone replacement therapy (HRT) fits into the picture, and specific strategies that work for women over 40 regardless of hormonal status.

If you've felt like your body stopped responding, this episode offers both the evidence and the practical framework to test that assumption. Building muscle after menopause isn't about fighting your biology, it's about adjusting your inputs.

Episode Resources:

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Timestamps:

0:00 - The dangerous menopause muscle loss narrative
3:50 - What the research shows about strength training after menopause
7:30 - Life changes vs. hormones (correlation vs. causation)
10:52 - 5 factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss
18:45 - How to train for muscle building over 40 (not just "staying active")
22:10 - Protein targets and meal distribution for women over 40
24:55 - Why sleep and recovery become non-negotiable in midlife
28:05 - The body composition feedback loop and metabolism myths
31:15 - Where HRT fits
38:15 - How negative messaging creates the outcomes it predicts
41:20 - Weekly training structure for building muscle

Many women over 40 are told that muscle loss is an unavoidable result of perimenopause and menopause, but the research paints a different, more empowering picture. Muscle can be built at any age when the right inputs are in place: progressive resistance training, adequate protein intake, sufficient daily movement, and consistent, high-quality recovery. The idea that hormones alone switch off your ability to respond to training creates a nocebo effect that discourages action, weakens consistency, and leads to lower protein, easier workouts, and fragmented routines. This mindset becomes a loop: you change inputs because you believe change is futile, then the outcomes confirm the belief. Breaking that loop starts with evidence-based habits and clear targets that you can control day to day.

The science on postmenopausal training is encouraging: resistance exercise reliably improves strength, muscle mass, and physical function. Studies comparing responses across hormonal statuses show that, on average, adaptations to training are not significantly different. That means the stimulus still works; muscles remain sensitive to progressive overload. What changes in midlife is often everything around training: heavier life stress, caregiving duties, career demands, and disrupted sleep. These shifts reduce training volume and intensity, lower daily movement, and erode recovery. The net effect resembles an age or hormone problem, but it’s largely behavioral and environmental. This is good news because behavior can be shaped, measured, and improved without waiting on perfect labs, exotic supplements, or specialized protocols that overpromise and distract.

Five drivers explain most midlife muscle loss: lower training volume or effort, inadequate protein, decreased non-exercise activity, compromised sleep and stress recovery, and body composition drift that raises inflammation and reduces training tolerance. Each driver is actionable. Training must be hard enough and progressive: about 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, performed 1 to 3 reps shy of failure, using mostly compound lifts like squats, hinges, presses, and pulls. Protein intake needs to rise to overcome mild anabolic resistance: aim for 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of body weight per day, distributed across meals with at least 25 grams at breakfast and lunch to spark muscle protein synthesis and control hunger. Daily movement targets of 7,000 to 9,000 steps improve insulin sensitivity and recovery capacity, helping you handle harder training sessions.

Recovery quality often decides whether your training pays off. Hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, and sleep apnea can fracture sleep architecture, blunting progress even when workouts look perfect on paper. Tackle the specific disruptors: a cooler bedroom, consistent wind-down routines, evaluation for apnea, and scheduling heavy sessions with enough days between to restore performance. If you are actively dieting, be conservative—keep protein high, avoid aggressive deficits, and remember that under-eating is under-recovering. Body composition also feeds back into performance: extra fat mass can raise inflammation and lower energy, which makes training feel harder and encourages inactivity. Addressing nutrition quality, steps, and strength work together reverses this loop without defaulting to “slowed metabolism” as fate.

Where does hormone replacement therapy fit? Think of HRT as a modifier, not the foundation. The foundational inputs are training, protein, movement, and sleep. HRT can improve quality of life and may nudge some markers in the right direction, but evidence for consistent, direct muscle or performance benefits is mixed. When combined with resistance training, training drives the change while HRT can be additive for symptoms that hinder recovery. If symptoms are severe, work with a qualified clinician and make decisions based on how you feel, not just labs. Either way, the path to more muscle still runs through progressive overload, adequate protein, daily activity, and deep, regular sleep.

Adopt a simple weekly operating system to create momentum. Train two to three days per week with focus and progression. Eat 25 to 40 grams of protein at each meal and front-load it at breakfast. Walk daily and park farther away. Guard your sleep window and schedule deloads or lighter days when life gets heavy. Then audit your week with three yes-or-no questions: did you progress a lift, did you hit 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch, and did you sleep at least seven hours? If two answers are no, you’ve found your next lever. This is not about perfection; it’s about regaining agency. Your muscles still listen. Give them a clear signal, and they will respond.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:00

  If you're a woman over 40 who's been told that muscle loss is caused by peri and postmenopause, this episode is for you. Menopause is real, of course, and the symptoms are real. The frustration is real, and I'm not here to dismiss any of that. But what I am going to show you is that the story you've been sold, that your body has stopped responding, that building muscle is now close to, if not impossible, is not supported by the evidence. And believing that it is maybe the thing holding you back. You're going to learn five hidden factors that drive mid-life muscle loss. Most of them you can control. Why post-menopausal women respond to resistance training just as well as younger women, and the exact protein and training targets that work at any hormonal status. The women I see who build muscle in their 50s and beyond, they're not biologically advantaged, they're just doing specific things differently. I'm your host today, Philip Pape, and I want to start by acknowledging something. Yes, I'm a man, to state the obvious, and I'm talking about menopause. I'm aware that I've not lived this experience. I haven't had hot flashes at 3 a.m. I haven't had the brain fog or the feeling that your body has suddenly become unfamiliar to you. And these are real things I hear from women and they matter. But what I can offer is the research and the patterns that I've seen working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and hopefully a perspective that feels empowering rather than dismissive. I've been accused of being too positive, but I hope that comes into play today to benefit you. Because this is what I've observed. Many women are being told a story, a narrative about menopause and about muscle that is making things harder. It's not making it easier. The story goes that once your hormones shift, your body stops responding, right? The drop of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, that building muscle becomes close to impossible or, you know, at least dramatically harder, and that you're now fighting your biology. And that, you know, when you believe that story, and I get that the industry thrives on negativity, uh, often to sell products and services, you often then stop doing the things that would actually help. It kind of becomes a scapegoat, and your training might become something that you feel is not as beneficial. Your protein, you know, you may not feel like you have to eat as much protein and like all the little things add up. And then because all these inputs change, the outputs tend to get worse. And then it's a vicious cycle that seems to confirm the story. So today I want to offer a different narrative. Not one that dismisses what you're experiencing, of course, but that separates what is genuinely caused by hormones from what is actually changeable. Because there is more in that second category than many of us are being told or sold. So I'm breaking it down into five factors that actually drive midlife muscle loss. Where HRT fits into that, right? Hormone replacement therapy, spoiler alert, it's not the first thing you're necessarily having to do. And then specific practical things like training protein targets that work for really work for everybody, but specific to postmenopausal women because there might be some subtle differences that might be helpful. And the research here is extremely encouraging. And then at the end, I've got three quick yes or no questions you can ask yourself to tell you exactly where to focus this week. Takes like 30 seconds. So stay until the end for that. All right, let's get into it. And I want to talk about the narrative, right? The menopause narrative, post-menopause, pre-menopause, whatever. It's it's it's a common pattern out there. You know, many of you women are in your mid-40s, 50s, and you notice some changes, right? This is perimenopause can start as early as mid to late 30s and goes all the way the time you hit menopause, which is one year without uh period, and all the time in between, there are changes that happen with hormones and then the symptoms that occur from that, like lower energy, like all the other symptoms that some of which I mentioned in the in the teaser, maybe your scale has gone up. Resistance to weight loss is a big, widely reported frustration, right? Your clothes fit differently because of the different body fat distribution, right? Maybe more belly fat. And right around this time, you know, simultaneously, all the other symptoms are happening along with the physical changes. And so it's easy to say that menopause causes these changes. And I understand why that's very appealing because it does provide an explanation that, okay, it's not your fault, it's your hormones. And we don't want to say any of this is your fault, right? It's it's not about fault, really. It's just about understanding what how things work. Where I think it gets complicated is that the fitness industry, the wellness industry, that to me is kind of a dirty word these days, has taken this and run in a very harmful and dangerous direction because now there is kind of a Wild West, you know, cowboy or cowgirl or whatever set of functional doctors and hormone panels and menopause-specific workout programs and supplements targeting all your hormones that may or may not be safe or do what they they purport to do. And we're all chasing lab work instead of symptoms. It's just kind of a mess. And at the same time, you have a lot of great people, doctors, professionals, healthcare people, uh coaches that are trying to do the right thing and do it in the right way, but it's hard to separate the signal from the noise, let's say. And so the implicit message is this is where I think it's a problem. Your body is broken now, and you need some sort of expensive, complicated intervention to fix it. And I'm the only one that can help you. And that's where you sell products and services. But I think it also strips away agency, all right? Agency, self, you know, efficacy, as we call it, which self-efficacy combined with self-regulation is the way that we do things and get consistent with the lifestyle changes we're trying to make occur. When you look at the actual research, it tells us something different, as you would expect, something a bit more subtle. There's more nuance, and we have to understand that. Okay, so what is the reality from the research? First, yes, muscle loss does occur, roughly three to eight percent per decade after age 30. I actually bring that up a lot on podcasts, not to scare people, but to let you know what's going on with your body so we can do something about it. This is sarcopenia. Now, sarcopenia is not just loss of muscle mass, it's also loss of the function from muscle mass. That's a different topic. But just in general, we start to lose our muscle mass. We've known this for many years, since probably the late 80s in the research. The nuance that we leave out is that this decline is not just driven by age or and or by menopause. It's associated with the changes in behavior, the five factors we're gonna talk about, that tend to happen during this time of life. And they happen to men as well. For women, it does get exacerbated because of some of the hormonal changes, and that's where the reality is, right? We're gonna look at that. And there's a lot of things that are happening as we get older through our 30s, into our 40s and 50s. A lot of them are because life gets complicated, right? It's not just because of hormones. And when we look at studies on resistance training in postmenopausal women, we find always that guess what? Resistance exercise increases skeletal muscle mass and strength and physical performance. And this is in postmenopausal women, okay? Their muscles responded perfectly fine to the stimulus. One of the things I love sharing on podcasts, especially geared toward women, is that women can increase their muscle mass at the same rate as men and at the same rate, regardless of age. And that's really empowering if you're aware of that. There was a study just last year, 2025, that looked at training outcomes across different menopause statuses. And they found that training adaptations were not significantly different based on hormonal status. So, again, the stimulus response relationship still works. And I know a lot of things are not working as we get old. Our joints get a little less pliable, right? We have a little more aches and pains and some other things happening, but this is one thing that continues to work. Your muscles don't forget how to grow in response to that stimulus. So, what is actually happening is more of a correlation causation problem. Okay. Menopause happens to arrive around the same time as a lot of other changes. For example, tell me if any of these sound familiar to you. Career and job demands are often getting super complicated and stressful in your 40s and 50s, especially for those of you who have professional careers. This is where you're really hustling to get, you know, climb the ladder. Maybe you're in leadership and management positions, you have a lot of responsibility, you're negotiating, you're trying to find jobs, trying to take interviews. Like all of that stuff is happening much more at this time of life than it probably did in your 20s and 30s when you were a little more entry-level and just getting into it and had more energy for it. Kids, kids, kids, guys, kids maybe, first of all, having kids, right? You're in your 40s and 50s. I'm 45, a dad of two daughters, and this it takes a lot of your time, devotion, energy. I love it. I love being a dad. And I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is an important part of my life, and it could be part of yours. And then depending on your age, kids may be leaving home, going to college, going to their jobs, living on their own, or they are hitting their most demanding years. Or you had an oops baby, as we call them, where your kids are many years apart, and now you have a younger kid. So there's kids. What about your own parents are starting to get older and maybe need care and attention in your time? Maybe you have to be driving around, traveling, housing them, maybe assisted living, like all that stuff, medical care. What about sleep? Sleep tends to become more fragmented as we get older. Oftentimes it's linked to all these other issues, including stress. Some of you have sleep apnea, insomnia, you know, supplementation medications interfere with it. Maybe your drink, whatever. And then we, of course, we have exercise that tends to become less consistent or training becomes less consistent because life is just harder and you're trying to fit everything into your schedule. So that might be just the tip of the iceberg for a lot of you, but I hope I hit on the big reasons why life may be different in your 40s, 50s, and kind of this age range. Now, let's talk hormones because I'm not saying that estrogen doesn't matter. That's a very important hormone that we should be talking about. It does. Estrogen decline can modify quite a few outcomes. Your recovery, your connected tissue health, some aspects of body composition because of the redistribution of fat. Of course, it creates a bunch of symptoms, but for most women, it's not the primary driver of muscle loss. And that's that's the key for today's episode. The primary drivers are the things that you can actually influence. And that's great news because if it were purely hormonal, you'd be stuck, or at least like everybody would have to have, you know, estrogen replacement just to avoid muscle loss. And that's not the case. That's not the case. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know what, it could be hormones and lifestyle, just like GLP1 meds, it could be medications and lifestyle. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. Now, if it is mostly behavioral and environmental, right? If if you take a pie chart and one slice has hormones, but all the rest are behavioral and environmental, that gives you a ton of options, right? So what are these five factors that I've been mentioning? Because if you identify which have shifted for you, that's like the first, that's the first step toward reversing course, which is probably why you're listening to or watching this podcast. All right. So we know the menopause steals your muscle narrative, is at best incomplete. It's not that hormones are irrelevant, right? They are part of the picture, but they're usually not the main driver. Now, what is? All right. So I'm gonna list these factors, and the goal isn't to make you feel guilty, right? Life in your 40s, 50s, beyond is legitimately harder for many to manage than in your 20s. And so a lot of it's circumstantial or evident environment based, but you still need to recognize them. So factor number one is your training volume and intensity. And this happens gradually. Now, if you don't even exercise at all, well, that's your biggest low-hanging fruit right there. By exercise, I should have said train. If you don't use resistance training in your life, ladies, right now, you probably haven't been listening to this podcast, I'm guessing. So definitely we have a whole library on training, but that's gonna be your probably your biggest lever for many of you, other than maybe sleep and stress, because that is how you build and hold on to muscle, period. Now, many of you have exercised in one way or the other, or you have trained, or you go to the gym. And now it's a matter of are you doing it the right way? Are you training the right amount of time? You know, are you lifting heavy enough? Are you progressing and all of that? Are you doing it in a way where you're you're not avoiding it because you think it's gonna injure you? Or, okay, you have back issues, so that's why you don't train, not realizing that training can help with your back issues. And there's all of that going on. There's also a subtle psychological shift that happens for some women where the menopause symptoms, fatigue and joint aches and disrupted sleep, and there's a lot of symptoms, right? And they they tend to make hard training itself then also feel less appearing, appealing. It seems exhausting, it seems like not something you want to do, you don't like it, so you unconsciously back off. And of course, that's understandable. This is the human condition, right? Responding to those things. But then the result is, of course, you don't have what you need to hold on to build muscle. And again, your muscles don't know your age, they don't know your hormone levels, they will respond. If you go into the gym, train hard close to failure, get that mechanical tension, okay? You know, not just the pink dumbbells for 10 reps every time. You have to adapt and force your body to grow. That's the biggest factor is training, volume, the approach, whether you're doing it or not is a huge deal. And we're gonna touch on this again when we get to the practical tips on what to do. That's the biggest one. Uh, the second factor is your nutrition, especially your protein intake. I just had an interview with Steph Mager. She's an all-time world record squat holder, and she doesn't really track macros and calories, but she does make sure she gets enough protein. She weighs around 180, and so she gets around 180 grams of protein every day, right? One gram per pound. And so this is this is kind of sneaky, right? Because if you haven't been tracking it before, you probably didn't have enough to begin with. And even if you have, the same what you had before may not be enough anymore. This is one thing that can change as we get older, and that we get something called anabolic resistance, where you have a slightly blunted response to the muscle building signal from protein. So it just means you might need a little bit more. Think of it like your muscles becoming a bit harder of hearing. They need a louder signal from the the amount of protein that you eat. But if you have enough protein intake, you know, gram per pound, let's say, or even less than that, 0.8, 0.7, it's it should be more than enough to give you that signal. But for many of you, you're eating even less than that. So if you're a 150-pound woman, that means let's say 100 to 120 grams of protein, you know, on the on the lower end. More than that is fine. It's great. And many women I start working with, you know, they're getting like half that and they don't realize it because they're not tracking. And then also they might try to shove all that protein into dinner. And I always encourage distributing it throughout the day because it's gonna help you with your fullness throughout the day and also help you get the protein. You're not trying to catch up and you're not binging and things like that. Factor number three is just your daily movement. So again, this time of life, we tend to get more sedentary. You know, all the all the movement outside of your workouts tends to decline around this time of year. It's not that you're lazy, it's because we have desk jobs, less physical housework, you know, things are more convenient now with uh ordering things online and driving instead of walking. And we don't, you know, we always try to find the closest parking spot. And, you know, we're not maybe not chasing our kids around anymore, right? There's a lot of reasons for it. Whatever reason it is is personal to you. But you know what? Your muscle and supporting your muscle mass and your strength and recovery and your health and longevity are all affected by your overall activity. It affects your recovery, recovery, your insulin sensitivity, how your body processes nutrients. So we're trying to get up in that seven to nine thousand steps a day minimum, minimum. This is one place where I do like to set a threshold for people, find a way to get there. And if you haven't checked your step count recently, that's step one, just to find out what it is with your phone or wearable. But if you're down in the three, four, five thousand steps a day, that's a big lever for you. All right, then factor number four is recovery, all right, especially sleep. This is where hormones do play a direct role because this it's a chicken and egg, right? For you ladies and peri and postmenopause, sleep often gets more fragmented and difficult to come by because of the hormone changes, or you have hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, racing thoughts, all of these things might, they might prevent you from falling asleep or wake you up. Maybe you have sleep apnea, lots of things, reasons, right? And this is genuinely a difficult thing. It's it's a challenge, and I don't want to minimize it. But I also want to frame it as another problem that we can solve, right? Rather than just an inevitability that we can't control that we have to accept. Because all of this stuff is in your control. The stoic philosophy of what can I do, not what can't I do. When recovery is compromised in any way, and that could be the amount of sleep, the amount of deep and REM sleep, interrupted sleep, too much stress, too much training and fatigue and not enough rest or deloads or whatever, then your capacity to build muscle is just reduced. It's reduced. You could do all the things right in the gym, and you're not gonna see the results you want if you're chronically under-recovered. By the way, not eating enough is also a form of under-recovery. So simply stop dieting for a while and fix on fix these things when you're in peri postmenopause. That could be the solution. And there are interventions, there are hacks, there are tips, there are strategies. Having a cool bedroom, having a wind-down routine. You know, some of you may need medical support for severe symptoms or a CPAP machine, right? Whatever it is, the point is that poor sleep is a direct constraint on your muscle building activity. Factor number five is actually the body composition changes themselves. Now, this is another kind of interesting chicken and egg situation because fat gain is probably happening as you get older, right? Because we gain a little bit of weight, it drifts up over the time for most people, because you're not not, I'm not gonna explain why you're doing it. You know why. It's it's overconsumption combined with the lifestyle changes and everything else. And then it creates a feedback loop that makes it even harder. Now, for women in perimenopause, for example, the changes in estrogen will change body fat distribution and could make it more difficult to, you know, you have more body fat than than you'd like. And this is this then leads to it's harder to lose weight and et cetera, et cetera. And then having more body fat, and for men, this might be like you've got the beer gut, maybe you drink too much, you've just had, you know, more sedentary lifestyle. This then increases your inflammation and your insulin resistance. And Might reduce your tolerance to training, right? You just can't do as much and it's kind of a vicious cycle. It also makes you less motivated, you have less energy, you're down on yourself, maybe talking bad about yourself and you don't like how you look, right? It all adds up. This factor, though, it often gets blamed on a slowing metabolism. But that's not really what it is. These are cause correlation, not causation. The slowdown in people's metabolism is largely caused by the lack of muscle mass and the lack of movement, uh and all like a lot of the things we just talked about. Because if those things were held steady, we know that people's metabolisms are also pretty steady from the age of 20 to 60. Okay, and so the loss of muscle caused your metabolism to drop, the the loss, the lack of movement, et cetera. Okay, but so those are the five factors. Now, here's what I want you to notice. Every single one of those five factors is something you can address. It's not necessarily easy. I'm not pretending that fixing your sleep during menopause is simple, ladies. But it's possible. You're not powerless, you can get help. There are tools. Some of this is just a matter of intention, and some of it is a matter of understanding how do we get friction out of the path. All right. So the question now for you becomes which of these five factors has shifted the most that you want to start with? And we'll get back to that self-check at the end that might be helpful. But first, I want to talk about HRT. All right. Now, before we talk about HRT, I do love tools that can help you track and hold yourself accountable with less friction. All right. And I have an app called Fitness Lab that is like having a coach in your pocket. It's like having an intelligence layer that takes all of this stuff happening in your life, your training volume, your recovery, your biofeedback, how you're sleeping, your hormones, everything. And it gives you a few simple tasks to do each day. It helps you breathe, helps reduce some stress so you know what to do, what things are drifting in the direction we don't, and the app will gently nudge you back. We recently added the Apple Health integration. It was in beta. Now it's out to the public, so it's in everybody's version if you want it. It can pull in your sleep data, your steps, your workout history. So again, that also reduces your stress because you don't have to think about that stuff. It pulls it in. The app is available on Android. We don't have the health stuff integrated on that yet, but I thought I'd mention it. And the thing about the five drifting factors in midlife that I just mentioned is a lot of us are just not aware of them. They are accumulating over months, but probably over years. And it's great if you can catch them by measuring the right thing. So my app Fitness Lab, I think, helps with that tremendously. A lot of women have been reporting how helpful it's been as an assistant for them in taking off the stress and allowing them to finally make progress. And it's built on these principles and the evidence and body composition, you know, thinking about how do we get your training and nutrition to give make this the best time of your life. So there is a special link exclusive to podcast listeners in the show notes. Click that link to check out Fitness Lab and get a nice discount for listeners. All right. So let's talk about the hormones. Hormone replacement therapy specifically. And I know this is a charged topic today, right? This is a lot of a lot of controversy, a lot of opinions on it. I've had guests talk about it here. I've gone on podcasts about HRT. My own thoughts have been coalescing over the years. Many of you are on HRT, or TRT is specific testosterone for men, for example. Maybe you're considering it. Maybe you have strong opinions about it one way or another. Okay. This isn't going to be an HRT episode. I think HRT hormone replacement, especially the big three, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, in a few limited ways, right? Creams and patches and things like that. There are some methods that I'm not a big fan of from what I've learned from healthcare professionals and how they work. But again, we're not going to solve that here. I think if you need it, it can vastly improve your quality of life. It can reduce all the symptoms. I think it should be symptom-based primarily, not just lab work-based. You can have labs that are a little off, but if you don't have the symptoms, you may not need as much treatment. But if you have the symptoms, who cares what your lab says? You may need help with that. And I think really good menopause professionals will focus on the symptoms. So we're talking hot flashes and night sweats. And then, of course, you've got osteoporosis you're worried about. And then, of course, you're concerned about weight gain, weight loss, body composition, muscle, all of that stuff. There's a million other symptoms I'm not even going to go into. There's libido issues, all of that. And if your doctor has recommended it or the professional you're working with and it's working for you, right? Thyroid Medicaid, there's so many, then that's awesome. Like I want you to pursue those things and be very in control of your destiny and very educated on this and talk to enough people. And look, if you're not sure who to talk to, please reach out to me. One easy way to do that is on Instagram at Wits and Waits. And I can point you to a few professionals I really like, some of whom helped me and people in my own family. And I trust them to do that. So you know that I'm giving you a good recommendation. But it HRT is not a replacement, right? It's not a replacement for doing the lifestyle. And the best hormone experts I've talked to on the show have the same message. It is an additive thing, it's not foundational. You need the tools to support you along with the lifestyle changes. And don't roll your eyes at that, please, because if you're not doing the lifestyle changes, the hormones are just going to have a very minor impact. Maybe they'll reduce some of those symptoms, but they're not going to help with the big things, with the muscle mass and the strength and the function and the health and longevity long term into your 80s, 90s. You know, what you want to be your golden years is when you're older. And when we look at studies on HRT and outcomes for muscle mass, for grip strength, for physical performance, it's kind of mixed. Right? You thought I was going to say, oh yeah, everything improves. It's kind of mixed, right? Some markers improve in some studies and some in others or go the other direction or don't improve at all. I'd say there's currently today the body of evidence doesn't say, hey, HRT itself reliably improves strength or physical performance. All right. It helps with many, many other things. But also there are methodological issues and variability and how these hormones are given during these studies. So it's just hard to say. And so if something's hard to say, you can't make a claim. That's my point. There's uncertain benefit for muscles specifically. There was a randomized controlled trial last year that combined estrogen replacement with a resistance training program. And that's a very useful combination. It sees it lets us see how those two things interact. And what they found is that resistance training drove the improvements. The HRT was additive for some markers, but training was doing that heavy lifting, pun intended. Okay. So here's how here's let me tell you how I think about it and my mental model, so to speak. Think of your muscle building capacity as having a foundation and then it has like modifiers on top of that. So the foundation is, of course, your training, your protein, your recovery, your movement. So those are the like the big rocks. HRT is a modifier, optimizer, right? It can nudge certain outcomes in a positive direction for some women in this area, in this area. But if the foundation isn't solid, if you're not training with progressive overload, not eating enough protein, not sleeping well, the modifiers kind of like on a squishy pit of slime, in that it has not nothing to work with. I don't know how good of an analogy that is, but you know, here's another one. If you have a car and you put gasoline in your car to get it to run, but you have never changed the oil and never changed the tires. And I actually know somebody I'm thinking of who had that. So of course her car didn't get as nearly as many miles as it could have because she ran it into the ground despite putting gas in. It's like the gas is not the problem and it's not the solution, right? So I think of HRT that way, where if you're taking it, but you're still having issues with your physical self, with your body fat and your muscle mass and everything else, it's probably not more hormones or different hormones, probably the five factors we discussed earlier, which is again where I'm trying to go with this episode without too many words. I hope. I do want to say something about the the menopause fitness space. Okay. Some of the content out there is it functions as a nocebo. You ever heard of the term nocebo? You've heard of placebo. A nocebo is like doing nothing. And I think it makes women afraid to train hard sometimes. And I hear it in the language of like, I'm worried about training too heavy for whatever reason. Now, some of it is about getting bulky, some of it is about injury or safety or thinking that you don't need to or whatever. I don't know, I don't know the exact reason it is for you if that if you've told yourself that, but you know, your body, just because it changes in that way, it can still respond quite incredibly. And by saying that it can't, it's a very discouraging message, and then it creates the outcome that it describes. Because if you believe something, then it's true. You've heard of that, right? If if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're true. It's true. So if you believe you can't build muscle, that's your identity, and you're not gonna train in a way that's gonna build the muscle. You're not gonna eat in a way or live, live that way. And that's the identity shift that we talk about here. It's not a woo-woo thing. It literally is like I can do this, so I'm gonna act the way that expresses who I am, as opposed to I'm gonna try to force behaviors on myself to get an outcome. That that's not sustainable. What is sustainable is yeah, I can build muscle, I want to get stronger, I want to be athletic as I as I age. So I'm gonna do the things that that need to be done to get there. Obviously. Like, obviously, I'm gonna eat better now because it feels better to eat better, and I train better when I eat better. So that that that's like the menopause space, it just drives me crazy. The principles, the principles don't change. I'm all about principles, first principles. Like how you get it done can change, but the principles don't. You know, do you have enough mechanical tension when you train? Do you have progressive overload? Do you have enough protein? Do you have enough recovery? Right, all of that. I'm kind of repeating myself, but they work after menopause, just like they did before. The margins might be a little different. You might be a little night might need a little more protein, a little bit more recovery, more attention to sleep, right? But that's just adjusting the inputs, which is very different from oh, my body's broken now. All right, so enough about what doesn't work as well as advertised. Let's talk about what does work practically. All right, I'm gonna give you some just specific things. Talked about these before on the show. It's worth repeating, and they work as well for post-menopausal women, pre-menopausal women, men, anyone. Okay, it's just gonna work. That's the great thing about it. So training. Minimum effective dose for training is probably at least two, if not three days a week. And you're using resistance training of some kind, whether it's barbells, dumbbells, machines, probably around 10 hard sets per muscle group. Anywhere from five to 15, depends on your responsiveness and whether you're in a fat loss phase and all that. But say around 10 hard sets per muscle group per week, and then go up or down based on your recovery. And you're gonna prioritize compound lifts, ideally, especially when you're a newer lifter. That would be some sort of squat pattern, a deadlift style pattern, could be Romanian deadlift or even hip thrust, but you know, a hinge type pattern, a press, benching, and overhead. I like both. And then maybe a rowing pattern eventually or pulling pattern, like pull-ups. Some people also like loaded carries and core work and all that. I think that gets more on the hypertrophy side, but we can we can have that argument. Execution of this is training within two to three repshive failure. Now, you might have heard me say two to four, one to three. Training pretty darn close to failure. Okay. Don't leave gains on the table and make sure you go up in weight, reps, or sets over time. Something needs to progress. So that's the first fix. Protein, we already talked about it. I'll just give you the range again 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. Don't overthink lean mass, target body weight, all that stuff. Just 0.7 to 1 grams a pound of your current body weight, and then work from there and really use your biofeedback and experience to adjust. And this is where, by the way, other people, whether it's coaches, communities, training partners, can be really helpful. I mean, you guys should be talking to and thriving in and among a group of like-minded people are trying to do the same thing. It's gonna accelerate your results. So that's protein. And then I think I mentioned before, like distributing your protein throughout the day, it can be really helpful for hunger. And yeah, it's helpful with for muscle as well, but it's really more about the practicality of making sure you get enough protein. Well, you have recovery, and that's just getting enough sleep and good sleep. If you're disrupted because of hot flashes or night sweats or something, you're gonna have to address those things. Now, there are a lot of over-the-counter and supplement and herb-based solutions to some of these things, like hot flashes, night sweats, even like vaginal dryness. And I don't know why I threw that in because it has nothing to do with sleep, but I'm just thinking of all the conversations I've had with the menopause experts. There's a range of potential solutions. You've got to go with the symptom and try to address that and then do before and after. If it doesn't help your symptom, then it probably isn't the right solution, regardless of what your blood work says. Okay. So you have to address all the things that are disrupting your sleep. Don't just accept it. You know, I have a client who like thought she says she snores a lot. And I said, Well, that may be sleep apnea. You should probably get it looked at. She did, and she's like, Yeah, that's what it was. CPAP machine, boom, so much better sleep, right? Little things like that can go a long way. You just have to address them. And stress management, you know, rest days, deloads, they all are part of this whole recovery thing. Stress is its own thing. I did a whole article, a whole episode recently about sleep and stress in the context of hunger hormones. But really, what we're talking about is how do you get yourself to get into that rest and digest mode on a regular basis, whether that's breath work and meditation, walking, therapy, some sort of relaxing movement or practice. Okay. And then, of course, rest days. You have to have the right balance of training days and recovery days. And if you really train hard, you know, you may have to be creative about your training schedule. I spoke to Steph Mager, powerlifter, and she was talking about how she puts her heaviest days on like Monday and Friday, so they're far apart, and then two lighter days Tuesday and then like the weekend. You kind of have to get smart like that to maximize your recovery. Now, if you're dieting, if you're in a fat loss phase, just be extra conservative about all this stuff. Don't assume you can't do them. Don't like give up or use it as a cop-out or excuse, but just understand that that's an extra stressor to all of the other things we've talked about. Protein needs to stay higher. You don't want to cut too aggressively. And, you know, you have to be smart about how often and how aggressively you're in a fat loss phase. Okay, here's what I want you to take away from this episode. I started by acknowledging that I have not lived the menopause experience. But what I have seen through working with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, through the research, through hundreds of conversations, is that the defeatist narrative isn't going to serve anyone. It's not helpful other than the people making the money off of it. Yes, of course, menopause is real, perimenopause, all the symptoms. I would I have people that are close to me who I love who are dealing with these kinds of issues, and it's hard to find the support you need. It's getting better. Some of the research is getting better. Women's health, though, is still somewhat in the dark ages compared to just general health. I'm not even gonna call it men's health, just general health, just women haven't been studied as much for a variety of reasons. And so I totally acknowledge all of these things as being a frustration, right? The symptoms and the challenges that result. And I'm not dismissing it, but the other thing that's real is your capacity to build muscle. And the research showing post-menopausal women that gain strength and lean mass because they're training are right there to look up yourself. The evidence that protein, progressive overload, recovery, they work no matter your hormone status. And so don't worry about your genetics or your biology or your metabolism or anything else. All right. Test the narrative. Ask, may say that I'm gonna see if my body still responds by trying it out. That's the best thing you can do, okay? Because you're gonna discover that it does. Uh, we had Lauren Calenzo Semple on the show quite a while back. I love her work. Check her out because she's been making the point for years that the fitness industry profits from complexity. Telling women that menopause requires new approaches, special protocols, specific supplements, cycle-based training and food, which I get questions on all the time. It sells products and programs, but what matters is the principles and how you, as an individual, need to apply the principles, right? Your menstrual cycle may be erratic or maybe extreme and cause you to have to change the way you do things. And that's true for you, but it's not necessarily true for the next woman. The principles, though, are the same. What changes is the method and the margin for error, right? You may have to be more intentional about certain things, like how much protein you have, how much recovery you have, how consistent you are with training, all those. You may have to be more intentional, but that to me is an empowering thing related to self-efficacy. It doesn't limit you. It means you have levers to pull. It means you are not at the mercy of your biology. So the question isn't can you build muscle after menopause? The research says yes, absolutely. The question is whether you will do the things that make it happen because you have the power to do it and I know you can do it. And before I share one final thing, I've got I've got three quick yes or no questions that will tell you where to focus this week. And we're gonna get to that in a second. But I will say, if this episode resonated with you, if you like my message here, if you agree with it, if you think it's positive and empowering, and you're looking for a tool to help track these things and help you before they accumulate, and you want the same voice and style that I bring to this and the evidence-based nuance that I'm trying to inject into this process, check out my app Fitness Lab. Use the link in the note show notes. You can take a free quiz to see if it's right for you. It's one of my favorite tools available because of how it works. You get daily briefings and tasks that are unique to you. You and the next person using the app will have completely different tasks because it's like having a coach who is watching your training and your biofeedback, your recovery. If you have Apple, it's now integrated with Apple Health as well. So it can pull all that data in sleep steps, resting, heart weight rate, activity data. Um, and and I'm but I'm behind the design elements of it. So I'm continuing to add features, and then we have a great support team in case there's any bugs or things like that. We're getting great feedback on it. You don't have to manually log a bunch of this stuff, and you don't have to guess at what to do next. It tells you what to do next. It says, today is your day. Here are the few things you've got to do to be successful. Let's get them done. If you don't, no judgment, but we're gonna talk it through and figure out how to get it done. So go use the link in the show notes for 20% off, exclusive to you, the podcast listener or viewer on YouTube. All right, here is that quick check in. I promise it's three questions yes or no. One, did your last training session include at least one exercise where you added weight or reps from the previous session? Two, did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Three, did you sleep at least seven hours last night? Very simple questions. Okay. Did you have an exercise where you added weights or reps? Did you eat at least 25 grams of protein at breakfast and lunch yesterday? Did you sleep at least seven hours? If you answered no to two or more of those questions, you found your starting point. Okay. Pick one of those and fix it this week. And I know it's easier said than done, but you've got to start from awareness. And I don't want you to fix all of them. Just pick one. That's it. That's it. That's where you know your support for this lifestyle is going to come from. Just those. All right. I want you to run those questions over each week if you want to stay honest with yourself. Obviously, there's a lot more you can track and you can think about. If you don't want to think about, grab my app, link in the show notes. The bottom line is that menopause does change things. That is true, but it doesn't close the door completely on building muscle because the principles are still going to work for you. Margins might be tighter. You might have to be more intentional. That's it, right? More intentional doesn't mean impossible. It just means more intentional. And honestly, we could all be more intentional about things. That's probably what got us here in the first place. Just, you know, even besides things like menopause, age, and whatnot, if we are truly honest with ourselves. So I hope this episode gave you the evidence, but also the encouragement to test this theory out for yourself. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that your body is capable of building muscle at any age. It just needs the right inputs. My name is Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Can Electrical Stimulation Build Muscle and Speed Recovery? (Garrett Salpeter) | Ep 433

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If you train hard, want to build muscle, and still lose fat, how do you actually recover faster without breaking yourself down? Can electrical stimulation really support body recomp and strength training, or is it just another shiny gadget?

Garrett Salpeter joined me to connect the dots between neuroscience, rehab, and performance. We break down how early strength gains are driven by neural adaptation, why pain and restricted movement are often software problems not hardware ones, and where most recovery tools fall short.

You’ll learn why traditional TENS units underdeliver, how direct current stimulation works differently, and what the research shows for muscle building and rehab without excessive joint stress.

If you care about evidence-based fitness, smarter recovery, and training hard without burning out as you get older, this conversation will challenge how you think about recovery. Tune in to learn more.

Today, you’ll learn all about:

0:00 – Electrical stimulation myths
3:49 – Nervous system and strength
7:10 – Pain, protection, adaptation
15:08 – Fatigue and central governor
20:19 – Direct vs alternating current
31:40 – Muscle growth without load
35:45 – Real-world bodybuilding results
40:12 – Clinically designed recovery tools
50:40 – Regulation and real-world use

Episode resources:

• Website: neu.fit 

• Instagram: @neufitrfp / @garrett.salpeter 

• YouTube: @NeuFit 

Strength, pain, and recovery are often framed as “hardware” problems: torn tissues, worn joints, and weak muscles. Yet the nervous system sits above all of it, acting as the body’s control software that decides how far you can move, how hard you can push, and when to hit the brakes. In this conversation, we unpack how protective reflexes, inhibition, and threat perception can limit output and slow healing long after tissues are “fine.” By focusing on the software first, you can often restore range of motion in minutes, reduce pain, and build a foundation that lets training finally stick. The goal isn’t to ignore structure; it’s to recalibrate the control system that governs it.

A central insight is that the brain prioritizes survival over performance. Stretch reflexes, Golgi tendon organs, and fatigue governors exist to prevent damage, but modern sedentary life and past injuries push these thresholds too low. The result is guarding, inhibition, and hypersensitivity that restricts range and feeds chronic pain. When you return to sport, your muscles act like poor shock absorbers, shunting load into cartilage and tendons. Break that cycle and progress compounds again. The sweet spot after injury isn’t maximum rest or maximum grind; it’s optimal input that stimulates healing and relearning without crossing a re-injury line. That’s where targeted electrical stimulation can create high-value neural input with less mechanical load.

Not all stimulation is equal. Traditional alternating current (TENS, interferential, “Russian”) can pump fluids and blunt pain, but it often co-contracts opposing muscles and teaches stiff patterns. Direct current behaves differently: it favors sensory afferent input for mapping protective hotspots, reduces unwanted co-contraction, and creates electric fields that influence healing—what classic research calls the “current of injury.” Historically, DC burned the skin at meaningful intensities. Modern pulsed DC waveforms solve that, delivering a net DC field that penetrates tissue without sting, enabling both neuromuscular re-education and regenerative signaling in a tolerable way.

Evidence matters. In a 150-person diabetic neuropathy study, TENS reduced pain but did not improve function. Pulsed DC not only reduced pain but also improved sensation, EMG amplitude, and nerve conduction velocity—signals of real regeneration. In performance contexts, lab work compared traditional resistance exercise to low-load training with DC-assisted recruitment. Acute results showed similar muscle cell swelling, a proxy for hypertrophy stimulus, at lower perceived exertion. Over eight weeks, quad growth under the electrodes matched heavy training using light external loads. Think of it as “digital load”: higher motor unit recruitment without the joint stress of heavy weights.

How do you use it? For rehab, clinicians “map” the body to find guarded zones, then layer movement on top of stimulation to retrain efficient patterns. Unlike passive TENS, this is active learning—exposure therapy for the nervous system. For athletes, DC can target weak links, build lagging muscles, and maintain or grow tissue when joints won’t tolerate high loads. You’ll likely lift lighter, do controlled volumes, and manage soreness carefully, because recruitment is potent. Ratings of perceived exertion are often lower, but the physiological stimulus remains high, so dosing and recovery still matter.

The broader promise isn’t a magic shortcut; it’s precision. By addressing the software that governs hardware, you can speed safe range recovery, reduce pain, and keep training momentum through setbacks. Whether you’re a seasoned lifter aiming to bring up quads without beating up knees, or a forty-something trying to stay consistent despite recurring pain, targeted DC stimulation paired with smart movement may unlock capacity you already own—hidden behind conservative neural brakes.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  If you're someone who trains hard and wants to recover faster, or you've dealt with nagging injuries that seem to take forever to heal, and you've heard about electrical stimulation devices that claim to re-educate your nervous system, build muscle, and accelerate recovery, but you're not sure what's actually supported by research versus what's just marketing, this episode is for you. My guest today is an engineer turned neuroscience researcher who's developed one of the most talked-about electrical stimulation devices in the rehab and performance space. We'll get into what the evidence actually shows, where the claims might outpace the science, and the practical ways that you can use this technology for recovery and performance. 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 joined by Garrett Salpeter, founder and CEO of NewFit, creator of the newbie device, and author of the NuFit method. Garrett brings a background that we don't often see here. He is trained in physics, engineering, and neuroscience, and he's applied that to developing electrical stimulation technology used by hundreds of clinics, dozens of professional sports teams. And you probably heard about electrical stimulation in various forms. It's been around for decades. There's definitely a lot of claims around newer devices that sound too good to be true. So we're going to discuss the mechanisms, the evidence, maybe some of the science in the context of movement, of pain, of rehab, and those kinds of topics. So, what does the research show? What remains unproven? How can you benefit from targeting the nervous system as part of your training and recovery? So, Garrett, welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast.

  Garrett Salpeter: 1:48

  Thank you, Philip. I love that introduction. I like the three E's that you there. That's that's good.

  Philip Pape: 1:55

  It's a filter, you know, if you're not interested in nerding out and how to engineer your life and lifestyle to and do it by saving time and getting the result, then it may not be the right show for you. But you're uh you and I, I think are kindred spirits in that regard. Because, you know, with some of your story, I know there's an aspect of curiosity and hey, how does the nervous system fit into all of this? Because it connects everything in our body. But, you know, I want to define like neural adaptation and physiology and things like that with the nervous system, how they relate to strength training, to rehab, to our body. And then maybe from that we use it as a jumping off point into okay, how can these devices or this technology be used to take advantage of that? So I guess the question is where does the nervous system fit in to us as humans?

  Garrett Salpeter: 2:42

  That is a big question, a big topic. And there's there's a lot of different pieces that we can put together to start to build a picture here. So the nervous system is literally the control system of our bodies. It is, you know, our brain and spinal cord and nerves send electrical signals to control all of our organs, of course, our muscles for movement, and then our our heart, you know, for our heart rate and heart beating and blood pressure, right? There's neurological control of constriction and dilation of the blood vessels. And then going further down the viscera, there is neurological control of all the digestive organs. The stomach and gut motility is regulated by the nervous system. There's stimulation from the vagus nerve is really relevant there. And then it also controls the organs of elimination and reproduction. So if you think about issues that people have with blood pressure, you know, think about the amount of blood pressure medications people take, the amount of you know, medications people have to take for various digestive ailments, the issues we have with infertility, you know, if you think about these, these are all issues in in organs of the body that are controlled, we just listed off, are controlled by the nervous system. So it's super relevant. Also, of course, for our energy state, how we feel, how we move, uh, there's emotional affect, that's all you know in the brain, which of course is part of neuroscience, part of the nervous system, you know, big picture overall. And you know, it's super relevant to everything. So I think if we're trying to look at an approach for helping someone improve their fitness, their health, their body composition, their vitality, you know, the nervous system, because it is the underlying control system of the body, is a very attractive and you know reasonable target or you know, place to really focus our efforts. And then also, you know, I do a lot of work, and our our company does a lot of work in the physical therapy realm, you know, chiropractic, physical medicine, helping people recover from pain and injury and surgery or restore function if they've had MS, neuropathy, stroke, spinal cord injuries, you know, that sort of thing. And, you know, of course, that seems broad. The common thread in all of that is the nervous system. And that's that's why I talk about all those different areas. And one of the big breakthroughs in terms of the nervous system is that so many times when people are injured or have pain, we are operating in this hardware-based paradigm where we're so focused on the tissue that's been injured, thinking that that that needs to heal. And yes, of course, you know, we want it to heal. However, so many times, you know, I've I've just seen over and over again, and now our network of you know, hundreds of clinics and thousands of practitioners have reported the same thing, where there's so many times where some you know someone will come in with some sort of injury and they think that, oh, because the ankle's sprained or the shoulder has a grade two separation, or because the disc is herniated, they're not able to move past a certain range of motion, or they're not able to, you know, to exert force or do this without pain. And then in the span of you know, 10 minutes of neurological stimulation directed appropriately at the right amounts, in the span of 10 minutes, all of a sudden, someone's range of motion. If you're just listening, you can't see me, but if you if you could if you see the camera, you say, I'm gonna bring my arm for just from my side, you know, from here, and eight to ten minutes later, it's all the way up overhead. It's like, well, how does that happen? You know, in 10 minutes, no one's ligament is literally you know being sewn back together, right? Or it's not just naturally just mending back together. So the the change is not in the hardware, in the tissues and structures of the body, the change there is functionally in the software in the nervous system. And there's so many times where it's not as much about that initial injury or insult as it is about the neurological response, the guarding, the inhibition, the hypersensitivity, the perception of threat that leads to pain. And so many times working at that level allows us to have these breakthroughs to help people feel significantly better, significantly faster. And yes, there's times where you don't get as much of that, you know, that type of home run, wow moment, what you know, type of effect. And that's when we know that it is more of a hardware issue. Oftentimes, there's a significant component of it that is in the software in the nervous system. And so you can kind of tell how much of the issue is more hardware-based versus how much is more software-based by applying this type of neurological stimulation. And I think just to kind of put a bow on it, yes, that is sort of the breakthrough is that often by working with the nervous system, even for things that we think are more structural issues, we can often have these really incredible breakthroughs.

  Philip Pape: 7:25

  Man, you you just encapsulated it so well and you and you spoke a lot of my language there with the hardware and software too, because my engineering background's in control systems and and working with electronics, and I always love the beauty of the math of the human body and how many of these layered systems there are. And we take them for granted and do try to simplify sometimes things down to what we see or you know, a physical limitation. And of course, there's the mental side of it too. But as I like to define things in scientific terms, the idea that there's an electrical connection that is connected to guarding and maladaptive, you know, patterns that you get stuck in after injury. And like you said, the perception of threat when we talk about when we oversimplify and talk about flight or fight versus like the parasympathetic nervous system. It's very, very fascinating. And there's three things that came to mind, like in my personal experience that I think will relate to what we're talking about and the listener. You know, years ago, I had uh herniated disc and avoided for a long time having surgery. I did have surgery, and whether it was necessary or not, I remember reading a book about uh a gentleman who thought that like 90-95% of back issues could be treated with mental or psychological approaches. And I've always found some solace in that because I've seen that with folks who kind of apply a positive mindset and then try to use the tissue and strengthen, and then the pain goes away, and you're like, that's very interesting, right? And so, and it's not a woo thing either. It's it's it's connected to the nervous system. Another is the idea that strength training, which we talk about on the show all the time. I'm always telling new beginners, you know, you're not gonna build a whole bunch of muscle in the first two months, but you're gonna get a lot stronger. And there's a neural component to that that I think is tightly connected to all this, that if you can understand it, it explains some of these other areas we're gonna talk about. And then lastly, is I just had a follow-up for my rotator cuff surgery, and the doctor's like, your range of motion is much farther than I expected. He's like, I think it's all, I think a lot of it is in your head in a good way. Like he wasn't trying to gaslight me. He was saying, you know, I think it's, I think it's uh, you've been through it before, your body's like has muscle memory and this and that. And I'm like, that's interesting. I gotta talk to Garrett about that too when we have our talk today. So having said all that, like when we talk about the nervous system limiting someone in some of the ways you just alluded to, whether it's strength or recovery from an injury or thinking they have a limitation, what specifically are you referring to, like in a way that's measurable, if that makes sense? Like, what is actually happening? And is this dependent on the person's you know, thought process and their psychology of it? Or is there something else that's going on if if that makes sense?

  Garrett Salpeter: 9:58

  You brought up some great topics there. We're talking about we're talking about the the book about you know the the psychoemotional kind of underlying factors in contributing to back pain. Is that Dr. Sarno?

  Philip Pape: 10:10

  Is that Yes, there you go. Yeah, like the 80s or 90s, something like that. Yeah.

  Garrett Salpeter: 10:14

  Yeah, it was really good. So so then the underlying neurological phenomenon here, I think the first piece that we have to understand to start to build this narrative here is to understand that our brain's number one priority is survival and protection, right? Our brain cares far more about making sure we live to see tomorrow than it does about us looking good in a swimsuit or jumping a few extra inches in the air on the vertical jump or throwing a baseball a few extra miles per hour farther. So our brains are really set up to do more, you know, it's more like a break than the throttle. Our brains limit us. There's a lot of governors, a lot of inhibitory pathways. There's, you know, if you look at, I love your you know, talking about control systems and your perspective there, Philip. When you know, when you look at the control system that is the nervous system, there's just as many inhibitory pathways as there are excitatory pathways. And there's uh actually, in many ways, more you know, like when people talk about they get drunk and they lose their inhibitions, these different things that behaviors that they wouldn't you know normally let the safety mechanisms are gone, yeah. So inhibition is is that process of limiting function. And so, from the perspective of movement and maybe athletic performance, and just in this realm, what happens there is that the brain and nervous system have these built-in mechanisms like a stretch reflex. You know, if you stretch past a certain point, it makes your muscle contract to protect itself from tearing. You have a the Golgi tendon organ mechanism that senses force or tension in uh the junction of the tendon and the muscle. And the idea there is that if it goes past a certain point, it's gonna shut down the muscle to make sure it doesn't contract too hard and rip the tendon off the bone, right? There's these these mechanisms that are there for a reason, it makes sense. We don't want to get rid of them, but I'm just just sort of laying the foundation of understanding that there's these mechanisms in here that limit our output. They're there for a reason. Okay, so number one priority is survival and protection. So our brains, another part of that is that our brains, you know, evolved in over you know millennia where food was scarce, and and one thing that our brains often do that you and listeners may relate to is you know, our brains often will cause us to feel a little bit lazy, to want to want to not do something, want to conserve energy in case there's a famine tomorrow. So, another way in which our brains actually hold us back. Fatigue, there's some great work. Uh, Tim Noakes was the lead scientist who sort of proposed this idea, some work on fatigue actually being a central mechanism in the brain, where the brain actually creates fatigue as an emotion to prevent us from overheating or exerting too much energy, kind of proactive feed forward, protective mechanism like that. So, so all these pieces I introduce in order to say that our you know, brain and nervous system are interested in in kind of holding us back. And so oftentimes the use it or lose it framework is really applies here because if we are not stretching past a certain point or not exerting force through a certain range of motion or past a certain threshold, those mechanisms are just gonna gradually, gradually default towards narrowing, allowing less stretch for the stretch reflex, allowing less force for the Goldie Tin organ, allowing less energy production, metabolically speaking. So we're gradually going to be going towards that conservation of energy and that protection. And so it takes work just to maintain effort. And then so because of sedentary lifestyles and and you know poor habits and things like that, a lot of these mechanisms get set too conservatively. And then on that backdrop, if you add in injury, if you, Philip, have a shoulder surgery, you know, hypothetically, I know you literally just had a shoulder surgery, but you know, if if someone has a has an injury, an insult, you know, a surgery, of course, is like an injury, but you know, even more traumatic, in response to that injury, these same mechanisms kick in to try to limit movement. You create tension and guarding in some muscles, inhibition shutting down weakness in other muscles, and hypersensitivity and pain, all of those with an eye towards preventing movement so that you don't move that freshly, acutely injured area and hurt it worse. And then the problem happens when you don't effectively rehabilitate and restore and recalibrate those, and you end up getting left with these various protective and compensatory patterns where those that tension and that weakness, you never quite get back to baseline after an injury. And so then you go back out into life and you're at a little bit of a diminished level, and then you know it happens again, and then there's the sedentary and bad habits mixed in, and that sort of compounds to reducing function over time, and that's where you get to you see these pictures side by side. It's like both of these people are 70 years old, one of them looks like 90, and one of them looks like 50 and is super quick, and right, and so it's you know, things are our habits and activities can compound for us in a positive way or in a negative way. And that in terms of the underlying you know neurological mechanisms, does that start to build some of the pieces there?

  Philip Pape: 15:40

  Oh, fan, yeah, fantastic. No, no, that really hit directly on it. Uh, because it sounds like it's an it's an adaptive response, just like anything else we do, and you have to train the nervous system essentially in all these different ways. I was thinking when you were talking about um rehab and and limiting, there's always this conflict when you hear layman advice, but even surgeons and doctors, where it's like take it easy and rest versus use the tissue and heal. And some people are like, oh, you you go too hard and and don't go too fast, and and others are like, but you're not going fast enough, right? And and nobody ever knows like what the right thing is to do. Uh, and that's part of the confusion here, right, in those situations, versus when you're kind of healthy and and nothing every everything's good, and then you kind of feel confident to take it to that next level. So I I briefly thought of like the David Goggins Navy SEAL mentality out there around, you know, when you're 40% or when you think you're at your limit, you're only 40% there, and then you have another 50%, and then there's this mental thing. Um, can you touch on that real quick before we get into like AC versus DC current and and the device technology and all that?

  Garrett Salpeter: 16:44

  So there, yes, I definitely want to touch on that. I also want to touch on uh something else you said there. But so in terms of the, you know, when you're when you think you're done, you're really only 40%. That speaks to that central governor of fatigue. When our brain causes us to feel like we need to stop, that often is a protective mechanism that is set too conservatively. And by learning to push ourselves, by leaning into that, by learning to push ourselves over time, we can expand that capacity and do more before the brain starts to trigger that. And then we can all, of course, learn that that even though it feels like I might die, I'm actually, if I push through that, I'm gonna be okay on the other side. There's a component of that. And then the other thing that you mentioned, which I think is a great insight, is this whole question of after an injury, after a surgery, you know, do I push it? Do I rest, ice, compress, elevate? Like what do I do? And so there is this old paradigm of rice, right? Rest, ice, elevation. And that is based on looking at things through the hardware lens. It's it's coming from the perspective of, okay, the issue is that this tissue is damaged and we need to just give it time to heal. It's not looking at what happens neurologically, what happens physiologically within the body, because when we rest, you know, the body is always wanting to conserve energy, the body's always responding to the signals that we're giving it. And so if if we're just resting, activity, various activities in the body metabolically and in terms of rebuilding and repairing structures, those activities are going to diminish. You see that people who are uh, well, an extreme example would be astronauts in space when they don't have, when they don't experience gravity, they begin to lose muscle mass, bone density in the span of you know a day, it starts. When people are in hospitals and are uh have you know have a leg raised or are unweighted or just you know totally sedentary, they start to atrophy very, very quickly. So the body's responding to the signals that we're giving it. And of course, if we're trying to recover from an injury or surgery, we want our body to be working at its maximum capacity internally to accelerate and optimize the healing and regenerative and repair processes. And so, to your point there about what do I do? Do I just sit there and raster? Do I really go David Goggins at it? What we have to do is it's not minimum or maximum, it's it's optimal, it's in between. And it's like many things in life and in engineering, it's about creating as much healthy, productive input as we can without crossing that threshold where we overload and cause re-injury. And you know, if you think about it, like like I talked about how a lot of these mechanisms are evolutionarily over millennia. You know, if you think about one of our you know, Paleolithic caveman ancestors, you know, think about someone who gets injured. They're not gonna be sitting around watching TV, they're gonna have to sort of like move on it. And they're, you know, they're gonna, they might be hobbling around, but but there's there's some benefit to within reason just getting after it and moving because you're gonna be signaling the body to start working again to to upregulate all the underlying processes that control the the healing result. And so what we want to do is find ways to do. That, not necessarily being, you know, with the average person, the David Goggins, you know, just suck it up. But using uh technology, like you know, like of course we have and are passionate about sharing at NewFit, by using technology like that, we can create neurological input just the same as if you were really moving and loading that tissue, but without creating the same mechanical loads that might otherwise put you at risk of re-injuring the tissue. So that is a very you it's a great insight, and it that balancing act is the thing. If you want to optimize the overall recovery, you basically want to spend as much time as you can on that that point.

  Philip Pape: 20:37

  Yeah, that's a great segue. You're right, because there are other technologies and folks I've had on the show too, when we talk about blood flow restriction, for example, where that's the similar philosophy is how do we give you enough stress to, I'll say, progressively overload your healing, right? While without going to the level of overload or overtraining, you know, because when people are pretty healthy, most people probably don't train hard enough. I joke about that on the podcast because I get questions like, how do I avoid overtraining? I'm like, I bet you're not even training hard enough next, you know. But but when it comes to injury, right, there's a little finer line. So electrical stimulation. I honestly don't know much about it. I did some research, of course, for this show. I have a little bit of an electrical engineering background as well, like circuits. We're not going to get into that and everything, but I know there's, you know, the two types of current, AC versus DC current, come into the equation here. And using, like you said, stimulation as an aid for recovery to give you extra inputs to kind of take the load off of your own body is a very interesting concept. So help us understand, you know, why I brought you on the show to begin with. It's like I want to get into some of this technology and why it works.

  Garrett Salpeter: 21:42

  At the most fundamental level, what we're doing with electrical stimulation is we're we're using an outside influence to stimulate the same signals that happen inside of our body anyway. So it's sort of like the first domino. You know, if you have a bunch of dominoes set up and I tap the first domino with my finger, or you tap the first domino with your finger, the same thing is they're all going to knock each other down, right? So the rest of that, after the first domino, the rest of the cascade is the mechanoreceptor, the sensor out in the body, and then the neuron going to the spinal cord, and then the spinal cord up to the thalamus and into the brain, and the various processes that happen as a cascade in response to all of that. So what we're trying to do is create that, use an external stimulus or source to trigger that process that would happen naturally in the body anyway. And that's the same process, that cascade of neurological activity is the same process that happens in response to load, to movement, to stretch, to force, all these other things that we were talking about earlier. So that probably gives you a little sense of how we can start to use electrical stimulation to start to optimize that balance of creating input to drive positive changes or improvements and upregulation and processes in the body, start to trigger those, but without having to get as much of the mechanical load. So we're starting to start to hint at that. So then the question becomes sort of what type to of electrical stimulation to use and how to apply it. And what we're probably best known for is using direct current, this kind of more modern paradigm of electrical stimulation. So there's benefits to direct current that I'll get into just a quick aside. The history is actually very interesting, where a lot of these benefits that that we'll talk about momentarily, a lot of these benefits were known back in the 1960s, 1970s. The Soviet sports scientists were experimenting with all types of electrical stimulation as part of their effort to prove that their political system was superior and they were trying to assert athletic dominance. And so a lot of what we get today, periodization, plyometrics, a lot of these principles that we use in sports performance training came from that era of Soviet sports science. And so they knew a lot of the benefits, but there was always this really big hurdle, this really big problem, where when you turn direct current up to a high enough level to create progressive overload and neuromuscular reeducation, it would literally sting and burn the skin. You'd get positive charges gathering around the negative terminal or electrode and vice versa. And that creates resistance, leads to heat dissipation, and then ultimately burning, stinging, burning, discomfort. And so direct current totally fell out of favor. And in its place, filling that vacuum came the various alternating current devices that we're familiar with. Most people probably think of the tens unit, yeah. Then there's also interferential, there's quote unquote Russian STEM, which even though the Russians use different types, they're what we think of as like sort of the trade name Russian STEM is alternating current. And so alternating current came became the standard in the subsequent decades, the standard in this field, because you could get the current into the body without stinging and burning the skin. You send these impulses in, you can get some you know muscle contraction in a way that can help you pump blood and lymph and other fluids. So there's some benefit there with the tens unit. You get some of this blocking or masking or distracting of particular neurological signals that can help reduce pain temporarily, like an electric aspirin. And so there's there's some benefits to that. However, they're also limited, and that's why a lot of you know insurance companies, for instance, stopped covering or dramatically reduced the amount at which they cover or reimburse electrical stimulation. A lot of clinics stopped using it. You know, there's these old STEM units in clinics around the country just collecting dust because there's just you know significant limitations in what you can do.

  Philip Pape: 25:53

  Real quick, so like if you had dry needling with stimulation, that's probably tens, it's probably AC current type stimulation.

  Garrett Salpeter: 25:59

  That usually, yes. And that that's a little more mild, and that's just getting that mechanical kind of twitching and pumping. So a little bit of a you know, in that sort of narrowly defined limited use case there, yeah. Uh typically, yes. I mean, you can use our device for that, but most of the time it's it's that sort of thing, yeah. And so so direct current has two main benefits, which are the reasons why you know we've put a lot of effort into engineering this product that allows us to get direct current into the body without burning the skin. And so the first is the functional effect on the nervous system. When we're doing uh I would normally I would often say software programming, but for you, Philip, I'm gonna say when we're doing systems engineering, attempting to get you know, optimize these patterns within the nervous system, there's a there's a really powerful effect there. And then there's also, because of these direct current electric fields, powerful effects on the underlying processes of healing and repair. And so I'll just share each of those uh a bit on each of those individually. So, in terms of the process of neuromuscular education and communication and precision of signaling within the nervous system, when you have an alternating current device, the signal literally is going back and forth, positive, negative, positive, negative. And so when you turn it up again, when you turn it up to a high enough level to really make a difference within the neuromuscular system, you're signaling this contraction of both sides of the body. It's like your bicep and tricep fighting against each other, hamstring and quad fighting against each other. It's like if you're driving your car, hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time. So that's the signal, and that becomes the limitation in how much you can take and it and it locks you up, and it ends up training these inefficient movement patterns, which can, you know, yes, make the body less efficient and also create a lot of internal resistance and tension that that could exacerbate problems, or at least not make the improvements that we seek. And so with direct current, we can bypass a lot of that. You know, one metaphor that that I like that often lands with people is you know, imagine you have a highway, you have all your cars going northbound, right? And so, you know, northbound could be from the body up to the brain or northbound on a highway. You have all your cars going northbound, then all of a sudden you have a car just going the wrong way. It's like, oh shit, there's a, you know, that that's that's a that's a problem. So that's that's sort of what's happening there. And and with direct current, we can bypass a lot of that. So we don't get the protective contractions, and we get a lot more of this sensory afferent input signaling into the nervous system, which allows us to do things like scan around on the body and find where it's guarding and protecting against these various sensory inputs, which means uh that's actually where the body's gonna be compensating around and resisting movement in real life, too. You know, allows us to find those and allows us to do this sensory input that's kind of like a form of exposure therapy to drive input to allow the nervous system to recalibrate and down-regulate the various protective or inhibitory responses and allow greater function. And so that's a big part of why in some cases we see those five-minute miracles, or in 10 minutes, we have the person who can all of a sudden lift their arm up overhead or all of a sudden can bend down and touch their toes for the first time in 10 years. And you know, again, not that that you have that every single time, but we see that often enough that it's it's worth talking about. So those effects on the nervous system happen in large part because of the effects of direct current. And then there's also the effects of these direct current electric fields on the body. Uh, you know, cells in the body have various charges. There's really interesting research. Like there's a great book, book recommendation, The Body Electric by Robert Becker, and he talks about the research showing that when animals and humans, also, of course, we're we're animals, when whenever when there's an injury, the body actually creates electric fields. He calls it the current of injury. The body creates electric fields inside that do things like summon inflammatory cells to start to clear out the debris and then further act as messengers to summon the next level of growth and repair uh cells that actually rebuild the structures there. So we have these electric fields, and there's really cool research. It had been mostly in animal models until a study we did that I'll tell you about, had been in animal models looking at the effects of direct current on the underlying processes of healing and repair and regeneration. And then we did a study, the first comparing in humans alternating current versus direct current. And for this, we worked with diabetic neuropathy patients. So patients' average age was 74. And this is an interesting population because it's been written off that they can ever really heal in any meaningful way, that they can ever really restore function. And for it was 150 patients, so really statistically powerful. 75 of them got traditional tens unit. And with them, what happened is what most people expected little to no meaningful, significant functional improvements. There was, however, some reduction in pain. It's about symptom management. That's kind of the standard of care. So there was some benefit there. With the direct current of the newbie, however, there was not only the same or more reduction in pain, but there were improvements in sensation and function and EMG amplitude when we're actually measuring the electrical activity inside of the nerves and the nerve conduction velocity. So we're seeing improvements and healing and regenerative changes in the axons, in the myelin of the nerves. And again, that speaks to these benefits of direct current. So a long way of coming back to that conclusion of we care about the type of current because of the effects that it has, both functionally on the nervous system and on those underlying processes related to healing within the body.

  Philip Pape: 31:42

  Yeah, I was gonna ask about that study, so thanks for getting ahead. There's another one I'll mention in a second. But direct current, I imagine the safety aspects, I mean, are those addressed because it's a pulsed form of direct current versus continuous? Because continuous would seem to like be a problem. But how does it work in that sense?

  Garrett Salpeter: 31:58

  Yes, you're exactly right. So if it were continuous, past beyond a certain period of time, you are going to get that charge buildup that we talked about, that is the reason why you get resistance and heat dissipation and burning. And so what we're able to do is have this pulsed direct current, and there's actually multiple waveforms. So in between the primary pulses, there's another waveform that comes in and sort of you know moves around the charges a little bit so they don't accumulate, so you can get that next pulse through. And it allows us, therefore, to get the net electric field delivery of direct current, but with the comfort and the ability to penetrate through the skin and all the layers of uh capacitance between skin and fatty layers and connective tissue and all that, it allows us to get the benefit of that net direct current field, but with the sort of penetrating ability of alternating current.

  Philip Pape: 32:54

  That's cool. That's cool. All right. I think he did a study in the University of South Florida. I don't know if that was with Dr. Campbell's lab or if it was something else, because I I know Dr. Bill Campbell down there.

  Garrett Salpeter: 33:03

  Bill Campbell, oh brilliant guy. So yeah, so one of his associate professors is a guy named Sam Buckner, who uh was the lead researcher. It was it was in his lab, and his lab is part of Dr. Campbell's program. Yeah, so I got to meet Dr. Campbell when I was there, but his name is not on the paper because it's his uh, you know, kind of Sam Buckner, I think is is in his department or whatever the whatever the right word is, but they certainly work together, yeah.

  Philip Pape: 33:28

  Yeah, and I think I think this one for the listener was uh there was an exercise protocol along with the newbie device, and they found more swelling or similar swelling and soreness, I think, to lifting, but with less effort. But I don't know if it showed better outcomes. Is that the same study we're talking about?

  Garrett Salpeter: 33:45

  Yeah, so there's actually two. One okay one was the acute study, which is looking at fatigue and soreness and and yes, muscle cell swelling immediately after a traditional resistance exercise, like traditional weightlifting, and then immediately after a session with the newbie and you know, little to no external load. And the reason that muscle cell swelling is interesting, as you know, Philip, and as you know, many of your listeners probably know, you know, you get that, you know, when you're lifting and your muscles are swollen, you get that the pump. The pump, the pump, the pump is actually a thing because what happens when your muscle cells are depleted of energy, and perhaps there's microtrauma, not not necessarily, it doesn't have to be soreness and damage, but when they're depleted enough, they actually start to start to slurp in or suck in the blood plasma, the extracellular fluid there, because the blood plasma, right? We have our red blood cells, then our plasma carries a lot of things, including amino acids and proteins. So the blood the muscle cells start to suck in that fluid so that they can get the proteins and the raw materials and glucose and energy and stuff like that. And so part of the process of hypertrophy, one of those early steps is muscle cell swelling. And so being able to look on an ultrasound and see the amount of muscle cell swelling is an important precursor for the hypertrophy, the processes of hypertrophy and muscle building. And it's sort of functions as a proxy to know that you got the job done in your training, and you can expect, assuming all the underlying health processes are viable, you can expect that you're you're on the road to hypertrophy. So there was the the effects were virtually the same using the newbie with little to no external load versus you know traditional higher resistance exercise. And then there was a second study looking at muscle growth over a full eight-week training cycle.

  Philip Pape: 35:42

  Okay, no, yeah, and well, and I was wondering about so the first study was immediately measurable, but not necessarily longitudinal, like that hypertrophy actually did occur over time, or you're saying the outcome was the same as the heavier load traditional group?

  Garrett Salpeter: 35:55

  So for the first study, yes, outcome was approximately the same. And then for the second study, you know, in the area of the electrode, the muscle growth over eight weeks was approximately the same using little to no external load plus the newbie for muscle recruitment was approximately the same as traditional resistance exercise using heavier weights. Uh I think it was twice a week for eight weeks, or something like that. Yeah.

  Philip Pape: 36:17

  And were these untrained or trained individuals?

  Garrett Salpeter: 36:19

  These were uh that's that's a good question. It's an important question. Um and I I knew that detail at one point.

  Philip Pape: 36:29

  It's all right, it's all right. No worries. I'm not gonna, it's not a quiz.

  Garrett Salpeter: 36:33

  They were they were you know college students in the lab, and one of the interesting things is that they were, you know, each individual subject served as their own control because they did one leg, it was knee extension and looking at quad muscle growth, and they flipped a coin for which one was right leg, which one was left leg. So they did the traditional you know resistance exercise, you know, something like 70 to 80 percent, one rep max, multiple sets on one leg, knee extension, and then you know low to no external load with the newbie on the other leg. And so in the area around the electrodes, it was uh uh similar muscle, so in that quad muscle, uh similar muscle growth.

  Philip Pape: 37:12

  Okay, and and are we so when you look at populations that benefit the most, the least, where it's not worth or whatever, are we talking about so uh what comes to mind for me is somebody who trains regularly, is this an enhancer? Somebody who trains regularly and is recovering, I could definitely see see an application there, and then people who don't train regularly, and I guess in that context, it's either recovery or just is it okay. Let's start with this. Is there a population where they want to build muscle and take it easy and not have to train as hard? Like, does that work with the with the with their device?

  Garrett Salpeter: 37:49

  So, you know, there's there's no there's no easy button that Yeah, okay.

  Philip Pape: 37:54

  I want to get that out of the way because BFR is this has the same conversation. People are like, yeah, just use BFR. You never have to lift heavy again. I'm like, you know, BFR is kind of hard to do, uh, and you have to do a lot of reps. So I I'd actually prefer to just lift heavy. But yeah, well, give a I guess lay out for us the main segments and use cases.

  Garrett Salpeter: 38:10

  So I think, you know, of the of the use cases you you mentioned there, I guess I have a slight inclination to just start at the top, which is someone who's extremely well trained. What can we do for someone who's a professional bodybuilder, for example? Like, you know, someone who's already gotten the muscle definition, you know, just like the what seems to be the maximum a human could possibly achieve. And there's you know, dozens or perhaps now hundreds of professional bodybuilders who have been using the newbie for a variety of reasons. You know, one interesting example that stands out is Dexter Jackson, who won Mr. Olympia in 2008. And it was when you know Jay Cutler won a bunch of them. He won a few, and then Dexter won, and then Jay won again. It was during that era. And so uh Jay also uses and unlikes the newbie now at uh at his gym out in Las Vegas. So so Dexter, when he was he was either 49 or about turn for he had just turned 50 because it was Mr. Olympia during COVID and it got delayed. So he's either 49 or 50 years old. So let's say he was 50. So when he was you know 47, 48, 49, he was still competing in bodybuilding, but everyone said he started to lose his legs, his legs are getting a little smaller, a little bit less defined. And once you lose your legs, you're done. And he started working with the newbie, he did one leg day per week for 16 weeks leading up to this Mr. Olympia. You know, should have been the 2020, but it was in 21 because of COVID or what you know, whatever year that was. So he started using it. And if you look at the before and afters, you can actually see holy crap, this guy built his legs at 50 years old, doing one day per week for 16 weeks on the newbie, and he With a guy named Brad Rowe at the the Gold's Gym Mecca, the original Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. And he went out and he won uh he won uh achieved fourth place at age 50 when he hadn't been top 10 in you know years. It was this amazing, amazing transformation.

  Philip Pape: 40:18

  So you're saying he got newbie gains.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:20

  He got newbie gains.

  Philip Pape: 40:21

  All right, I'm sure you've heard that before many times.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:24

  Gains with a Z.

  Philip Pape: 40:26

  Yes.

  Garrett Salpeter: 40:26

  And so he um, you know, is just just one example. But there's a there's a lot of examples in bodybuilding where the benefits are either something like Dexter's experience where you need to really create load in a specific area to get to get more precise, targeted growth. You know, for someone, maybe it's calves, maybe it's biceps. For him, it was his you know, quads, that lateral vasculateralis quad sweep and some VMO definition, you know, stuff like that. Uh so sometimes it's that, it's sort of bringing up, you know, in air quotes, I'll say weak links. You know, uh sometimes it's being able to rehab or train around injuries or be able to have a sustainable way to continue training even in the background, uh, even when there's these you know significant joint degeneration or injuries in the background, because a lot of these you know high-level bodybuilders, the volume of training they've done, they've beaten themselves up. Look at you know, Ronnie Coleman now is one of the strongest guys in the sport and you know, Mr. Olympia level, and you know, now he's wheelchair bound because he just beat the crap out of himself, you know, just so he's super debilitated. So being able to train to get that deep muscle recruitment effect so you can can maintain or even continue to build muscle without having to get as much mechanical load and wear and tear on the joints and the connective tissues. So that can be a big part of the value proposition there.

  Philip Pape: 41:55

  So let's stick stick on that population for a second, right? Because we talk about muscle fiber recruitment and like how different loads have a different impact in that regard, right? 80, 90% load, more on that strength regime tends to work on the deeper muscle fibers and the larger muscle fibers, and that versus 30 to 60 percent is like your hypertrophy regime of percentage of your max. So for a guy like that, or even somebody who is just an advanced trainee, I think your device requires a professional to it's like FDA cleared and you can't do it on your own. Is that correct?

  Garrett Salpeter: 42:25

  Yeah, it's an FDA device, you know, so it's it's either used by you know a physical therapist, chiropractor, licensed medical person, or under their supervision. So there are people who use them for fitness, don't themselves have credentials, but they're either under the supervision of or the business run by a medical professional, stuff like that.

  Philip Pape: 42:42

  And so if you were going after your quads specifically, how would that look as far as like dosing protocol now that like practically what does that look like?

  Garrett Salpeter: 42:52

  So in terms of kind of understanding why this matters, I think it's it's worth going back to what you said. You know, you're talking about like these higher percentages of your one-rep max, typically being more lower rep, more strength oriented, a little bit lower load, higher rep is typically more hypertrophy oriented. So for hypertrophy, what you essentially need to do is stimulate mechanically and deplete as many motor units, as many, as many muscle fibers as you can, which means you need to activate neurologically as many motor units as you can. And that's part of why pushing past some certain threshold of fatigue is required, because as some motor units fatigue, you're gonna start calling on more and more and more. And so the volume of muscle fibers that you're gonna stimulate or hit is gonna be great enough that you're gonna get more of a muscle growth and muscle building effects.

  Philip Pape: 43:44

  Right. You're you're saying just naturally, like that's how we have to train, right? You have to train close to failure. You're not talking about with the device, you're just the premise being this is mechanical tension, that's how we get hypertrophy.

  Garrett Salpeter: 43:54

  Yes.

  Philip Pape: 43:54

  Yeah, yeah. Just so the listener knows, that's yeah, that's why we say train close to failure and why you could do it at a low percentage of your your max, but you you know, I always say, you know, bodybuilding and physio or um hypertrophy is like a physiological adaptation versus strength, which is a specificity or performance adaptation.

  Garrett Salpeter: 44:10

  Yes, that's right. That's a good more of a hardware versus more of a software adaptation. So the key to extrapolate here is setting the stage for what we're gonna talk about next. The key is, of course, muscle fiber activation, you know, maximizing that. You need as many motor units. The motor unit is the neurological structure that's gonna control multiple muscle fibers. So you want to activate as many of those as you can. And we can do that then with this external signal. We can use this external signal. So, what I talked about before in the rehabilitation realm, where we're getting more of the sensory input, there's certain settings, especially has to do with changes in frequencies and the and the use of direct current generally that allow us to get more of that. We can also change the settings to where we actually get more motor unit output. Now, it's not as much of that back and forth muscles fighting against each other because of the direct current, it's more targeted more directly on the target muscle that we're stimulating. And by changing the settings, we can preferentially get more relaxation or contraction. So, for this context, we're of course going to the settings where we're going to get more contraction. These are the settings that were used in that study with Dr. Spock Buckner and Cam Campbell at the University of South Florida. And what this does is it increases motor unit recruitment just the same as you know, increasing resistance, like it's like digital weight. You know, if you think about what happens, if I just curl my arm, if I just flex my elbow here with nothing in my hand, I might be using 10 or 20% of the motor units in my bicep. If I get a moderate weight, maybe I go up to 30 or 40. If I get a heavy weight, maybe I'm going up to 60 or 70, right? A really average person can only activate maybe 40 or 50%. A really well-trained athlete can maybe activate 70 or 80%. You know, no one's really getting to 100. 100 is like in the electric chair when you get so overloaded with electricity that you literally tear your tendons off your bones. You go through a bypass all those protective mechanisms that we talked about. So weight is causing me to increase the number of motor units and muscle fibers that I'm activating. So we can put the pads on at these certain settings and electrically stimulate. Remember, we talked about that first causing the same electrical signal to go in now to the motor units that's going to cause those neuromuscular activation, create more contraction there. And even with a relatively light weight, we can still get that, you know, 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 percent of the motor units to contract. And so you can do, you know, you could be curling your arm here without any weight, you know, 20 times, but if you have the machine on, it's almost as if each one of those 20 reps was like a one-rep max or a three-rep max or a five-rep max. So each one, you're getting more activation, and so that allows you to get more volume of work and to touch or stimulate or affect more muscle fibers, and that's how you can have uh you know a greater per unit time, like a faster effect in that realm of hypertrophy, because you're going to be getting more stimulation on more muscle fibers in a shorter period of time.

  Philip Pape: 47:16

  So when you do that, does the effort feel the same? And is it like you're pre-fatiguing where now you can't do as many reps because you're you're effectively getting to that failure point sooner, or because you don't feel it, you're getting past the point you normally would?

  Garrett Salpeter: 47:30

  Part of that is the you know how it feels, the rating of perceived exertion or RPE, which you know you're Yeah, RPE or I R I R the inverse, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So R I R being reps in reserve, is that right?

  Philip Pape: 47:43

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I the industry's moving I see more toward just using RIR now, but RPE is is totally cool. Yeah, it's what bodybuilders know.

  Garrett Salpeter: 47:50

  In the first study, they actually looked at RPE. And even though the effects you know on muscle cell swelling and and fatigue and soreness and stuff like that, even though they were they were similar for both, there was less RPE with the machine. So it did feel easier. And so I mentioned there's there's you know, there's no easy button in the sense that there's no shortcut, you do still have to work, but it is a bit easier, subjectively easier than lifting that heavy. So it does feel a little bit easier when you're doing it like this. And so the way that we commonly implement this in practice, like if you're if you're in this example, you know, just following along with wanting to grow the quads, you know, if Dexter Jackson or you listening to this would normally have to do, you know, say you're doing uh five by five, you're doing five sets of five with 500 pounds on a squat. Just easy numbers.

  Philip Pape: 48:46

  Yeah, yeah. That everybody who listens does that easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Garrett Salpeter: 48:50

  Well, not not easy to lift, but easy numbers just because they're all fives.

  Philip Pape: 48:54

  But yeah, got it.

  Garrett Salpeter: 48:55

  Easy to keep in our minds. So now you might do, you know, the you might do five by five with the machine on, but you might only do, you know, 20% of that weight would be 100 pounds, or half of that would be 250 pounds. You're you can use a much lower amount of weight, so you're not gonna have to have as much load on your spine and as much, you know, torque on your knee joints and stuff like that. So you can get that, and you can still get similar muscular recruitment effect. So it's sort of like digital load there. So it it's you know, it doesn't feel totally easy. It's not like you're doing nothing. There's some discomfort of you know turning the machine up and stuff like that. So it's a different type, you know, generally does feel a little bit easier. And then there was another there was another part to that question, too. That can you remind me?

  Philip Pape: 49:42

  Uh I was talking about, oh yeah. So I think the other part was then can you bang out a few more reps before you feel the before you get to failure, in which case you're effectively going to a higher level of close to failure than you would otherwise.

  Garrett Salpeter: 49:55

  You yes, you can. And so uh you can do more reps. You know, if you're if you only have 100 pounds on your back instead of 500, because you have the machine, this like you know, digital weight helping you increase recruitment, you'll be able to do more. And so that's where you know this whole notion of having uh you know a trained professional working with you comes in because you will often have the experience of feeling like, oh yeah, I could do more reps, I could do more reps, but we actually want to want to stop, want to limit that until we see how someone responds. Because you can have you know significant muscle soreness after this because you're getting so much recruitment. So we have to, you know, it's with great power comes great responsibility. We have to uh sort of titrate up, dose appropriately this because it is such a potent stimulus.

  Philip Pape: 50:40

  Okay. I'm having a lot of fun because this is uh fun. I'm nerding out with you. But okay, so then that's really interesting. So now the next, I guess, category was okay, maybe you do lift and now you're dealing with injury, or like in my case, a surgery or something like that, what that looks like for uh for recovering or you know, how it compares. Because let me let me tell you, Gary, you're probably aware there are so many schemes and products and devices out there now. I mean, you have peptides that are becoming all the rage, and I have so much skepticism about those, even though some people swear by them. There's the BFR has been around for years. There's the electrical simulation, which I honestly don't hear talked about as much, and I think it's because the tens like really didn't blow anybody out of the water, you know, like anybody uses like eh, I don't, whatever. So the recovery rehab thing is huge, especially for our listeners who tend to be over 40 and dealing with these kinds of things. So let's let's deal with that uh scenario now. It's a good one.

  Garrett Salpeter: 51:34

  This is, I think, one of the real sweet spots of this type of technology because like we talked about back at the the towards the beginning of this, when people have injury and limitation and pain, it often is this compounding effect of diminished neurological function. Of course, there's a structural corollary of that, you know, with connective tissues and you know, need needing to strengthen and maintain range of motion and stuff like that. But a lot of it really is neurological. And so if you are you know a 40-something year old man or woman and you haven't been training for a while, or you attempt to train and then your back starts to hurt, so you take some time off, then you go back out again, your knee hurts, then you try to go do something else, maybe you know, play tennis and your elbow starts hurting, you're in this situation. The reason that those injuries happen, and the reason that you can't sustain that practice for a long enough period of time to accumulate the progress and achieve the results that you wish to achieve, the reason is because your muscles aren't working properly, they're not doing the job to support and stabilize your joints through the full range of motion. There's a simple metaphor, again, another oversimplification, but a useful one is to talk about how muscles are sort of like shock absorbers of a car. And when they're working right, they keep, they they protect a lot of the joints. So it's like shock absorbers protect the chassis of the car. They they, you know, they they protect your joints, whereas when they're not working as well, you know, torques and forces concentrate in certain areas of of cartilage in your knee joint or in in other certain connective tissues, and you end up irritating those and eventually damaging them. And so a lot of it comes down to yes, how the muscles are working, which as we talked about also, is the control under the control of the nervous system, right? The muscles, there's there's really no such thing as you know, muscle memory. Muscles don't do muscles just blindly follow the neurological commands they're given, right? So ultimately it is the nervous system. And so, so by working at this level, by finding, and you can do this sometimes really, you know, a week or two of this re-education type work can lay the foundation where you can go out and train you know for months or years just by sort of hitting the reset button, by recalibrating, by resetting that foundation of healthy movement. Sometimes it you know certainly takes longer, but in you know, that that type of use case, someone who's struggling to get back to a routine or or maintain a more sustainable uh you know, fitness, training, sports, hobby, recreational element, this this is super helpful for those types of people. And you know, if anyone's interested, what I would encourage you to do would be you know, you don't have to work with me, I have no financial incentive in this, but you know, find one of our practitioners. You know, we have a website directory and stuff like that. So I would encourage people to go find, you know, it's mostly physical therapy clinics, chiropractic offices, some gyms. You know, there's many hundreds of locations around the country. And you know, for international listeners, we have you know some in the in the UK and Australia, we have other distributors coming online with our product in other countries, you know, now, but uh as of early 2026, you know, just you know active distributors in those countries so far. So I you know I would encourage you to try it out because if you can get rid of, you know, it's sort of like we want we want to get to the root cause of why people are experiencing these pains and injuries and limitations. And you know, if we if we really keep digging, you know, you as an engineer, Philip, know the the five whys. You keep asking why, keep asking why until you get to the root cause. And oftentimes it is that you know dysfunction within the nervous system, and this allows us to really get to that root cause where you can make more meaningful change.

  Philip Pape: 55:19

  And is it when working with a like a physical therapist, is it often applied on its own in many therapy sessions, uh, or is it off always with uh a form of movement, you know, like bands or exercise of some form?

  Garrett Salpeter: 55:34

  So the it can be applied in you know a variety of settings. There's a couple of things that we do that are more like you're sitting there, like we have the like the neuropathy study was actually a foot bath where one of the electrodes is floating in a bucket of water, your feet are in there, you're kind of sitting there. You know, we have a vagus nerve protocol where you lie down in sort of our quote unquote electric meditation or master reset. And then there's, you know, sometimes you can connect it to an electric glove and people do manual therapy work. You actually work on you know trigger points for certain areas, mobilizations there. And then, yes, you know, what we're probably best known for is this mapping process where you scan around, find where there's neurological dysfunction that would you know correlate to compensatory and protective movement patterns, like we talked about. So probably best known for this process where you scan around, and you know, virtually everyone that you would go to see who's offering new fit treatments or training sessions would do this mapping process with you and then have it on while you're doing different movements and exercises. And the the reason that's so valuable, well, one traditional alternating current tens unit treatments are typically passive. You lie there and just let it work you. So that's a big difference. And the reason it's so important is that it allows you to relearn, to incorporate the appropriate muscles back into movement patterns. So it accelerates, it fast tracks that process of re-education, of relearning, you know, efficient movement patterns, healthy movement patterns.

  Philip Pape: 57:01

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that definitely appeals to my mindset of trying to trying to move and use the tissue and load and and all of that. So, all right, this is good stuff. I mean, I know there's a lot more we could cover. Uh, you know, we've pretty much hit on the big parts here, how it works, why it works, why it's different than the AC devices out there, different use cases. Is there any any other big blind spot we haven't covered that in this context you think the listener wants to know about?

  Garrett Salpeter: 57:27

  You know, I don't I don't think so. I mean, of course, there is the because we're working so neurologically, you know, there are the use cases. I mentioned the neuropathy study, you know, we've we have studies also look you know with functional recovery in MS patients. We have a a case study on an ALS patient published in the Journal of Integrated Medicine. So, you know, those types of things. Only reason I mentioned that is that, you know, if if you're listening to this and you have a you know, friend or relative with some complex neurological condition or injury, you know, there there could be hope of you know harnessing the power of neuroplasticity for longer-term adaptations and changes. So I just share that because we've seen some really you know, as cool as it is to work with you know, professional athletes and and the bodybuilders and the Joe Rogans of the world, he he talked about us on his body, you know, he has come in here and helped them a lot. So uh you know, as cool as that is, you know, the the people that that we've helped get out of wheelchairs and regain their autonomy, those have been just the most inspiring and wonderful transformations. So that's you know, that's why I mentioned that.

  Philip Pape: 58:31

  That's incredible. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I'm glad you came on because I learned a lot. And ultimately, if that happens, hopefully the listener learned a ton today about this potential tool. I'm definitely gonna look more into it and even uh talk to some PTs I know and see if they're already in your network or not, or you know, maybe look you guys up. So, with that, where would you like the listener to reach out to you or learn more about the product or the technology or anything like that?

  Garrett Salpeter: 58:55

  So our website and social media are probably the two best places. Website is newfit uh www.new.fitne-e-u like neurological.fit. Uh and then on on Instagram and Facebook, we're most active at newfitrfp for rehab fitness and performance. I also have a personal Instagram if uh want to chat at all in there. It's just my first and last name, Garrett.sallpeter.

  Philip Pape: 59:17

  So new.fit, that's N-Eu.fit at newfitrfp, you said?

  Garrett Salpeter: 59:23

  Yeah, for rehab performance.

  Philip Pape: 59:25

  Yeah. And at Garrett Saulpeter, and we will put that in the show notes. All right. Sorry, just getting that in my notes. All right. Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you so much for coming on wits and weights, telling us all about this uh really cool tool. We love tools, tools in the toolbox, especially when they work. And guys, go check out the studies. I'm gonna see if I can find a couple of the ones that I've found on my copious notes and pull it in there as well. But Garrett, thank you so much for coming on.

  Garrett Salpeter: 59:47

  Thank you, Philip, and all the witty waiters out there. Appreciate you.

  Philip Pape: 59:52

  Well, good one. I haven't heard that one before. All right, take it easy.

The Body Recomp Advantage for Appetite and Fat Loss After 40 | Ep 432

Try Calocurb, a 100% natural appetite support supplement that activates your body's GLP-1 signals to reduce cravings by 40% and hunger by 30% within one hour. It's a helpful tool for your next recomp or fat loss phase. Get 10% off at witsandweights.com/calocurb

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If you're over 40, cutting calories to lose fat can backfire.

Why? Because if your approach is too aggressive or your stress is too high, your hunger spikes, training suffers, and you often regain everything you lost when you increase calories again.

Body recomposition (losing fat while building or preserving muscle simultaneously) can avoid this. It's not just a physique strategy but also an appetite strategy.

In this finale of our 8-part appetite series, you'll learn why body recomp avoids the hunger cascade that derails most fat loss attempts. 

Discover my Recomp Ladder framework that prioritizes your levers in the right order.

Get 3 ready-to-use body recomp plans: aggressive maintenance for efficiency-focused recomp, small deficit recomp for faster results without hunger, and the build-then-mini-cut approach for breaking plateaus.

You'll also learn who recomp works best for (hint: if you're over 40 with an inconsistent lifting history, you're in the sweet spot), the 5 most common recomp pitfalls, and a simple 2-metric check to know if your recomp is actually working (no scale weight required).

Timestamps:

0:00 - Do you actually need a deficit to lose fat? 
3:20 - What body recomp really means (and what it's not)
5:22 - Recomp as an appetite management strategy
7:10 - 3 reasons recomp works better after 40
11:32 - Who body recomp works best for
14:43 - When recomp gets harder (and what to do instead)
15:53 - Appetite support during recomp
18:05 - The Recomp Ladder (5 levels)
21:42 - 3 specific plans for body recomp
25:04 - 5 common recomp mistakes and how to fix them
30:35 - Bonus: Quick 2-metric body recomp check (hint: NOT the scale)

Most diets tell you to eat less and move more, then act surprised when hunger, cravings, and fatigue knock you off track. A more practical strategy for many people over 40 is body recomposition: losing fat while building or at least keeping muscle, without the constant stress of a big calorie deficit. Recomp lowers the demand on willpower because you avoid the hormonal backlash that comes with aggressive dieting. Instead of chasing the scale, you work a system that nudges body fat down and strength up. The payoff is steadier energy, better training, and a physique that looks sharper even if weight barely changes.

To make recomposition work, anchor everything to a simple hierarchy I call the Recomp Ladder. At the base is progressive strength training because muscle is the engine of your metabolism and the tissue that shapes your body. Next comes protein and meal structure: build meals around 30 to 50 grams of protein, then add fiber and food volume to stay full on fewer calories. Only then do you set energy targets, choosing maintenance, a small deficit, or a small surplus. After that, keep daily steps high to support calorie burn without crushing recovery. Finally, use optional tools like GLP1-activating supplements, mindset strategies, and accountability to smooth out cravings and habits when life gets messy.

Who benefits most from recomp? Beginners, detrained lifters coming back, anyone with higher body fat, low historical protein intake, or inconsistent training quality, and especially folks over 40 who find deficits drain recovery and amplify hunger. At this stage, muscle is often the limiting factor due to years of yo-yo diets and stop-start training. Gaining three to five pounds of muscle while dropping five to eight pounds of fat can transform how you look and feel at virtually the same scale weight. Because appetite signals often recover more slowly after decades of dieting, keeping calories near maintenance or only slightly below helps performance, mood, and adherence.

Choose from three practical paths. Plan A is aggressive maintenance: train hard, keep protein high, and hover 50 to 100 calories above your usual maintenance so you stay fully recovered and capable of building muscle while your body taps into stored fat. Plan B is a small deficit recomp, roughly 100 to 200 calories under maintenance, ideal for those who still build quickly and want more visible fat loss without the backlash of a deep cut. Plan C pairs short lean-gain phases with brief mini-cuts to create clear wins in both muscle and fat loss without long, draining cycles. All three plans succeed when you respect recovery, avoid excessive cardio, and push intensity in the gym.

Measure what matters and ignore the rest. A low-stress, two-metric check can tell you if you’re actually recomping: waist circumference at the navel and one key lift tracked weekly. If your waist trends down while your chosen lift trends up, you’re on target. If waist stalls, fat loss is lagging; if strength stalls, muscle gain is lagging. Skip body fat gadgets and accept that scale weight can rise while you look leaner. Common pitfalls include chasing the scale, cutting too hard, undertraining intensity, inconsistent protein, and overdoing cardio classes. Keep steps high, lifts progressive, meals protein-forward, and patience steady. The slower, steadier route often becomes the fastest path because it’s the one you can sustain.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  Here's a shocking thought. What if you don't need to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat? For most people over 40, the conventional approach, cutting calories, adding cardio, fighting through hunger, tends to create more problems than it solves. Your appetite spikes, your training suffers, you end up regaining what you lost and going in a vicious cycle. But body recomposition offers a different path. And it's not just for your physique, it's also an appetite strategy. So today I'm gonna show you the exact conditions that make body recomp work. A hierarchy I call the recomp ladder that puts the levers in the right order, and three implementation plans based on where you are right now. 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 Pabe, and today is episode eight of our appetite series. It's the finale. If you missed any of these, these are episodes throughout January 2026 where we've covered hormones that drive hunger, how sleep and stress affects cravings, protein and fiber for fullness, how your body changes in terms of appetite after 40, and where strength training fits into helping manage hunger compared to cardio. Today, I'm gonna show you how body recomposition, aka body reconf, pulls all those levers at once. And I'm trying not to repeat what we've already covered. Today I'm gonna give you more of a framework to make fat loss dramatically easier to stick with over time. The core idea is that body reconf reduces your need for aggressive deficits. Smaller or sometimes no deficit means less issues with hunger hormones, better training over the long term, you don't have as many cravings. And so a lot of these things tend to just solve themselves when you're not constantly trying to diet. Some of you have tried so many diets and you keep trying to diet and you keep trying to even lose fat the quote unquote right way, and it just is like hitting a wall. Okay. And I'm not saying nobody can, I'm not saying not everybody can do a fat loss phase. We don't necessarily need to, and there's sometimes a better way. Also, I've been giving you lots of really cool tricks at the end of these episodes lately, and I have another one for you today. It is a two-metric check on your body reconp. All right, so you forget about the scale, forget about things that don't make sense. I'm gonna give you two numbers that tell you if it's working to keep it simple. All right, let's get into it. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by CalloCurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. Let me start by clearing up what recomp is. We've done episodes on recomp before, but there's a lot of noise around this. Body recomposition is simultaneously losing fat while maintaining or gaining muscle. And that's it. A 2024 editorial in a sports nutrition journal described it exactly this way and also talked about the scientific literature and how robust it is in examining this for decades, right? It's a set of conditions where your body gets pushed to allocate nutrients toward muscle while drawing energy from stored fat. So it's totally real, it's documented, it's a real thing. Okay. But we have to know what it is not. It is not losing 20 pounds in six weeks. It's not dramatic changes on the scale. If you're doing recomp well, your weight might barely move or move slowly or even go up while your waist shrinks, your clothes fit differently, you get stronger, and you look visibly leaner in photos. And this is what we're trying to get to with body recomp. But it's also where a lot of people get frustrated because they might step on the scale and not see a change and then think nothing's happening, even when it is. And sometimes the scale is changing, but it's not in the way we want, even if it's going down. Does that make sense? Right? We're not just trying to measure the mass of your body, we're trying to measure how you're actually successfully reshaping your body. So there are metrics that we track to do this, right? Is your waist going down? Is your strength going up? Are your steps and activity staying reasonably consistent? Are you hitting your protein targets? Is your sleep and stress relatively stable? And is your trend weight fairly stable? It might be slowly declining, it might be slowly decreasing. It depends on what direction you're pushing it. And a little bit later, we're going to give you the three plans for which direction you want to go and still call it recomp. So if you're checking the boxes of all those things I just mentioned, right? You know, your waist is going down, your lifts are progressing, then you're probably recomping and the scale's noise that really isn't that important. And here's why this matters for appetite, okay? This is for today's episode on appetite and recomp. Recomp lets you avoid aggressive deficits, and that tends to cause all the appetite problems in the first place that most people experience, okay? Both in the deficit and even afterward when they're trying to recover. Because when you try to lose fat with a large calorie deficit, and I'm large is relative, right? So I don't necessarily mean a crashed diet, it could just be, you know, a percent of your body weight a week, which is pretty aggressive. You adapt and you tend to get more hungry and you tend to move less, you compensate, your training tends to regress a bit or stall out a little bit, right? You end up hungrier than you've ever been in some cases, depending on how aggressive it is. We covered all this in the recent episodes, but body recomp is a nice, elegant sidestep for all of that cascade of issues because you're never really in a big deficit. You might be at maintenance, you might be in a small deficit, you might even be in a small surplus, but you're nowhere near the truth the threshold that triggers the pushback. And you might have heard of terms like lean gaining, maintaining, main gaining. And we're kind of playing on those concepts. We're not going to make any claims that those that this is going to just completely transform you in the fastest amount of time because it's not about that. It's avoiding the other issues that throw people off and prevent you from adhering to this. I would rather you rather you take the slower approach to get the result than the faster approach that you rebound from. Obviously, think about the logic. That means the slower approach is actually the fastest approach because it's the one that sticks, right? So for today, I don't want you to think of recomp as a physique strategy, even though it is. I want you to think of it as an appetite management strategy that keeps you out of diets and happens to improve your physique. Okay. Now, why am I emphasizing this for people over 40 specifically? Because I know that sometimes I throw that into these episodes and I get some pushback like, well, doesn't this work at 25 and 30 and 35? I'm I'm putting it in here because at this time of life, this is when I see the I guess spinning of wheels when it comes to all these diets. And because it tends to get a little bit harder because of life issues and stress and stuff like that, it's not always the best solution for you. So I'm going to give you three specific reasons, though, this is important. Okay. So even if you are under 40, if this affect is affecting you, this is highly relevant. First, muscle becomes the limiting factor. All right. Because of the decline in muscle mass starting in your 30s and ramping up in your 40s and 50s, and you've had years of inconsistent or no strength training, probably multiple diet cycles that have cut mass even further, your lean mass even further. You've lost even more muscle doing these diets, your body's just going to respond differently than when you were 25. And so the fastest way for someone experiencing these things isn't necessarily to lose a bunch of weight. It is to build the muscle while gently losing fat. Okay, gently, gently, guys. It's really to focus on that muscle side. And of course, if you heard some of our recent episodes, I think I did another one that was called Build Muscle First Cut Later. It's that concept, but we're not talking about going into a big surplus today. We're talking about recomp. Okay. Here's another way to think about it. All right, if you're carrying, say, 25% body fat, so this is would be for men. For women, just add 10%. And you diet down aggressively and you lose weight, but you and you end up with 22% body fat, but you've lost a little bit of muscle and your metabolism's a little lower, you're gonna look a little smaller, but not necessarily more defined, and you're not gonna have a better physique. And you might even be less healthy depending on the loss of muscle. If you recomp, let's say you add three to five pounds of muscle over an extended period of time and you lose five to eight pounds of fat, where you weigh almost the same, but you've completely changed how you look and how your metabolism functions. For many, that is a really nice outcome to get, even though you have to be patient, it takes time. The second reason this is relevant is, and we talked about this, I think, in episode 428. After 40, your hunger and satiety signals are just not recovering as quickly from aggressive dieting. And it's probably just a matter of the time you've spent in dieting, not your age, but just the time. So we we talked about ghrelin and leptin sensitivity and how your body fights back and adapts and all that good stuff. But recomp avoids that issue, right? You're not creating the same conditions that trigger that response. You're not going into metabolic adaptation, or even if you're doing a very, very slight deficit, your body hardly notices. So you could still maintain your performance and you could still walk and maintain your movement. You don't compensate, you're not exhausted, you're not running out of energy, you could still eat enough carbs and overall calories and enjoy life. You avoid binge restrict because you're not binging, or you're not restricting, right? So, and I can go on. The third important reason here is recovery and joints. Let's be honest, guys, those of us who are older, after 40, 50, 60, you probably, you know, you can't outcardio your appetite because that's going to create all sorts of recovery issues that we talked about, I think, on the last episode. And if you don't have enough calories coming in, if you're always trying to diet, you're just not supporting the joints and the recovery, which may be, you may have more pain these days. You may have a harder time recovering, you may have more connective tissue issues. And I like older folks to be even spending less time in a diet, if that makes sense. And that's another reason to do it. All right. So if you're in your 50s, men, ladies, and you're trying to lose fat, be honest with yourself on how you feel and how you perform when you're in a deficit. And if you'd rather maybe not be in a deficit and take this other approach of slowly building muscle and slowly building fat, but then feeling great throughout the whole process. And then life is great. And that's what makes it really, really sustainable. So coming up, I'm gonna give you what I call the recomp ladder. It's a five-level hierarchy that puts the levers in the right order so you're not randomly adjusting things and hoping it works. But before I introduce that, I want to make sure you know whether it's even right for you. Hopefully, you already have an idea based on what I've talked about, but I'm gonna be very specific. So, who does it work best for? It's not for everyone in every situation, okay? It's likely to work when at least one of the following is true. Okay, I'm gonna give you six things. If you can say yes to any of these, it's probably gonna work. So you got a lot of options, ready? Number one, you're a beginner, you're a noob to strength training, or you're highly detrained and coming back after a long layoff. Great, beautiful time to recomp. Number two, you're detrained from an injury or some other reason, which is kind of tied to number one, right? So it may not even be that long of a time, but because it was an injury, you probably experienced some atrophy and some setbacks, and now you're trying to get back to it. Number three, you're at a higher body fat percentage. Okay, that's probably a decent time to recomp because your body has its own reserve that will experience as energy, even if you go in a little bit of a deficit, your body won't feel like it's in deficit. Number four, your protein intake has been historically been poor, and now you're gonna jack it up to what it should be. You might respond really well to a recomp. Number five, your training quality has been inconsistent or suboptimal. And therefore, why would you go into a deficit and lose more muscle? Let's recomp. And then number six, you're older and you have an inconsistent lifting history or concerns about your your joints or recovery, and the idea of dieting just does not sound palatable. All of those are great reasons to recomp. Okay. Notice nobody's really excluded from this. Anybody can be successful. It's just to what degree? So if one of those hit really hard, you're in the sweet spot and your body has room to build muscle, probably responsive, very, very responsively, even while in a slight deficit, definitely at maintenance, okay? And absolutely at a slight surplus. So even if you're not in the sweet spot, everyone listening can do probably one of my three, two, two of the three directions that I'm gonna give you in a bit, right? Now, when does recomp get harder, but but still possible because it's always possible? Well, when you're already pretty lean and you're already pretty advanced as a trainee and you've already built muscle. This that's the first one. The second one is that you have a small margin for error. You know, what I mean by that is you have an all or nothing mindset and are not ready to track things in the right way to know that you're recomping and you you give in very easily to like scale issues and whatnot. I'm not saying that recomp won't work. I think in that case, you have to work on yourself and just being at maintenance and not worrying about recomp in the first place. It's more getting the mindset right. And then I would say the third thing is if your life stress is super high and recovery is compromised, recomp's gonna be harder just because your body's not gonna respond as well, even if you're in the right caloric degree or caloric situation, if you will. So even if you're a slight surplus or a maintenance, the life stress, the lack of sleep could be offsetting that a bit to preventing you from getting everything you want out of it. Right. And even so, recomp still might work. It's just gonna be slower. You have to be a little more precise with your nutrition, your training. But in that case, you might need to alternate between building phases and like mini cuts. And this is where the big, this is where the confusion comes from because some people, like if I have a female client who's in her 50s and her metabolism is over-responsive, meaning it drops really fast. Maybe it's a thyroid issue or hormone issue. Sometimes it's just, you know, her own individual response. A recomp may be kind of frustrating because it's gonna take a lot longer for her than someone else, maybe. And so we might want to do bulks and cuts to get the visual and the physical transformation to occur, but that's with more support. That's usually under a coaching situation. I still think recomp can work for a lot of people. And the key is to being honest about where you are. Okay. If you've been lifting consistently for a bunch of years and you're already super lean, you've probably done it a different way anyway. And recomp is going to be kind of a grind to actually see anything come of it. Maybe I would consider that more sustaining or maintaining your results. But if you're coming back after a few years off, or if you've never really dialed things in the right way, you're definitely in prime recomp territory, and then we have everything in between. All right, before we continue, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, CaloCurb, C-A-L-O-C-U-R B. Please don't skip forward to the next section. If you haven't heard about them, because I truly believe in this company and this product, I'm using it myself. I'm using it myself right now during a fat loss phase. If you've been following this appetite series, or even if this is the first time you're hearing us, managing hunger is one of the biggest challenges in a fat loss phase. We all talk about calorie deficits, we talk about training, but honestly, a lot of people have trouble just sticking to a low number of calories if they're not used to it. And that's especially true when you're trying to do body recomp and trying to keep a small deficit, but still preserve your performance. And that's one of the plans we're going to talk about in a second. You're still in a deficit, you're still gonna have some hunger. And the issue is that even a moderate deficit can trigger things like late-day cravings that then throw your consistency off, and all of a sudden you're no longer really in that deficit. You start snacking at 8 p.m. So, Callocurb, I like it as a tool. It is 100% natural appetite support. It triggers your own GLP1. It's a supplement that has a marasate. You can Google this, A-M-A-R-A-S-A-T-E, and it's a hops flour extract developed over 15 years of research by the New Zealand government, funded by them, not by a private company. And it works by activating your body's natural GLP1, the gut brain access. It helps you feel satisfied faster and stay in control. Basically, you take these a little bit over an hour before you eat, and it triggers those signals so you start to feel full before you even eat. And that's why the studies show it reduced cravings by 40%, hunger by 30% within an hour of taking a capsule. That also leads to a reduction of 18% calorie consumptions. Now, what I appreciate is that it is not a stimulant, okay? It's not a pharmaceutical, it's just hops. So you don't need a prescription. It's a great tool to support the fundamentals we talk about on the show. It's like a compliance lever for your recomp phase because we are trying to dial in and be so precise. Try it out at witsandweights.com slash calocurb. The link is in the show note. You get 10% off when you use my link. Go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, let's talk about the recomp ladder framework. And I want you to stay stay tuned till the end because I'm gonna share a two-metric recomp tracking system that is super, super low stress. For some of you that don't like to track a lot of things, I'm gonna very, very much simplify for you. All right, here is the recomp ladder. It's a hierarchy of priorities that put your levers in the right order. And I came up with a ladder because I think that was inspired by Jeff Nippard. He has like something, the muscle ladder or something. And I keep using pyramids, but I think ladder is the right metaphor. Anyway, so level one is at the bottom. This is the training stimulus. Okay, you have to have the training stimulus or your body won't build a preserve muscle. This is where you need progressive overload, adding weight, weight reps or sets over time. You have to have enough volume, enough sets per week, but not so much you can't recover. And of course, you have to be consistent with it. Now, a lot of the details on all these levers are covered in other episodes. It's also how we help people in uh physique university and with my app, Fitness Lab. So if you prefer kind of going it on yourself with some help of a coach in your pocket, you could use the app. If you'd rather join a group that helps you out with coaches in the group, including myself, Physique University, those links are in the show notes. I'm not gonna pitch those beyond that. I just want to mention that the details of each of these steps could each be their own episode. And level number one on the ladder is definitely your strength training. If you're not strength training, none of the other stuff matters. I've got people who come into physique university and we do an intake and they say, I ask them how many days a week are they training? And they say zero. I actually start smiling then because I'm thinking, wow, this is the biggest opportunity you're not taking advantage of, and it's the easiest thing to give you the most growth. It's the highest ROI. I'm not saying it's easy, but as far as the return you get on your investment, if you're not strength training, all the other stuff doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Yeah, you can lose some weight, and maybe you'll lose some fat. You might, you're gonna lose some muscle as well, but it just doesn't matter. You're not gonna be able to change your physique. It's not gonna help your appetite. You're just gonna be worse off if you're not training. So that's level one. Level two is on the nutrition side, it's the protein and meal structure, right? Protein becomes that next lever. You have to have meals that are anchored in high protein, probably 30 to 50 grams of protein at big meals. And then fiber and food volume supports satiety as well. So that's that's my if I had to explain nutrition in one sentence is protein, fiber, and food volume. It's not cutting carbs, it's not cutting out foods, or it's not even calories. Calories tend to follow once you start to improve the quality and composition, excuse me, of your meals. And we cover protein all the time on this podcast, but you want to be getting at least 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. Okay. So training first, then protein, then on the ladder we have the calories, which is your energy target. Now, you might hear calories are at the bottom of the pyramid. It depends on what we're talking about here. So, in terms of recomp, I'm trying to give you priorities that are going to set yourself up for success. So training, then protein, then energy, because you have some flexibility here. All right. In a fat loss phase, like a more aggressive fat loss phase, you really have to be in a very decent intentional deficit. And in a muscle building phase, a very decent surplus. For recomp though, you're gonna want to be around maintenance or a small deficit or a small surplus. And we're gonna talk about that in a second. I'm gonna give you the three different ways to do this. The key thing to track, though, is are you actually building muscle and getting stronger while you're losing fat? And you have to be able to measure that the right way, which, you know, spoiler alert, is not the scale. Okay. So that's level three on the ladder. Level four out of five is movement, movement and steps, general activity. This is appetite-friendly movement, like we talked about on, I believe, the last episode, that keeps your meat up, keeps your calories up without creating hunger and stress from more high-intensity metronomic cardio. All right. So this is the seven to 10,000 steps a day-ish. Maybe a little bit more for some of you. I wouldn't go less than 7,000. That is that is a good minimum. And again, one of the highest leverage changes you can make, again, once you've put in place the other three parts of the ladder. And then level five of the ladder is I'll say optional appetite tools, right? So this is where looking at how to optimize and tweak what you're eating to support your hunger signals, to make eating a little bit more automatic. Because at recomp, yeah, of course you can track calories and macros. I'm a huge fan of that. But even if you don't, recomp should be the easiest kind of phase to eat, I'll say intuitively in, but intuitive with a big asterisk as in a skill you've developed because you've tracked before. And this is where optional tools can come in. Supplementation, up callow curb, like I mentioned before, could be helpful. And it's something you don't even have to worry about until you've got the other things dialed in. Levels one through four, right? If you have levels one through four dialed in and now you're still struggling with some cravings or hunger, emotional eating, then there's different tools. There's also mindset tools, psychological tools, you know. So all of those kind of fit in this piece of the ladder, and that's why I put it at the top: supplementation, mindset, psychology, support, accountability, like all of that can go here to ramp things up further and optimize. So that's the recomp ladder, training, then protein, and energy, the movement, then tools, right? Now I want to give you those three plans I talked about so you can start applying body recomp. All right. Plan A is honestly my favorite. I'm just gonna say it right out the gate. Plan A is aggressive maintenance. Okay, this is all about efficiency. It's my preferred method. I've talked about it before. In fact, there was an episode that I think was called Build Muscle Without Bulking. Oh, yeah, build muscle without bulking if you want lean gains. And that was episode 384, where I believe uh I talked about this in detail. But the philosophy is the efficiency of the approach rather than the throughput of the approach. So instead of like throwing more fuel at, you know, your body, doing more, hoping for more on the other end, you're optimizing how your fuel gets used. You're turning the nutrient delivery, your recovery, your mechanical stress to direct what are still somewhat limited resources. I mean, you're you're above maintenance here, but you want to direct them toward muscle. They're they're limited in the sense that you're not in a big surplus. So here's why this works: your body can only synthesize so much muscle at any given time, right? You can't just add more calories to it. We've talked before about upper limits of building muscle. You don't want to go into a dreamer bulk. But and many of you are listening to this episode on recomp thinking, well, I'm not even gonna go close to that because we're talking recomp, aren't we? Yes, yes. But you have to understand the principle that your body needs a certain threshold to build muscle, and of course, it has a limit as well. With aggressive maintenance, okay, you're keeping your protein high as usual, you're training as normal, and you are in a slight surplus. So what you're trying to do is aim for maybe 50 to 100 calories. It's probably similar to what the bros would call lean gain or main gain or something like that, to make sure that you stay ahead of the fact that your body's metabolism will probably start to ramp up and you don't want to fall back into the state, the stress state of a deficit, right? Your body can still pull some energy from stored body fat because you're not in a deficit and you're feeding it enough to build muscle at the same time. Pretty cool. So that's that's kind of where we're trying to get. And secretly, guys, you know what it ends up doing for a lot of you? For a lot of you, it puts you into a surplus like you've never been in before. And what I mean by that is not that it's huge. You've never been in a surplus before, but it avoids some of the fear of going into a surplus because it's I call it aggressive maintenance. So I'll be honest, I'm kind of tricking you into doing a surplus, but it's a very lean surplus. And you get massively good results from it. That's really my point. Because your goal over about eight to 16 weeks is you're gonna see your waist go down, you're gonna see yourself get stronger, scale weight either stays relatively flat or goes up a tiny bit. What happens when people go into aggressive maintenance is their body starts to burn more calories at the same time. And in many cases, their weight does not go up, and it's a perfect place to be. It's what a lot of more advanced folks on social media, when they say build muscle at maintenance, they actually mean true, true, true, fully recovered, energized maintenance. And most people don't get there because they're afraid to push the calories. So I think this works really, really well. All right, that's all I'll say about aggressive maintenance. Plan B is the other direction, small deficit recomp. And this is, I guess, the more traditional recomp you hear about, which kind of appeals to people who want to have a little more meaningful fat loss versus the muscle gain, but they still want to gain muscle. So you're kind of trying to have everything uh at the same time. I think for some people it doesn't work as well because they don't build as much muscle. But for those of you who are newer to training or detrained and very responsive to the muscle building side, it could still work quite well, right? And and protein's still high, lifting intensity is still high, you're still moving, you don't feel super stressed because the deficit is small. You know, maybe a 200-calorie deficit, right? Something like that, or 150 or 100. It's just a small deficit, enough to just chip away at the body weight loss and maybe even give you a little bit of that win on the scale that you're probably looking for psychologically, invisible progress, but without triggering all the hormonal and metabolic adaptation appetite issues that tend to derail more aggressive diets. So, you know, it's questionable whether you can call that body recomp or just a mild deficit. And then plan C is really this is kind of this is maybe a cop-out in terms of calling it recomp, but I really think it is. And this is doing like eight to 12 weeks of a little bit of more of a push into a surplus and then a six-week more aggressive mini-cut to strip fat. And this really is a slight combination of bulks and cuts, but in shorter phases that might be even more efficient for you and be more meaningful to give you those wins, right? Because you are meaningfully pushing up the muscle and then meaningfully moving down the fat, but you're doing it over a short period. So maximum, you know, 18 weeks, which is like four months, like the whole thing, the up and down. Whereas normally I tell people to bulk for like six to nine months and then maybe cut for you know two months, something like that. Right. And then each building phase makes the next cut easier. You're bulking and cutting. So again, this is kind of a cop-out version of recomp. I mean, technically, bulking and cutting in the long term is recomp, but I wanted to give you an option that's like somewhere in the middle that still uses bulks and cuts. All right. So there we go. Flexibility, choice. I know you guys love that. And then I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the myths that that hold people up when it comes to recomp that makes it not work, and then they come back and say, hey, reconp's not working for me. Okay. So five, five pitfalls that I see. Number one, chasing the scale. The scale's a tool, but really you've got to use the waist measurements, strength markers, and other measurements if they are helpful for body recomp, including the mirror and your clothes and photos and all that. Pitfall number two is cutting too hard where you actually are getting into a deficit. You're just so impatient to lose the fat that now you've gone past recomp into a deficit, and now you're going to cause issues with energy and training and hunger and all the things that happen in fat loss, which aren't necessarily a bad thing. They're things you should expect. They're the trade-off you make. But if you're not willing to make that trade-off, that's why you did body recomp, this can be a pitfall. Pitfall number three is not enough training intensity. And for whatever reason, you know, sometimes people, if they're not in a bulk and they're not thinking like build muscle, they don't push as hard as they need to do. And this is where having a coach or getting a form check or using my AMRAP trick that I gave you a few episodes ago, you're gonna have to go hunt for that if you don't know where it is, it can be very helpful. Pitfall number four is inconsistency with their food, especially protein. Okay. If I see protein all over the place and you're constantly dropping low, that is gonna hold you up big time. That could backfire, especially if you're trying to recomp. You just may not get the result you're looking for. And then pitfall number five is too much cardio. This is always a pitfall. For those of you doing too many, you know, group classes, F-45, Pilates, whatever. Replace a lot of that with walking and see what happens to your body recomp, because that could be stressing you and compensating your body where you don't get what you want out of it. All right. So that was the ladder and the three plans and the pitfalls. Now remember that two-metric recomp check that I promised. Stay with me. I'm going to show you how to use two things to know if you're recomping without stressing over anything else right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, CaloCurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CalloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, here is that simple recomp check that I promised. If you don't want to track a lot of things, and you don't want to track body fat, you don't want to use spreadsheets, you just need two numbers. Two numbers, waist circumference and strength. Now, this is not rocket science. You've heard me mention this, but I wanted to simplify it to just two things. And and not when I say strength, I don't mean everything. Just bear with me. Once a week, measure your waist at the navel, the belly button. Okay. Just relax, don't suck it in, do it at the same time of day. I like in the morning, just like when you weigh yourself. That's it. Waist. Easy, waist. Everybody can do their waist. Then you're gonna track one key lift that you care a lot about right now. And that might be your squat, your deadlift, your bench, some variation of those. Maybe it's an isolation movement, but I'd rather you focus on a strength-focused movement. And are you adding reps or weight over time? And that's it. So between point A and point B, is your waist going down and is your strength going up? If that is happening, you are recomping and keep doing what you're doing. If your waist is stuck, you're probably not losing very much body fat. If your strength is stuck, you're probably not building muscle. It's that easy. Your waist is where you store the most visceral fat, which is why it's like a decent approach now. Some people make it more complicated and they do like three different points of their waist. But again, I'm trying to simplify it for you. All right. So you don't have to calculate anything. Don't, by the way, don't use an in-body or like smart scale for this. Because even that adds complication and variability and error that you don't want. Just use your waist and one lift. And there you go. You'll know if your body recopy, right? The scale can't tell you this. So if you come to me and you're like, I've gained two pounds, so what? What if you gained two pounds of muscle? Or what if you gained four pounds of muscle and lost two pounds of fat fat, two pounds of fat, so your net change is two pounds higher on the scale. Guess what? You're leaner. You're leaner even though you're heavier. So that's very important. And you can start this right away. Pick your measurement day, pick your key lift, track those two things for the next month if you're doing recomp. And that's your low stress recomp check. All right. I really, really appreciate you listening to Wits and Weights. I'm grateful for you sticking around with me for this appetite series. A lot of more fun, cool, different episodes to come. I'm not going to talk about appetite for a while. So I think I've done that to death. So until the next time, I want you to keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember you don't have to starve to get lean. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

How Strength Training (Not Cardio) Suppresses Appetite and Burns Fat | Ep 431

Struggling with hunger during your cut? 

Try Calocurb for natural appetite support that activates GLP-1 to help you feel satisfied. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. Get 10% off at witsandweights.com/calocurb

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Hungry after every workout and stuck in an endless “eat less, move more” loop? 

Strength training is actually one of the most powerful appetite control tools you have, but most people only think of it as a muscle-building tool.

Learn the science behind why lifting suppresses hunger hormones like ghrelin while boosting satiety signals like GLP-1 and PYY. We cover why cardio often backfires through energy compensation, leaving you hungrier and more fatigued without the fat loss results. And discover the behavioral shifts that make strength training superior for long-term body recomposition.

Plus, get a template for building an appetite-friendly training week, cardio structured to avoid spiking your hunger, and a specific post-workout timing strategy to eliminate overeating at your hardest meal of the day.

Timestamps

0:00 – Strength training for appetite control
3:38 – How cardio triggers energy compensation and stalls fat loss
7:42 – The gut hormone shifts that suppress hunger after lifting
12:31 – How protein cravings and reward substitution change your eating
16:27 – Building a training week that supports fat loss and controls appetite
20:12 – How to adjust cardio to lose fat without spiking hunger
23:47 – 3 myths keeping you stuck (cardio, calories, and willpower)
27:12 – Bonus: post-workout timing trick to stop overeating at dinner

Most people assume fat loss comes from burning more calories through long cardio, yet the missing piece is appetite. What you do in the gym changes your hunger signals, your food choices, and your ability to stick to a deficit without losing muscle or sanity. Strength training often suppresses hunger after hard sets, while cardio tends to trigger compensation: you eat more, move less, and feel “earned” calories tug at you. This difference matters more than the treadmill display’s estimate. When your workouts help you feel satisfied on smaller portions and keep non‑exercise movement steady, the deficit finally holds, and results show up without white‑knuckling every meal.

Under the hood, appetite is a symphony of hormones and signals. Lifting hard turns up sympathetic activity and floods the system with metabolites like lactate, which blunts ghrelin while nudging PYY and GLP‑1 upward for a temporary, yet powerful, appetite dip. That window can last one to two hours for many lifters and is long enough to strategically place the meal you usually overeat. Contrast that with moderate, longer cardio sessions that leave you depleted and reward‑seeking. You might consciously justify extra food or subconsciously move less the rest of the day, shrinking your true deficit. The science increasingly treats resistance training and endurance work as different tools for appetite management, not just calorie math.

Behavior and identity layer on top of biology. Many of us use food as relief after stress, which is normal but unhelpful when goals demand consistency. Strength training offers “reward substitution”: chasing PRs, tracking progress, and feeling capable becomes a new source of satisfaction. That shift nudges food choices in line with your identity as a lifter. Protein goes up to support recovery, which further increases satiety and protects lean mass. Instead of punishing yourself with “eat less, move more,” you fuel training, maintain muscle, and run a purposeful deficit to reveal it. When setbacks happen, the gym pulls you back on track because progress is tangible and motivating.

To harness these effects, structure an appetite‑friendly week around three to four lifting sessions focused on compounds—squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, pull‑ups—with moderate volume. Aim for roughly 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week, near failure, while managing recovery so fatigue doesn’t drive hunger. Add isolation work as needed for joints and aesthetics, but keep sessions efficient. Walk daily to elevate low‑grade movement without spiking appetite. Include limited cardio if you enjoy it, prioritizing short, easy sessions two to three times a week, 20 to 30 minutes, at conversational pace. Keep sprints minimal and strategic if desired; they rarely worsen hunger.

Finally, use timing as a lever. Train before the meal that tends to spiral—often dinner—so the post‑workout suppression window helps you feel full on less. If afternoon snacking is the trap, schedule training to bridge that gap. Fuel cardio deliberately with protein and carbs if it otherwise makes you ravenous, and avoid long, moderate sessions that trigger compensation. Remember, willpower is the smallest slice of appetite control. Hormones, sleep, stress, training intensity, protein, and meal timing do the heavy lifting. When you align these inputs, hunger stops fighting you, adherence climbs, and fat loss becomes the by‑product of a system designed to work with your biology, not against it.

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• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  How does lifting weights connect with hunger? Today I'm going to show you three mechanisms that make your strength training a powerful appetite control tool, not just a muscle building tool. You'll learn why hard lifting sessions tend to suppress hunger hormones often for hours, how your training changes your food choices without the need for willpower, and a strategic little trick that uses your post-workout appetite window to eliminate overeating at your toughest meal. Most people don't realize that their training is already doing half the work for them when it comes to hunger. They just need to understand how to use it. I'm your host, Philip Pate, and today we're gonna talk about lifting weights versus cardio versus hunger. Most people think that cardio is a fat loss tool, and lifting is for building muscle. Or even if they understand that diet controls fat loss, they think that cardio is a way to, you know, ramp up your metabolism, burn more calories. And I get it, right? You burn more calories during, say, a 45-minute run than a 45-minute lifting session, but it's not just about math. And honestly, those differences aren't very meaningful because I think the math is incomplete. Fat loss isn't just about calories burned during exercise. In fact, it's not at all. It's about what happens to your appetite, your meat, your food choices, your ability to stick to a deficit for weeks and sometimes months without losing your mind, because we have to stick to it, but also not losing your muscle. And when you look at those variables, strength training comes out ahead by a wide margin. And you're like, why am I talking about this? This is weird. This is episode seven of our eight-part appetite series for January, because appetite and hunger is a huge part of this. And I wanted to cover the mechanism that brings this together in terms of how your training, how your workouts actually shape your hunger and your cravings and your body composition results, bring it all together. We've been talking a lot about, you know, food and sleep and stress and hormones, but today it's really more about how training connects with that. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a really cool uh trick, if you will, a hack, a tool, protocol related to pre-workout meal timing and post-exercise appetite suppression to reduce overeating. A lot of you guys have a problem with overeating, and we can actually take advantage of our hunger signals related to training to offset that and potentially save you tens, if not hundreds, of calories without changing anything else. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, CallowCurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from a marisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, let's start with why the cardio for burning calories or fat loss approach is a problem, why it backfires, even when it might look impressive on paper, and how that connects to hunger as well. Because it's not just about compensation, it's also about hunger. We're gonna address those topics. So when researchers study exercise and fat loss, you know, they tend to see something that we've talked about more and more lately called energy compensation. And in fact, the not extreme of this, but one of the best examples of this research is Herman Ponser's research on how our metabolisms are pretty steady from the age of 20 to 60, at least our BMR, and that doing more exercise doesn't necessarily burn as many calories as you think. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do exercise or train or move. It's a comp compensatory effect, and it depends on the type, the modality, and the quantity, right? And this is the tendency that for your body to offset the calories that you burn through exercise by either eating more or moving less the rest of the day. There are some compensatory mechanisms at the cellular level as well in terms of your metabolism, but a lot of this is other things like just you're compensating by eating and the types of food you eat and you're moving less, et cetera. And so cardio tends to trigger more compensation than strength training. That's the important takeaway today. There's a systematic review on training or exercise and energy intake in adults with overweight and obesity that found that exercise can improve appetite regulation, but the degree of compensation varies dramatically based on the type of exercise, the duration, and individual factors. So that's what I'm talking about. Now, what does this mean practically? Well, let's say you do a long cardio session, let's say you do 45 minutes or an hour of, you know, moderate intensity, right? On the bike or treadmill, pretty common type of uh exercises. And maybe you burn 400 calories and you may not have, to be honest. You know, that's what the machine says. Um, and now you're pretty tired, you're pretty wiped, you feel kind of depleted. And what happens afterward is your body compensates in a couple ways. First, the, you know, I earn this and I'm gonna earn it back type of eating. Now, this is both conscious and subconscious, you know, because after cardio, you may feel justified in eating more at a psychological level, right? But it's also real in that the body is craving these things, right? So then you have a smoothie right after you go for that run, or you have a larger dinner, and you may not even notice it, right? It depends on how how much control or structure you have over your meals to kind of offset that. But this happens a lot more after cardio than after lifting, for sure. Secondly, your neat tends to drop neat is non-exercise activity thermogenesis, all the movement you do outside the gym, right? Walking, fidgeting, taking the stairs, standing while you work, chores, all that. And after you have a cardio session that's a bit exhausting, especially if it's longer, people unconsciously move less the rest of the day. They sit more, they skip taking the stairs, they're wiped out, they make little excuses or rationales in their brain continuously every time there's a decision point. And again, a lot of it's unconscious. So it's not like, you know, don't blame yourself for this. A lot of this is unconscious. So then if you truly did burn 400 calories during that exercise bout, you know, maybe you eat half of it back, 200. Maybe, maybe you have another 100 or 150 of calories you don't burn later because you're not moving. And so your net, you know, if you're in a if you're in a fat loss phase, your net deficit just got smaller, right? Because your metabolism is essentially lower while while your intake is higher, right? So again, even if you control for the intake intentionally, you might feel hungrier and you still might have a slightly lower metabolism than you thought, if that makes sense. Now compare this to strength training, where the session itself might burn a fewer, a little bit fewer calories, let's say 200 to 300, it's still more than you might think. But the compensation pattern's different because lifters often experience temporary appetite suppression after training. And they're not as likely to feel depleted in that reward-seeking way. And then because the fatigue is more localized, right? Maybe your legs are tired from your squats, maybe your overall energy is still decent, but you're not totally wiped like you would from a cardio session, then your neat tends to stay more stable because you still, your body kind of feels like, you know what, I have there's still more things I can do. I still have some energy, you know, I haven't gone for my walk yet, which is different than my lifting session. So there's like, again, psychologically and physiologically, a little bit of a difference there. And there's research to back this up. A 2024 review specifically examined resistance training and appetite-related variables because researchers they noticed that the lifting produces different appetite outcomes than endurance work. And I think the research world is starting to treat lifting and cardio as different, you know, tools for appetite, not just calorie burning, and also for body composition and trying to look at what causes what. Now, I'm not trying to trash cardio at all. Trust me, there's lots of forms of cardio from walking to sprinting that I'm a big fan of. And cardio definitely can be a big tool. It also is not going to reduce your metabolism just because you're doing cardio. It's again the matter of the type and the quantity. And I think the compensation piece is only part of the story. So now, what is happening in your gut hormones after you lift? Okay, now we're bringing back to some of the stuff you learned on the previous episodes in this series. If you haven't heard those, go back in our January episodes and look for the different ones about your gut hormones. So let's get into the mechanism. So this is this is post-exercise appetite suppression. So, what does strength training do that cardio doesn't? A 2023 review on acute exercise and appetite control showed that moderate to vigorous exercise often produces transient, right? That's temporary appetite suppression. And these are the your gut hormones. Acylated ghrelin, ghrelin goes down, that's your hunger hormone. PYY and GLP1 goes up, those are your satiety signals that help you feel full. And a 2024 update review confirmed that exercise-induced appetite suppression exists, and ghrelin is the consistent variable here in terms of the hormones. Now, this is temporary. It doesn't mean that you're going to eat less forever, right? But the window helps us because we can use that strategically, right? We're going to get into that. We can use that window strategically. So, what makes strength training potentially superior here? Well, it comes down to intensity and metabolic byproducts. So higher intensity work, and that means, you know, hard sets of strength training, higher loads, basically just lifting hard and heavy, and heavy doesn't have to be low rep, just getting close to failure and doing it the way you're supposed to do anyway, to build muscle, it produces these metabolites in your bloodstream. You're accumulate lactate, hydrogen ions, other byproducts of working hard and fatiguing those muscles. And then this creates a sympathetic nervous system activation, right? Your CNS, your central nervous system gets activated, the fight or flight response, all of that. And when you're in that state, your appetite gets suppressed. Your body is focused on performing and recovering as opposed to digesting and eating. Because you might have heard fight or flight versus rest and digest. Well, you're not in the rest and digest. So ironically, as much as we sometimes call this a bad thing, it's it's an acute, it's a hormetic response, a stress response from lifting weights that will suppress appetite. And that's why post-lifting, lacking having no hunger or having a lack of hunger is very, very common. Where you finish a hard session of, you know, lower body work, but upper body, I don't care. A hard session. And oftentimes the last thing you want is a big meal. You might want like a protein shake, you might want some water, you might want a little bit of carbs or something right after, but it you don't have that like I have to devour everything in sight feeling that you do often get after a cardio session. It's it's usually absent. Again, this is these are generalities based on populations, based on studies, based on general observations all coming together. It may not be you, but this is generally something we could take advantage of. Another paper from 2024 made a really cool observation that acute exercise, okay. I'm just using the words from the study, acute just means in the moment, a small amount of it, right? Like an exercise session, can elevate um appetite perceptions, meaning you might perceive yourself as hungry in some ways and yet not translate into increased energy intake because your gut hormones are powerful enough to override the subjective feeling. So that's an interesting one. And then there's something a lot of people don't realize too, that strength training, because it supports having higher protein intake, right? You're in other words, you tend to do both. You train and then you also eat more protein. And we know higher protein is one of the best satiety tools. It keeps you really full. When you lift, you naturally want to eat more protein because you want to recover, you want to support your muscle building. It just all supports each other, you know? And again, you could definitely eat more protein without lifting more if you do it intentionally, but these tend to be corollary things that happen, okay? And and all of these make the hunger management and food priorities easier, like less friction, you know, with less friction. All right. Now remember, I promised you a specific timing trick at the end to use this knowledge, to use this post-workout appetite suppression. We want to eliminate overeating, and we're gonna build with that, build toward that. So definitely I want you to stick around. Before we do, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Calo Curb. That's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B. We've been talking about how strength training naturally suppresses appetite by shifting your gut hormones, especially GOP1. Well, Callow Curb works through the same pathway but a different mechanism. It's a 100% natural supplement, and it has something called a marisate, which is a patented hops extract developed over a bunch of research by the New Zealand government, okay, not by a private company. It's actually funded by New Zealand and it activates your body's natural gut brain axis. So your satiety signals, so you feel faster or you feel full faster. So if you take this at least an hour before you eat, and I've been taking it myself now that I'm in a fat loss phase, aside from occasionally a little hops burps, I'm sorry about that. I know it's gross, it does cause you to eat less. So if you're trying to, if you, you know, have a plate of dinner and you would normally eat the whole plate, you may end up eating two-thirds of it or half of it. And the studies show that. Clinical studies reduce show to reduce cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%, calorie intake by 18%. You have to wait at least an hour after taking the capsule. So put a reminder in your phone, take it like an hour or two before dinner or lunch. And what I appreciate about appreciate about Calicurb, you know, it's not, it doesn't purport to do more than it does. It's actually pretty simple ingredients. It's a hops and it triggers a hormone that makes you a little bit more full. That's it. It's and it's your own hormone. So it's upregulating your hormones, it's not replacing that with a synthetic, for example. So it kind of falls in between, you know, using nothing or just food and the GLP1 medications. It's kind of in between those. It's a great tool that works alongside lifting weights, hitting your protein, managing your training nutrition, eating your fiber, and timing your meals. And it can be an additional lever for those times when appetite is working against you, which is often, I'm raising my hand now, during a fat loss phase or mini-cut where your calories are cut down. So, ladies, if you're down in that 140, 13, 1200, 1100 calorie range, men down at 18, 17, 16, 1500 range, that's when things get a little bit hairy. And this could be an extra tool in the toolbox. You don't need a prescription. It's just a single little capsule. You can go on and off, use it whenever you want. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb. The link should auto-apply my code Wits and Weights for 10% off. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. Link is also in the show notes. And now I want to get back to the training appetite connection, right? We've covered the hormonal and physiological side. Now let's talk about the behavioral and psychological stuff because many people use food as reward, right? After a hard day, after stressful meeting, after putting the kids to bed, after you know, dealing with a tough boss, whatever. Food often is the thing that makes you feel better. And that's emotional eating, stress eating, reward eating. We've all been there. You might be struggling with that right now. Maybe it's something you've dealt with in the past and have sort of put tools in place to move past it. And you know, we don't always 100% get away from it. It's always going to be there in our heads. We're human beings. We have parts of our brain that crave energy in that way. Strength training can become a reward instead. So I love this. I love pivoting so that we can swap one reward with another and satisfy that itch and satisfy that emotional need and that gap in a very positive way. So think about what happens when you're following a solid training program and you're tracking your lifts, your PRs, your sets and reps, your exercises, your loads, and you're seeing progress over time. You hit some new PRs on the big lifts, small lifts, whatever, and you notice changes in your body, maybe your arms felt your sleeves a little, you get a little tone or cut or built or whatever the word is. You're feeling more competent, competent, uh competent and confident, but also capable now. It builds, it builds lots of confidence in your skills. And that feeling, that feeling becomes its own reward. I've talked about on this show, you know, folks who come into physique university or clients of mine who all they want to do is lose weight initially, but there's something inside them that says, no, I really want to look better, feel better, show up for my kids, you know, show up for myself, really, and live a long, healthy life. And we switch to focus from focusing on weight to focusing on lifting and performance and recovery and progress, and that becomes extremely rewarding. It starts to compete with food for that reward space in your brain. And that is a thing that exists called reward substitution. So remember that phrase: reward substitution. You're not fighting cravings, you're giving your brain a different source of satisfaction, right? You're swapping it out. So you don't have to, you know, you don't have to get through that friction uh with willpower, right? You can swap it out and actually seek out the reward now. And there's an identity piece here. When you see yourself as a lifter, someone who trains, you know, three days a week, four days a week, whatever it is, someone who builds strength and muscle, your food choices will line up with that. They're gonna start to line up with that. Maybe not on day one, but you're gonna be constantly trying to solve that problem for yourself in a good positive way. Like you want to solve it. It's not that somebody's forcing you to do it or you're trying to diet or lose weight. You know, you're not just trying to eat less either. Oftentimes you have to eat more. You're someone who's building a physique. And that mindset often protects you from crash dieting because you know it'll hurt your training. You know that it makes you value protein because you want to recover and it makes a calorie deficit, if you decide to do that, feel like it has a purpose. And it can be, it can be short term or it can be a little longer. But the point is it has a purpose. It's not just punishing yourself or thinking I have to lose weight. It's like, no, I want to reveal this muscle. And that's the narrative I see with folks, you know, for example, who recently came into our program from the uh get lean in 45 days workshop, who said, you know, I want to reveal the muscle I've built. And if you haven't done it yet, that's fine. Build the muscle and then you can reveal it. But compare that to the cardio for fat loss, eating less for fat loss, eat less, move more mindset, you know, running to burn off what you ate. You feel like you're doing it because you have to. And then food is an enemy, right? Food is a bad, and you call yourself bad. And I didn't do good, and you know, I made bad choices. When I hear that language, I know you're in that mental state, and we can get you out of that. When you're lifting, food becomes fuel. Eating supports what you're trying to do. It doesn't work against it, it supports it. You know, you're seeking out the fuel, but you can still enjoy the food too. And this is very psychological, I get it, but it's it's so important. People who build their fat loss phase around strength training, which by definition you have to do, or else you're gonna lose muscle anyway. They stick with it longer. They stay more consistent, they don't spiral as hard when something goes off. They're like, no, I'm gonna pick myself up and go the next day. That relationship with food and exercise works together. So I hope that's a place you want to be. All right, that's so that's the that's the brain stuff. I want to get a little more practical now. How do you set up your training to get these benefits for your appetite? Okay, it's because you might be thinking, okay, well, I already lift weights, so am I good? Well, there's there's a a way to optimize it. Let's put it that way. So let's talk like a template here. I I know some of you like systems and templates. If you want appetite control plus fat loss while keeping muscle, we know that strength training is the foundation. Walking is very important as well. Other forms of cardio are optional and the dose matters. So here's what like an appetite-friendly lifting week might look like. I would say three to four days a week, probably not five or six, because that's where you could jump into the, you know, too much fatigue and too much volume, which can drive compensation. The exception is if you are really intentional about keeping those sessions very short, if you are doing five or six days a week, in which case, for some of you, that might actually work better. Mostly compound movements, okay? So the big lifts, squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, pull-ups, they hit multiple muscle groups, create the metabolic stress, build the most, you know, muscle per hour invested, are probably gonna have the best impact on your appetite because it's kind of like low and slow, and you're not doing all of this volume and all these different exercises, you're very efficient with your time, et cetera. Moderate volume. So this is like 10 to 15 hard sets per muscle group per week for most people, which is honestly where you generally want to be anyway. Now, if you go less than that, it's probably gonna help hunger even more, but it may not be enough volume for you. If you're in a severe fat loss phase or severe deficit, I should say, you may find you need to do fewer sets, but keep the intensity high, right? Keep the intensity high. You want to get challenged, but you don't want to destroy yourself because recovery is important here. If you're not, if you're not recovered enough, just think of this. If you're not recovered enough, that also makes you hungry because your body is seeking those resources. And then of course, you still want isolation work in there if you're working on hypertrophy, if you're trying to, you know, work on your physique. But of course, if you're in fat loss, you're you're you're mainly maintaining your muscle mass, you're not really building it. So it depends on if you're in a deficit or not. And that would be, you know, whatever supports your joints and the aesthetics that you care about to support those compound lifts. So all the variations, all the isolation work, all the cable work, machine work, stuff like that. And, you know, that's basically it. You know, we we we talked about sleep and stress on a recent episode. You can go visit that because that's a whole other pillar that exists that affects appetite. But today we're talking about the training side. And I think if if you simplify it to just what I talked about, I think it becomes more sustainable. You can focus on progress and it creates the hormones and also the behavioral environment that helps with appetite control. And you can measure your biofeedback and say, is this working for me? Now, if you want to include cardio, that's fine. Here are some quick rules I have related to appetite and cardio. I would say two to three sessions per week maximum. Okay. And keep the, keep it if you if you like zones, I would keep it, you know, upper zone one or lower zone two, that easy conversational pace at most to kind of build that extra little bit of cardiovascular fitness that you're going for potentially, and also maybe burn a few more calories, sure. And 20 to 30 minutes maximum. Don't make these like hours-long sessions. So two to three days a week, maybe 20 to 30 minutes. Avoid these long sessions because that will tend to trigger that compensation and the hunger. And you know, sprinting is a whole different beast that I love. You know, one or two sprints a week. And we're talking my specific protocol, which we can make available to you, and we had a previous episode on that. But sprinting can be great because it's really not going to make you hungry at all, most likely. And fuel your cardio days appropriately. So think of deliberate cardio sessions as a form of training where you have, you know, protein and carbs around your training, especially carbs. Not training fasted if it makes you really hungry afterward. Obviously, there's a compensation mechanism there as well, potentially. And the point is, cardio is not bad. It has benefits for cardiovascular health, for mental health, for recovery if you enjoy doing it, but it's obviously not the primary fat loss tool. That is your deficit. And then strength training is really important here for holding muscle and also it can help with appetite. Okay, so if you're doing a lot of cardio and you're like, I'm always hungry and I'm not losing fat, that could be your answer. I would get rid of most of that cardio, just do training and walking and see what happens. So I want to clear up a few myths before we wrap up. I have three myths that I come up with that I think are important and I hear all the time. Myth number one is that cardio burns fat. And we kind of address this. A lot of you are like, yeah, I know that. But the reality is the fat loss, the release of energy from your fat cells is purely become of because of a calorie deficit. That's it. It's not any specific exercise. If cardio adds some calories to your metabolism, then it's part of the equation, but it still has to do with being in that deficit. And the training, the strength training determines whether you lose fat or you lose some fat and muscle. We don't want to lose muscle, right? Training is what protects your muscle math, your metabolic rate, all of that. And then cardio can contribute to the deficit, maybe by keeping your expenditure a little bit higher. But if the trade-off is you're a lot hungrier, more fatigued, not as recovered, that could be like taking two steps forward and like one and a half steps back or even three steps back, depending on how much you're doing. Myth number two is that, well, lifting doesn't burn many calories, so it's not really contributing to fat loss. But the reality is it's not about how many calories you burn, it's all the downstream effects where muscle mass, you know, raises your resting metabolism long term. Appetite suppression that we talked about in this episode will make your deficit easier, protecting your meat because now you might move more generally throughout the day with low grade movement because you're not compensating for it. And then being able to adhere to this and stay consistent, right? So we have to think the long game and think the whole equation here. And then myth number three is that you know, appetite really comes down to how well you can handle hunger and how well you can push through it. Appetite's way more complicated than that. It's it's got a bunch of inputs, right? Your hormones, brain, your brain-related genes, let's be honest, everybody's got different levels of appetite. Your gut signals, your sleep, your stress, your training, your protein, the food volume is important, behavioral patterns. So willpower is a tiny, tiny piece of that big pie. And it's not the one that you want to have to rely on. So why don't we focus on the other inputs? How do we improve those, which are gonna far outpace the willpower piece, right? So the if you're white knuckling through your diet, something has to change. The system isn't set up to support you. And it could be just a matter of food volume. It could be a matter of the deficits too aggressive. There's some answer there for you, okay? All right, let's bring this home. Fat loss isn't punishing yourself in a submission. It's really revealing the muscle you have in a targeted way. And strength training is one of the best tools in that toolbox versus anything else that I know of. All right. It's also massively helpful for appetite because of the way it shifts your hormones, because of insulin sensitivity, how it protects your meat, but also mentally, how it how you think about yourself. You're doing hard things and you're building and you're working towards something in a positive way, and then your food supports that, right? So this is episode seven of the eight. When you combine this episode, the training, with the nutrition cuff stuff we covered previously, like protein, fiber, meal timing, energy density tools like Calicurb and others that might be helpful. You end up with the system to have hunger work support you. And we're just trying to chip away at that and use that engineering mindset to make the behavior you want the actual easier path of least resistance, if that makes sense. All right, remember I promised you a specific timing trick that uses post-workout appetite suppression to eliminate overeating. That's coming up right after this. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out Callocurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash callocurb. All right, you made it to the end, and here is the bonus I promise. We talked about how strength training creates a window of appetite suppression. It's usually one to two hours after a heart session where your hunger hormones are blunted and your satiety signals are increased. And here is how you can use that. I want you to train before the meal you most often overeat at. Okay? Now I know this could be a change in your schedule. If you train in the morning, but the meal you most often eat at is dinner. And that is the case for a lot of people, where the portions get out of control, where stacking continues after the meal, where the day's stress catches up, food becomes that release valve. Try scheduling your training late afternoon or early evening. Now, this goes contrary to some advice that I give, probably the majority of the time, for many people to shift their training to the morning to try to help out with their stress and their appetite and their consistency. So take it with a grain of salt because this is specific to out-of-control over consumption in the evening. And it's an experiment. All right. It's an experiment to go ahead and train late afternoon or early evening, not too late, you know, lift hard, then come home, eat dinner during that one to two hour window afterward. And you're, you might find that you naturally eat less, that the meal feels more satisfying with a smaller portion just because you're you got that blunted appetite, right? You just I can't eat that much. I'm not like ravenous like I would have been otherwise. Now, if dinner isn't your problem, maybe it's late afternoon snacking, try mid-afternoon training session, finish around like, you know, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., whatever makes sense, to carry you, carry you through that danger zone, so to speak. And just try a schedule change in your training. Some of you may need to do the opposite. Move it to the morning and then have a decent size post-workout. But some of you need the opposite. You need a nice big meal in the morning. That'll set you up for better hunger signals throughout the day. Then you train later in the afternoon. At the end of the day, you have to find the thing that works for you. But I wanted to mention this as an option. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that that very lifting could be the key to helping with your appetite. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.