Are the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, and Row Actually "Unsafe" After 40? | Ep 489

The barbell squat isn't as dangerous as you've been told. It's one of the few things that keeps your bones from thinning after 40. But a popular podcast just ranked it the most unsafe exercise you can do, with the conventional deadlift and barbell row right behind it.

I'm breaking down the 3 errors in their argument and the real reason people get hurt lifting. You'll also hear what muscle activation actually tells you about muscle growth, why their own co-host kept disagreeing with them on air, and what happened when researchers put postmenopausal women under a heavy barbell. 

Hit play if you want to keep squatting and deadlifting without worrying about your back.

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - The 3 lifts called "unsafe" by a popular podcast
4:16 - The strongest case against the big lifts
5:56 - The first error in their argument
8:56 - What EMG activation really shows about muscle growth
11:40 - How to train the big lifts safely and for a long time
13:55 - What goes wrong when a lift starts hurting
16:58 - Barbell training next to running injury rates
20:15 - What heavy loading does for your bones after 40
24:55 - The question to ask before you swap a lift
27:15 - Choosing a gym that lets you lift properly

Episode Resources:

• Chris Duffin on biomechanics, resilience, and training heavy after 40

• Transcript

  The 3 lifts called "unsafe" by a popular podcast

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've ever been told that the barbell back squat is dangerous, or that the deadlift is gonna wreck your spine, or that a bent over row is just asking for a back injury, and you should swap all of them for other movements or machines. I want you to hear this before you give up the best lifts you potentially have in your arsenal. Today I'm gonna walk you through why the case against these lifts falls apart under its own logic and why for anyone over 40, especially women going through menopause, heavy loading on those exact lifts is one of the best things you can do for your bones. You'll learn the three thinking errors that make a safe lift sound scary, what the actual injury numbers say when you compare lifting to something like running, and the one variable that causes most lifting injuries, and it's almost never the lift itself. 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, Philip Pape, and today's episode is based on a listener. I want to give him credit right up front, Tim E. He's a valuable member of our Eat More Lift Heavy program. He came to me a little while back and he said, Hey, Philip, I was listening to another show. And I'm not gonna give credit to this show. We're gonna pick it apart, but I'm not, this is not a call out. This is addressing some serious assumptions in that show. They ran this whole countdown of exercises that they called unsafe. And I get it, social media podcasts, you want to be provocative, you wanna be counterintuitive, you wanna be contrarian. But the problem is when it gets people to change their behavior for no good reason. Number one on that list was the barbell back squat. Number two was a conventional deadlift. And then a little further down the list was the bent over barbell row. And Tim basically said, Hey, can you stress test this, Philip? Because it doesn't sit right with me. I've been doing these lifts, I've been successful, you know, building muscle and strength at these lifts. Millions of people use them every day. We talk about them all the time. And what I want to know is there something to this claim that they are unsafe? Right. And they and the episode was like, you know, the three most unsafe exercises or something like that. And I really love that because that's what I want you to do, what Tim is doing. I don't want you to just accept any claim. I also don't want you to reject it because you don't like it, but just say, hey, what is my skepticism radar telling me? Is the reasoning good here? Does it make sense? Does it pass the sniff test? So, Tim, this one is dedicated to you. Now, I want to be fair here. As always, nuances is important. This is not a hit piece on another show. I'm not gonna name them, as I said. Some of the alternative exercises that they talked about are genuinely perfectly fine. These sounded like two fairly intelligent guys who have a history training. One of them was kind of questioning the main host's list as it went along. So I did appreciate that. That's not the issue. The issue is the reasoning used to condemn the big lifts because it gets repeated. It gets repeated like a game of telephone, and maybe it gets twisted here and there. But you hear it from trainers, from physical therapists on social media, from articles telling men, you know, go ahead and trade your squats for goblet squats. Men, women, whatever, people over 50 because you're old, whatever it is, right? And it's kind of everywhere in the water supply of what you're fed through social media. So we're gonna address that. And then stick around to the end because after we get through all of this, I'm gonna share a study result that should change how really everyone over 40 thinks about lifting, but women in particular. And then a question that you can ask yourself before you decide to swap, say, a barbell lift for a machine, before you give it up, right? So I want to really help you make these decisions for yourself. So here's where we're going today. I'm gonna show you the three logical errors in thinking that run through every argument of, oh, this lift is dangerous. I'm also gonna give you the injury numbers, which I'll say surprise me the first time I dug into them. Um, and I want you to know what that looks like. And then we're gonna talk about why axial loading, which is like a fancy way of saying load that runs down through your spine is specifically a feature, not a bug. Okay.

  The strongest case against the big lifts

  Philip Pape 4:16

  It's a feature, not a bug, especially as we age, and you can actually take advantage of that rather than being scared by it. So let's steel man the case first, uh, because I don't want to, I don't want to knock down a weak version of an argument. I don't think that's helpful to you. But the argument against these lifts usually goes something like this. The back squats put a big compressive load right down through your spine. And that's risky, especially as you age. The deadlift is the one that everybody talks about as well, where you're bent over, you've got a heavy bar, and if your form breaks down a little, you know, you round your back, oh, you're gonna herniate a disc. And then we have the bent over row where you're holding that hinged over position under load while you're also yanking a bar into your torso. So now your lower back is doing a bunch of work. And the recommendation from that is okay, we need to find alternatives, like just the assumption that they're gonna most likely hurt you. Alternatives or use machines, or use a leg press instead of squatting, use a chest supported row. So your lower back is out of it. And look, if you use AI and ask AI these questions, it's probably gonna validate your concerns and suggest these things, especially the way you ask it. So we need to really dig deeper. Or it's gonna say, oh, use a trap bar, or just do RDLs, or just do split squats, take the spine out of the equation, and then you don't you take the risk out of the equation. Now it sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive, and it tends to be generally wrong. Not because the alternatives are bad. Okay, though some of those are great, though, all those exercises I named, but the logic underneath is built on three specific errors. And then once you learn these, you can't unlearn them. Okay, here

  The first error in their argument

  Philip Pape 5:56

  we go. Let's walk through them. The first thinking error is treating load as a hazard rather than the thing that you seek to help you adapt. Load, the heaviness, right? The weight. This is the big one. And I think it's kind of underneath the rest. It cascades into the rest, let's say. When somebody looks at a heavy squat, and it especially if you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, let's say, and you see this compression on the spine, and you're like, oh, that seems dangerous. You're looking at the load itself as a threat, right? Something to minimize. Oh, how why would you put all that compression on your spine? Well, the problem with that is that load is the entire reason that the adaptation happens. The compression, the tension, the force running through the bone and the muscle and the tendon, right? That is not like a side effect to be worried about. That is the training signal, the stimulus, the adaptation that the thing that your body then responds to when you sleep, when you eat, et cetera. Your bones get denser because they're loaded. Your muscles grow because they're loaded, you know, through mechanical tension. Your tendons and connected tissue get more resilient because they're loaded. I've even had PTs on the show tell us this themselves. This is a PT. People who are concerned with rehab and coming back from injury saying, look, load and oftentimes heavy load on the exact muscles and joints you're concerned about is often what is needed to recover. So if you take the load away in the name of safety, you've removed the medicine, the prescription, let's say, in John Sullivan's words, the barbell prescription, right? You've made the movement quote unquote safer by doing, making it do less of what it's intended to do. Now, I had Chris Duffin on the show back, I think it was episode 456. And if you don't know him, he's the guy that squatted over a thousand pounds in his 40s for reps. He's a got a biomechanics and engineering brain, absolute legend. And he said something on that episode that stuck with me. He said that we adapt to nearly any movement or stress that's imposed on us. That is what's get getting stronger is, right? And we've heard that, we've heard that description through starting strength and through plenty of good strength coaches and practitioners. That is what getting stronger is. It's your body responding to load. So when you get afraid of a lift, if you're afraid you're hurt, you'll hurt yourself, you stop pushing and you stop adapting. And you may not even pay as much attention to good, say, form as a result, which is the irony of it. And then you actually do not get stronger or more resilient, and the fear itself becomes the problem and manifests in potential further weakness and injury. You've probably heard the phrase, I'd rather have a strong bad back than a weak bad back. And that kind of summarizes it nicely because the strength and the risk and chance of injury, they're two separate things. We want the strength there. So error number one is that, you know, load is not the enemy. Load is the stimulus. And when you take it away to feel safe, you're throwing away the thing that's going to help you. Now you're

  What EMG activation really shows about muscle growth

  Philip Pape 8:56

  just gonna get stuck. Error number two is confusing muscle activation with muscle growth. Now, this one's more technical, but I want you to just stick with me because it's it's all over the place. And I still hear the term activation thrown out a lot where it shouldn't be. So a lot of the content about this exercise is just as good or better than this is based on something called EMG, electromyography. Basically, they stick sensors on your muscles, they measure the electrical activity during an exercise, and they say, look, the chest-supported row lights up the lats just as much as the barbow row. So you might as well do the easier, safer one. Or this machine activates the quads more than the squat does, so it's superior. The problem with that is that is an acute activation signal, acute meaning like localized, the EMG number we're talking about, that electrical signal, it does not reliably predict how much a muscle actually grows over weeks and months. And there's a good body of research on this. There's a really sharp critique from a researcher, his name is Andrew Vygotsky. And the point is basically that activation in a single session and hypertrophy over time are two different things. One does not, does not cleanly forecast the other. So stop paying so much attention to muscle activation. And we have training studies where a heavier load produced more EMG activation, but the actual measured muscle growth came out about the same as a lighter load. So it's not always correlated, is my point. If so, if EMG doesn't track growth, then the argument of this exercise activates the muscle just as much as that is not a valid reason to call, for example, a barbell lift redundant and having no other benefits. You're comparing the wrong thing, apple to oranges, right? Like judging two cars by how loud the engine is instead of how fast they go. It's like a distraction or a red herring, if you will. And then there's a flip side here that favors the barbell lifts. A lot of the recent research points to training muscle in a stretched, lengthened position as a real driver of growth. And what do a full-depth squat and a full deadlift do? They load your muscles at long lengths. They activate many muscles. Uh and there I use the word activate, but they I should say they recruit many muscles. And big compound lifts, by design, give you a ton of benefits in that sense. Now, isn't that interesting? But the very thing that makes them feel harder and makes you maybe want to avoid them is the thing that makes them work. So that's error number two: that activation is not growth and not a reason to switch up your lifts. Now, before I give you the third error, I want to take a pause because we're about to hit the most important one and it connects

  How to train the big lifts safely and for a long time

  Philip Pape 11:40

  directly to something I do every day. So many people think they need a different exercise. And what they actually need is someone to help manage their load and the fatigue and the recovery along with their nutrition so that the big lifts stay productive and you do them safely instead of them turning into a problem. And you then you build the confidence to do them and you gain the benefits from them. Now that's the whole idea behind our Eat More Lift Heavy program, exactly where Tim gave us this question. This is our 26-week coach program where we teach you to eat enough to support your training, to fuel properly. We help you progress any of your lifts that you want to do with proper programming and adjustments and dealing with the recovery and potentially injury. Look, we have a lot of folks that come in and they're like, I'm dealing with this injury or this rehab, or I had a surgery or this or that. You know, not from us, but they they they have it going on and then they want help. And one of the things I like to say is look, if you wait till you're ready and everything is perfectly healed, let's say, and you're over 40, you'll never be ready. We all have some level of pain or injury or something going on. And so you kind of need that guidance. And if you've been nervous about the big lifts or somebody talked you out of them or whatever, that is who this is built for. So you can find information at eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. Now I bring it up right here on purpose because the reason people get talked out of be out of these lifts is our third error. It's our third error. And I want you to really listen up to this blaming the lift for what is actually a programming problem. Okay. Blaming the lift for what is a programming problem. So I see the pattern over and over and over again. Okay, it's just so predictable at this point. Somebody's back starts hurting. Honestly, I've been through this cycle in the past. Your low back starts hurting. They've been squatting and deadlifting. And the conclusion is it's the squat and deadlift are hurting my back, and those lifts are dangerous, or some level of that. But then when we look at what actually happened when you dig in, it often wasn't the movement. It was how the movement was loaded. For example, jumping up in weight too much too soon, or too much volume,

  What goes wrong when a lift starts hurting

  Philip Pape 13:55

  or training through fatigue. And that could be the physical fatigue from a lack of energy, but it could also be because you're not eating enough or you're in a deficit or something like that, where your form starts to degrade set after set and you don't stop, or you get distracted, or you're listening to music when maybe you shouldn't, or you're talking to someone in the gym or scrolling your phone, and an and an. You get all these things are forms of fatigue or distraction. Not enough recovery between heavy sessions. You're going five days a week and balls to the wall, and it's super heavy. Right? These are all programming variables. I didn't even mention the actual form of the lift, right? That's also important too, but maybe overstated versus some of these other things. And those are all dials that you can turn, right? And then when you get hurt and you blame the lift instead of the dial, well, you're never going to fix the root cause. And going back to, I mentioned Chris Stuffin, when he was on the show, he talked about people getting into lifting later in life and they get strong pretty fast, right? Because they're very responsive to the stimulus. And then all of a sudden their back starts hurting. And the reason is your muscles tend to adapt faster than your skeleton does, and even your connective tissue. And so your muscle can handle the load before your bones and disc and connective tissue have caught up, and you can outlift your own structural readiness if you rush it. Again, also why we like to for beginners to be eating and not dieting when they first start, just to kind of be fully supportive of that process. And again, it's not the lift itself, it's not the deadlift. It's the progression being too aggressive for where the person is. Because when we talk about lifting heavy, it's relatively heavy to what you're capable of, not just heavy in general or just trying to lift as much as you can or going up 20 pounds overnight on a lift. So it, you know, if your body is tightening up, you're feeling pain, it's often not because you're squatting, it's because you're squatting like garbage, because you're squatting wrong. The movement itself isn't the problem. It's the way it's being loaded and executed. And granted, there's a lot of fear-mongering, even with that, talking about sheer forces and all of these things that people are not understanding properly. So I don't want you to be scared away. Again, it's not the movement, it's how it's being executed. So again, error number three is when a lift hurts, the culprits almost always load progression, fatigue, recovery, or technique, not the lift itself. Now, I want to connect all of these things. Notice what they all have in common. They all point the finger, these errors, I should say, these errors in thinking, all point the finger at the movement. Like, okay, the movement's dangerous, the movement is redundant, the movement hurt me. And sometimes I hear people say, well, yeah, it's because of technique, not the movement, but nobody can do it right, which is BS. That's total BS because thousands, if not millions, of people do do it right. And there's a lot of tolerance for, you know, having your own, I'll say version of the form that's still within the bounds of correctness and safety. And so it's not the movement, it's the variables around the movement that matters. And guess what? You can control those. And sometimes you need help, sometimes you need coaching, sometimes you need advice, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever to figure it out because it's a

  Barbell training next to running injury rates

  Philip Pape 16:58

  process, right? Now, let's talk about the numbers. What do the injury numbers say? If these lifts are so dangerous, you would expect the injury data to be pretty ugly, right? You'd expect people who squat and deadlift to be getting hurt left and right all the time, you know, falling over. Oh my God, everybody, you know, my aunt, my cousins, my parents, my my, you know, kids, whoever, all these people lifting are just just getting hurt left and right from their lifting. But they're not. They're not. And it's not even close in the data. When you look at the systematic reviews on injury rates in the barbell strength sports, powerlifting comes in somewhere around one to four injuries per thousand hours of training. Weightlifting, you know, the Olympic lifts, that's in a similar range, roughly two to three per thousand hours. That is really, really low. Now let's compare that to running, which every, well, I'm not gonna say everybody thinks, but a lot of people think of as this like safe, gentle, healthy thing. You should do more of, you know, strap on your shoes, anyone can do it. Well, novice runners get hurt at a rate around 17 or 18 injuries per thousand hours, right? Versus one to four for powerlifting, 17 to 18. Recreational runners, which means they have a little more experience, still seven or eight. So running injures people at something like two to more than 10 times the rate per hour of powerlifting, right? And that's just running. We know soccer is also up there, and that's also due to like contact injury and stuff like that. So, from a framing perspective, when it comes to injury, barbell training, when you do it with reasonable programming for what we just talked about, is one of the lowest injury things you could do with your body. And what matters for the whole argument about unsafe exercises is okay, well, what if what about when people do get hurt lifting? Where is that happening and why? Well, the most common sights are the lower back and the shoulder. Sure, we we all can attest to that. I can personally attest to that. But the mechanism, we see this over and over again, is load and fatigue and technique. The beginner who jumped the weight up too fast, the person grinding through the form that's already broken down because of ego, and they don't want to rack the bar, they're ego lifting. It's almost never, hey, they performed the squat properly, and but because it's a squat, they got injured. No, it's how it's loaded, which is the exact same point as error number three, and we're just tying it to the injury data. Mismanagement of the lift, that is the risk, not the risk, not the lift itself. Now, I care about intellectual honesty. So if you think about the argument from the podcast that I'm addressing, that fatigue degrades your mechanics, that is true. So there's a cascade. When you're deep into a very tiring, fatiguing set, and then your form falls apart, that is a window where injuries can occur. So they're not wrong that there can be danger when it comes to that, but it it happens upstream in the fatigue and the programming that allowed you to get to that point. Does that make sense? That allowed you to get to that point. And it could go beyond that too, to like secondary and tertiary variables like your diet, right? If you're not eating enough or if you're training fasted and you're just wiped out, that just enhances the fatigue. You know, if you're not sleeping enough, that just enhances the fatigue. All right, so why does this matter to you? What do we do about it? We've established that the lifts are not inherently dangerous. Injury data backs us up. And now I want to get on the positive side of things because this is specific to you, especially if you're getting older, you're over 40, you know, you're concerned about the injury

  What heavy loading does for your bones after 40

  Philip Pape 21:06

  and the health and the joint risk. Maybe you're new to this, maybe you've never done this before. And for example, women, you know, reach out to me all the time, going through the perimenopause, postmenopause transition, also have a lot of questions about these things. And I like to be very positive and empowering about this because it's not a negative. You are not hopeless at all. It's quite the opposite. So the compressive load through the spine, that axial loading, the thing that people always talk about as potentially dangerous for your bones. That is the single best evidenced non-drug stimulus we have for building bone density. Or at least preserving bone density, if not building it. There's other things that can also build bone density, like jumping type movements. And this matters enormously right now, at this point in time, because the menopause transition accelerates your bone loss. A meaningful chunk of a woman's lifetime bone loss can happen in those few years around menopause. Right. And I'm not fear-mongering, that's just stating a fact. And we can do something about it. I've talked about the lift more study before, L-A-F-T-M-O-R. And most studies are done on young men in college. This was actually done on post-menopausal women, average age around 65, who already had low bone mass. And they're the same type of population that gets told as they get older, they go to their doctor and they're told, what are you doing lifting weights? What are you doing lifting heavy? You got to protect yourself. Oh, you got to watch out for your bones. So, what they did in the study is they had them do heavy deadlifts, heavy back squats, overhead presses, all around 80 to 85% of their one rep max, twice a week for eight months, and they were supervised. So heavy stuff, okay? The stuff that the internet Like it's gonna break you. No, it's not. And what happened? Well, their bone density in their spine improved by almost three percent. While the comparison group that just did light home exercise, they lost bone. Hip bone improved, strength improved, balance improved, posture got better. What about safety? Out of the whole group, one minor adverse event, it was like a back spasm. That's it. So this is heavy barbell training in 65-year-old women with weak bones. It was effective, safe, and hugely beneficial. And remember that I mentioned they were supervised. Okay. So the women didn't just walk in off the street and they were like, here, load 85% of your max, go for it. They actually spent a month first learning the movements and building up with lighter loads. Exactly what we talk about. That's the whole point. That's progressive overload. It's not just grab the heaviest thing and jump into it. It's you build the skill up over time with completely manageable weights and increase that load, which is the medicine, which is the prescription. As I mentioned correctly, you have to dose it correctly. So when you hear all this stuff about unsafe exercises and you're like, oh, you should do the leg press or the chest supported row and forget the other ones. You may be missing out on that load on your spine and hips that you actually benefit from, especially for your bones, especially for your skeleton. So I wanted to mention that. Now I'm not saying machines are bad, of course not. Okay. We can't, these are not mutually exclusive things. For building muscle size, machines, free weights come out about even. We had uh Lauren Calenzo Semple on here to talk about that. Nothing wrong with machines at all. I use machines all the time. If you like the leg press, use it. It's a great tool. And I'm not saying the alternatives they suggest in the podcast or anybody suggest are quote unquote wrong. There's so many options you have. A trap bar, for example, sure, it does reduce the load on your lower back compared to a straight bar. So if it's a better fit for you, great. Again, you're missing out on other things big time, potentially, maybe not, right? It depends on what your goals are. RDLs, goblet squats, split squats, chest supported rows, they're all legitimate exercises. They're great supplements, they're great substitutes to the mane occasionally, or maybe you work them in on different days other than the mains, for example. And sometimes you have just those in and you don't have the mains for a while. And I'm not saying everybody should barbell squat and deadlift no matter what. If you've got a diagnosed issue, a back problem that really flares up with a movement, a movement doesn't work for you, you don't have the mobility, whatever, you have to individualize. Okay. If you regress on something, you have to build it back. It helps to work with someone. That's just a smart thing to do. And then I'm not saying form and fatigue don't matter. Obviously, they matter enormously. That's the whole point. So the big barbell lifts, in conclusion, are not the hazard. Load is a stimulus, it's not a dangerous thing. Activation is not equivalent to growth. When a lift hurts, look at the programming. All right. That will help you find the root cause. Load progression, fatigue, recovery, technique, that is it. Now, before we wrap up, remember that study result that I promised you about heavy lifting and women over 40 and a question to ask before

  The question to ask before you swap a lift

  Philip Pape 25:46

  you swap a barbell lift for a machine. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if this episode changed how you think about the big lifts, do me a favor and just text it to someone, share it with them, email it to them. You know somebody who is scared of lifting or squatting or deadlifting or who, you know, tells you, oh, isn't that dangerous and just doesn't know. And it's holding them back. Or maybe they think they're too old or too fragile. Text this to them. That is the person who needs to hear it. And it might be the thing that saves their lives. I can't understate that. That is not an under an overstatement. It's gonna keep them strong for decades to come. All right, so here's the number that I want to share with you. Up to 20% of the bone a woman loses in her entire life comes off in the handful of years around menopause. I alluded to this before. It isn't just spread across decades. It's actually concentrated right there in a window that for most women is happening at the same time that everything else is changing. People are telling you to be careful, take it easy, skip the heavy stuff. You might be getting gaslit by all sorts of doctors. You know, you've got the symptoms of menopause, the hot flashes, whatever it is personalized to you, the hormonal fluctuations, the stress in your life. So the timing is pretty tough because this is yet one more thing you might be afraid of or not sure it's gonna help, or thinking it's gonna exacerbate the other issues. And yet the signal for your skeleton, for your bones from heavy lifting is phenomenal. So the next time you're about to swap a barbell lift for a machine to be safe, ask yourself a question. Be honest with yourself. Am I swapping this because the movement genuinely doesn't fit my body? Or because someone told me it was dangerous, or I haven't mastered it yet, right? I haven't, I haven't mastered the things Philip talked about in this episode. There's something else that I need to work on before just giving up the lift. And if it's the second one, then you're not really solving the problem, are you? Right? You're just give kind of giving into fear and not getting the benefit from it. And I just want you to be honest with you. So I want to motivate you to see if you can keep the lift, if it is right for your body, or if the reason isn't that it doesn't fit your body, but for these other reasons, and fix the other stuff. You know, we can help you do that. I've talked about that before. I'm not gonna pitch my stuff again, but get the help if needed. Up and one final little thing

  Choosing a gym that lets you lift properly

  Philip Pape 28:06

  about this is seek out the right gym and equipment as well. Don't settle for what you have. I see a lot of women, for example, come to me and all they have access to is a Smith machine. And then they're trying to squat with a Smith machine. And it's it's really dangerous form they're using because they can't get into the right form given the constraints of the Smith machine. Forget the Smith machine. Go with the free the free weights or other machines. Anyway, um, that's a separate topic. I'm gonna leave it at that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the barbell isn't the risk, it's a tool and used well. It's one of the best things you can do for your body over 40. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How to Build More Muscle Lifting 3 Days a Week After 40 (Martin Silva) | Ep 488

What if more gym days are killing your gains? 

Could training less help you build more muscle?

Are you working harder just to recover worse?

Strength training over 40 isn’t about cramming five or six workouts into your week. It’s about creating enough stimulus to build muscle without burying your body in fatigue.

Coach, former pro physique competitor, and Optimize Your Body host Martin Silva explains why fewer, higher-quality lifting sessions can improve hypertrophy, recovery, strength, and body recomp.

Learn how training frequency and volume work together, why stopping one to three reps before failure can produce better muscle-building results, and how mechanical tension, tempo, and technique matter more than destroying yourself in every workout.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why more gym days backfire
2:00 - From high volume to better results
5:45 - Minimum effective volume and frequency
9:50 - Mechanical tension, tempo, and technique
15:10 - Staying shy of muscular failure
19:56 - Choosing three days or six
25:46 - Better activities for recovery days
28:09 - Mobility, injuries, and changing beliefs

Episode resources:

• Podcast: Optimise Your Body with Martin Silva

• Episode mentioned: I Trained 3x Per Week... And Got Leaner

• Website: optimiseyourbody.com

• Instagram: @martinsilvafitness 

• Facebook: @Optimiseyourbodycoaching

• YouTube: @martinsilvafitness

• Transcript

  Why more gym days backfire

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You're getting a bit older, but you still want to build muscle, lose fat, and feel like yourself. You know it's important to lift weights or at least work out in some way. So you're in the gym five, six days a week. Maybe push-pull legs, maybe an upper lower routine, some cardio added in, but the scale just isn't moving. Your strength isn't going up. Your joints aren't feeling it. So you think maybe I'm not doing enough. My guest today spent close to two decades preaching exactly that. He's competed at the pro level. He's built a coaching practice around training people hard and often, but then he started doing less and his results got better. So today we are getting into why most lifters over 40 are training too much and often for the wrong reasons. What's holding back your strength training results, and how a smaller number of higher quality sessions can do far more for you than five or six days of grinding it out. If you're showing up to the gym week after week and the work isn't paying off, tune in to find out if less really is more. 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, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna talk about how often you should be lifting weights to build muscle, to lose fat, to get lean, especially after 40. Now, the popular advice tells you always that more is more. More days in the gym, more volume in each session, more sets, more cardio on top of that. And then the results don't come, and the assumption is, hey, I'm not doing enough. My guest today is Martin Silva, a coach with close to two decades of experience, an ex-pro physique competitor, host of the Optimize Your Body podcast. Go follow that right now because we've got a back-to-back on our shows. Martin works with someone probably a lot like you, who is busy, a professional, maybe over 35. You want to build muscle, lose fat, feel strong, feel like yourself again, without rebuilding your entire life around going to the gym. Now, what I like about Martin is

  From high volume to better results

  Philip Pape 2:00

  that he changed his mind and he did it in public. He used to train a lot more. He used to train five, six days a week, push every set to failure. He used to recommend more volume is the answer to everything. And then he started training less. His results got better, as did those of his clients. So today you're gonna learn why high frequency training may not be the best approach for you, what to do instead, and how to apply this, whether you've been lifting for many years or you're just getting started for the first time. Martin, welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Martin Silva 2:30

  Thank you very much for having me on, brother. And thank you for that intro. That was awesome.

  Philip Pape 2:34

  Yeah, man. So I've been I've been listening to your show. I encourage listeners to do the same to follow you as well. But I really love talking about frequency and volume because there's a lot of confusion over just the general principles of it, what works, what doesn't, as well as individual responsiveness. And coincidentally, in my feed yesterday, I don't know if you follow Paul Carter, you know, love him or hate him. Yeah. He said building muscle is not a hard work endeavor. You can literally max out your physique, hitting the gym twice a week, never doing more than five reps, never training to failure, not bulking. If you're consistent and have a load progression scheme, you'll make all the gains you can make. You agree or disagree?

  Martin Silva 3:07

  Yeah, I do agree to an extent on that, but you hit the nail on the head, right? The individual, whatever word you use, but individual variants 100% plays a big part. Now, with that, obviously with the the not training to failure piece as well, which we can get into. I think the key thing is here, Philip, and you'll know this with all the people you've coached, it's obviously the consistency piece, right? It's like you could do the worst program in the world and get better results than the best program in the world done inconsistently, right? So just we we got to put that one in there first before we get into the science. If you're not consistent, forget about all the nuance, right? Because people talk about, you know, should I be doing this, that, and the other? And should I be doing like a single-leg squat and you know, balancing on one leg and all these bands? And it's like, don't worry about that, just show up first. But then there's a hell of a lot of nuance which we can get into. So I do partly agree with what he said in terms of training twice a week. So if you do it properly, and if you just think about again the consistency piece, I just want to hammer that home. If you look over the space of you know one year, because you'll probably you probably heard this with people you coach or you know, people you have on that initial call. And a lot of people haven't really trained for a year consistently for either a a long time or b ever. So if the person who's doing two sessions per week, and we know the research shows you need to hit every body part at least twice per week. So two or three times per week to get maximum results. You want to send that muscle building signal. So it's like every two or three days max, even four days. Let's say you trained on a Monday, you know, by by Thursday or Friday, that muscle building signal you've sent to any given body part has kind of died off at that point. So you want to hit it again. That's part of the research behind that frequency piece, right? So, yes, doing twice a week, you can get great results. And actually, not training the failure, you know, stopping one to three reps shy of failure, you're gonna get the same muscle. Well, you know, again, there's a little bit of variance there when it comes to training to failure, depending on the level you're at. But most people, 90% of people, right, they're gonna get way better results stopping one to three reps shy of failure. You're gonna get the same muscle building stimulus and growth without the fatigue, essentially. So, what he's saying there is pretty much bang on for most people. And and that's the tough part, I think people always want to do, which we can definitely get to today. They always want to do more. And I used to judge a good workout by how sore I was the next day, which you find a lot of people still do. They'll say things like, you know, I was sore, but but in a good way. And you're like, okay, let's let's unpack that a bit. How long were you sore for? You know what I mean? And if you're more, if you're sore for longer than generally a day or two, really, you've already crossed the line with the intensity, actually. So actually, you

  Minimum effective volume and frequency

  Martin Silva 5:45

  don't want you want you might feel like you've done something the next day, but actually you don't want to be oversore for the most part as well. You want to recover, which is the key thing, right, Phil?

  Philip Pape 5:53

  Yeah, I agree, man. Recovery is number one. Like you reverse engineer everything from that. So you mentioned frequency. So let's clarify frequency and volume for Volks. Cause when you talk about hitting every body part two to three times a week, you're talking about the frequency of hitting that, getting that muscle stimulus across the week versus the number of sets within those sessions. Because we're I I eventually want to get to talking and comparing, like, okay, how does six days compare to two, but if it's the same volume and things like that? So one thing this brings up is a term I've seen lately, body maxing. I've seen people talk about it where you might train two or three days a week and you know, maybe seven or eight or nine different exercises per session, but you're only doing two sets. So you still save time, you still have a typical length, but you're now hitting different areas of the muscle, different muscle groups in different ways. From that perspective, like what do you think of the effectiveness of that approach to get the frequency or to get the volume? Or is there a more optimal approach than that?

  Martin Silva 6:50

  So, yeah. So when you look at, you know, it's weird, right? Because it's not weird, because when you look at research, there's a lot of things it doesn't account for, right? So what I'll say is, you know, maximum muscle growth and gains, 10 to 20 sets per week per body part, right?

  Philip Pape 7:03

  With a minimum of five, maybe, you know, yeah.

  Martin Silva 7:05

  Minimum of five, bare minimum. But you know, if you do it properly, and look, if we look at a beginner, for example, someone who just gets started, they've got the the beautiful newbie gains, right? Where they just they'll respond, and then obviously genetics plays a big part as well. Well, they'll respond really well because it's the body thrives off novelty, right? So it's a new stimulus, and they can start off by doing like anything, right? Literally, they could do one set and they'll build muscle. So if you're doing two exercises per body part and you're doing like seven to nine exercises each workout, 100%. If you look at that, even if you did two or three sets per work, let's say you did only did like the minimum, let's say you did five or six sets, right? If you're just doing those two workouts, let's just say you did five or six sets each body part and they were both full body workouts. If you're doing it right and you're focusing on that mechanical tension piece, I think that's the piece that gets overlooked the most. And we can get into that as well with like the uh, you know, just for what we mean by that is is really adding because the muscles only really know tension. So they don't really know how much weight you're lifting, right? Whether you're doing 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 100 pounds, all they know is how much tension you're applying to the muscles. So that's why technique, you know, mind muscle connection, and this is where I think the variable of doing slow tempo reps is just is just so underrated. You know, if you look at the optimal, I believe the optimal hypertrophy rep range, I'm pretty sure is a you can do a 3-1-1, but a 4-2-2. So just for the audience, that's basically a four-second negative portion of the rep. So on the lower portion of the rep, think about that. Four seconds, and then a two-second pause, and two seconds when you're actually doing the concentric part, you know, on a curl when you're actually curling, for example. So that's an eight-second rep, right? That's a long workout. So let's say people did that, or they even did, you know, because it takes forever, right? Let's be honest. If they do a three-one one, three-second negative, and they did what you said, they did the two sessions and they did it with intention, right? And they really focused on the skill of each movement, and they weren't just, you know, go in there to sweat. They were actually focused on the intention. What am I doing with this movement? You know, how can I improve it? You know, sure, they're gonna get results, right? So that's where the nuance comes in with, you know, don't throw that rep away because you never get that rep back, right?

  Philip Pape 9:24

  Exactly. I I so I love where you're going. There's two concepts, two principles you mentioned specifically, and that was the mechanical tension and skill. Like you use the word skill, I think is super, super important. And I think, you know, it is true. Mechanical tension, it really all comes down to that. Even if we talk about progressive overload, you can only achieve that because you're hitting the enough mechanical tension to get the stimulus to grow to then go heavier night. You know what I mean? It's all like secondary to mechanical tension. So the slow tempo, let me

  Mechanical tension, tempo, and technique

  Philip Pape 9:50

  ask about that, right? Because I think there's people conflate like time under tension versus I think what you're alluding to, which is the long, the lengthened and shortened positions and the eccentric and concentric having their own value, like eccentric, I know, is correlated with flexibility, you know, as well as the stretch reflex versus the pause, each having its own value. I I love pause everything these days because of like joint issues, it's great. So I love that. Yep. And then the concentric, like exploding out and using those muscle fibers. There's a lot behind it. And I don't think people have to understand it all, but like if you boiled it down to, you know, how to lift, like how would you describe that?

  Martin Silva 10:28

  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, because like when you when you go into the gym, right? This is why I say the clients, it's showing up, like I said at the start, right? If you don't show up, forget about all of this. You've showed up, right? You've done the hard part, you got to the gym. I'd say that's the hardest part anyway, because the being there for the most part is the easy part when it comes to getting in shape. That's the fun part. So once you're there, then it's like, what's the intention of what I'm doing? Right. So I'll give you some examples now. When I have clients, the intention now, you're doing, let's just say they're doing between four to six reps or between two to six reps. The intention with this rep range now is for us to get stronger, physically stronger. I've built them up to a point where they're focusing on lifting heavy, and that's the goal is to get stronger each workout. Make sure you're having plenty of rest in between, and we're getting stronger each week. We're adding weight to the bar, and then obviously the side effect of that is building muscle. You know, you're gonna get some hypertrophy from that if you do it right. Then you've got the hypertrophy, let's just say the the time and attention phase. You get into the gym, think in your head to do it right. Like, what is my intention? What am I doing here? Okay, well, I'm doing, I don't know, it could be anywhere between six to ten reps, and I'm gonna do slow tempo. That's generally or eight to ten, even eight to twelve, but I I like to cap it off at 10 with the with the slower reps. If you're doing like a three-second negative or four-second negative, then your goal then is just exactly what we said it's the slow negative portion of the rep. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to just apply as much tension to the muscle, primarily on that lengthening portion that Phil talked about, when the when the muscle when the muscles lengthening out. So, simple example is obviously when you're squatting down, you're going down nice and slowly. And as you're as you're bending your leg, obviously your hamstrings are stretching out, and then when you drive up, you're flexing the quads when you stand up. So on the way down though, as you're sitting into that squat, that's when you're getting a lot of the tension. So, yeah, that and then and then you can do like a higher rep range then, which is basically like you know, it's basically similar to cardio when you do that, right? If you're doing, you know, 15 to 20 squats, for example, you're not gonna go too, you you know, you're not doing slow reps for any more than if you're doing it properly, I'd say more than 10 reps. And then you, you know, your goal then is I'm gonna get a good pump on, I'm getting the heart rate up, I'm still gonna stop two to three reps shy of failure, but I'm I'm going for a higher rep range. So obviously, then I've got to take the weights down to accommodate that. So that rep range, you know, plays a part in the rep tempo, of course, a big part. And I would just say when you're going into the gym, you know, you and you also should be feeling, you know, some people, again, it's the punishment mentality, which I was stuck in before. When they go in the gym, like I really want to get into this. It's not for everyone, right? Some people, less is not more, because some people need to go to the gym and push more. But the majority of people, 100%, especially people we we coach as well, right? Where if they're above 35, I know you generally work with people that are over 40, you know, in that age category, generally, you know, they've they've they've got the all or nothing mentality. That's probably a lot of the times what's holding them back, held them back a bit from getting in shape. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. So then that transfers into the gym and you're going all out, you're like pushing yourself, and that's good to obviously progressively overload, but you want to be keeping the few reps in the tank at the end of each set. You don't want to be compromising technique, and you want to really be leaving the gym like with more energy. You should be leaving energized. You should never feel like you've got to lie down or like, oof, I'm tired. I need to sit down and just gather myself. You've crossed the line when that happens, and that's gonna slow down results because the body's gonna, it can only do you know these two things separately, right? So you've got recovery, the body's recovering is the recovery process, regenerating, and ultimately repairing your muscles and everything else, and your nervous system's recovering. Then you've got the adaptation when your body adapts to the stimulus. So they happen at they don't happen at the same time. So you want to recover as fast as you can so you can adapt quickly, and and when you adapt, the body adapts by you know building muscle or getting stronger. You know, that's that's the plan.

  Philip Pape 14:29

  Yeah, man, the recovery trap. So that that's gonna tie to a question I'm gonna ask in a second about the days per week. Because that's really what would what the reason I'm asking these questions is because I surmise that training less means you have to train more effective. And conversely, if you're training effectively, you can train less. So just hitting on that point a little more, first of all, some of the takeaways I got here for the listener, right, is that nobody wants to do 20 rep squats, but if you do, it's gonna affect the tempo, right? Because you don't want to be miserable doing a five, five minute set of super, super slow 20 rep squats. But it's gonna affect your tempo and your breathing. And there's kind of these variables that interplay with each other. You know, you've got the load, you've got the reps, you've got the breathing, you've got all these things. And I also think there's an aspect to that with the tempo

  Staying shy of muscular failure

  Philip Pape 15:10

  of the mind muscle connection and listening to your body and learning things, especially when a lift is new. So then my question is how do you know you're near failure if you're trying to stay one to three reps shy and you've never really trained like this? Is there a technique like AMRAP or testing yourself or something that you would do to kind of really hit what true failure feels like?

  Martin Silva 15:29

  Yeah, this is this is a really good question because you know yourself, it just takes a long time to get intuitive with the body. You know, after a while you get intuitive, but if someone is if someone is just starting out, I would actually start off with more in fact. So I would go for more like two to three, two to three, leaving two to three reps in reserve at the end of each set. Now, to gauge that, there's not really like I try and keep it as simple as possible with clients. I don't I don't want to use like a formula or anything like that. I actually did a video recently where I was just kind of like showing them what it looks like, literally, where it's it's not it's not you know stopping one or three reps shy, but losing technique along the way and just going, okay, I reckon I can get one or it's actually really focusing on like stopping short of losing form, really. It's more a case of stopping short of losing one to two or even three reps of form. So that's why, you know, the best way to do it is again, you have to get intuitive and gauge it as you as you go. But I don't think it takes that long to get intuitive and like, okay, I'm gonna go for 10 reps. That's my that's my target. So let me pick a weight, let me just roughly gauge a weight that I reckon I could do 12, 13, maybe even 14 reps with, right? Roughly to absolute failure. I'm gonna pick that weight and then I'm gonna stop on around about 10 reps. You know what I mean? So it's kind of a tough one to explain. So I don't I've tried using like different things in the past where it's been almost like like a formula with clients and stuff, or a little, and it's just like I find it's just more it's too complex, and they get they get better when they just get more intuitive with it. You know what I mean? It is at the same time, one more thing. If yeah, you don't really know what it's like. That's the other, the other flip side. You don't know what it's like unless you've trained the failure as well, though, right? Actually gone to failure, and you know what that Phil, there's with that, that's all in there, man. There's so much in the tank. Once you experience and you know the technique and stuff and the tension piece, there's so much in the tank, right? Once you've got that piece.

  Philip Pape 18:08

  And I'll say, just mysteriously, you tend to go l farther from failure on the exercises you don't like. It's funny how that happens.

  Martin Silva 18:14

  That's a really good point. That's a really no, excuse me, that's a really good point. I do the same thing as well, you know. Like you say 15 to 20 squats, you probably got like 40 in the tank and you stop on 15.

  Philip Pape 18:24

  You're like, this is just too much. You know, it's funny, I ran Bull Mastiff last year. This is an Alex Bromley program, and it was the first time I've been exposed to like Amrap sets. It's the reason I ask it, but it does involve math a little bit in that you you tack on a last set and you go to Amrap and you realize how many sets you how many reps you really have in the tank. You're like, whoa, I have like seven left in the tank, and I thought I had two, but it helps you gauge the progression for the subsequent weeks, like based on a formula, actually. But it's interesting. Yeah, you just have to figure this stuff out over time. So then now let's talk about the frequency volume kind of interplay here, right? When we talk about three days a week, what are we comparing that to? Because I'm thinking a lot of people are trying to do like upper lower splits, typically four days, maybe some sort of power building, like a five day. Some people are insane, they like to go to the gym every day, right? And you mentioned recovery. So I think, okay, part of this is a recovery factor of just literally having that day off, even if it's to do other stuff, like you've been doing some mobility stuff I saw on your IG, right? Like that's still recovery. Is it that because we don't get enough sleep? So it's a couple extra days to sleep in, is it all the above? And I'm asking that because some people say, you know what, I'd rather have six days of half the session length in my home than three days, and it's the same volume. So are we talking two different things here?

  Martin Silva 19:41

  Definitely. And that's that's really interesting because personally I find it hard to get people to do like frequent workouts. Now, they they will do it, and I do have some clients doing it, but doing something every day, for example, in an ideal world, 20 or 30 minutes, 30 minutes, it really depends on the level, right? But let's just say 20 or 30 minutes every six days a week. Maybe one day then they could just have an active day where they walk or maybe do some mobility. Um, I would say for most people, especially when we look at age, and and it's not just you know what it's like, Phil. I know how many kids have you got, by the way? Two, two kids. You got two kids, yeah. I got a I got a kid on the way as well. I got a boy on the way. So uh yeah, man, I'll be joining you there. But but when you look at that, right, the responsibilities people have just naturally we get as we get older, right? So it's like you've got work stress, you've got kids, you've got this stress bucket filling up. So actually, you know, it's it's a lot harder to cross the line when you're doing 20 to 30 minutes, like a purposeful workout each time, then you'll cross the line with intensity and then get stuck in that recovery trap we talked about when you're doing those short workouts, generally, if you get it right with a workout. Then also you you you do you it's that frequency thing as well, right? You're sending that signal,

  Choosing three days or six

  Martin Silva 20:47

  that muscle building, anabolic signal every single day and doing something. And then you can split that, you know, you can split that into like a lower up, maybe uh, and then just like a light kind of accessory workout or full body or even mobility, or you can split that into like, you know, three full bodies, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then just do some light body weight stuff. Literally, it could just be your own body weight, squats, you know, push-ups, sit-ups, or core stability stuff and some mobility on the on the Tuesday and Thursday, for example, right? So there's there's different ways that you can split that. But yeah, I would say really for most people, as long as as long as they're getting, you know, the it's the time they spend in the gym, right? So if as long as they're if you're doing three workouts in a week and you're doing one hour per session, for example, it's totally fine, right? Because some people they can do that, they find that more consistent. I think a lot of people find it easier from my experience with being consistent with someone like that. And then, but they normally want to do more than that three a week, right? So generally, you know, again, the all or nothing, they want to do more, more, more. So I do my best to start them off slow with that three a week. And then if they want to do an extra gym session, let's just say, for example, on top of the three full bodies, then they could go, like you said, they could do some mobility, they could even go and do some light stuff on even machines, but like this is where it gets a bit more technical, then, right? So it's like you've got to kind of like program them for that because then it's like you've got to take the intensity right down, and you're literally just gonna get like a light pump on on the eat into the next main training session.

  Philip Pape 22:13

  Yep, yep.

  Martin Silva 22:13

  There we go. But we should touch on what you said the upper lower stuff, right? You mentioned about like most people want to do that because I don't know, personally, I actually find that more enjoyable as well, doing like upper lower, you know, because you do a lot of things.

  Philip Pape 22:28

  I gotta do legs every day.

  Martin Silva 22:29

  Exactly. That's it. That's it, man. Legs every day, we're full body, it's not not pleasant, or at least one or two exercises. So, yeah, upper lower split four times per week, where you're doing, you know, let's say the whole of the upper body one day, and then maybe legs and abs the other, and then an upper lower again. Can work well as also. So yeah, I think the key thing is, you know, you're making sure that you're getting adequate recovery. It goes back to that, right? You get an adequate recovery. So let's just let's just look at three different scenarios, right? Because I'm thinking in my head, people that are coaching stuff. So it's like three, four bodies a week, right? The person who does that and they do that properly, a proper program, which is geared for their body. You know, if you work with someone like you know, Phil, for example, right? He's experienced and he's got the wisdom and he knows the nuance, and we're getting older now, mate. You know what I'm saying? So you know, you know the deal, right? So it's like you can program something properly and you're gonna get more bang for your buck. It makes a big, big difference, you know. I think there's so much nuance to the training piece. People always talk about nutrition, especially strength training. I think it's not it's not spoken about enough. So three per week, if someone did that consistently, right? Full bodies for like a year, six months to a year, the results would be amazing, right? But you know, I think for mental health and just for getting that boost and just for a habit to do something every day strength related is just a really, really good way to look at it, you know, because that actually it does it does a lot. Because again, you're sending the signal every day and you are getting a little, don't forget about all the other impacts that you get from strength training, right? Now, when you go into more than that, when you go into like the five and the six sessions per week, I just feel like at that level, you know, that's gonna be for more of an advanced person. If you want to actually lift that many days a week, realistically, I'd want you to be at a really, really high level. I do get some clients doing that. I can think of literally one guy now where he does like six a week. He's an absolute weapon, but he's been consistent for like three, four years. And you know, he just he just loves it. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, you know what I mean? It's it's a rarity, though. If you if you want to do that consistently and consistently get results and build muscle, it's got to be very smart that programming so you you know you don't get stuck in that recovery trap.

  Philip Pape 24:31

  Yeah, I think I think you hit on it, right? Like it is about consistency and if you can make it work, because because I know even personally, and then working with clients, trying four, five, six days a week, you just get weeks where you feel like you can't make that work for whatever reason. Business travel, you know, family events, holler, and you're like, am I gonna have that many weeks that are interrupted where this makes sense, or should I default to three and add in one or two? And that's a little bit of a psychological twist on them on it, right? So, or are you gonna do it for a short period, you know, leading up to a powerlifting meet or something, and then it makes sense. So I like that.

  Martin Silva 25:03

  Hey man, let me let me let me touch on that real quick because that's such an important point you make, is the behavioral aspect. We can talk about the science and frequency and everything else, but that gets overlooked. And it's like when you're traveling with work or when life, because life gets people don't never think about that, right? And you you you have to you have to remind people, don't you as a coach to anticipate these challenges that are gonna come. And if you're doing like an if you start skipping body parts, you know, you're doing like an upper lower split, you miss a leg day, right? Which is probably gonna be the leg day, it gets more tricky. You end up getting discrepancies, then mentally you kind of check out. Whereas if you're doing full body, for example, like we said at the start, on a bad week, I say this to clients, right? You're away, life's hectic. Can we get those two in this week? You know what I mean? Two full bodies, and you're still hitting every body part twice. And even if you don't do every single body part, if you just do the compound lifts, even if you just did like legs, shoulders, back chest, for example, right? The the so you're doing the compound movements, you can stay on track much easier then. So that's a good point.

  Philip Pape 25:59

  Yeah, I mean, I think you hit on the basics. This is what people need to understand and make make their plans flexible. And it sounds like different splits can work as long as you're getting the frequency, as long as you're getting the volume, which is all well established in the the research, like you said. And so I guess the last thing is in those in-between days, you know, you did touch on like something strength related, but I do know a lot of folks who would rather have the flexibility for just walks or, you know, playing some sports that they like or some sprinting or just not doing anything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Other than some walking. Like, what are your thoughts on, you know, working with clients? Like, what are the big activities that you'd recommend to fill in those recovery days to keep them active,

  Better activities for recovery days

  Philip Pape 26:37

  but not necessarily more strength movements, let's say.

  Martin Silva 26:40

  Yeah, yeah. Very simple, right? And it's not rocket science, bit boring, but just walking, right? Getting outside and moving as well, because a lot of people are like stuck indoors all the time. Or better yet, it's just doing something fun that they enjoy, right? Because as we get older, we forget to have fun. So if they've got a hobby or something that requires moving, you know, and just keeping themselves active, 100%. I would say just like literally, just the more you can move, the better. Yeah, simple as that, really, because you know, and I probably you probably see this as well. People you work with, you know, most people are just sat down most of the day. So it's a good opportunity to get outside, move, and ideally get in nature as well. The way I look at nature now is like a vitamin for me personally, you know, it's something I need. It's it's not it's not like it's something that's negotiable anymore. I need it to perform and to be able to deal with stress better, you know. So I factor that into my week as well. So that's what I I try to do with clients as well, is you know, get them to what are they doing for fun this week, for example, right? What are you doing for fun on the weekend or something? So I think it's a good good way to look at it for people is like, what am I doing for fun on the weekend? Let's plan something ahead. And it can be active stuff as well, right? It can be outdoors or whatever.

  Philip Pape 27:46

  I think it's really important what you hit on there. I had a coach who was a business coach, and he he actually he wasn't he wasn't helping me with nutrition training, nothing like that. And he's like, Philip, when's the last time you just took your laptop outside for half an hour? Like you just enjoyed nature. Yeah, I'm like, you make a good point. You make a good point. I'm a hustler, like I'm constantly, you know, we just get wrapped up in our our high stress world and and try to find that is important. So last thing I want to ask you then is in your own journey, right? Like, I'm sure you've changed your mind on things. I alluded to an Instagram post about incorporating mobility in between and how you need coaches and you need accountability. So, like, what's something that you've really evolved on over the past few years that you used to think this is how it is, and now maybe a little bit more flexible thinking on that.

  Martin Silva 28:29

  Yeah, I'm glad you reminded me of the mobility piece, actually. I got to bring that one in because you saw my post. So now I'm I'm 39 in a few months' time, right? So 38 now. And you know, in my 20s, I only started doing mobility in like my late, I think it was my late 20s, I started doing mobility. And I was just like, wow, this is awesome, especially lift before I lift. Mainly, I was I was trying to get it in before I lifted and just working on those usual kind of tight areas, hips, you know, shoulders and thoracic mobility, and then you know, the trunk rotational movements. And I because because back then I was more obsessed with

  Mobility, injuries, and changing beliefs

  Martin Silva 29:00

  kind of aesthetics, right? From the bodybuilders stuff, and I noticed, wow, I actually can lift way heavier when I do this, you know. So that was, and then it was like, okay, and I my body actually feels better, and I kept doing it. And then over the last year, I just got slack with it. I was just getting away because I was this is a trap that we all fall into as well, with loads of different things, right? When you can get away with something or it doesn't cause problems initially, then you try and get away with it, right? We try all of us try and cut corners, and you know, at times. So, anyway, long story short, I noticed a twinge in my in my shoulder a couple of months ago, and I'm like, yeah, okay, you're taking the mick. And I tried, and knowing everything I know as well, right? So almost 20 years of coaching, knowing how well I know my body, I would just go, I would warm up, I'd feel a little bit of a twinge in it. It's like a bit of an impingement, and then I would just go, I'm all right, I'll just I'll just train. I'm fine now, I feel fine. And me, I uh what happened? I don't want to go on too much of a ramble here, but like last week, I randomly, right? I never haven't been this for ages, I was just upstairs on my rooftop, did a bit of a workout like body weight, and I just started throwing a jab to see how my shoulder was. I literally couldn't even lift my arm up, and that was like a wake-up call. I'm like, this is ridiculous now. What are you doing? Right. And I was doing like I'm doing like heavy bench press and stuff as well. I'm like, it's it's it's crazy. Anyway, so started that last week, and that's something I've changed my mind on, really, is mobility is just a necessity. And and you know, mobility is is it involves some flexibility, but it also involves strength when you're doing mobility, and that is not only is it gonna stop you getting injured, right? That's the bare minimum requirement that you get from these things, but it really helps you get better results because it kind of amps up your nervous system if you do it before you lift, and then obviously if you're doing static stretches as well, that's really important. I'm kind of slack on that, but I can get away with the more mobility dynamic ones, right? So I should add in some static stuff, but the dynamic one takes care of most of it, and doing that before you lift, you get better results, and then obviously, you know, at a bare minimum reduces injury, but you feel so much better, man. Another thing I've changed my mind on, I was thinking about this is nutrition. Oh, sorry, the less is more thing. Everything we just talked about, I've even over the last couple of years, I've still realized with clients in particular and myself, less is more, less is more, right? It's like less, even less is more, right? How can I just scale that back a bit more in terms of results with building muscle? And how can I get them to change their relationship? Not even not relationship, but change their outlook with training so I can sell them in to those kind of little short workouts or shorter workouts done more frequently for most people. So, like 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, you know, whatever, just done like more frequently. And even if it's body weight stuff or even the bands and stuff or mobility on the days in between, quick workouts, because they just get better results and they feel better. And then they get it's the mindset shift they then get with just doing the stuff, doing the strength stuff without having to like push themselves. It's the whole mindset shift. So I feel like that is something I've really kept changing my mind on over the over the years. It's like less is more.

  Philip Pape 31:50

  Yeah, and that's what I love is that we should be open to changing our minds and realizing everybody's different. So, man, this has been really cool. I think we hit on, I think we hit on the main points. I want to send folks to connect with you. And also, if you if you happen to have a resource or a good episode related to what we talked about today, we can send them there. Any any place you want to send them to?

  Martin Silva 32:08

  Great, yeah, yeah. So, in terms of an episode that we yeah, I've got some recent ones actually. I think I just did a recent one on not the most recent trainer, one on my YouTube and on my podcast. It's I think it was like eat less, what was something like I got bigger, eating less, or something like that. Sorry, training less, not eating, train less and and built muscle. I trained less and got bigger. It's literally a few episodes ago. It's everything we touched on, but a bit more depth in terms of uh you know the stuff we touched on. So go check that out. Yeah, and like you said, the podcast is optimize your body on all platforms, and yeah, it's just modern silver fitness on on YouTube. Yeah, that's that's pretty much it. And obviously, Instagram as well at Martin Silver Fitness. So, in terms of my resources, you can find you know most stuff on uh on my Instagram on the link there. And yeah, that's pretty much it, my man. Yeah, man.

  Philip Pape 32:50

  We'll throw the links into the podcast, obviously, Instagram, YouTube, that specific episode so people can find it. And then, of course, we're doing a collaboration between our shows, so we'll have me on your show as well. So follow both shows. Uh, I think you're gonna love Martin. I mean, I follow a lot of nutrition and fitness podcasts, but then I unfollow a lot of them because they get kind of monotonous. And uh I try not to be that, and I I get the sense you're not that either. You have very, you know, targeted problem-solving topics that are really good for the uh this audience. So go check them out. Martin, thank you so much, man, for coming on Wits and Weights. It's a pleasure to know you and chat with you today.

  Martin Silva 33:23

  Same, man. Thanks for having me on, man. I'm looking forward to interviewing you next. Cheers, my man.

  Philip Pape 33:27

  Looking forward to it. Cheers.

Is My Metabolism Damaged From Dieting? (What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You) | Ep 487

Has years of dieting on and off damaged your metabolism? It that why fat loss feels so hard now?

This is one of the most common fears I hear, and the short answer is almost certainly... no. So what is going on?

Most of what feels like a broken metabolism is one of two things: either the normal discomfort of a deficit or the way your appetite pushes back as you lose fat, preventing a consistent deficit (where you feel like you're dieting but can never lose weight).

If you look at weight loss studies, those reporting the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least, implying that too much hunger isn't by definition "necessary" for a successful deficit.

Learn about metabolic adaptation in a moderate diet, the "four-week wall" when most people quit a fat loss phase, and the difference between the discomfort you should "ride out" and red flags where you should take a break or change something about the diet (like the speed/aggressiveness).

The people who finish are the ones who lose the fat!

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, body recomposition, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?
1:46 - The satiety diet question
4:10 - Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting
8:31 - Why more hunger predicts less fat loss
12:24 - What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit
19:29 - Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags
23:27 - Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish
25:33 - A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40
28:12 - Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

• Transcript

  Is your metabolism damaged from years of dieting?

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've dieted on and off for years and you're wondering, has all that restriction damaged my metabolism? Is that why fat loss feels so hard? This episode is for you. The short answer is no. It's almost certainly not damaged, and I'll show you the research behind that. But there is something real going on, and it's often about hunger and how you read the signs of your deficit. Some of what you're feeling is what it's supposed to feel like. But oftentimes people quit right when that calorie deficit is starting to pay off or about to. Some of it is a warning sign that maybe you shouldn't push through. So today I'm going to show you the difference between those, why your metabolism is more resilient than you've been led to believe, and whether you should push through or stop. 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 Pate. And a few weeks back, a couple episodes ago really, I made the case for the satiety diet. The idea that you can lose fat without fighting hunger the entire way through. And I still definitely stand by that. You should build your diet so it's as comfortable as possible, that it gives you as much satisfaction as possible, because that comfort, at least relative terms, to say a crash diet or a severe deficit where you are not thinking about satiety is what keeps you in the game. It's what leads to what we call adherence, sticking to that deficit so you can make it through successfully, especially when it's going to go on for a longer time because you have a lot of fat to lose. But then I got a question after that episode that drives today's episode. And it's something like, okay, Philip, I built a satiety diet.

  The satiety diet question

  Philip Pape 1:46

  I'm eating the protein and the fiber and the volume, and I'm still hungry sometimes. I still have days where my energy is lower. Is my metabolism just broken or adapted or downregulated from all the years that I spent under eating? And that question, the is my metabolism damaged from dieting, is probably one of the most common questions even today. Even though we've addressed it on this show quite a bit, I don't want to take for granted that we hear that message that you need to fix your metabolism. So we're gonna answer that head on. The short version is that your metabolism is far, far more resilient than social media might lead you to believe, especially when they're trying to sell you a program or a diet. What feels like a broken metabolism is usually two different things. It's either it's the normal discomfort from a deficit, but it's also the way that your appetite and your body pushes back when you lose fat and when you're in a deficit. Now, this is independent of other aspects of metabolism from, for example, muscle loss over the years and things like that. We're gonna set that aside for now and just talk about the adaptation piece and the, you know, is your metabolism damage piece? But if you can kind of learn to make sense of this, what's normal, what's not normal, should I finish my cut? Should I push through? Or maybe are these signs things telling me I need to slow it down or maybe take a diet break? That's what I'm trying to help you with because I think that's where we can make the right decisions so that we are successful with our fat loss and can take what I often call the fastest path, which isn't always the quickest path, if you know what I mean. Sometimes you have to take breaks and sometimes you have to slow it down so that you can continue and then be successful. This matters a lot if you've been dieting for many years, like many of us have. Uh, I think the statistic is the average woman diets over a hundred times in her lifetime. And you've probably been told, hey, if diet feels too hard, something is wrong with you or wrong with your metabolism, or you know, there should be an easier way to do it. We're gonna take that apart today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second self-check. These are three questions you could ask yourself on any given day within a cut, okay, a fat loss phase, to know whether to keep going or to back off. So I love these little kind of self-checks so that you can course correct if needed. All right, here's what we're covering today.

  Why relaxing your deficit turns into serial quitting

  Philip Pape 4:10

  First, why the advice to just fix it when it feels bad backfires and makes people what I'll call serial diet quitters. And unfortunately, the message on social media is often, you know, fat loss can be effortless. I'm gonna show you how by my program. We're gonna talk about what the research actually says about whether your metabolism is damaged, about hunger during a diet. And, you know, I'll warn you now, the hunger part is maybe not what you would expect. So we're gonna give you a little tease on that. And then the part that you are probably listening to this podcast for is how to tell the manageable discomfort apart from the real warning signs and what should you do for each one. We're gonna get practical. So let's start with where most people are right now. You let's say you start a fat loss phase and the first couple of weeks feel all right. Maybe even feel great because you're motivated. The scale maybe starts to move because of especially the water weight that drops in that first week. You see these stories a lot of time, like, I went on keto, I went on carnival, I started fasting and I lost all this weight in the first week or two. And you can see this on any diet, really. And then around week three, four, five, let's say, this is when things start to get a little bit hairy, where you're a little bit hungrier between meals, your workouts start to feel maybe a little more sluggish, maybe you're a little bit more irritable, maybe you're shorter with your kids, and then the doubt creeps into your brain, something's wrong, this isn't working, the diet's broken, you know, especially when you don't see the scale move, you know that voice that I'm talking about in your head, right? You know what I'm saying when the scale doesn't move, especially. So what do you do? Well, you fix it. You add some food back in and say, okay, I'm listening to my body, that's one approach, or you cut harder, that's another approach. Sometimes either of those approaches actually can work, right? Cutting, cutting calories further and or eating more or eating more food volume. But for a lot of people, what happens is they they relax the deficit every time that it starts to feel like a deficit. And if a deficit never really feels like a deficit, I guess the way I'm gonna put it, you're probably not in one. Okay. And so then you never finish the cut. Does this sound familiar where it starts to get a little bit hard, or you succumb to maybe emotional eating or binges, or you have all these things come up in your life, and all of a sudden the average calories end up drifting back to where you're not really in a cut. And you're like, well, my numbers say that I'm in a cut, and this feels great. Like, like I've been told it doesn't have to feel that bad if it's a moderate deficit, right? Even Phillips talked about that. If I have satiety, uh enough satiety in the diet, but then I'm not losing weight. So what is happening, right? And so this is what I want to get you away from. I want you to realize where the rubber hits the road and you have to kind of stick with it and ride things through rather than go in these waves and like quickly react to hunger or conclude that fat loss just doesn't work or your metabolism's damaged or whatever. Does that make sense? So I think the trap is that if it feels bad, you need to change something. I think that is correct if it's a high level of negative biofeedback, but not necessarily if it's just a little bit of something like hunger. And so we want to talk about the difference today. I don't want you to treat every uncomfortable feeling as a red flag when many of them are just a little bit of a warning or a little bit of a signal that maybe things are working and heading the direction you want. Does that make sense? And many people listening, dear, many of you listening have gone through many diets in the past and you can't trust your body and you feel like you can't trust your hunger signals. But that's because they were crashed diets or you were cutting carbs or something like that. If we take a reasonable approach to this, that's under control, under control and with intention, you can then distinguish the difference between these. Now, on the other extreme, you have the message that, hey, fat loss, you know, losing weight requires a little bit of suffering. You have to push through, you have to have discipline, and that's garbage too. I mean, that doesn't comport with the evidence or what actually works. It just makes pick makes people miserable, it makes them quit. And so we kind of have two sides of the extreme, right? Either that side or, you know, it shouldn't feel bad at all, it should be easy, you need to optimize your diet. And I'm gonna show you how to do that if you buy my program, right? So that's why I made the satiety episode.

  Why more hunger predicts less fat loss

  Philip Pape 8:31

  But here's the part where I think we should talk about hunger and what the research says, because this is a very important mechanism. And it surprised me a little bit as I reviewed the research, because I've heard for many years, and you probably have as well on podcasts, that hunger is the signal that fat loss is happening. I've said that before, and I still say it to clients: I'm like, well, if you're having a little bit of hunger, you can expect that. It's just not gonna be, we don't want it to be too high, and we also don't expect zero hunger either. Putting GLP ones aside, because that changes the whole game. And that the more you white knuckle it, the more it's working because, you know, you have to have some hunger. Now, whether you are talking white knuckling or just a little bit of hunger, you know, I've always said, okay, you have to have some. What the research says is that people who report the most hunger and the strongest cravings tend to lose the least amount of weight. There's a study called Beef Wise. It's six months of behavioral weight loss. And those who came in hungrier and more prone to deprivation lost less weight. People who reported more satisfaction with their diet lost more weight. Okay, so this kind of aligns with the satiety episode that I did not long ago. There's a big study called Pounds Lost. And the the the variable that predicted who actually hit the 5% weight loss target was not hunger, it was dietary restraint. Not restriction, but restraint, meaning the skill of controlling what you eat, right? Which is which is what we try to do all the time when we talk about on the show, like knowing what you want to eat, how much you want to eat, tracking it, et cetera, and being in control of that meal planning, meal prep, and all of that. There's also data we have that shows that on times or weeks where people rate their hunger highest, their adherence that same week tends to be lowest. So if you put all that together, hunger isn't necessarily the cost or the price of the progress you want to make to get those fat loss results. It's often the thing that makes people stop their fat loss, which you would say, okay, well, then all those people saying you should go through a fat loss phase without feeling hungered, it should be easy. Maybe aren't they then on the right track? Well, stick with me. So your body fights back when you're losing fat. And one of the ways it fights back is by cranking up your hunger. And people who feel that hunger the most are the ones that are likely most likely to stop their fat loss, to bail on it, right? So if the idea of just feeling hungry all the time means your fat loss is working, it's gonna lead you to chase getting to that point of feeling that hunger. However, the evidence shows us that too much of that causes you to stop your diet and get out. So it sounds like a catch-22. What do we do? Well, the goal is to feel the least hunger you can, even though you still have hunger while still being in a deficit. And that's the fine balance that we're trying to find. Now, this is important, so I don't get accused of contradicting myself. That doesn't mean that a could, a good cut feels like nothing. You cannot reliably lose fat with zero change in appetite. Some hunger is simply what you're gonna feel from a negative energy balance because your body is trying to defend that settling point. It used to be called a set point. Now we use the term settling point. It's trying to defend that weight, get back to homeostasis because it's getting the sense that you were depriving it of energy. It's like, what is going on? We need you to eat more to make up for this. So the point is that you shouldn't feel anything, it's that more discomfort doesn't correlate with more progress necessarily. And in fact, a lot of discomfort is more of a red flag that you're gonna end up quitting your diet. So that is the difference we're talking about today. I hope I didn't take too long to get to that setup. That's where my thought

  What metabolic adaptation means in a moderate deficit

  Philip Pape 12:24

  is going. So is your metabolism actually damaged? I want to answer this question. If you've been dieting for many years, especially, for almost everyone listening, the answer is no. I don't care how many diets you've done, how extreme or restrictive they were. And I want to go through why so that you stop blaming a broken metabolism or listening to anyone who suggests that. And then we can see what's actually fixable and in your in your control. So people assume that after enough diets, their metabolism has adapted almost not permanently. Maybe they know that it's not permanently, but they think it's, you know, look at the big, biggest loser science and how long it took to recover, and they're like, well, my metabolism is tanked. I'm also older, I've done so many diets. That is why I can't lose fat, and that is why the scale is stuck. And there is a phenomenon under this, of course, it's called metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is where your body burns a bit less than predicted when you lose weight, both because of the weight loss, but also because of the lack of energy while you're in the deficit. Now, in a moderate deficit, okay, a moderate diet where you're in, let's say, less than a 500-calorie deficit a day, the adaptation is something like 40 to 90 calories a day. It's not this catastrophic amount. We've seen that in the literature. Of course, it varies from person to person, also varies of how based on how long you've been at the diet. But these dramatic numbers you've heard, like the biggest loser study, where the metabolism dropped hundreds of calories below baseline, that was extreme starvation level dieting plus hours and hours of daily exercise. Okay. And that is not most people, even if you've had trouble dieting, even if you're doing quote unquote too much cardio or whatever, you're nowhere near to the level they were doing it on biggest loser, where they had to be pushed to that extreme. So that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more of a moderate cut, where when it gets hard around week four of the cut, which is typically, you know, a month in, your metabolism, it's not like it's breaking, or you're all of a sudden gonna plateau permanently and like that's it. We've seen in studies like the Kevin Hall studies at NIH that even unrealistically large amounts of metabolic adaptation don't really change when your weight plateaus. What changes is the lack of adherence that compounds, that adds up over time. And that's good news. It simply means most people are not in the deficit they think they are. And in their brain, they think they are. So it seems like your metabolism is broken. That's pretty cool. And I I've seen this in my own data where it's very, very hard sometimes to trust things unless you are tracking, right? Unless you know for sure you've had those taste-licks bites, those extra calories, you've had things that are more calorie dense than you thought, et cetera. And it all does add up. Now, damaged isn't the same as unchanged. Okay, change happens all the time. Transitions are happening all the time in your body. If your body has lost weight, then you are running on fewer calories than you used to be from being smaller, and because of that adaptation we talked about. And that's why maintenance calories take fewer, fewer calories than people would expect when you've lost weight. But that's just normal, right? That's just normal. There's also that this this wall that people hit around four to six. The question is, is this a real wall of weight loss, right? When you you you know, you lose weight pretty quickly in those first couple of weeks, maybe it starts to slow down weeks three, four, and then all of a sudden it seems to stall. Well, there, you know, there's nothing special that happens day 30 of a cut, but there are a few things happening. There's the motivation that was there at the beginning is starting to wear off. You know, the whole novelty of the diet is starting to wear off. The accumulated hunger from being in a deficit starts to add up. The initial fluid weight loss that occurred might have given you an artificial feeling that it was faster than it was. So all of these things added together feels like you hit a wall. And it shows up for the vast majority of people who are in a diet. And it's often right when people quit, or pretty soon after that, they quit the diet. That's where I see the frustration. That's where I see in our program eat more lift heavy. People start to vent in the comments or the community. And that's exactly where we can kind of talk them off a ledge by saying, Well, let's look at your data. Let's look at your data, understand what's going on. And this is probably the moment at which you just want to continue doing what you're doing because things are about to take a turn for the better. And here's the other thing appetite doesn't just reset overnight. There's research that follows people after significant weight loss that shows that their hunger hormones still shifted toward hunger even a year later. So being in a reduced state comes with elevated appetite and then it lingers, which I would say is just more reason to treat manageable hunger as something you would expect and kind of ride it out rather than try to fix it in a moment of panic. And then you might make things worse because then you might still have hunger and you're eating more food. Beyond that, if that makes sense. So, what we've established so far, just stay with me here, is some discomfort is normal and unavoidable. But more discomfort is not better, and too much discomfort is a red flag that you're probably not long for this diet anymore. But your metabolism is mostly fine. And the hard part of a diet often occurs right around when most people give up. So, now what do you do with all that? All right, I'm gonna share the fix in a moment, but if you're looking for a more accelerated way to get there, what we're gonna talk about with support, with personalization for you, if you want someone in your corner to look at the numbers and tell you, hey, what I'm feeling is normal, or am I cutting too hard, or what is the data telling me when my weight stalls? That is a huge part of what we do inside Eat More Lift Heavy. You can learn about it at eatmoreftheavy.com. This is the 26-week coached program that we run, real human coaches. And honestly, the single thing people tell us that made the most difference wasn't a, you know, tweak to their macros or something like that, something very tactical. It was having someone in their corner during the hardest parts of these phases. Okay, the four or five weeks into the diet doubts that creep in where we could say, you know what, this is normal, just hold the line. Or, you know what, your data is telling us maybe you do need a diet break. Maybe you do need to change these variables over here. And that is a very hard call to make for ourselves when we're hungry, when we're starting to second guess everything, or when you haven't done this before and you haven't built the confidence yet. So if that is where you are, if you're trying to lose, let's say, eight to 15 pounds of fat and you want a very structured, supportive way to do that, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Just take a look. All the information is there, the pricing is there, it's completely transparent. We've built this for especially people over 40 who are just tired of starting over and over again, who want to sustain their results and will help you get there. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.

  Hunger and discomfort you ride out vs. true red flags

  Philip Pape 19:29

  All right, so the whole game behind this is learning to sort what you're feeling into the right bucket so that you can act on data versus feelings versus whatever. And the the first bucket is I'll call manageable discomfort. It's what you should expect, but maybe you didn't know you should expect it. And that's where you generally just ride it out. The other bucket is unmanageable struggles, right? The struggle bus, where something has to be adjusted in your protocol. And it may feel the same. And everybody's feelings are different for like, you know, when you go to the doctor and they're like, tell me your pain on a scale of one to 10. I hate that question because I don't know, what is my six compared to your six? How is that objective? So it's kind of the same thing, all right? That's why I think this is more difficult than people make it out to be. And I wanted to do a whole episode on it. So let's look at both buckets. The first bucket, manageable discomfort. What does that look like? Well, you're hungry between meals, but you can get to the next meal without it really affecting you that much. Doesn't ruin your life, doesn't make you, you know, run for the fridge. It's just this feeling, right? This feeling of a little bit of a gap, a little bit of emptiness, a little maybe, maybe some rumbles. And then along with this, your other biofeedback are things like your workouts may feel a little more flat than they used to be, but your strength is still there. Maybe you are hitting more reps still, right? Maybe you're mentally a bit more irritable, but it's kind of a blip. It's not like it takes over. It doesn't, you don't obsess about it. Your sleep is still pretty solid. And then the real key to this, to tell you that it's manageable, is that it is, I'll say stable or slowly getting more familiar to you, like you adapt to it, is my point. Like you kind of getting used to it and it's stable rather than getting worse or worse. That I honestly is the biggest indicator is okay, you've had a little bit of hunger, but a lot of people, everybody's gonna experience that. The question is, it does it kind of even out and stayed roughly in that zone, which can be indicated if you're trying if you're saying measuring your hunger on a scale of one to 10, and you go from a 10 to a nine to an eight to a seven, and it kind of hovers around six or seven and doesn't keep going down. For example, now for you, a six might be terrible. I don't know. I'm going back to my earlier comment about the one to ten. But your body, when it's in a calorie deficit, is going to give you a little bit of hunger. It's stable. You can ride it out. You expected it, you looked forward, not look forward, but you expect that to happen. Okay. The other, the struggle bus piece, the unknown. Manageable struggle is a completely different beast. Okay, that's something that you don't want to push through because you're going to make matters worse. And honestly, a lot of you have been in this situation. And hunger that is relentless, that's ravishing, that keeps driving you to binge eat, where you are not choosing to eat more, you're just getting overpowered emotionally. Food noise, along with a lack of performance in multiple areas of your physiology, like your strength is dropping over and over. Your sleep is getting worse. Your mood is maybe getting worse and affecting your life. You know, for the women listening, this could even affect your period, which that would definitely be red flag potentially. Feeling cold all the time. I mean, when I'm in a big deficit, I actually start to feel cold. And usually it's if it's a big deficit, I'm keeping it really short as well. I don't like that feeling of just feeling weak and cold, right? Dizzy, uh depleted. Any of that is potentially a red flag. And the answer here is hey, the deficit's probably too aggressive for you, or you've done it for too long, and you just have to back it off. Now, there's a lot of ways to do that. You can slow the rate down, you can take breaks, you can use refeeds, you can go on and off and do intermittent dieting. Like there's a lot, not fasting, intermittent dieting, right? You go into the diet or out of the diet across days or weeks. Okay? So that's kind of like your instrument panel giving you the dashboard warning of what's happening. Now, how do we be pro how do how are we proactive about this?

  Why a slower cut is what gets you to the finish

  Philip Pape 23:27

  So you don't even have to overthink any of this stuff. Well, it's annoyingly simple, let me tell you. That's this podcast is all about giving you the simple fix. It's to run a smaller deficit than your brain wants you to. Okay. A lot of us pick a deficit based on how fast you want the result. And then you're like, oh, but it feels hard. If we instead aim for something like at most a half a percent to three quarters of a percent of your body weight a week, for a lot of you, that's going to be slower than you want. Some of you, that's right in the realm, and you're probably good. And for some of you who are smaller with lower metabolisms, that might be too aggressive. So again, it's highly individualistic, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot around that 0.5% of your body weight a week. And I know that's not a sexy answer, but the slower deficit is gonna produce way less of that struggle bus discomfort, or it shouldn't produce it at all for the most part, which means you're far more likely to keep going and actually make it through. And what we know from the research is that people who finish are the ones who lose the fat. Sounds obvious, but if you don't actually finish your diet, you're not gonna get the result of the diet. There's even good data in post-menopausal women, specifically, that the more aggressive cut, it's not, it's not just that it feels worse, but it does potentially cause muscle loss and bone loss. I don't want to overpitch that, but there are there is evidence on that. And we do know that going too aggressive does risk muscle loss, which is not something we want. Of course, I'm not talking about that level of aggressiveness today. I'm really talking about when you're just past the line versus coming under that line and finding out where that line is, right? Now, if you're keeping protein up high enough, somewhere around 0.7 to one grams per pound of body weight, if you continue to lift, those are the important things for holding on to muscle while you lose the fat. They also happen to blunt hunger. Back in January of 2026, we did a whole hunger series on this podcast. Go find those. And at least one or two had to do with the link between training, lifting weights, muscle, and hunger.

  A straight answer on fat loss for women over 40

  Philip Pape 25:33

  And I do want to make one final comment about the women who are listening who are in their 40s or 50s, peri-postmenopause. I am definitely not gonna tell you that menopause makes this hopeless or ridiculously difficult, or your body is uniquely broken. There is research comparing how peri and postmenopausal women respond to a diet versus younger women, but it's very thin, it's almost non-existent. That's one of the problems we have, is we don't have very much data in your specific population, especially not head-to-head trials. But the one direct comparison I could find showed no difference in how much fat they lost or how well they stuck to it. Because if you can get into the deficit, you can lose the fat. The other things that are going on are things like your body composition shifts due to a lack of lifting weights, for example, due to a loss of muscle mass. And if you are in our audience or you're working with us, we get you lifting weights. And so that solves a big percentage of all of these potential issues or even symptoms that you have. I shouldn't say all the symptoms, but many of the symptoms you have during this period once you start lifting weights. But if you have rough symptoms, you should be talking to your doctor or therapist or hormone specialist or whatever about all the options. You should just always be looking at all the options. And I'm not going to pretend there's like a menopause-specific diet hack because there is none. There is none. But what I am saying is simple. You should expect some discomfort during a deficit, but learn to read it. Ride it out if it's manageable, respect the warning signs and the red flags, and run the slowest cut that you can stand. And there's many reasons you can or can't stand a slow cut. I know you want to lose X number of pounds, so you want to do it a certain amount of time, but you're not going to get there if you go too fast, is my point. If you do that, if you run the slowest cut you can manage and stand, then you're going to finish it. And finishing is the whole thing here. All right, before we wrap up, I promise you that 30-second self-check to tell whether you should stay in the cut or not. That's coming up in just a second. But if this episode appealed to you, if it taught you something, if you think someone else would benefit, please just share the episode with them. Text it to them, say, hey, I think I'm gonna like this. It's pretty cool. And there's other episodes around this. And if as an alternative, if you'd rather yourself go back and listen to another episode related to this one, I would go listen to the satiety diet episode. Just look for satiety diet in your feed and make sure to follow the show so you can get the whole feed. That one is about building a diet that is comfortable in the first place. So that combined with a moderate deficit is really what it's all

  Bonus: 30-second self-check for the toughest days in a deficit

  Philip Pape 28:12

  about. All right, here's a 30-second check that you can run. Anytime you have a hard, difficult day during a fat loss phase. The first one is my strength holding? Like, are my numbers in the gym kind of holding steady? I mean, they could be going up. That's even better. But things aren't dropping. I'm not feeling tanked in the gym, really tired, really sore, really weak, or even skipping gym sessions. Okay, that's the first one. If the if the numbers are steady or growing, you're fine. You're probably fine. You haven't been hit by any big energy crash or reds or low energy availability or anything like that. If they're dropping or have any of these other symptoms I just mentioned, that's a flag, a red flag that, you know, maybe you need to take a break. Number two, can I get to my next meal? And what I mean by that is okay, not am I a little bit hungry? Everybody's gonna be a little bit hungry. That's totally allowable. The question is, is the hunger in control of you or are you in control of the hunger? If you're losing that fight, especially on a regular basis, if you're binging, that is a big flag. That is a big flag. We don't want to be doing that. And number three is how is your sleep and mood? I'll say across the week. So, like as a trend, not just today, you know, you can have a bad hour, a bad day. I know I've had stressful days and totally changes my mood. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like an entire week where you're just not getting good sleep or your mood is just in the gutter, that's a red flag. Now, if you have zero red flags from those three questions and you're feeling a little bit of hunger or a little something, that's probably just the cut working and you can ride it out. If you have even one or more of these flags, even just one, I would suggest you probably need to back off on the deficit, at least to allow those things to resolve. Strength, hunger, sleep, mood, very important signals. You don't need a coach to do that check. You can do it yourself, and it's very quick. So I hope that's helpful. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the goal is never to feel nothing, it's to feel just enough hunger and I'll say discomfort to know that it's working and know the difference when it's not. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Eat More Protein to Lose More Fat (No Calorie Deficit Needed) | Ep 486

Most of us treat fat loss as a subtraction problem. Eat less, move more, lose weight.

Energy balance (calories in calories out) is definitely real, so that holds at the top level when it comes to pure weight loss.

The trouble is that "eat less" is often done restrictively, often leads to even LESS protein, nutrient, and fiber intake, and often done at a rapid pace, any of which cause you to lose muscle, energy, get hungrier, and all the other things that ultimately make you quit (or gain he weight back).

This episode goes deeper than calories to the power of... protein! Protein does not behave like the rest of your calories. It costs more to digest, though that effect is smaller than people claim. It is also the most filling thing you can eat, and I get into a study where people dropped hundreds of calories a day on their own, without being told to, just from eating more of it. That is the real lever, and why eating more can make you leaner even when you are not "trying" to push an aggressive calorie deficit.

Then there is the claim that you can eat unlimited extra protein and still lose weight and body fat, so we'll examine that nutrient partitioniong claim. I also discuss daily protein targets, what to do if you're already leaner, and a 30-second way to think about the scale that explains how your body can change while the number stays flat.

Try my favorite custom protein! Get 20% off your first custom protein blend at truenutrition.com/witsandweights with code WITSANDWEIGHTS. Build your own protein from the base up, pick your flavor and sweetener, add "bosts" like ashwaghanda, fiber, creatine, and more, and hit your daily target with something you're excited to drink!

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why eating less keeps backfiring for fat loss
3:30 - Energy balance vs. differences between macros like protein
7:28 - Does protein burn more calories to consume vs. fats and carbs?
9:20 - Why protein is the most filling macro for fat loss
10:03 - How high protein creates a deficit through appetite
12:30 - What is the best protein supplement?
13:40 - Nutrient partitioning and mouse studies
16:00 - The myth of "free" protein calories in a surplus
20:30 - Your daily protein target for muscle and fat loss
22:35 - Why protein matters more for lean dieters
24:50 - Free macros guide for body composition
25:33 - Bonus: the two-envelope trick for body recomposition

Episode Resources

• Free Nutrition 101 for Body Composition (Fat Loss Macros) guide - how to find your maintenance and set your protein, carbs, and fats for any phase (fat loss, building muscle, or body recomp):
  https://witsandweights.com/macros

• Transcript

  Why eating less keeps backfiring for fat loss

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Can eating more protein actually burn more fat without even being in a calorie deficit? Well, protein does something to your body that no other food does. It's the most filling macro you can eat. It costs you way more calories just to digest it, and it's the one nutrient that protects your muscle when you're losing weight, which means eating more of it can leave you leaner, sometimes even when you're not in a deficit. Today I'm going to show you the science behind that. I'll call out the one protein claim that gets oversold, and I'll give you the exact number to hit no matter what your goal is right now. 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 today we're going after one of the most deeply held beliefs in all of fitness, which is that fat loss is a subtraction problem, that you need to eat less and move more, shrink those numbers, reduce those calories. If you're over 40, if you've been dieting on and off for years, hey, we all have. Maybe you're even going through perimenopause or menopause right now, and you feel like your body isn't cooperating anymore, you have almost certainly been sold the subtraction model over and over. And it is not that the math is wrong or that calories and calories out is wrong exactly. It's that the math hides an input, a very important input having to do with the composition of what you're eating that is a very, very powerful level. And that, of course, is protein. And when you understand why it's different, and we're going to get into some more nuance today than you probably hear on most podcasts, where there is a lot of discussion about protein today, for sure. When you understand these differences, you stop thinking about fat loss as how little can I get away with eating? And you start thinking about it as what do I need to add into my diet, into my nutrition, so my body does the work for me. So things are easier. So I feel better. So I perform better. So I build muscle. So I lose fat. So I get leaner, all in a way that doesn't feel like this huge amount of misery and suffering. And then I want you to stick around to the end of the episode because after the main content, I'm going to share a 30-second mental model that I use with clients called the two envelope trick. And it's a very fast conceptual visual way to understand why the scale is very unreliable, especially when you're trying to change our body composition, but also to motivate you to focus on what we're talking about today. All right, so here's where we're headed. I'm going to show you the three real reasons that protein affects your body fat differently. I'm going to be honest with you about a big claim that floats around online today that does not survive what I call skeptical scrutiny. And then I'm going to give you the protein floor to set and hold no matter what phase you're in. So some of this is going to be a refresher, but there are going to be some surprises today for you in how powerful protein really is. So let's start with the belief, because the conventional data that gets shared often creates competing camps that don't necessarily need to be competing. Meaning there's some truth in a lot of what people say online. There are a lot of falsehoods as well. And sometimes the truths overlap from two different camps. So the conventional model is really about energy balance. Calories in,

  Energy balance vs. differences between macros like protein

  Philip Pape 3:30

  calories out. It's like your body is a calorie bank account. You eat less than you burn. And you now your body has to withdraw from the fat account, right? If it's a bank account, and therefore you lose weight. And at the highest level, that's pretty much true. I'm not a calorie denier. Energy balance is real. Thermodynamics exists, it's physics. Okay, we need to assert that that is a truth. But what the model treats as an assumption that is not true is that it treats every calorie as identical. Now, a calorie is just a measurement of energy. So, in essence, the energy piece of it is identical. But your bot the way your body processes calories changes drastically depending on what you eat. And of course, we know this because we know that, for example, eating all processed foods versus eating mostly whole foods, you're going to be hungrier and you're going to eat more just naturally because they don't fill you up as much. Well, that's because it's affecting your hunger and your hormones related to hunger. That is a real phenomenon that's occurring because the calorie source is different. So we have to kind of separate calories, which is a real thing, it's a unit of energy, from the practical reality of when you eat foods from different types of macros and nutrients separate from the calories. There's other things going on, is my point. So a hundred calories of protein, a hundred calories of rice, a hundred calories of olive oil, they all go into your body with the same amount of energy. And yes, but that's not the whole story. There's a lot more that's actually far more important, in my opinion. In fact, when you only count calories, you often do yourself a disservice because then you start making choices based on calories rather than based on these other factors. When you think about what happens when a chronic dieter, and a lot of you listening are chronic dieters. I say that with love because I've been there. When a chronic dieter tries to lose more fat, and oftentimes you talk in terms of weight loss instead of fat loss, which is the first problem. But anyway, what do you do? What's the move? I'm gonna cut calories again. I get emails from people who say I've cut down to 900 calories and I still can't lose weight. And they say it as if I should be losing weight because I've cut calories, not realizing that there are other factors involved, both on the calories and in calories outside. Now, where do calories usually get cut from? Well, people cut the thing that's easiest to cut, which is usually whatever the food is on your plate in general. And so protein tends to drop along for the ride, even though, as we're gonna discuss later, protein is one of those things you want to keep anchored at a reasonably high level, but it tends to drop and now you're eating less total and you're eating less protein specifically, and you're hungry, hungrier, and your training suffers. And even if a scale drops, part of what you're losing might be muscle because now you're not holding on to that. If you're even lifting weights, which many of you are not doing that either, and you have to be lifting weights. The older we get, the more this is a problem, especially through periposmenopause, where you're already fighting to hold on to that lean tissue. So the subtraction model, if you follow it, you're going to walk straight into a big cyclical vicious cycle, I should say. A big vicious cycle where you're losing muscle tissue, your metabolism's declining, you have to cut more, you stop losing weight, so you cut more, metabolism declines. You get what I'm talking about. It's a vicious cycle. So it's not that calories don't count. It's that eat less as this blanket instruction results in all of the wrong decisions for protein, for nutrients, for energy, for performance, for muscle that are essentially the opposite of what we're trying to do. Which you're gonna understand why that leads to, okay, why so why some people say eat more to lose weight or eat more to lose fat. And even that is overly simplistic. You have to explain what you mean. What are you eating more of and why, and in what you know, phase and process are you doing it? But anyway, let's talk about why protein is so different.

  Does protein burn more calories to consume vs. fats and carbs?

  Philip Pape 7:28

  And the first one is a little bit oversold, but I want to talk about it, and that is the thermic effect of food, T E F. This is that protein burns more calories to digest than the other macronutrients. That is true. Every time you eat, your body spends some energy just processing what you ate. And the macros are very different in how this happens. So when you eat fat, it costs almost nothing to process, about 0 to 3% of the calories get consumed. Carbs are around 5 to 10%, and protein is around 20 to 30%. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body's gonna spend something like 20 to 30 of those calories just breaking it down and putting it to use. So you net as little as 70 of those 100 calories. Now, this is a real thing that has been measured in humans, but the size of it probably gets oversold a little bit. So let's say you're eating 180 grams of protein a day. That's a very solid target for a lot of people in this audience, probably above what many of you are eating, to be honest. But that's what I eat. So I weigh 180 pounds. I tend to eat around 180 grams. That is 720 calories from protein. So if you're netting an extra, call it up to 20% back compared to eating those same calories as fat, you're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 calories a day. Now that is real. I'm not gonna call it magic, but that is very real, right? 80 to 100 calories, but it's also not massive and you know, 500 pounds a day, a pound a week type of reel, but it's starting to move the needle. And guess what? It's the smallest of the effects I'm talking about, even though a lot of people fixate on this, but I think it's good to know. Okay, so it's a nice little tailwind. Now let's get to the next part that starts to change your behavior and starts to change the result. And that is, okay,

  Why protein is the most filling macro for fat loss

  Philip Pape 9:20

  that is satiety fullness. Protein is by far the most filling macronutrient per calorie. And this has evidence behind it, despite the keto and carnivore folks trying to suggest that fat is the most uh filling, or some people say carbs are the most filling. It really comes down to protein. Now, protein as a whole, I get it, it's a macro and it contains lots of different foods. So we have to look at specifics. But there's a classic study from 2005, Weigel and colleagues, where they raise people's protein to about 30% of their calories. And then, and this is really important, they let them eat as much of anything they wanted, totally free. We call this ad libinum. That's what the researchers call it. And what happened is people spontaneously ate about 440

  How high protein creates a deficit through appetite

  Philip Pape 10:03

  fewer calories a day. That's it. So they were not counting calories, it was purely natural because they were full. They just stopped reaching for more food and they ate 440 fewer calories a day. And so what happened? Over the study, they lost fat without being told to be in a calorie deficit or trying to be in a calorie deficit. So the protein created the deficit for them through their own appetite. It's not that they weren't in a deficit. This goes back to why I say energy balance is a real thing, but how we get there and whether we get there and whether we stick to that deficit is much more practically important. So if you think about that, this flips the whole psychology of dieting. The restriction or subtraction model says you have to fight your hunger with willpower, you've got to be in a calorie deficit. Cut, cut, cut. You've got to starve, you've got to do optavea, you gotta do uh uh what's that called? Weight watchers, whatever. The protein model says, hey, just raise your protein high enough, and a big piece of that psychological battle that you've had for years just disappears because your gut is sending the fullness signals. Your hunger hormones tend to settle down. The food you would have grazed on or licked, tasted bit in the evening no longer is attractive to you, or you don't, you just simply naturally don't reach for it, or you simply feel full. This is the difference between white knuckling a diet and one that is running a little bit on autopilot, which is where we try to get our clients to and what this podcast is all about. I want it to be easier for you guys. And if you're on GLP1s and you start to do this, you might find that you're too full and you have to reduce the dose or even start to come off of it. This is one of the key levers that we use to help people reduce their dosage or potentially come off of it with working with their medical professional, because that is not in my scope of practice. And if the, let's say the evening snacking, that's where you tend to fall into the temptation, right? This is a great lever. More protein earlier in the day. We actually see studies where front loading the protein can be even more beneficial, can vastly help than just trying to try harder. And we know this from the evidence. So this is a great time to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because getting more protein into your day is what they help solve, but in a very cool way, because you get to build it yourself. Instead of a one-size-fits-all tub, you customize

  What is the best protein supplement?

  Philip Pape 12:30

  everything the base, the flavor, the sweetener, and even what they call boosts. It just takes a few minutes. You pick the base first. There are, I think, over 20 types of protein: whey, plant-based, dairy-free, all third-party tested and then tested again at their facility. Then you add the flavor, which is sweetened with stevia or monk fruit, and you set how intense the flavor is, or you go unflavored. And then you add what they call boosts, like fiber, probiotics, ashwa ganda. They have a whole bunch of those as well. And honestly, I love how it tastes. So I have a blend with whey, egg, and casein protein, cookies and cream, stevia sweetened, and it is very smooth. None of that chalky aftertaste or chemical aftertaste you get from a lot of proteins, and it doesn't affect my stomach at all. So if you have an intolerance, this is a great way to control what goes in your protein. So if you're looking for a supplement that kind of solves everything, tastes great, and gives you a little extra in terms of these boosts, go to true nutrition.com slash wits and weights and use the code wits and weights for 20% off your first custom blend. That's true nutrition.com slash wits and weights, code wits

  Nutrient partitioning and mouse studies

  Philip Pape 13:40

  and weights for 20% off. Try their customizer, build it today, and enjoy getting delicious protein customized exactly to your needs. All right, now we've covered the two effects that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to protein's magic, the fullness and the digestion. But there is a third one that potentially is more exciting, but also more overrated or oversold. And so I want to get into the nuance here, and this is why I saved this one for last, because it requires a little bit of explaining. The idea is called nutrient partitioning. And in its, I guess the strongest claim is that when you're building muscle, your body preferentially shuttles nutrients toward that muscle and away from fat storage, so that when you add protein and of course you're training hard in the gym, you can produce muscle gain and fat loss at the same time, what we call body recomposition. And there's a good review by Habers and colleagues from 2025 that talks about the mechanisms here, which is that growing muscle pulls in glucose and the muscle growth signals, the signals from that growing muscle, then increase the release of fat. And because building tissue is metabolically expensive, the energy gets quote unquote spent on construction of the muscle instead of stored as fat. And so it sounds awesome. It sounds like like the holy grail for body recomp, you know, body recomp. But in that same review, in plain language, it says this partitioning effect is most apparent in animal models. That's in mice. And the best demonstration we have in humans comes from a class of drugs called myostatin inhibitors, like bimagrumab, where people gain lean mass and loss significant fat at the same time. But that's a drug. You have to be taking that drug. That's not just eating more protein. So when you strip it down to what do we really know based on the evidence and what's proven in humans eating food and lifting weights, the effect is there, but maybe it's smaller and slower than we think it is based on the animal work, even though there is a whole set of research looking at myostatin inhibitors that could change the game in the future, just like GLP1s have. So muscle and muscle gain and fat loss can happen at the same time. We have plenty of human recomposition data that I'm gonna get to in a bit, but your body isn't

  The myth of "free" protein calories in a surplus

  Philip Pape 16:00

  this like magic nutrient partitioning machine that ignores calories, right? You still have to have you still have to have the energy balance accounted for as well. So this brings me actually to the biggest online claim for protein. And it comes from real studies, as many of these claims do, right? Things get cherry-picked and then they get reinterpreted so often incorrectly. These are the Antonio studies where resistance-trained people ate huge amounts of protein. And we're talking like 4.4 grams per kilogram. So that's hundreds of extra protein calories a day. And then on paper, when we look at their numbers, they didn't gain any body fat. And then people took that to mean, hey, protein calories in a calorie surplus are essentially free. Like you literally cannot get fat from extra protein. And I've heard really good folks like Dr. Bill Campbell talk about this research, not with that language, you know, with the right amount of nuance, where they're like, yeah, there's there's other things going on. What it's it seems that you're adding protein in and then not gaining body fat. But what is actually happening? Well, the first of all, there's methodological issues with the studies themselves. We could break that down first, and that is self-reporting, which is always a challenge, not, not, not the be-all-end-all, but self-reporting what you eat. And we we know this is one of the most consistent findings in all of nutrition research that people are terrible at reporting their intake, especially when you ask them to eat way more than usual. And it's honestly right there in the data. I mean, if the subjects didn't gain the weight you'd expect if they'd actually eaten all that extra protein above and beyond their current calories, they probably didn't eat as much as reported, or they unconsciously compensated by moving more and eating less elsewhere. And the moving more piece, people want to focus on and say, well, yeah, that's okay, Philip, but it's because their metabolism, their energy out must have gone way up to make up for it. It didn't go up at that much. I mean, it probably went up for sure. And there's things like the thermic effect of food we've already talked about. But when you actually control for these things, like in a metabolic ward where researchers are controlling the calories that you eat, and by the way, they did this in 2012. Bray and colleagues, these what they call protein overfeeding studies, we do see an addition of body fat. So I think there's some contradictions here. People love to glom onto something that seems like, you know, the secret, the magic. And you know what? It's close to magic, not as much as some of these people claim, but it's still phenomenal. Eating more protein definitely will result in less body fat added and more lean mass added than overfeeding on carbs or fat. So we definitely lean by toward biasing protein, but it still also comes down to energy balance. So the the honest like conclusion here is you cannot eat unlimited protein in a big surplus and expect zero fat gain. Okay. What does come out of this data that matters to you is because protein is so filling, because it costs more to digest, and because it drives your body to build and repair instead of store fat, then if you build your diet around a high protein floor, it will tend to naturally settle you near maintenance or a mild deficit on its own, even when you're eating what feels like a lot of food. Okay, and your metabolism, your expenditure might be a little bit higher as well, which means you could eat more than you would have otherwise on a purely calorie basis as well. You're not gaining fat because thermodynamics doesn't work, because calories in, calories out doesn't work, but because, or it's not that you're not gaining fat because of those, but it's because all of these things tend to stack together, resulting in you being at maintenance or in a slight deficit while it feels like you're eating a lot more and you're preserving or building muscle. So you're getting some body recomp at the same time. So I know you want it to be all flashy and this amazing like eat unlimited protein and you're gonna lose body fat. I will say people who jack up their protein do often lose body fat, but it's not because of thermodynamics being broken. It's because of all these other things that are that are happening, which guess what? For practical purposes, that matters. Like that's super important anyway. So you can say, you can say at a top level, eat more protein, you'll probably lose body fat. And it's probably generally true for a lot of people, which is phenomenal. That's pretty cool. So now when we talk about body recomp, the idea of losing fat and

  Your daily protein target for muscle and fat loss

  Philip Pape 20:30

  gaining muscle at the same time, we the discussion was always in the past, oh, that's only for beginners or that's for people on drugs, you know, performance and anti drugs or whatever. And that's not true. You know, we know a lot more people can experience body recomp, even experienced lifters. Eric Helms, I have a lot of respect for Eric. He put out a great piece recently working through the math of it in mass, uh the mass research review. And the bottom line is that whether you gained or lost body energy depends on the relative change in fat mass versus muscle, not the number on the scale, right? Because a pound of fat holds roughly 3,500 calories of energy, whereas a pound of muscle holds only about 800. So the density difference makes a difference here. And it it complicates the math. So when people are trying to do the math, they they tend to get lost in it because of those differences. So you can hold your body weight the same, like your body weight doesn't change. But then if you lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle, that is a massive change in your body composition without a change in your body weight, which is what we deal with all the time when clients are like, oh, my weight did not go down. I was hoping to lose weight, but my inches went down and my lifts going up, and I honestly look a little bit trimmer. You might still have a little belly fat that you want to lose. That's fine, but you are getting leaner. So that's pretty incredible. All right. So if protein is this big, close to magical lever, how much do you need? Let's just get that out of the way again, especially if you're new to the show or you need Refresher. The target that I usually go with from the research is roughly 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day. That's about 1.6 grams per kilo in metric. And there's a really well-known meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues in 2018 that found muscle gains start to plateau around that point. More than that is not harmful. There's no issues with it. If you like to eat more protein, awesome. Enjoy it. There is a case for going higher up to a gram per pound, especially where when you're in an aggressive fat loss phase and you're trying to hold on to that lean mass.

  Why protein matters more for lean dieters

  Philip Pape 22:35

  And then it's fine to go up just because of preference. And if you happen to get benefits that we talked about today, like satiety above and beyond that amount, and that affects your calories overall and makes things easier, go for it. There's newer research, it was a meta regression from Reffalo, Trexler, and Helms that looked at how much protein you actually need to hold muscle in a deficit. And the interesting finding is that pushing protein really high, like around 1.1 grams per pound, only mattered for the leanest people. So for example, women already under 20% body fat and men under 12%. But for everybody else, and that's most of us listening, protein explained only a small slice of who was able to hold on to muscle. Guess what explained more of that? Well, the size of the deficit and whether they were training hard. So I'm not going to oversell the protein floor. I never have, or at least not in a long time since I started doing this podcast. I often use the 0.7 grams per pound as adequate for almost everybody. And if you want to go higher for other reasons, that's fine too. The last thing I want to mention is the idea of anabolic resistance. A lot of the research we have skews toward young men, but anabolic resistance gets more pronounced as you age. It means your muscles respond a little less to a given amount of protein than they used to. And I guess the practical upshot of this is it kind of simplifies things that, hey, you should just make sure to get a lot of protein. Just 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal is usually a way, good, good rule of thumb. Don't wait for dinner. If, if anything, front load it if you can and spread it out throughout the day so that you can get that floor. All right, before I wrap up, remember I promised you that 30-second mental model at the end, the two envelope trick. I'm gonna share that in a second. So stay with me. But if this episode sold you on the idea that protein is the lever and eat less is probably not way the way to go, the next natural question is okay, Philip, what do all my other numbers look like? How much protein should I eat? And then how do I set my carbs and fat? So people ask, what should be my macros be? Well, I put together a free guide

  Free macros guide for body composition

  Philip Pape 24:50

  a while back that walks you through setting up your macros for different phases and why and the kind of flexibility you have behind it. It's called Nutrition 101 for body composition. Go to witsandweights.com slash macros, totally free. And it's my whole framework on flexible dieting. How to find your maintenance, how to set your protein, carbs, and fats, how to make it sustainable. Just general ideas of setting this up, the basics. Everything we talked about today, put into the actual targets that you can use. So go to wits and weights.com slash macros to download that free guide. All right, here's the two envelope trick or concept. I want you to imagine your body as two envelopes. That's it. It's it's just two envelopes. One has

  Bonus: the two-envelope trick for body recomposition

  Philip Pape 25:33

  all your fat in it, and one has all your muscle in it. All right. And they're gonna have very different amounts of energy. A pound of fat has 3,500 calories, a pound of muscle has 800 calories. But you have different amounts of fat muscle. Let's not worry about that. Now, over a couple months, you lose a pound of fat and you gain a pound of muscle. So what happens? You're gonna take a pound of fat out of your fat envelope, you're gonna add in a pound of muscle to your muscle envelope, and so they're gonna balance each other out. What's gonna happen? You're gonna step on the scale, it's gonna read the same. No change in scale. And so if you're only using the scale, you conclude, oh, nothing happened. I was trying to get leaner. That means I was trying to lose weight, nothing happened, right? But you just took 3,500 calories out of the fat envelope of your body, and you only put 800 into the muscle envelope. So you've actually gotten rid of some volume and you should actually be leaner. Your clothes should fit a little bit differently, you should feel stronger and look leaner, and none of that is visible on the scale because the scale only measures weight. And yet you just traded a light energy dense tissue for a heavier, leaner one. All right, that's the best I could do it to visualize this on a podcast. The next time the scale doesn't move, I want you to ask a better question. Not, hey, what do I weigh, but which envelope is filling and which one is emptying? Because you want to fill the muscle envelope and you want to empty the fat envelope. That is the game. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, fat loss was never really a subtraction problem. Protect your protein, protect your muscle, let your body do the math for you. And I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How Hard Should You Really Be Lifting After 40? | Ep 485

How hard are you REALLY training? Is it enough to build muscle?

Most lifters believe they are stopping a rep or two short of failure, when the real gap is far wider, and it often stalls muscle and strength.

Learn about the research on proximity to failure and how badly we misjudge our own effort, including predicting reps to failure and how close to failure you need to train to build muscle. We get into why the common advice to leave reps in reserve backfires for people who picked up strength training over 40, what training to failure does and does not require, and how women and older lifters recover from hard sets.

Plus, you'll learn a calibration drill and a mental trick to make your effort objective so your gym time pays off.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps

0:00 - Effort and proximity to failure
2:27 - Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40
5:00 - Training hard vs. training volume
7:55 - Accuracy of estimating reps to failure
10:05 - Proximity to failure and muscle growth
12:20 - Progressive overload methods
13:24 - Calibration drill to calculate true failure
16:30 - Recalibrating effort over time
18:50 - Bar speed and effort signals
20:30 - Training to failure for older lifters
22:13 - Rep range goal setting 

Episode Resources

• Progressive Overload Guide (free) - every method for adding load over time, plus a rep range system that moves the weight up on schedule. Find this and more at https://witsandweights.com/free

• Transcript

  Effort and proximity to failure

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Let's say you're at the gym and you just finish a set, you rack the bar or dumbbells, and you're like, oh, that was a hard one. Maybe I've got one or two reps left in the tank. I'm doing awesome. Progressive overload. But here's the problem. There is a decent chance that you had five or six reps left, not just two. And maybe you have no idea because you really haven't felt what real failure is like. Today I'm going to pick apart some of the common advice about not going to failure and being careful and all of these pieces of advice that actually might hold you back and give you a simple way to find out where your actual limit is so that every set you do counts. This is about training hard. What does the research say about how far off we are versus where we need to be, how close to failure you need to train to build muscle, and then how to actually fix how hard you train, as well as a little trick I have toward the end of the episode. 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, Philip Ape, and today I want to talk about effort. Because if you're doing strength training over 40, especially, and you feel like you're working hard, you're following a program, you're showing up three, four, five days a week to the gym, and the muscle isn't developing the way that you expected, or you're not getting stronger, or you're hitting a wall, this episode is for you. There is a specific reason it happens. Remember, I'm an engineer. I like to solve problems, and we can solve this for ourselves. It's often not the reason you've been told or that you think. It isn't that you're too old. It's not about your hormones. It is not usually your program either. It is that the effort that you think you're putting in and the effort you're actually putting in are far apart, and the gap between them is even bigger than you thought. And that's why you're hitting the wall. And you're like, okay, great, Philip. So that I'm done. Thank you for the advice. I'm gonna go in the gym and I'm gonna train hard. No, we can be very objective about this. This is a skill, and we're gonna break it down. And then at the very end, I'm gonna give you a little trick that I like to use, a mental trick in the gym. But we need to set the stage. And what does the research say about training hard? And what do you often hear about maybe not training too hard? What's useful, what's not, what's helping your results, what's not. How badly do we misjudge our own effort? And then how do we take the guesswork out of it? All

  Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40

  Philip Pape 2:27

  right. So you probably often hear in social media maybe you're overtraining or you're working too hard or you're doing too much. Um, this is often marketed, especially toward women. Ah, you're doing too much. And it gets conflated with what the heck are we talking about? Well, we're usually talking about stressful cardio, right? Too much chronic cardio or not getting enough sleep and recovery, things like that. But you also hear it when people talk about proximity to failure. And they say, well, leave a few reps in reserve. You don't need to train to failure to build muscle. And I've even shared the evidence on, you know, one to two, three to four reps from failure to get the mechanical tension necessary. You don't have to go to failure. And you should stop before your form starts to break down. And then also you should be careful, especially at your age. How many of you be careful? Don't look too heavy, you know, watch out. And I want to be clear that a lot of that advice is good advice, depending on what we're talking about, because I'm not telling you you need to grind every set into the ground, because that definitely is going to backfire. That can get you hurt, that can get you over-reached, over-trained, under-recovered. The research definitely does support leaving something in the tank. And we're going to get to that. But the catch here, why I'm creating this episode, is that's only if you know what failure is like. That's only if you know what training to failure really is and really means. That is for lifters who can push a set to the absolute limit and then deliberately back off to reps. And for that person, if you say two R-I-R or eight RPE, they know what to do. But this is why I don't like reps in reserve for beginners. It took me a long time to get to where I really, really knew what failure is. And even to this day, when I go into the gym and I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to train hard and I'm pushing toward those limits, it takes mental and physical effort to do that. So, let alone a newer lifter, like many of you probably are, you're trying to figure this out for yourself. You don't really know where that wall is. So it ends up holding you back because of that. Okay, now a lot of you came to lifting later in life, like I did. You know, I didn't really start lifting properly till I was about 40 years old. Or maybe you're getting back to it after years away. Maybe you started in your 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s. I mean, look, you can start. I hope you're if you're 85 listening to this, if you've never lifted weights, get started. This is this is the perfect time to start, is now. But maybe you've spent most of your life training on machines or in classes or boost camp, boot camp classes, or YouTube videos, or whatever, P90X, things

  Training hard vs. training volume

  Philip Pape 5:00

  like that where it's not really the structured progressive training and you've never really approached a true limit. You may have done it to where you're sore or you're sweating or somebody's pushing you rah-rah with like music, but that's not the same thing when we talk about you know, strength training and mechanical tension progressive overload. Okay. Also, you might be a little bit afraid because you don't get injured or you're not sure about form. I just spoke to somebody uh recently who's joining Eat More Lift Heavy, and you know, he said he had hired a trainer maybe six months ago. One of the reasons was accountability, but the other reason was form and he didn't want to get injured. I'm like, that is super, super smart, right? Nobody wants to get injured. We want to have the right form. And so when someone says, Well, no, you need to train hard, you have to have a lot of effort, that's one of the fears that goes through your head. But it also means you might never have been close to that edge. You don't know where that edge is, that wall is. And so when someone says, Hey, leave two reps in the tank, you can't if you don't know what the tank limit is. Right now, I'm not saying go David Goggin style, where it's like, you know, when you think you're at 100%, you're only at 30% or whatever. It's not necessarily that either. It's a more objective thing in between. So you often are probably ending your sets in the gym every time almost because it's uncomfortable, because your breathing has changed, maybe you feel a little bit out of breath, because the weight started to feel heavy and your brain's like, okay, that's probably enough. Don't push it, or I'm gonna lose form here, or something's gonna get broken or injured. Tell me if that isn't right. You've had those thoughts in your head. I have as well, right? Or you feel a little bit of a tweak, or you feel like your back is rounding on an RDL or deadlift or something like that, and or there's a little bit of a grind that you think is a grind, even though you probably do have more reps than you think. And then you think, okay, that was a strong effort. That was a good set. My quads are sore, my whatever is sore. Good. Now, if even if you're doing that, you're probably leagues ahead of many others who don't even train, obviously, and who don't, or those who go to the gym and really aren't training. Even if you're if you are training with a structured program, then great, that's awesome. Like that's the first step. But today we're talking about training and getting the most out of it. Because I don't want you to waste your time in the gym. I don't want you to take more time than you have to. I know folks that can train two or three days a week and get super, super effective workouts because they know how to train hard. And others that go in with these like body part splits four, five, six days, and they're not making progress because they're not training hard. They're just going in and putting in quote unquote work, but it's not effort. So if, you know, you're standing in front of the mirror, you're trying to flex your muscles, you're like, why does my body look the same, independent of fat loss, let's say, because that's a different factor. And you're like blaming your age or your metabolism, or hey, I'm not a responder, or the program. The real answer is that maybe you've been way inside your comfort zone and far short of the stimulus that actually builds muscle.

  Accuracy of estimating reps to failure

  Philip Pape 7:55

  So let's quickly look at the research here, and then we'll parlay that into practical tips as always. Okay. There's a researcher named James Steele and a group that includes Jurgen, Giesing, and James Fisher, and they ran a study that a lot of people should be aware of. They took 141 people, so it's a decent sample size, not massive, but it's not, you know, eight people. And they had them predict how many reps they could go or or do on a given exercise. And they had them actually go all the way to failure. Okay. They pushed them to true failure where they couldn't move the weight anymore, their muscles give out. And everyone underestimated across the board where they thought their limits were. They stopped or they thought they they thought they'd stop well before they had to. The least experienced lifters were off about four to five reps where they thought they were near their limit, and then they had like a half a set left, right? When we're talking about, you know, 10 to 15 reps, that's a lot. And the more experienced lifters were closer. They were off by about one or two reps. Now, when you pool all the research together on this, and there's a really good review by Israel Halperin and colleagues that does that, they the average miss across everybody, the average miss is around one rep. So if you've been lifting hard for years and you really know your body, your guesses are probably pretty decent. And I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the person who came to this later in terms of doing it properly. The person like you, dear listener, who's been told to be careful their whole training life, because for you, the four to five rep gap is probably more like reality. And that's what we're gonna fix today, right? You feel like you're near the edge, but you're not. That's pretty wild, actually, if you think about it. Just quick tangent, right? You could be smart, dedicated, consistent, going to the gym, doing everything the program says, and still be so far from what's real effort that you're essentially doing a really good warm-up and calling it your working sets. And it's not because you're lazy, it's not because you're trying, you go through all the trouble to get to the gym on a regular basis, but because you haven't calibrated effort. That's it. You just haven't calibrated the effort. Like, what does it really mean? So, okay, Philip, great. Now, how close

  Proximity to failure and muscle growth

  Philip Pape 10:05

  do I need to get? Do I have to go to failure? I want to connect that to muscle. And we've talked about this in some recent episodes. And the answer obviously is no, you don't have to go to failure. There's the analysis in just a couple years ago, 2024, by Zach Robinson, Michael Zordos, and colleagues. You guys know Zordos from Mass. And they looked at this across dozens of studies. So this is a meta-analysis. They found that getting close to failure does build a bit more muscle, but the effect is small and mostly shows up in the last few reps before failure. So training with one to three reps in reserve is fantastic. It builds muscle really, really well. You don't have to hit true failure, you know, zero reps left on every set. In fact, if you're big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, all the heavy stuff, you probably shouldn't because of the fatigue costs. It's very, very high, as well as the safety and injury costs potentially. I don't want to overhype that, but it's really more about the fatigue. It's the systemic fatigue. And so you're kind of balancing the two. So if you sit with those, that's really the whole premise of this episode. You don't need to go to failure. One to three reps is plenty, but that only works if your one to three reps is actually one to three reps and not five or six. So it's not that it needs to be one to three. It's that you need to be at your actual one to three reps. So the fix isn't to train harder exactly. It's to find out where that edge is so that you know that you're training harder, if that makes sense, right? Like hard is this subjective thing, but we can make it objective. And I think it's a good moment to pause here because I said something a second ago that I want to give you a free tool for right now. I said that the real judge of whether you're training hard isn't the feeling, it's whether your reps and weights are climbing week over week, right? Because that is showing you that you're getting close to failure and getting the mechanical tension. And we call that progressive overload. Like that is the game. And a lot of people hear progressive overload and they think it just means add weight or reps every week. And you can't add five pounds to the bar forever, right? Like we talk about you hear that in programs like Starting Strength, which are designed for novices, novice and linear progression. You can't just add five pounds to the bar forever.

  Progressive overload methods

  Philip Pape 12:20

  There are a bunch of ways to push the load up, to add a rep, to shorten rest periods, to change how you run a set, to change the order of exercises. There, to do it to modify two variables at once, to increase the sets without increasing the load and the reps. So there's so many permutations on how to do progressive overload. And that's where like good programming comes in and good experience and knowledge comes in. So I do have a free guide that lays all that out, every method, when to use each one. My own favorite way to run a rep range so the weight goes up in a somewhat consistent fashion. And I think it pairs well with today's episode because once you have the effort calibrated, like knowing that you're close to failure, then you combine it with the progressive overload scheme and oh, you are golden now to really start making progress. So totally free guide, go to wits and weights.com slash free. It's called the progressive overload guide. I'm gonna include a link in the show notes, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash free to find it and many of our other resources. Progressive overload guide, again, link in the show notes. All right.

  Calibration drill to calculate true failure

  Philip Pape 13:24

  So what is the deceptively simple fix, as I like to say? Well, it's a calibration drill and a shift in your mind. Okay, we're gonna do both. So the calibration drill is to pick an isolation exercise, not a squat or deadlift, not a heavy barbell, anything, just something where if you fully fail, nothing bad's gonna happen. So this could be a leg extension, this could be a dumbbell curl, curls are classic. It could even be a machine chest press, right? Where you could just like let go and it just resets to where it is without any harm. It could be a leg curl. Something we're running out of gas and just like hitting complete failure means the weight just can't move anymore, and you just have to like set it down or drop it or whatever. Now, take that exercise and actually go to true failure. Okay, don't just go to where you're uncomfortable. You have to mentally push past that point and go to true failure. We're not not talking about the heaviness of it or telling you how many reps, just the point where you are trying with everything you've got to move the weight. Your brain is connected through your nervous system to those muscles and it will just not move. Okay, many of you have been there, you've done that, many of you haven't because you get uncomfortable and you stop, or you're counting reps. Don't do that. Go all the way to the point where your brain says stop, and then I want you to go past that where it gets hard, and then I want you to go past that to where you normally stop, and I want you to go past that again until your body, until your body, not your mind, says, sorry, I just can't do it for you. Your brain is well past your body at this point. That's what I want. That maybe that's more of the Goggins mentality, but do it. Okay. And I want you to count the reps as you do it. However many reps you got past the point where you normally would have stopped, that is the gap in what you think is hard versus what is actually hard. Okay. I know it sounds simple, but have you done that before? Have you done an MRAP? Have you pushed a complete failure? I take this for granted because when I got into, I'll say exercise, it was through CrossFit. And one of the benefits of CrossFit was that you did push yourself a lot. It's, you know, Metcons, it's wads, it's sometimes stupid stuff with bad form, but because of the more conditioning aspect of it, you pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and you kind of developed that mental toughness and it it carried over nicely into training. But even then, when I got to like heavy squats, sets of five, it was very hard to push close to failure. Now, the nice thing about beginners using sets across, like sets of five, three by five squats, is that if you're lifting the weight, if you're adding weight to the bar each session, it's going to push you to those hard moments that you wouldn't have pushed yourself. But for today's exercise, I'm talking about an isolation movement like a curl and just mentally going all the way to your brain, till your body physically can't do it. Like it's physically, you try and you shake and it just doesn't do it. All right. Now, the first time you do this, you're like, oh, oh, that is fit. Wow. Okay. Like I thought I was doing the 25-pound dumbbell.

  Recalibrating effort over time

  Philip Pape 16:30

  I thought I would get, you know, 12, but I got 20. Like I got 20. Well, that's insane. That's what they've been talking about. I'm serious, guys. Now, for some of you experienced lifters listening, you're like, God, Philip, shut up. Like, I know how to train hard. Okay, fine. Maybe this episode isn't for you, or maybe it's a good boost of inspiration to recalibrate your own toughness. So that calibrates, that's the drill that I was talking about. It helps you calibrate and give you a reference point. And now when you go back to your normal training, you you know better what one to three reps in reserve is. Now, you can't just do this once. You've got you've got to always be training that that maximum and feel what it is. In fact, when we talk about PRs and you getting stronger, it's going to shift where that failure point gets higher and higher. And of course, you don't have to do this every session. I'm not even suggesting that at all. There are some interesting programs. We have one called Ironclad in Eat More Lift Heavy. And it's modeled off of some set-based progression, some wave, what do they call it, undulating periodization, fancy term. But basically, it's designed with max reps for some exercises. In other words, if you're going to do three sets, you might do two sets of six. And then the third one, you go to six, and then you keep going to failure. And you do that simply to understand: am I really where I need to be? Or should I increase the weight much more next time than I would have otherwise? Like, should I go up 10% instead of just 5%? Or am I truly at failure? And maybe I just need to stay where I am and add reps, or go up, you know, just a few percent. But if you want to do this for yourself just randomly, I would do it every couple weeks on a safe isolation movement just to keep yourself calibrating and then calibrating, and then it inspires you to really train hard. So that's the drill. Now, what the shift in mindset I was talking about is to, I want you to stop trusting your feelings. Now you're like, what? Shouldn't you go with how your body feels? Shouldn't I be listening to my biofeedback? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the feeling in your mind that you're actually training hard when it's something else going on. Examples are you're breathing heavy and out of breath. That doesn't mean you're near failure. That just means you might not be very well conditioned or have good work capacity. That's a separate issue. Or a weight that

  Bar speed and effort signals

  Philip Pape 18:50

  feels heavy. Not enough, guys. Not enough. Okay. Because I can't tell you how many times I push an exercise and it feels heavy. And I'm like, oh, can I do another one? And I'm like, of course I can do another one. And you have to mentally shift it to just try. That's the thing you have to try. It's that voice that tells you, hey, I I've done eight reps and last time I did seven reps. So that must be hard. That must be heavy. That must be the heavier, heaviest thing I've ever done when you can actually do another two reps. So the only honest and objective signal we have is I'll say bar speed really. Did the bar slow way down and did you have to grind on the last reps? And also, could you not do one at all physically, like we talked about before with the isolation work? Now I'm not saying you need to go to complete failure on things like a squat. I mentioned that already. But there's probably still a gap there. Does that make sense? And another good signal that you're maybe not training hard enough is that you're just not progressing, assuming everything else is on point, your nutrition, your recovery, your sleep, your movement, which that's a big assumption because a lot of people don't have those on point. Or maybe you're in a fat loss phase or something like that. So I'm not saying train to failure on everything. Please don't. Failure on big compound lifts is a great way to get hurt and to fry your recovery for days. And the extra muscle is not worth it if you would even get it because the recovery would be shot. Leave those at like one to three in reserve, but it has to be a correct one to three. I'm also not saying pain, you know, more pain, more gain, right? Old school. We're not chasing soreness. We're not chasing suffering. We're chasing an accurate

  Training to failure for older lifters

  Philip Pape 20:30

  objective gauge of your effort so that sustainable effort lands in this productive zone for you. And I'm definitely not saying you have to like train like a CrossFitter or try to, you know, push to failure and grind on everything. In fact, the research on older lifters is very, very encouraging that just about everything doesn't have to be fit at failure, but you have to get within those reps of failure. And again, hitting back to what we're talking about before, you have to know where that is. There's also decent evidence that women tend to handle this kind of work well and recover at least as fast as men, if not more so, between sets on average. Okay. Again, individuals vary widely. So I don't like to make general, you know, gender-based statements, but that's what we see on average. It's really about aiming accurately with effort that you can recover from so that the work you're doing pays off, right? And so the effort you feel and the effort you're actually producing are probably different at the moment. And calibrating yourself, even with like a set to failure every few weeks, will help you close that gap. All right, before we wrap up, I want to give you a little trick. It takes 10 seconds, a trick that I promised you early on that will give you an extra awareness of your effort. Real quick, though, if this episode was like an aha moment for you, if you realize that you've been training comfortably short of the stimulus needed to build muscle this whole time, and if you're tired of guessing on your own, this is what we help you fix inside. Eat More Lift Heavy. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. This is our 26-week coached program for adults over 40. A huge part of what we do is we teach you to read your own effort and your

  Rep range goal setting

  Philip Pape 22:13

  own data across the board, not just training, but nutrition, biofeedback, all of it, so that you stop guessing. You stop wondering whether it's working and you see that it's working. And part of that comes through the community of, hey, is this working? Here's my data. And we can help you say, you know what? Yes, you are losing fat because your waist is going down or because or you are getting stronger because your lifts are moving in this way. And if they're not, here's what you can do about it. We help you build in that calibration, set up your training around it, train the right way with the right program for your lifestyle, for your equipment and goals and all of that. And so we're in your corner the whole way. If you are looking for that kind of guidance, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. The cool thing is if you scroll down on the page, you could see exactly what each of the 26 weeks has in store, what you are going to learn, what skills you're going to build. I think it's very unique in this industry to have that kind of education along with the accountability and the results. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check that out. All right, here's a trick that can help you fix your effort even further. And this is before you start the set. So if you're doing a rep range, I want you to pick the number that you're going to hit and say it out loud. And what I mean is, let's say your program has six to ten reps for the exercise. And last time you got six with this current weight. So you got the minimum of the rep range. Now, most people are going to go in and they're going to think, okay, if I got a little stronger, I should probably be able to hit seven reps now at the same weight, right? Is that is that what you think? Right. I'm raising my hand. That's often where my mind goes. I'm like, well, okay, this week, if I hit seven, I know I'm a little stronger and I'm pushing. But that's a problem because when you do that, when you say I'm going to hit seven, your brain is going to allow you to only go to seven and then you're going to stop. And you might have had one, two, three more reps left that week. You don't know how much more stronger you actually are. You also don't quite know if you trained hard enough last time. So I want you to flip it around. I want you to go in on that six to ten, and I want you to aim for the top of the range. If you got six last time, is what I'm saying. Okay. I want you to say, I'm going to hit 10. Like that is my goal. I'm going to hit 10. And then when you get to the seventh rep, you're like, nah, I got three more reps. I'm going to 10. And you will surprise yourself more often than not. You might only get nine, but that's still two more reps than what you were aiming for at the seven and three more than last time. Does that make sense? And then when it comes to rep range progression, we call it double progression. Once you have hit 10 reps on a six to 10 for that first set, you're going to add weight the next time to bring the reps back down, but you're always going to aim for 10. Now you could push it further and say, you know what, I'm going to try to get 12, even though my range is six to 10. But you get the idea. All right. I hope that helps you guys train harder so you get more out of your gym time. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the effort that builds muscle isn't what feels hard. It's the effort you can actually measure. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Why You're Exhausted After 8 Hours of Sleep, Even If You Don't Snore (Dr. Shereen Lim) | Ep 484

Doing the right workouts, eating well, and still waking up exhausted? What if your “good” sleep score is missing the real problem?

I talk with Dr. Shereen Lim, dentist, dental sleep medicine expert, and author of Breathe, Sleep, Thrive, about sleep-disordered breathing, airway health, and why women over 40 are so often missed.

You’ll learn why snoring, teeth grinding, mouth breathing, nocturia, and unrefreshed sleep can point to airway issues even when you’re lean, fit, and doing “everything right.” 

We cover sleep apnea, upper airway resistance, CPAP, dental devices, palate expansion, mouth taping, and why nasal breathing matters for hormone health, metabolism, longevity, and evidence-based fitness.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Why sleep still feels broken
2:27 – Sleep disordered breathing explained
4:52 – Jaw structure and airway collapse
7:43 – Midlife changes and women’s risk
9:36 – Sleep trackers versus real testing
11:40 – Grinding, nocturia, and red flags
15:19 – When mouth guards make breathing worse
16:35 – CPAP and dental device tradeoffs
21:46 – Mouth taping and tongue posture

Episode resources:

• Dr. Lim’s book – Breathe, Sleep, Thrive

• Website: drshereenlim.com.au

• Facebook: @drshereenlim

• Instagram: @dr.shereenlim 

• Transcript

  Why sleep still feels broken

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Are you doing all the right things for sleep and yet you're still waking up feeling tired? Maybe you get enough hours, maybe you've cut caffeine, you're taking magnesium, you have a cool bedroom, and yet something is off, even if you're lean and fit, and especially if you're over 40. Now, the problem might not be in your bedtime routine. It might have to do with your airway and not the loud gasping kind of sleep apnea that we're familiar with, but something a little bit behind the scenes that you can't necessarily see and you might not see in a sleep test either. My guest today is Dr. Shireen Lim, one of Australia's first dentists with a postgraduate qualification in dental sleep medicine. She's going to explain why your body changes as we age in ways that mess with your breathing at night. What signs to look for, what to do about it that may not be CPAP or another supplement. 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 this episode today is about a sleep problem that many of you, even if you're relatively lean and healthy, and particularly if you're a woman over 40, might not realize you have. It's the reason you can potentially do everything right with your routine and your sleep hygiene and still wake up feeling like you didn't sleep. My guest today is Dr. Shireen Lim. She practices dental sleep medicine in Perth, Australia, and is one of the first dentists in the country to obtain a postgraduate qualification in the field. She's also the author of the book Breathe, Sleep, Thrive. Her broader work does cover airway development across the lifespan, but today we're going to focus on what happens in adults and especially adult women in midlife when it comes to sleep and often undiagnosed issues. You'll learn how to recognize these signs of sleep disordered breathing, while your sleep tracker or ring can show you a great score, even while your sleep is fragmented, and a range of interventions available to you so you can take proactive steps starting this week. Shireen, welcome to Wits and Weights.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 2:07

  Yeah, thanks very much for having me and for accommodating my time zone.

  Philip Pape 2:11

  No, absolutely. It's a lot of fun talking to folks from the other side of the world. And I've been listening to a lot of your work. I've read your book, and I'll say a lot of misunderstandings potentially about sleep issues and sleep apnea. And in my field, in our field, nutrition coaching, we often go right to bedtime routine and hygiene

  Sleep disordered breathing explained

  Philip Pape 2:27

  and maybe sleep apnea and testing. And when a lot of people think about apnea, right, they're thinking about snoring, right, is the big one, being overweight, or maybe too much fat or even muscle around the neck. I know folks who are lifters who have an issue, they get, you know, big necks, things like that. What is the real picture on just sleep disordered breathing in general? Maybe start with a symptom. So if someone listening is experiencing them, they might recognize it. And then we can start to dig in on some specifics.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 2:54

  Yeah, so sleep disturbed breathing is really a spectrum of conditions that are related to a structurally narrow airway and increased collapsibility. So we have these interruptions to our sleep. And on the more severe end, we have obstructive sleep apnea where we have more prolonged pauses in breathing, and that can be linked to oxygen deprivation. But really, problems begin when mouth breathing starts. So even mouth breathing. And we have snoring, which is one of the first signs, as well as upper airway resistance syndrome. So we when we have not quite sleep apnea, but interruptions in our breathing. And rather than having the prolonged obstructions, there's an increased stress response, which helps to open up the airway with increased work of breathing, but it is very disruptive, even though we don't get the oxygen deprivations. So there's this continuum of problems, but they can all have the same symptoms. So that could be mouth breathing, teeth grinding, just like unexplained awakenings during sleep, people waking up and going to the toilet in the middle of the night, or feeling unrefreshed on waking. They're quite common symptoms that people with these problems may experience. And then in turn, there's going to be often problems with mood, daytime energy, and virtually every chronic health condition, there's an increased risk because we're not getting good quality restorative sleep.

  Philip Pape 4:18

  Yeah, and it's interesting because we don't often communicate about sleep from that physical perspective of the airway. And it's funny you mentioned some things that I've heard just about everybody experience to some extent teeth grinding myself. I wear a mouth guard, I have for years. So maybe I have an undiagnosed issue. But even like waking up throughout the night, sometimes unexplained, it comes out of nowhere. So I mean, you know, when you talk about like upper airway, I think you call it upper airway resistance syndrome, right? There's one of the things you mentioned as a risk factor is a small mouth. And I want to kind of separate like physical, genetic, structural limitations from maybe, you

  Jaw structure and airway collapse

  Philip Pape 4:52

  know, behavioral, I guess it would be a good dichotomy to talk about. So, you know, you talk about stuff that happens in childhood, which we're our audience is past that point, right? But like extracting molars and crowding from braces and orthodontics. And a lot of our audiences had braces as kids, probably had teeth pulled, myself included. So, how does all that play in now that we're 45 years old or whatever, when it comes to upper airway and mouth size, let's say?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 5:17

  Yeah. Well, obstructive sleep apnea really is a developmental problem that begins from infancy. And a lot of it is related to how well our jaws are growing as well as how well the mouth of our muscles are working, including the tongue. And so, in terms of the jaw, the jaws really, the upper jaw or our palate is really the floor of our nose. So the more developed that upper jaw is, the better our breathing passages. It's also our tongue space, so we have more room for the tongue. But we really want the jaws to grow forward and wide because really they are the rigid support for our collapsible upper airway or throat. And so the more forward and wide they are, the less collapsible the airway will be. And so when we have problems like the extractions that you were talking about or crooked teeth, they're really indications that the jaws aren't growing properly. And, you know, a lot of the time when we think about airway, we think what is inside the nose and what is inside the throat. But really, it is those jaws that are really playing a very important structural contribution and very overlooked contribution to how well we're breathing. And so that's why we'll find that many dental type of interventions can work quite successfully, whether it is nighttime guards that reposition the lower jaw forward, palate expansion to widen the upper jaw, or double jaw surgery to bring the jaws forward. These are all interventions that can actually address the root cause or that poor airway development.

  Philip Pape 6:58

  Yeah, that's good to know that you touched on also can what we can do about it now. And I I did, I think it's chapter 11 of your book, and you guys should definitely pick it up if you're interested. If you have kids, I want to know kind of what to think about now and going forward, because my daughter just had braces as well. So I understand it, but also what can you do now? And and I would say that there are some interventions, like you mentioned, the surgery where you know we don't like to think about having surgery, but I think a lot of people aren't considering. So that's the mouth. You also talk about like the muscles of the throat. And I know there's a specific mention you make to how progesterone, for example, in in perimenopause, the decline in that per changes the dilator muscles or something of the throat, right? And so, like, even things like that, we're not thinking how our bodies change over time. And that and that affects how open

  Midlife changes and women’s risk

  Philip Pape 7:43

  the throat is. So, does this explain a lot of why people, when they age, you know, start to experience issues independent of sleep apnea, or is it also part of the sleep apnea discussion?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 7:52

  Yeah. So as we age, we're going to have reduced tone of our muscles. And even for women where we have progesterone, it actually is an upper airway dilator muscle. So that helps to keep our throat or our collapsible airway open. So as we have less of that around perimenopause, menopause, we're going to have more sleep disruption because we're not as effective at keeping our throat open.

  Philip Pape 8:17

  So that's interesting that progesterone, you know, causes that to change. And, you know, I wonder what else with age affects what happens with our sleep. But let's get practical, right? Because people are listening or using sleep trackers, right? I have an aura ring, right? People have the watch and the whoop and all that. And I think we're relying a lot on the score. But is there a gap between like what that says or the fragmentation of your sleep, like REM and deep and all that, and reality? That's kind of one part of my question. And then also, does it miss out on measuring something altogether, if that makes sense?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 8:49

  Yeah, I think the sleep trackers are good to get a general indication of the sleep quality, especially if there's symptoms and trying, and really good for people that want some validation that there's something going on to get further sleep testing for this. But I think that they're more likely to pick up more significant or severe breathing problems, and less so the more subtle disturbances. They don't really tell us exactly how much the airflow is being limited or how hard we're having to work. It's really made me picking up the more prolonged obstructions where we might get the oxygen deprivation, where we can measure, you know, the oxygen saturation, but not necessarily the more subtle disturbances, which can also fragment or lead

  Sleep trackers versus real testing

  Dr. Shereen Lim 9:36

  to very unrestorative sleep.

  Philip Pape 9:37

  Okay. And would that then show up at least in the sleep stages? Or is that even potentially like you can have an issue with your airway or airflow speed or some of the things you mentioned, but you're not really going to see that symptomatically in like how the stages are measured, like RAM and deep and such?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 9:53

  Yeah, I think when you have a sleep study in a lab, there's sensors and it can really measure all your brainwave activity. It's just a little bit more accurate, and that will give us more information than a sleep tracker. Generally speaking, I think the sleep trackers are really effective more at picking up when there's more serious problems, but when there's more subtle disturbances, we often need to get more detailed sensors and information.

  Philip Pape 10:20

  So tell us about the testing then, you know, because the people are confused about that as well. Like what how do they even get it? What is it? What kind of sleep testing is it? Is it for, you know, am I getting tested specifically for like a CPAP machine, or is it a broader test? What are you referring to there?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 10:34

  I think if people are having sleep concerns, like they're having unexplained fatigue or different things, whether it be heart disease and we want to work out what is the extent of breathing conditions, the gold standard really is going into a sleep lab, and they have a lot of sensors that measure brainwave activity, how much the airflow is limited, the snoring, the sounds, the movement, and we can get the most accurate information. Whereas we can also do things like here, we can get a test at a pharmacy and do it at home, and it may not have any as many sensors and leads. So it might give more obvious data, like when there's big drops in oxygenation, but we don't really know exactly what's happening in terms of how aroused we're sleeping or just those subtle restrictions in airflow where we're not getting those desaturations, but we're working so hard to breathe.

  Philip Pape 11:30

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in like so a lot of my audiences in the US, you're in Australia, we have people all over the world. Like, is how would you what's the first step you would take to get a sleep test, a good

  Grinding, nocturia, and red flags

  Philip Pape 11:40

  one at a lab?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 11:40

  Oh, I mean, I'm sure it's really different in different countries. Okay. But for us, usually like we have to get a GP referral, which is from a general medical doctor, to get a Medicare rebate where we'll get it reimbursed. Yeah, so it's a bit of a process. Yeah, so go through your doctor. Yes, yeah.

  Philip Pape 12:00

  All right. Then, you know, I know you listed some things that I have never heard before in your book, or maybe I've heard, but you know, they're good ideas. You talk about stomach sleeping as a red flag, having like vivid dreams that you actually remember, or maybe not remembering your dreams. You talk about cold hands and feet, low blood pressure. Like, walk us through which of these red flags might be the strongest self-screening clues if you're you know you're not having having gone to a lab yet, but physiologically, like what how should we rank these things or tell us the the big ones?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 12:29

  Yeah, I think unexplained awakenings, waking up, you know, often going to the toilet at night because we're awake, so not having a reason because that could be an interruption from breathing that's leading to an arousal and teeth grinding. Teeth grinding is a really strong red flag. So teeth grinding uh is thought to be a stress response when there is an obstruction, so our airflow airway is collapsing, and there's that interruption to our airflow. Teeth grinding can be quite protective against sleep apnea where there's a complete obstruction of the airway. Yeah.

  Philip Pape 13:00

  I see disruption. Okay.

  Dr. Shereen Lim 13:02

  What happens is it's fight or flight response. Grind the teeth, recruit the muscles, opens it up. And so, therefore, we don't actually have that prolonged obstruction. But every time that's happening, there is an arousal from sleep. So it's getting from deep to light sleep, and in terms of sleep staging, it's going back into the lighter ends and having to start again. So never entering those deep sleep phases, which are quite restorative. And that's why a lot of people that have that teeth grinding, they're probably more likely to have upper airway resistance syndrome than obstructive sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea, you might feel more sleepy, whereas that teeth grinding the upper airway resistance might be more fatigued, you know, just feeling that unrefreshed, tired, unexplained tiredness.

  Philip Pape 13:50

  Yeah, that's interesting. And and just listeners notice Dr. Lim is talking about, you know, sleep apnea as one thing and then the upper airway syndrome as as another. And so it's important to try to figure out which one of these it might be. I was actually, I know you talk about a lot about the jaw, but like what if someone has an unexplained clicking in their jaw that starts to present that wasn't there before? Is that related to something we should be concerned about related to sleep, or is that more of a separate dental issue?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 14:15

  Yes, I I think they can be somewhat linked if they have a clicking. For me, that usually indicates there's a mismatch between our structure and our function, where our jaw structures and our muscles aren't quite in harmony. And that usually tells me that there's probably some underdevelopment of the jaws, which is undevelopment, underdevelopment of our airway structures and some degree of limited airflow. So really understanding that when the jaws are not properly developed or when we have orthodontic problems or we're needing to extract teeth to alleviate dental crowding, really that is a structural limitation of our airway.

  Philip Pape 14:54

  Got it. Does the have actually having a guard help is it a good helpful first step, or is it making it worse in some way?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 15:00

  Yeah. So if we have grinding, we should try to investigate are there any other symptoms of disturbed sleep, the mouth breathing, the snoring, the choking or the gasping for breathing, all those symptoms, the restlessness, tossing, turning, nocturia, going to the toilet,

  When mouth guards make breathing worse

  Dr. Shereen Lim 15:19

  those type of symptoms, we may be better off looking at is there an underlying sleep disturbance? Because there has been some research to suggest that when we put a guard, the typical guards that protect the teeth from grinding, it can actually aggravate breathing problems. Because what happens when we put a piece of plastic in between the teeth, it actually swings the lower jaw backwards. And so as we swing that lower jaw backwards, it pinches into the airway, and that tongue is more likely to be pushed back, which can actually create more problems as well. So some people will not be able to tolerate it. They won't be able to sleep well, they'll find it out by the side of their bed. So I think your question was about the sleep grinding appliances. Yeah, yeah.

  Philip Pape 16:05

  If it could make it worse, and you said it could, and yeah, could help, could make it worse. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So now let's get to CPAP, right? And like I think mandibular advancement. I have that in my notes. As are the, you know, are these like are these band-aids? Are these helpful? Like again, are they should should we skip them and go straight to like, okay, if you at that point you need something more severe done, or where does it fit in the toolbox?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 16:26

  Yeah. So I mean, one of the challenges in sleep medicine is that everyone's so focused on this end stage problem, which is obstructive sleep apnea. And it's really

  CPAP and dental device tradeoffs

  Dr. Shereen Lim 16:35

  very arbitrary. Like to get this diagnosis, you need to stop breathing for 10 seconds or more on average, five or more times per hour of sleep. So if that number is less than five, you won't get that diagnosis. But you could still have very similar problems where there's this collapsibility and really disturbed breathing. So a lot of the times when you have obstructive sleep apnea, the gold standard of treatment is going to be CPAP. So with CPAP, really it is high pressure airflow. It's essentially like a reverse vacuum cleaner. It blows air through often through the nose and it just spints or keeps the airway open. So that is quite effective. It's the gold standard. We know that it works. It keeps all the parts of the airway open and prevents it from collapsing. So that's usually this what people are offered. Even though it's quite effective, many people can't tolerate it. So even if they use it, many people will only use it half the night. Or even if they use it, many people will not be able to continue it all the time. Yeah, this is what a lot of places are offering as a treatment. We have the mandibular advancement devices, which are dental appliances. They're worn inside the mouth only during sleep. And what these do is they help position the lower jaw forward. So you advance the lower jaw forward, as the lower jaw comes forward, it actually stretches open the walls of the throat to keep that open, and it helps pull the tongue forward as well. So what it does, it helps to keep the throat open during sleep. The problem with these solutions is that they're nighttime band-aids. So they really address the symptom, which is that collapse of the airway during sleep. But what we really should be more focused on is restoring airway health. So when I talk about airway health, I'm really talking about nasal breathing. Nasal breathing is really the foundation for good breathing, good sleep, and good health. And we also need to pay attention to good jaw development or that structural framework for the airway, that rigid structure, and how well the muscles of our throat and our tongue are working, or how well our lips are closing so that we're breathing really well. Because if we pay attention to airway health, that is 24-7. It's not just alleviating the nighttime problem. Nasal breathing, like a lot of people don't even recognize that's how we're supposed to breathe. When we breathe through our nose, it's just warms, filters, humidifies the air, prepares it before it enters our body. We get nitric oxide, which is produced in the paranasal sinuses. So it's antimicrobial and it's a vasodilator, which promotes good oxygen exchange. And it's just really, if we close our mouth and we breathe through our nose, it promotes good muscle tone. Because if we have our mouth open and we snore and we close our mouth and we snore, we're gonna find that everything is more floppy and relaxed when we have our open mouth. Yeah. So the future really is looking at how we can promote health and 24-7 better breathing and going for more targeted options to address the structures as well as the muscles.

  Philip Pape 19:55

  Okay, and I'm sure that's a very long list. So just just in terms of the nasal breathing, and I know you you refer to myofunctional therapy, which is like working on your tongues and lips and parts of your face. Like, what are some very practical things people listening right now, you know, today, they could do an exercise, for example, maybe incorporate it as a five-minute part of their daily routine?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 20:15

  First of all, I'd really want everyone to understand nasal breathing is so important. And a lot of people would go to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and they're looking at is there anything deviated or is there anything that we can take out of the nose, like turbinates, adenoids, and things like that. So I'd really want people to understand because often people will have nasal surgery and it might not work out. There's still persistent nasal obstruction. I see this a lot of the time where people go for the nasal surgery, it doesn't work so well, and they still can't breathe well. I want people to recognize that the palate or the upper jaw has a very important structural role in nasal breathing. So if we have a narrow palate, we're going to have increased resistance to nasal airflow. And if we understand that air nasal airflow or nasal breathing is really important, then palate expansion is a really good targeted option to address that palate. Yeah. So I think I want people to understand that we need to pay attention to the jaws and nasal breathing is so important, but the palate is really critical for our nasal breathing. But in terms of what is a simple thing that people can do, like in terms of nighttime band-aids, really a lot of people will put mouth tape, a little bit of porous tape, just across their lips to help their lips close together. And oftentimes people will find that their sleep is

  Mouth taping and tongue posture

  Dr. Shereen Lim 21:46

  more solid. They'll wake up and they'll feel fresher, less mouth dried, their mouth is less dried, and people will have less headaches. So I hear that a lot as well. And it is a band aid, but we can do my Functional therapy as well, which is really retraining the muscles, retraining how to close the lips or being more aware of it or where to put our tongue. Like the roof, the tongue really belongs in the roof of the mouth. So we want to be aware when we say and we lift our tongue, that is where the tip of the tongue should rest normally. Yeah. But if it rests on the teeth, that's a low tongue posture, that is not going to be as good as for our breathing. If we have it up, we're less likely to breathe through our mouth. So that's just something to be aware of. Myofunctional therapy can retrain those habits. But you know, you know, obviously we need to look for anything that is obstructing or allergies, making sure that we have nasal sprays to clear our nose and free up the nasal passages. And again, the palate expansion.

  Philip Pape 22:52

  Okay, those are really helpful. Give me some ideas to look into the mouth tape, but definitely, you know, thinking about tongue posture and how do you promote nasal breathing? We'll include, you know, some good resources to connect with you at the end to kind of look into some of this and what you can do about it. Yeah, fascinating. So, should when should a listener then hearing all this actually then pursue like a formal sleep study? And is there something they should include or ask about? You know how like when we go get blood labs, it's like you sometimes have to be very specific about what you're looking for, else the normal test isn't going to look at it. Do you have any advice on that front?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 23:27

  Yeah, I think when should we go for a sleep study? Whenever there's any snoring or gasping or sudden awakenings from sleep, if there's any heart conditions, because we know that these disturbed breathing conditions are linked to increased risk of heart disease, their chronic stresses. Yeah, anytime there is a concern where people don't feel their sleep is refreshing, it's quite fragmented. The sleep study can be very useful. And here I think if you go to the doctor, they should be able to have various criteria. If it is a more obvious high suspicion of severe sleep apnea or that severe end problem, you can get a more basic test. But if it's more subtle and we're unsure, maybe you have to have a more comprehensive lab test with more information.

  Philip Pape 24:17

  Okay, so is there anything about like women in perimenopause that we didn't cover earlier? I know we mentioned the progesterone, but I'm I know you again talk about different segments of the population in your book. Is there anything else we should bring up for our listeners?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 24:30

  Yeah, I think women are so easily missed because the stereotype of obstructive sleep apnea is an overweight, obese male that falls asleep and has loud snoring. Uh, whereas females are more likely to be affected by upper airway resistance syndrome, the more subtle breathing responses, disturbances. And they may not even snore. It may be mouth breathing and some increased efforts to breathe. And then people think their unrefreshed sleep is related to menopause or being really busy working, having children, looking after family. And then they may be put on things like anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants without getting their sleep looked at. But really, when we have that very high sympathetic nervous system response chronically, because there is this collapsible upper airway, many women may be affected by things like functional somatic syndromes, where we there is just a heightened response to low stimulus, and it might look like irritable bowel syndrome or temporomandibular joint dysfunction, those type of conditions, or anxiety or insomnia, where sleep is not particularly restful, and then people find it difficult to get to sleep because it doesn't feel peaceful on a subconscious level. And if we can actually understand that there could be an underlying breathing disturbance before we medicate people, it may be worthwhile checking this out. And really for those people really understanding that it's not the obesity that's the problem, it's going to be their jaw structures. Who has that narrow palate, the recessed lower jaw, the history of orthodontic extractions? So there is a lot of women that are suffering with these problems that are undiagnosed. And even looking at tongue tie, where we have the connection between the undersurface of the tongue, that connective tissue connection, and the floor of the mouth is abnormally short or tight, and it doesn't allow the tongue to lift well and the tongue lies low. And when the tongue lies low, we're more prone to mouth breathing, and the base of the tongue is more likely to create obstruction of the airway. But when we're children as well, we really need that tongue elevation to help mold the palate. So these people are more likely to have the narrow palates as well. So all these risk factors there. So I think when we have women that have these problems, we're trying to get more people to understand that we need to pay attention to these more subtle breathing disturbances. But there's a the developmental origins of all these sleep diseases, really how the jaw structures are formed early on in childhood. And form follows function. And I really want people to not just be looking for these end stage problems and reacting whenever we have disease to promote healthy breathing around the clock and not undervaluing the contribution of the jaw structures. Otherwise, it's too easy to get people to go for CPAP and they're not offered other options. And a lot of women won't be able to tolerate that. And then they're at a dead end and they can't really get further treatment. But women may benefit particularly well from palate expansion, and it can actually help them as they get older. Well, help us as we get older when we're more affected by, you know, the low muscle tone and that reduced progesterone and that increased collapsibility, it can help protect us from more severe problems as we get older.

  Philip Pape 28:07

  Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think about how we do cover up a lot of symptoms with band-aids and pharmaceuticals and things like that. And you know, we talk a lot about things like gut health, for example, as you know, everything goes through your body from your mouth to the the other side, and how important it is. Well, I think of this as a comparable, right? The airway. I mean, you literally breathe every second of your entire life and you sleep a third of your life. So, folks listening, like think about this as one of those powerful areas of the toolbox where you could at least get things checked out, at least get things tested, learn about it, right? Revisit this show and take some notes. Is there anything you wish I had asked that we didn't cover today?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 28:46

  Yeah, I think, well, my passion is children's airway health. I really became involved in this area because of my husband's snoring and really wanting to get to the root cause. If if we can do dental devices that can reposition or expand the jaws, why don't we do this earlier in children when they're growing well? And so for your listeners that have children or even grandchildren, to recognize that one of the best things that we can do for children to help stave off this problem as people get older is to promote nasal breathing, healthy nasal breathing, especially when children growing in those first six years of life. Because when we mouth breathe and we have that open mouth posture, it promotes really low muscle tone. We're going to develop more narrow palates and more recessed jaws. And these are risk factors for poor airway in the future.

  Philip Pape 29:38

  Okay, so definitely it starts with childhood. And again, a lot of our listeners are moms. So let's send people to find you and reach out to you and definitely check out the book. I do think it's a good book, and you don't find a lot of these on the market on this topic. So besides the book, which we'll send folks to, Shireen, where would you like folks to reach out to you?

  Dr. Shereen Lim 29:55

  Yeah, I mean, I'm the most active on Facebook. I use that a lot as well as Instagram. You can just follow. I like I like to share cases and what I'm looking at. But I do have a website, Dr. Shereen Lim. You can find lots of information there too.

  Philip Pape 30:06

  All right. So your website, Facebook, Instagram, we'll send people there. Check out the book. Dr. Lim, it's been a pleasure talking about these. It's fascinating. And I hope people, you know, think about, you know, how to improve their nasal breathing and their jaw structure and get things checked out and sleep better. Sleep, sleep, higher quality sleep, and great for your health. Okay. Thanks so much for coming on Wits and Weights. Thank you for the opportunity, Philip.

Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, & More) | Ep 483

How long can you stop training before your muscle starts to disappear?

Most people take a week off, see that their muscles look a little deflated in the mirror, and assume the worst. The real answer is far more reassuring, and it is not what most lifters over 40 have learned.

These questions all came from members inside my Eat More Lift Heavy community, people serious about strength training over 40. 

Here are the 6 questions I'm answering (shoutouts to EMLH members!):

1. Tim E. - How long can you rest between reps before it counts as a separate set? (resting 2-3 seconds between squat reps, and 10 seconds between deadlifts)

2. Ajana B. - When she eventually hits perimenopause, what effect will it have given she's already built a foundation of strength training and whole-food eating?

3. Denise M. - Is creatine a benefit while doing Eat More Lift Heavy, and is there a better time to take it?

4. Desiree F. and JC - Best exercises to grow glutes, how often, and how many sets/reps (Desiree), plus how to grow glutes without the quads taking over or getting too muscular (JC)

5. JC - On a 0-10 scale, how important is eating protein right after lifting, and what stalls if you don't? (she now trains after dinner around 7:30-8pm)

6. JC - How many days of not working out before you start losing your gains?

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life:
https://eatmoreliftheavy.com

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, muscle and longevity, fat loss over 40, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps

0:00 - 6 questions being answered today
2:22 - Resting between reps (when does a set count as 2 sets?)
7:04 - What perimenopause does to muscle and bone, and what protects it
12:17 - Why the scale jumps when you start creatine
16:19 - Building a strong physique without bulking up
19:17 - Bigger glutes without bigger quads (muscle specialization)
27:47 - Does protein after a workout (the anabolic window) matter as much as you think?
31:21 - How fast you really lose muscle, and the minimum to keep it

• Transcript

  6 questions being answered today

  Philip Pape 0:00

  It's been a while, but today we have another QA. Today's questions all come from our members inside Eat More Lift Heavy. And there's some really good ones, such as how long can you rest between reps before it counts as a separate set? Why does the scale jump when you start creatine? How do you grow your glutes without your quads becoming the dominant muscle group? And how fast you actually lose gains when life gets in the way. I'm answering all of these as always with evidence. And I think a few of the answers are going to surprise you, so stick around and enjoy today's QA. 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, Philip Pape, founder of Fitness Lab and the Eat More Lift Heavy program. And today is a special one because a few weeks back I asked members in that program to send me their questions, the bigger ones, the science questions, the trends, the stuff they're always wondering about, but never had an answer to. They often get these questions just day to day in the program as well as on our monthly coaching calls. But I specifically asked for some additional questions from them. By the way, if you want to send a question for the podcast anytime, go to wits and waste.com/slash question. Many of your questions actually turn out it turn into full episodes as opposed to a Q ⁇ A. But today I wanted to take multiple questions and answer them. So that's what I'm doing today. I'm giving them shout-outs, that kind of thing. And if even if you're not in that program, I definitely want you to stick around because these are very relevant questions about resting between reps, creatine, glute training, perimenopause, the anabolic window, losing your gains. And if you lift, if you eat food, which we all do, uh if you're over 40, several of these are probably gonna be highly relevant for you. And then I save the best one for last. I want you to stick around to the end because the last question, someone, the last question is something that a lot of people get wrong and causes, I'll say, the most unnecessary panic. And that is how fast you lose your gains when life gets in the way and you can't train. It's one of the most common questions I get. Hey, I'm going on a trip. Hey, I'm gonna have surgery, hey, I'm taking a break. Hey, it's been a while since X, Y, Z. How big of an issue is that? And I think it's a very reassuring answer. And I'm gonna give you the minimum that you need to hold on to muscle, and we're gonna look at the evidence. I think that's a good one. So we'll close out the episode, but let's get into the questions.

  Resting between reps (when does a set count as 2 sets?)

  Philip Pape 2:22

  All right, the first question comes from Tim E. And Tim asks, and I I love this one because it's the kind of thing you think about as you're training, and then you forget to kind of look it up. So he says, How long can you rest between reps before it becomes a separate set? Now he's doing squats, especially that third set, and he's resting two or three seconds between reps to catch his breath, and he wants to know if that's okay. And we see this with heavy work. We see this with, for example, deadlifts. It gets confounded by the fact that people have trouble knowing how and when to breathe and brace very often. Again, that's something we teach you to do. So it all is connected. But the short answer answer for Tim is that it's totally fine for a few seconds to take a breath, and that's it. That's the short answer. But I want to explain why, because there's real science here. There's a whole, there are entire training methods built around deliberately resting inside a set. So inside a set, like Tim is asking. You've got cluster sets where you break the set into little groups of reps with short rests in between. You might have heard the phrase density sets as well. You've got rest pause where you go to near failure, you stop, you take a few breaths, then you squeeze out a few more. You in in both of those, the rest is usually around 15 to 30 seconds. That's where you've restored enough that, say, your bar speed comes back and your fatigue drops. So when a coach wants to intentionally build rest into a set, that's the kind of pause that they're using. You might have heard of the dog crap method, the same idea. It's like 15 to 30 seconds. If you've ever done BFR, same thing there. So two or three seconds, Tim, just to breathe and rebrace, obviously it's nowhere close to that 15 to 30 seconds. That's actually totally normal. That's just lifting. In fact, that's good lifting in many cases because sometimes you do need that to get reset in that brief moment. We see the same thing with the deadlift. Whether you're breathing at the top or bottom, these days I tend to recommend breathing at the top. But what the, you know, when I looked into the research, there is a meta-analysis. So meta-analysis is a study of studies. This was 29 studies that compared these broken up set styles to traditional straight sets. And when you match the volume and effort, the muscle growth is identical. The strength is identical. So even if you rested long enough to technically split the set, it actually wouldn't hurt your results as long as you're getting the work in. The micro rest, if you want to call it that, is not what really matters. It's the total quality reps. Now we've talked about training close to failure and mechanical tension and all that. That's kind of where the thought is. I'm less and less of a stickler about, you know, even the number of sets, for example, or reps, if you're getting the similar effort is. I think more importantly, is can you objectively measure it and track it session to session so that you're not just all over the place? And then Tim mentioned in the thread in our program where he asked the question that some people rest like 10 seconds between deadlifts and wonder if that's too long. And my take is that on that is, you know, taking 10 seconds to reset your breath, rebrace, get your setup right is probably on the upper end, but it's not quote unquote too long per se, especially if you're doing extremely heavy reps. I mean, we're not trying to let's take ego out of it. Let's take, you know, critics from different groups or philosophies, whether it's starting strength or other, and just think of the what you're trying to do. Well, you're trying to lift the weight with good form and you're trying to get the mechanical tension, you're trying to recruit all those muscle fibers. So if you take a few seconds to get braced properly and it helps you do that, so what? Okay, so what? I mean, if you were in a competition, you're only going to do a single anyway. So on the big compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, especially, breathing and rebracing, like if you're wearing a belt and you really fill that up, that interabdominal pressure between reps is a very good technique. So with a squat, that's where it's on your back. Now I don't want you sitting there for 15, 20, 30 seconds and taking forever and shifting around and all of that. I just want you to, you know, take that breath, get braced, go down. It really shouldn't take more than two or three, maybe at most four seconds if you're really heavy and getting a little bit winded. Now, improving your work capacity, because you know, having slightly better conditioning through things like speed work or just a decent amount of volume probably will make it such that you don't need as much time. But there is a difference between like the respiration you need and the support you need through a big breath. So I wouldn't overthink it. Tim, you you're doing that, was a lot to answer your question, which I basically answered at the beginning, but I wanted people to understand the full context. So that is the rest between reps question.

  What perimenopause does to muscle and bone, and what protects it

  Philip Pape 7:04

  I wouldn't overthink it. And that's it. So moving on to the second question is from Ajana B. And this is a really good, I'll say forward-looking question, trying to be proactive. She says that she's strength training and eating whole foods right now. And she's wondering when she eventually hits the perimenopausal stage, what effect that's going to have on her, given that she's built this foundation of good habits and fitness. And I do love this question. I think you're thinking ahead and probably hearing a lot of things online or social media, or, you know, there's a lot of fear-mongering as well about around perimenopause, which is the period that could last several decades for some women. Some women, it's a lot shorter than that. But what's actually happening during that transition, starting as early as, say, your mid-30s, for many women, it's in more like their mid-40s before they get to the menopause transition, usually around 50 or a little after that, estrogen starts to decline. It gets a little bit more volatile, a little bit more erratic. And estrogen has an important, you know, stimulus in the body. It supports your muscle stem cells. Those are the cells that repair and build muscle. Estrogen supports your bone. It helps, you know. So when we hear about osteoporosis being more of an issue for women, that's why. It helps keep fat in the lower body so that the like the more hip and thigh pattern instead of the abdominal fat around the organs. So as estrogen drops, you tend to see on average accelerated muscle loss, accelerated bone loss. Women can lose somewhere in the range of one to two percent of bone density a year in that transition. And there's a shift toward more visceral fat and a little drop in insulin sensitivity. And then sleep is often getting disrupted. That affects your recovery. Your lifestyle tends to be more stressful and more difficult on all these things as well. And you know, it sounds kind of grim when I say it that way. And honestly, the whole industry is built on selling against that fear. But what's really fascinating and empowering about this, and this is how we're gonna reframe this. I'm a big fan of reframing, not delusion, but literally just looking at it from the productive angle that's gonna help you. Every single one of those changes I mentioned above is directly opposed to what you are already doing in our program and what we talk about on this show for that everyone should be doing. And we also think there's a lot of confounding evidence in the in the literature that these things aren't necessarily caused by perimenopause and the hormone changes per se. They're just correlated with many other things happening during that time of life that believe it or not, some of those things happen to men as well, like the muscle loss and the drop in bone density, which gives us even more evidence that you can control counteracting that with your lifestyle. So lifting and lifting heavy, and again, heavy is a relative term. When I say heavy, I simply mean heavy enough for you to make progressive, to progressively overload, to hit the mechanical tension. That is the single best stimulus we have, stimulus we have to keep muscle and to keep bone, because mechanical load is what tells your bones we need to stay dense, have that dense matrix. Adequate protein fights the muscle loss. You know, eating whole foods, staying relatively lean without too much body fat, that keeps visceral fat low. It helps with your insulin sensitivity. Obviously, muscle helps with all of this as well. So you're not starting from zero already, AJ, because you're doing so many great things and getting ready for that. You are actually going to be in a better position, a better starting position. Kind of like when someone has surgery and they've been lifting for a year. Now they're super strong, they're in a much better position to recover. Well, going into perimenopause, you're already way ahead of the game. And by the way, anyone listening who hasn't started, today's the best day to start. And you can reverse things, you can enhance things, you can build muscle till any age, till your 80s and 90s. And so if you're already doing it, well, of course you have a head start with more muscle, denser bone, better insulin sensitivity, habits that are more automatic, or I should say behaviors that are automatic with a series of habits that you've developed. So a woman who's built that foundation would have a different experience than a woman who is trying to do it for the first time when they're say 50 years old while dealing with other symptoms like hot flashes, bad sleep, and so on. So it kind of makes sense, right? But what do you actually have to adjust when you get to perimenopause? Well, honestly, not much. That's the good news. You keep lifting heavy, you don't back off on the intensity. That's, I guess, a lot of women have that instinct where they start to hear that you need to change things like uh how you eat, or you have to cut carbs or intermittent fast or something ridiculous like that. That's often counterproductive. You tend to have to eat more, a little bit more protein because of a little more anabolic resistance. You know, you supplements like creatine are helpful. We're going to talk about creatine later in this episode on the very next question. You know, you still want to get plenty of sleep, if not more sleep. You want to ramp your training appropriately, depending on what phase you're in, how much energy you have coming in, because your recovery might be more sensitive. Maybe your bones and joints, you know, take a little more stress. So you just have to be aware of it and have good form. And I know you've been asking about form in the community as well. So, bottom line, the foundation you're building right now is the best perimenopause insurance policy you could possibly have. Keep doing what you're doing. And for all those listening, I hope that inspires you to get on it today.

  Why the scale jumps when you start creatine

  Philip Pape 12:17

  All right. The next question, question three, is about creatine. We love creatine. So Denise M asked, and then and then a few others piled on, is creatine a benefit? She said specifically, is creatine a benefit while doing eat more lift heavy? And if so, is there a better time to take it anytime during the day or around the workout? Short answer yes, creatine is one of the few supplements I'll recommend across the board. When you get to, I forget which week of the program, it's like week 16. There's a tool that I've developed that helps identify all the supplements that would be a good idea based on your specific situation. And creatine is going to be on everybody's list. I'll be honest, it's just gonna be there by default because it's good for anybody. I want to break down the how though. So dosage, very simple, five grams a day of creatine monohydrate. That is it. You don't have to do a loading phase. You don't have you can take it with anything at any time. In fact, I'll just mention timing real quiz real quick because she asked about that specifically. Denise did. It doesn't matter. Daily consistency matters more than when you take it. There, there has been a tiny bit of research that hints that post-workout has like some microscopic edge over pre-workout, but it's so small, it's probably not actually meaningful, let's just say. So take it whenever you actually remember to take it. Like I will take it, I tend to take it post-workout on my training days or with my lunch. Like, I have a mix that I take with lunch so that I could take all my supplements and whatnot on my recovery days. So whatever it works. You know, people have talked about like caffeine and should you take it in hot beverages? Is that gonna hurt it? No, just take five grams a day. There is some evidence that higher levels of creatine might have cognitive benefits. I don't want to overstate that until we know more, but some people have asked about that. I tend to take somewhere like 10 to 15 a day just uh for a little extra boost. It's gonna get metabolized and excreted anyway. And when you start taking creatine, this is the thing that freaks most people out. So to all my members and eat more lift heavy, you know, you've heard you've heard this before, but to everybody listening, when you start creatine, the scale is going to go up almost inevitably. Of very few people have I seen it not happen to. For most people, it's gonna go up like two to four pounds. Now, if you load it, like the old days, like if you take, if you take the loading phase, you might go up even more, but there's no need to load it. So two to four pounds, it's not fat. It's water being pulled into your muscle cells and muscle cells, and that's what you want. That's a sign that it's actually working. Your muscles are fuller, they're better hydrated, they function better. That's why you get a few extra reps in the gym when you take creatine, you get more performance and more results. So when you see that first, that bump in the first week or two, be like, okay, yeah, good, good thing. That means the creatine's working. I'm getting more muscle water. And, you know, for a lot of people, it actually looks better. It doesn't look bloated or puffy like some myths have held over the years. It often looks better. But you have to account for that, which is why I prefer taking creatine when you're at maintenance, so you can just allow for that bump to kind of normalize. If you're tracking with something like Macrofactor, it might interpret it as a drop in expenditure temporarily, but then it comes back. And then when we talk about, okay, is creatine even more helpful for older folks, especially women over 40 than for younger folks, younger guys, whatever. Women have lower creatine stores to begin with. And I found a two-year randomized control trial, okay, RCTs, we we love randomized controlled trials with humans. And these were postmenopausal women, average age of 59, where creatine combined with resistance training helped maintain bone strength at the hip, the femoral neck, the femoral neck of the hip, which is the part that's very, very important for fracture risk. So they weren't looking at bone, not just muscle, which is very interesting. So take take take for that what it is. Feel free to look up the evidence yourself. I haven't really deep dived into that aspect, but if you're anybody, if you're a woman who lifting through perimenopause, menopause, creatine is definitely going to be helpful for you. Nobody should shy away from it unless they're, for example, allergic to it, which is very, very rare. Five grams a day, easy peasy, lemon squeezy as they

  Building a strong physique without bulking up

  Philip Pape 16:19

  say. So I think this is a good place for me to mention something because all of the questions today came from inside Eat More Lift Heavy. And I just want to explain what that is, real quick, for folks who are curious. It is my 26-week coached program. We have another coach in the program, Coach Carol. She's amazing. She's a women's and hormone and thyroid expert who's also really good with like recipes and meals and nutrition. And she actually jumped into the comment thread to talk a lot about the glute training, which we're gonna talk about in a little bit. That's actually the next question. But about the program, it's not a meal plan and a workout. It is a 26-week program where every week you learn a skill and you develop the skills over time, and then we have you apply those skills and we give you feedback. So it's across three phases. The first one is called stop guessing, where we get your nutrition and training dialed in with the right level of tracking and measurement for you. And I know if tracking people are like, oh, tracking, just note that we make it flexible enough that it works for you and we get you, you know, uh seeing the results of the tracking and how they help you make better decisions. And everybody who comes through tends to, I shouldn't say everybody, but almost everybody who comes through tends to realize, oh my gosh, this is what I've been missing. It's actually not that hard and doesn't take much time at all to track these things, but I get tremendous benefit from it. And we show you what tools to use, how to use them, how to interpret the numbers. That's the first phase. The second phase we call eat more lift heavy. That's where you really just focus on building that muscle, that metabolic capacity, that that just great lifestyle and health for movement and training and eating that will pay off long term. And then the final phase we call trust yourself. You learn to run your own, I'll say your own physique, but basically you're learning to be more autonomous and independent with a lot more advanced tools that we give you, as well as things that you can use on your own. So you can make the decisions and then you can get us to help you with the feedback on that. And that last phase is the whole point because I don't want you to be dependent. I want you to know how your body works, why it works the way it does, how to gain and lose body fat, how to build muscle, how to measure it all successfully. And then you're kind of off on your own, or you go to the next phase and keep leveling it up from there. So the reason these questions today are so good from our members in EM in Eat More Lift Heavy is, you know, they've gone past the basics and they're asking deeper questions. And I get that from a lot of listeners as well who've been listening to the show and been training, following their nutrition, doing the thing. Guys, this is a skill. This takes effort, this takes uh time. I've had folks write in who, you know, they've never used my services in any way, but they've listened to the show and they said, you know what, I've tried some cuts, I've tried some bulks, I've tracked like you've suggested, I've I've been very thoughtful and intentional about it. Just, and look, I've had some great outcome. And you know, my response to them is heck yeah, more power to you. I love to see it and tell the world we need to inspire more people to do this stuff because everyone can do it. I don't care if you're a man, woman, what age, menopause, doesn't matter. You can get the results

  Bigger glutes without your quads taking over (muscle specialization)

  Philip Pape 19:17

  you want. Okay, let's talk about glutes, everybody's uh favorite topic. Or a lot of people, I'll say people, but let's be honest, a lot of women ask about glutes. It just is what it is. And the question from Desiree is what are the best exercises to grow glutes? How often, how many sets and reps? Uh, we've had several episodes in the past, and I've had some guests on talking about glutes. And, you know, remember, this is the general, the general answer to anything about how do I grow something is not just about exercise selection. It's also about the principles that underlie training in general. But we're I do want to get specific about glutes. And then JC jumped in with a follow-up that I think a lot of women are thinking about, which was hey, she wants a fit-toned shape. She doesn't want her quads to get too huge, she wants the right, we'll say symmetry. She doesn't want to get, she doesn't want to look ripped or like she got a, in her words, a certain kind of surgical enhancement. She just wants the glutes to grow without everything else blowing up. And you know what? I could personally identify with that, JC, because as a man, I genetically have a larger derriere. Hopefully that's not too much information, but for a man, that may not always be a good thing if I'm doing a ton of squats and it's like out of proportion, right? And I think I get what you're talking about. So let me talk about the training first and then the I don't want to get bulky or blow up other parts of my body part second. They're like two different questions. So the glutes, the glutes grow from loaded hip extension. Okay, that is the movement pattern. So your best exercises are things like Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, regular deadlifts, hip extensions, cable pull throughs, even cable and band kickbacks. So Carol mentioned that in the post in our community when she was providing specifics. Because again, if you want to grow something beyond average and you really want to get enough volume, you want to hit it from different angles at different positions, like lengthened, shortened positions and enough, you know, enough volume, right? Enough frequency and volume. So it's it's nice that we have all these different exercises to choose from. Now, you might hear that hip thrusts light up the glutes more than squats on the muscle activation tests, right? And that's true. Muscle activation is way higher. But I don't like isolating conversations to just muscle activation. If anyone is making a claim on social media that that's the main variable we care about, they're they're like 10 years out of bed with what really moves the needle here. This is the nuance, this is the evidence. When you look at the training studies that measure actual growth over time with MRI, okay, actually looking at your body composition, hip thrusts, and score. Squats grow the glutes about the same. So activation, muscle activation does not perfectly predict visual muscle growth and size in and of itself. What you need is both. You need both form, you know, both movement patterns. You need multiple movement patterns here. And that makes sense because you just need to use hip dominant stuff and squat pattern stuff and kind of make it all work together. Now there's a bunch of other exercises I didn't even mention, like I don't know, step ups and reverse lunges and walking lunges and all of that. That could also help. And what's cool about it is there's so much flexibility that as long as you have enough different exercises at frequency and volume and you're training hard progressively overload, you're probably going to be good. And that's honestly the training hard part and the doing it consistently part is usually where people are not doing it and therefore their glutes aren't growing. I've known people that they just do a basic program with squats. You know, women just and their butt blows up because they're they're lifting heavy with squats, and I'm talking low bar squats that use all the hip musculature. But it all depends. It all depends. So frequency-wise, you're gonna want to train those muscle groups specifically two to three times a week. It's kind of the sweet spot. You're gonna aim for 10 to 20 hard sets a week. So the higher you get, the higher dose response, but it's it's diminishing returns. So if you really have the time in the gym and you really want to dedicate, you know, aim for that 20 sets. You may be more or less responsive to someone else. Sometimes women respond to a little bit more volume. That's on average, just speaking, generally, for you, you may not need 20 sets, you may need 15. Um, heavy compound work in there, you know, in the 6 to 12 rep range, let's say you've got the accessory stuff like the kickbacks, pull throughs, and stuff, maybe in the 15 to 20 plus range. Um, doesn't have to be, but in a range where you can have really good form and really feel it and get that mechanical tension and get close to failure, and then progress it over a few months. So we're talking 8, 12, 16 weeks, just run that program straight out and see what happens. Now, you're gonna want to measure them as well, right? And so I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to JC's part of the glutes question, which is how do you grow the glutes without the quads taking over? And of course, you want to be measuring your glutes, measuring your thighs. Like if you really care about that level of detail, you've got to measure them with circumference measurements on a regular basis to just validate what's happening and try to offset other variables like food and sleep and inflammation and things like that. But for growing the glutes specifically, you want to isolate them more. That's really what it comes down to. You're gonna you're gonna go lean into like the hip dominant movements, hip thrusts, RDLs, kickbacks, pull throughs, because those all load the glutes and barely touch the quad. So you just want to look at the exercises and shift around the number of sets that are hitting the X, the, the muscle group that you want to outpace the other muscle group. Now, I have heard some coaches say, just cut out altogether things that hit a muscle group that you think is already too big. And there's logic there, isn't there? There is some logic to that. I wouldn't want you to get what they call imbalance, but that's very hard to do if you're doing regular movement patterns on a regular basis anyway. You can go a little lighter on the deep, like knee dominant stuff, the deep squats, the leg presses that drive a lot of a lot of the quad growth. You know, if you've got a lot of, it's not really so much about the lightness, though, as the effective reps or the number of um hard sets and reps. So it's really more about volume. You can kind of lower the volume on those and shift that volume more to the hands and the glutes, right? You can't perfectly isolate the glute from the leg, right? Nobody can do that. We're a system, but you can bias the ratio. You can make the glutes the priority and the quads then come along for the ride. So again, Carol gave specifics in the group on like, do these specific exercises. Here's a program. We've got a glute and leg program in our in Eat More with Lift Heavy as well. We've got all that stuff. That's like the mechanics of the specifics, but I wanted to hit on the principles. Now, the big fear behind JC's question about not wanting to get bulky. Um, I think that was part of the question. I want to put this one to rest because women already have less muscle than men, just in an absolute terms. Women also have more body fat. The women, female body, it's it's not designed to get bulky, is kind of the way I'm gonna put it. It's very, very, very hard. You're not gonna accidentally get big and bulky, let's say. The toned look that a lot of women want that you're describing, that is a function of proper hard training, plenty of heavy work, training close to failure, enough fat loss to see the muscles. If anything, what you might be worried about is when you gain some fat, some body fat, or you're eating a lot and you're in a surplus, and then you get a little bit bigger or bloated or puffy or whatever from body fat. Well, that happens to men and women, right? That but that's not really bulk, that's body fat, that's not from muscles. Um, now, granted, having more muscles, could it push that out a little bit more? Yes. But I've never seen a woman that is not taking enhanced, you know, drugs that looks bulky, at least in my opinion, from from a male who, you know, I'm married with a wife, so I'm a straight guy who finds women attractive. And all I'm saying is that from my point of view, I've never seen a bulky woman who trains and build muscle. So that's kind of my thought, all right? And I joke about it that as a man, I wish I could get quote unquote bulky. Now, I I can definitely put on the fat, but it takes a lot of work to put on muscle. You have to train hard, and it's gonna take years and years and years to put on muscle. And for women, it's gonna give you the toned look you want. And if you want to get ripped or shredded or whatever, that's just a function of leanness and body fat. We're not even gonna go there right now. All right, the next one is one of those questions where I think the answer is the opposite of what a lot of people hear.

  Does protein after a workout (the anabolic window) matter as much as you think?

  Philip Pape 27:47

  And uh, JC asked on a zero to 10 scale, how important is it to eat protein right after lifting? What's what can be held back or what can stall if you don't do that? She changed her workout time. She's now going to the gym after dinner around 7:30 or 8 o'clock at night, and she doesn't want to eat a big heavy meal when she gets home. So she asked. And I said, that's maybe a three out of 10, maybe a two out of 10. Uh, this is the famous anabolic window, the idea that you've got this narrow, like 30 to 60 minute window after training where you have to slam in your protein, or then you you waste the workout, or you don't get as much muscle protein synthesis or whatever. And a lot of people believe that for many years. And we know how much body, you know, bodybuilders way back in the day believed in tons of protein and the raw eggs right after your workout and all that. But the actual research, there is a a well-known meta-analysis on this, found that once you account for total daily protein, there is no magic anabolic window. It's it, if there is, it's more like many hours on both sides of your workout, which is awesome. Okay. And the part that I think is great for JC, for your situation, is that a protein-rich meal will keep your amino acids elevated in your blood for many, many hours. So if you ate dinner and you train right after dinner, your body's still digesting and using that protein all the way through your workout and after it. So you're totally covered. The pre-workout meal is covering the post-workout window. So if you eat a second big meal at nine o'clock, it's not really going to do anything for you. It's why you don't need to do the pre-bed casing protein. It is why I recommend a lot of people do not train fasted or at least experiment with training fasted versus not training fasted. But if you do train fasted and you had a huge dinner the night before, not huge, but like you had a decent dinner with plenty of protein and carbs, especially the night before, some of that even carries through to the next day a little bit. So, what actually matters, JC, is not the timing, it's the total protein. That is really the game. That's like 90, 95% of the equation. Hit that target consistently, spread it across your meals, mainly for practicality purposes and potentially a tiny, tiny edge, but don't worry about the workout timing when it comes to the protein. If you want something small after, like a small shake or some Greek yogurt, it's fine, but you don't have to force a heavy meal down at night. Just get your sleep. Like that's what I would recommend is focus on the sleep. All right, we got one question left, the one about how fast you lose your gains. Before I get to that, just a reminder about how to submit your question to the podcast. Every question today came from a listener. In this case, all of our listeners were also members of Eat More Lift Heavy, but we definitely air questions for listeners and we make entire episodes based on listener questions. I really love these because that way I know you are thinking of something specific that you're not sure of the answer to or have not heard a good answer to out in the world. And a lot of other people are thinking about it as well. So if you've been chewing on something, if you saw a claim online, a piece of advice you're not sure about, you want another opinion, something about your own training that doesn't seem to make sense, send it to me. Go to wits and weights.com slash question. That's wits and weights.com slash question. Give me as many details as you can, especially your own personal contacts, so I can help you out directly, not just a general question. I always reply to the emails directly. And then if you want, I can give you a shout out on the show. You can select whether you want a shout out when you submit the question. So go to witsandweights.com slash question. Okay, speaking of questions, last question. How

  How fast you really lose muscle, and the minimum to keep it

  Philip Pape 31:21

  fast do you lose your gains? So this is also from JC. She asked, How many days of not working out before you start losing your gains? And I told her about two to three weeks, but I want to expand on the details. This is a very anxiety-inducing question everyone has because we're always having things that come up in our life that force us to take a break in some way, right? My my brother and parents visited for a week, almost a week and a half, and I worked out the morning that they arrived so that I could get in a workout in knowing I probably wouldn't train most, if not at all, while they were here, which turned out to be the case. You know, we were just all over the place, we were exhausted, we were traveling, everything. But then I fit one more in during the middle of it. But sometimes I'll go a week, week and a half without training. And a lot of people, when they take time off, there's probably more of a psychological panic than a physiological change, especially if you're into training. Like you once you get into this game, once you get into lifting regularly, you love doing it. You you enjoy doing it, you know that the results are there. And you know, you start to feel a little bad when you take time off. Because you're like, I don't, what am I doing? Am I setting myself back? And you might look in the mirror and say, okay, I'm looking flatter, smaller, like from a muscle perspective, you think you're like deflated, right? Have you ever had that feeling? I've had that feeling. You know, I look at my chest and I'm like, oh, it's like I don't have a as big of a chest. What you're probably seeing though, in that first week without training, is a reduction in glycogen and water from your muscle because you don't have the training stimulus. So it's more like a deflated balloon, not a you lost the balloon. Does that make sense? As soon as you start training and eating normal again, normally again, it fills back up really, really fast. And I know this both anecdotally and in the research, but anecdotally, what's interesting, or I guess this is supported by research as well, people who are detrained for years. So they haven't trained for years, their muscle comes back fast as well. So, I mean, if that can happen, imagine how much faster it must be if you only take a week off. Also imagine how much you gain in a week. Are you gonna lose any more than that in a week? Yeah, you know what I mean? So it's not, it's not much at all, even if it were that, but it isn't that. So the actual muscle mass, you hold on to that a lot longer than you would think. The research tells us that trained people can take one to two weeks off completely, zero training, and lose essentially zero muscle. So your strength then holds a little bit longer for about two to three weeks, even up to four weeks, you know, the strength, because that's more neuromuscular. Those are movement patterns that's wired into your brain. Real meaningful muscle loss usually doesn't start until past that three to four week mark of doing nothing. And then there's this muscle memory, right? This is a real thing. It's not gym, Jim Bro, what do we call it, bro science. When you build muscle, okay, and oh man, that we had a great conversation. Who was on the show? I wish I could remember, or did was this a solo episode? Well, anyway, when you build muscle, you add nuclei to your muscle cells, and those nuclei stay even when your muscle reduces in size, when it I'll say shrinks when you're not training. And there's research showing that those nuclei are retained for many, many months. So even if you lose some size on the long break, it snaps back really, really fast, way faster than it took to build, because the memory is still there. The cellular memory or machinery, if you want to call it, is still there, just waiting to be sort of reactivated and refilled up. Now, the practical version of all of this is probably more of a thing that you should care about. When life blows up your training because of travel, because of a sick week, because work is just crazy, because family's visiting, you don't have time. You don't have to have your entire program to hold on to the muscle. You actually only need a tiny bit of volume. So, as little as, for example, one session a week, sometimes a third or less of your normal volume. I've heard of it as little as one eighth, but I wouldn't go that extreme. That's basically just taking it off. So as long as the intensity is up, if you have like one session, a few hard sets for your legs, pushing, pulling, right? Just a simple upper or full body and you're still training close to failure and all that, maybe 20 minutes, then you're gonna do an even better job of maintaining. I'm not saying you have to do that. I'm just trying to say it's so little that like what I did when my folks visited, I just squeezed in that one morning session while everybody was still sleeping, just got it done. It was, it actually felt really good. You may not be able to do that, but honestly, even if you're in a hotel, if you're somewhere without a gym, there's some basic movement you can do. But you don't even have to because we know that most of this is maintained for at least one to two, if not three or four weeks, and then it comes back super, super fast. That is the takeaway. If you feel a little flat, if you feel a little bad or untrained, whatever, it's mostly psychologically, psychological with a little bit of a fluid mechanics going on. And then you come back. I would say you start with roughly where you ended if it's only been a week or two. Some people find they're even they feel stronger when they come back because they needed the recovery. But if if it feels kind of sluggish and hard, you can drop off the intensity by maybe 10%, you know, like the load by maybe 10%. But it's gonna come back right really fast. The minimum effective dose is way, way lower than what you might have thought. So that's it. I'm just answering questions today and nothing else. And if you want to submit your question, go to witsandweights.com slash question. I'll give you a shout out on the show. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the people asking the best questions are the ones who keep getting better. So keep asking them. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Why Muscle Predicts Your Cancer and Heart Disease Risk | Ep 482

Most people start lifting to look better, and they treat the health payoff as a nice bonus. There's nothing wrong with that, but the mortality research suggests that the frame is probably backward.

Your muscle and strength are the keys to longevity, with your physique and how you look a nice side effect.

The evidence here is large, in some studies hundreds of thousands of people. One simple measure of strength predicted death better than blood pressure.

I look at what that means for the two outcomes most of us worry about after 40, cancer and heart disease, including a detail about how cancer treatment gets dosed that very few people know. I also get into why muscle behaves like an organ that helps protect your heart, not just things that pop in your shirt :)

You have probably heard that being weak is worse than smoking. Does that hold up? Then I get to the part that should take some of the pressure off, which is how little training it takes to collect most of the benefit and why it is never too late to start.

Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that reads your data, coaches you on your patterns, and keeps you consistent for adults over 40 who want to lose fat and build strength. Summer special is 20% off through July 3.
https://witsandweights.com/app

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, muscle and longevity, fat loss over 40, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps

0:00 - Why lifting for looks gets the benefit backward
5:36 - Muscle is medicine... looking good is the bonus
10:06 - The strength measure that beats blood pressure
11:30 - Is being weak really worse than smoking?
14:46 - Muscle, cancer survival, and how treatment is dosed
17:23 - Your largest metabolic organ and your heart
20:14 - A useful longevity tool
22:44 - The surprisingly small dose that protects your life
26:01 - Why it is never too late to build muscle
30:06 - A 30-second strength test you can do today

Episode Resources

• Try Fitness Lab (20% off through July 3)

• Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint (free guide)

• Transcript

  Why lifting for looks gets the benefit backward

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you lift weights mostly to look better, to fit your clothes, to see a little more shape in the mirror, I want to show you something today that will help reframe how powerful muscle is, because there is a pile of research, hundreds of thousands of people, that shows us that muscle and strength do much more for us than just our physique and just our function. They change how long you live and how well you live. It is a longevity lever, probably the biggest one we have. Today I'm going to walk you through the actual mortality data on muscle and strength, including how it lines up against cancer and heart disease, why grip strength predicts your risk better than blood pressure, and a part that should make you feel really good, which is how little training it actually takes to get most of the benefit. 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, Philip Pape, and today's episode comes from a very, very common question I get from everyone I talk to, clients, listeners, people who email me, they start lifting for how they want to look. And let's be honest, 90% of us maybe, I don't know if it's 90%, but most of us get into fitness or exercise or health or whatever, driven by how we look initially, because we're not happy with it. And yeah, we might kind of trick ourselves into saying it's about longevity or playing with our kids or whatever the deep value why is that we talk about all the time. But it often starts with we're just not happy in our skin. And there's nothing wrong with that. I wanted to start with that up front. Wanting to look good, wanting to feel strong in your own skin, that is a completely valid reason to train and improve your nutrition and walk more and all of that. It's usually the reason that gets people into this in the first place. But then what happens for a lot of us is we treat everything else, like the health stuff, the wellness, the living longer, the longevity, as kind of a nice bonus, as a side effect, right? It's like this thing that's an extra thing in the background that happens, and ultimately we're still chasing the aesthetic goal. I see it in the questions, I see it in the decisions like modifying how I train, the hypertrophy, you know, trying to do fat loss, maybe when you shouldn't, et cetera. There's a lot of things going on there. And I know it's often driven by vanity, even when you don't say it is. So let's be honest, just me and you in your AirPods or your headset or whatever or car, maybe you're working out now. Good for you. But I want I do want to flip this around, and I know I've covered this topic in the past, but I think, I think we're getting it backward, and I think it's more serious and important than we often talk about. More folks in the industry are talking about the importance of muscle and strength, but the data, the data on how long you live, on the longevity piece, on health, on cancer, on cardiac disease, is one of the strongest, most replicated bodies of evidence we have in all of health science. I can't repeat that enough. We're talking studies with hundreds of thousands of people, some cases over a million, that point to something I think most people who lived, us, I hope, or if you just came across this podcast, you're going to be motivated to do that, have never really thought too much about. And that is look, muscle is not just the side effect. Muscle itself might be the main event. The, I hate to say it, the UFC fight on the White House lawn. And I say that as a joke. Hopefully it's a joke to all sides of the political spectrum. And then the way you look, that's the side effect, believe it or not. And a lot of you, I think you kind of know this, and you're like, okay, here's another episode about the benefits of muscle. But I really want you to internalize this because if I see someone who doesn't lift weights, who doesn't use resistance training, I feel terrible for them. I wish I could just grab them and say, you've got to understand that that is the thing that's between a healthy, long, aging life and sickness and mortality, death, frailty, injury. I am serious. That is the dividing line right there. Now, if you're listening to this and you're you're getting older, you're over 40, you're over 50, right? I'm 45. I still consider myself pretty young, to be honest. And I feel young because I act young and I live young in terms of the resistance training, but also how I eat and walk and all that. I know you want to do that as well. And I know plenty of 75-year-olds and 85-year-olds who also feel like they're 40 because they're living this way and who wouldn't want that. Okay. And then we have, you know, the women in this audience going through peri and postmenopause, where hormones are changing. And this stretch of life into our 40s, that is where muscle and strength start to slip at a very rapid pace if you don't defend what you already have, let alone build more of it. And that's where the health payoff exists. That is where it is. Okay, so that's what this episode is about. I'm super passionate about this topic. I've seen too many people just die when they didn't have to, or get injured when they didn't have to, or go on medications when they didn't have to. And it makes me sad. Okay, now that's what this episode is about. If you stick around, I always give you a nice little treat at the end. We're gonna talk about, you know, the science in the episode. And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a very classic test you could do at home to tell you where your strength is. And you can test it anytime. If you're over a certain threshold, like you're good. Uh, if you're below it, you know you have some potential. But no matter your age, this is gonna be a super helpful test to just check it out relative to what the longevity research says. Okay,

  Muscle is medicine... looking good is the bonus

  Philip Pape 5:36

  today we are going to talk about why lifting just for looks and getting health as a bonus, it's kind of the backward frame, and it it may be causing poor decision making as well, which is why I wanted to address it. Then we're gonna talk about the numbers, the mortality data, the cancer and heart disease part of it, which is kind of how I framed, I think, in the title of this episode, because it's so important. It's so correlated with mortality and shorter lives and health spans or yeah, health spans. Um, we're gonna talk about grip strength and then the fix that I to all of this, okay, which is gonna seem so simple. It's gonna feel like a letdown, but in a good way. So let's get into it. All right, let's start with what people believe. What do people believe? Well, that if you lift to build muscle, muscle is gonna make you look better and move better, right? It's gonna improve function, which is not just looks, it's function. I get it. And that somewhere down the line, in some vague way, it's probably good for your health too. A lot of people truly believe, like they don't quite understand why muscle is important. It's one thing I go on other podcasts to talk about all the time. And when someone asks me on the podcast and they're not sure exactly what we're gonna talk about, that is what I pitch to them because it's so important. Where we think of health or even wellness, I hate that term, wellness, because it's kind of a dirty term these days, is tied into like influencer culture as well. But health and wellness, longevity, let's say, is thought of as the side effect or the background of all of this, but really it should be in the front. The reason this matters is practical because the way that you frame what's important in your priorities, is health more important than, say, strength and function or something like that, affects your decisions. So if you're always training for looks or for PRs or strength, then you might skip other aspects of the program, let's say, especially when it's not convenient, right? We need something that drives us, that motivates us. You might deprioritize recovery again, especially as we get older, our connective tissue gets a little less pliable. We get a little more prone to injury and we take longer to recover and things like that. You might bounce around from program to program because you're chasing something when something doesn't change fast enough, like let's say how you look or certain measurements. You'll question whether things are working. And of course, let's be honest, health and longevity is the long game. It's very, very hard to measure that in a motivational way, knowing that it's so far out, it's so many years out. So the mirror obviously can't show you a lot of different things. The body measurements and weight trend can't show you what's happening with your risk of mortality, of dying. It can't show you what's happening to your odds of getting cancer, can't show you how your heart is going to do 20 years from now. But all of that is being shaped right now by the muscle that you're building. But it's kind of invisible. So it doesn't get the attention or the vote when you're making your decisions. So that's the cost of all of this misprioritization. You end up training or eating or moving for the outcome in the short term. And then you ignore the outcomes that determine, you know, how long and how well you get to live. Now, before you think I'm gonna go down some weird path of longevity foods and inflammation and cortisol, I'm not because none of that really matters. Okay, especially for today's episode. So the thing that you can measure in the short term, ironically, is downstream of the thing that matters in the long term. So we kind of have it flipped around. And I know that sounds confusing, but it's because to put it another way, you can have suboptimal, say, physique outcomes in the short term, but it's because you're doing things that are beneficial to you in the long term. And there, and there's different elements of that we'll get into. So the frame today is not, okay, I'm gonna lift for looks, health is a bonus. It's hey, muscle is medicine and looking good is the bonus. Muscle is medicine and looking good is a bonus. And I don't know how powerful that statement is for you. I don't think it's a mic drop moment. It's just the way we're gonna frame it. Okay, so let's get into numbers. Let's get into objective facts. I love vibes as much as the next guy, but we can't live off of vibes, right? So there is a study called Pure, P-U-R-E, and it's probably the first one I'd look at. It followed 140,000 people across 17 countries, and they found that grip strength, that's just how hard you can squeeze, predicted your risk of dying. And by the way, when I've had physical therapy, they sometimes will at some point measure my grip strength. I think they stopped doing it. They're like, Yeah, yeah, you're you're strong. We don't have to worry about that. But it predicts your risk of dying. So for every roughly five kilogram drop in grip

  The strength measure that beats blood pressure

  Philip Pape 10:06

  strength, all cause mortality goes up by 16%. Cardiovascular death goes up 17%. That's powerful, guys. Okay, in the data, grip strength was a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure. Stronger than blood pressure. Now, your doctor measures blood pressure every time you go in, and maybe you measure it at home. But do you ever get your grip strength measured? I've heard people talk about like having grip strength as a normal thing that you measure. Now, maybe older folks get it measured. I don't know. Maybe in different countries they do, but I haven't heard about it around here in the US. Then we have the UK biobank. Now, thank goodness UK has all this data for whatever you think about the national health system. They have a ton of data on half a million people and they found the same thing. And the effect between the grip strength and mortality was a little bit stronger, pun intended, in women. A large meta analysis that had two million people found 16% mortality increase per five kilogram drop in grip strength, just like we said before. And then they, when they compared the weakest group to the strongest group, the difference in mortality risk was 40%. So that's like taking the the two extremes. Now, always want to have nuance. I always want to be honest on this show and not overclaim because a lot of people in the longevity space get loose with the claims. And I hope I don't do that. And if you please call me out on it if I do, you'll hear things like low muscle is worse than smoking. Now, maybe I've said that, I don't

  Is being weak really worse than smoking?

  Philip Pape 11:30

  know, just to get attention. I I again I don't recall. Put me on the stand and I'll say I don't recall. But I did dig into it for this episode because I wanted to know if that holds up. And honestly, per unit, it doesn't. Smoking is just so terrible. Okay. Somebody who's a current smoker versus a never smoker has two to three times the risk of dying. Like smoking's just terrible. It's awful. And so that's a huge fact, a huge like single effect factor from like one variable compared to this five kilogram change of grip strength. So if someone tells you weakness is worse than smoking, that is definitely overstated. But, okay, now this this is the thing that is actually wild and true. When you compare the extremes, when you compare the weakest people to the strongest people, the gap actually gets up toward the smoking range. Okay, that is actually supported by the evidence when it comes to fitness. Cardior respiratory fitness, when that is measured in the lowest fitness group versus the highest, it's been measured at five times the risk of death. And the researchers themselves have said that is comparable to or greater than smoking. So the whole family of things, the muscle, strength, fitness, it lives in that neighborhood of risk factors, of huge, huge, huge risk factors like smoking that we know about. That's kind of where I wanted to take that. Oh, yeah. So at the end of the day, could you make that claim? It's probably not far from the truth, to be honest, which says something that, you know, strength specifically is a smaller per unit effect than smoking, but it's a bigger predictor than blood pressure. And when you take account for fitness overall and the gap between the weakest and strongest, it's a huge risk factor. And that's still something. That's something profound, I would say. Okay. That is very, very profound. I feel like this is something nobody's talked about, what was talking about, let's say five, even five or 10 years ago. And a lot of people are still not talking about it. I read newspaper articles, I see things online, people send me, and article, you know, and I see new studies that come out on things like osteoporosis, let's say. And they'll say, Well, we tried this new medication and it didn't seem to work. So we're still trying to find what is going to help with bone loss. And then they don't even mention strength training. Okay. Actually, I did see one article recently that says, so we're going to keep advising people to do the things that we know already work, like resistance training. I was like, okay, kudos for you for actually saying that. But how many times have I seen it not even be mentioned? And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is either a massive missed opportunity or a massive lack of education, at least among you know the media and reporters who have to go and find this information from experts. Okay, so let's get specific here because cancer and heart disease is kind of the frame in the title of the episode. And I think it's really important. I want to start with cancer. There's a landmark meta-analysis. Almost 8,000 people who had solid tumors, cancer tumors, and they found that people with low muscle mass had significantly worse survival. So they had worse overall survival, worse cancer-specific survival as well. And the mechanism is that when you have a serious illness, your body is going to draw down its protein reserves. And now you're like, okay, now I see the connection potentially to muscle, where muscle is literally the reservoir of amino acids

  Muscle, cancer survival, and how treatment is dosed

  Philip Pape 14:46

  that your body pulls from to fight, to heal, to recover from surgery, and to tolerate treatment. So we're talking about cancer survival. Chemotherapy, okay. Chemotherapy is often dosed by body surface area. They give you a dose basically based on your size. But we know that two people the same size can have different amounts of muscle, different body composition. So the person with low muscle effectively gets overdosed relative to their lean mass and toxicity goes up. In there was a study where serious, like what they call serious chemo toxicity showed up in 50% of the low muscle patients, but only 20% of the other patients. So it was, you know, the same, the same drug or the same treatment, but because of the different amounts of muscle, one fared much better, the group that had more muscle. Now, I don't want to scare people, I'm trying to approach this with the right nuance. There's a difference between having less muscle and there, and something called, it's a syndrome called cachexia, C-A-C-H-E-X-I-A. And that's the muscle wasting that's driven by the disease itself. And you can't fix that by lifting weights. So I just want to mention that. We're talking about the reserve of muscle that you've built before you know you get cancer, you have treatment for cancer. It's kind of like when we talk about surgery. I I always recommend people get as strong as they can before they go into surgery because you're gonna have to stop lifting and recover afterward. And it's gonna give you a much better chance to handle the treatment and the recovery. So when it comes to cancer, more muscle in the bank, more muscle on your frame before you get diagnosed or before you start treatment means more to draw down from if you ever need it. And I mean, I guess this this goes for anything in the future. Having more muscle is just gonna help. It's just gonna give you extra buffer, a massively extra buffer in some cases. And that's very, very empowering because we know we can build muscle at any age, we can increase muscle at any age. That's gonna be part of the outcome of this discussion. So that's cancer. It has to do with survival rates, chemo treatments, survival, you know, coming out of it healthier because you were stronger and had more muscle to begin with. Now, heart disease is this is kind of where I guess the engineer in me lights up because the mechanism here is really, really crisp. Your skeletal muscle is the single biggest place your body disposes of glucose. After you eat something like 80% of the glucose that gets pulled out of your blood, right, from the carbs that you eat, goes into muscle. So muscles, this glucose sink. More muscle, bigger sink, better blood sugar control, less of the metabolic chaos that drives heart disease. So we're talking about things like insulin sensitivity. We've talked about this on the show before, but this could be one of the biggest,

  Your largest metabolic organ and your heart

  Philip Pape 17:23

  most important reasons to have more muscle. You can handle more glucose, have better blood sugar control, less blood sugar issues down the line. Now, that's independent of your body weight, which in it which is its own risk factor, right? We don't want to carry too much body fat, but we're talking about muscle. I think it goes further than that as well, because muscle isn't just passive. It's not just a passive tank or storage tank for glucose. When you train, when it contracts, I mean, not even trained, even when you walk and just use it on a daily basis, it acts like an organ. That's why we call it an endocrine organ. It releases signaling molecules called myokines. And during exercise, one of them, interleukin 6, IL-6. Look it up, IL-6. It can spike up to a hundredfold, like a hundred times when you're exercising. Kind of like blood pressure goes up when you exercise, these acute responses. So that's an inflammatory marker, myocine, a good one. And this is it's anti-inflammatory. It's anti-inflammatory. That's why I say a good one. It helps damp down the chronic low-grade inflammation that is underneath things like heart disease and diabetes and a lot of the things that ages us. So every time you train, your muscles sending out chemical signals that are protective. So the and let's talk about this because this is the part that connects everything. The same tissue you build when you're trying to get those big shoulder caps, when you're trying to get those big glutes. It is also a metabolic organ that is actively defending your heart health. And it's doing these jobs all at once, but you really only can see, you know, you only see your muscles getting bigger, but you don't see all this wonderful stuff going on underneath. So you see what I mean? Muscle is not just something to build for function or strength or or muscles in and of themselves. It's the health piece, it's the health intervention. It is the prescription for aging. It's probably why John Sullivan created his book called Barbell Prescription. He actually goes into a lot of the fascinating benefits of health and avoiding what's called a sick aging phenotype, which is anybody who doesn't lift weights is going to get sicker and sicker as they age, period, bar none. Now, I know you guys want to get practical, right? And I know you're sitting thinking, okay, I'm convinced muscle is medicine. How do I know if I'm building it? How do I know if my training and recovery are pointed in the right direction? And I want to quickly tell you about my app, Fitness Lab, because it's designed for exactly that. Fitness Lab, which we talked about in the last episode, which is all about AI. Go check that out if you haven't. This is the provides a coaching intelligence layer. It's always hard for me to explain it, but it's effectively like a coach. It's not a tracking app, even though it can track lots of things, it can pull in all your data, but it can really work well alongside other data you have and other tools that you already use, including just having conversations with it. And the whole point is it looks at that data, tells you what it means, right? Which normally AI can't

  A useful longevity tool

  Philip Pape 20:14

  do that as well unless you really feed it the data and kind of prompt it over and over and spend hours chatting with, you know, ChatGPT or whatever. My app can just spit out, okay, I know what this means because I'm trained in evidence-based body composition, training, nutrition, the whole gamut. And it can say, look, are you recovering enough? Is your training producing the signal that you need to build muscle? Are you actually progressing? Is your feedback trending the way that you want across the metrics that matter for your goal? So it is a lot like having a coach in your pocket. People joke that it's like having Philip in your pocket when they talk to the chat tab. And it's like paying attention to what's happening to you. And the more you use it, the better it gets because it's learning from you. So if you if you use Fitness Lab, if you've already got it, I would give it a good three or four weeks to start really learning who you are, and it's gonna pay off big time. As you're listening to this episode come out, we have a promo going on as well. So just to put more skin in the game, 20% off. I'm throwing it your way. It ends tomorrow, Friday, as this comes out, witsandweights.com slash app. You can take a free quiz and get a plan that shows you what it will help you with over the next, say, three to six months before you even decide to buy the app. So totally zero risk. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. The link is also in the show notes. Now, if you're listening to this after July 3rd and it's gone back to full price, I want you to reach out to me. Uh, one way to do that is go to Instagram at wits and weights. Another way is to go to wits and weights.com slash email. Okay. So with Instagram at wits and weights or wits and weights.com slash email. I know I've thrown a lot of links at you, but essentially go grab the deal right now for fitness lab, wits and weights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes, 20% off wits and weights.com slash app. Okay, so we've covered why that's Health piece is so important. We've covered some of the data. We've covered mortality numbers, cancer, heart disease. There's so much data under there. I barely scratched the surface, but I think I gave you the essence of it. Now, what is the fix? I have to warn you. This is this is my trigger warning for you. It's gonna feel too simple. So if you don't like simple things, just stop listening right now. But that is the point of the show to try to get to what is the simple fix? Okay, here it is. I want you to train for muscle the same way you would if you only cared about how you look. Oh boy, oh boy, that's it. I'm gonna ruffle some feathers, right? Because earlier I kind of implied that doing that could lead to some wrong decisions, didn't I? All right, stick with me. Stick with me. I'll get to that. There is not a separate longevity program you need to go buy. There's no GLP1 program.

  The surprisingly small dose that protects your life

  Philip Pape 22:44

  There's no menopause hormone program. There's no cycle-based training program that you need to buy. You get what I you get what I'm saying? I hope you feel what I'm putting down. There's no special anti-aging protocol that is different from just lifting hard and progressively over time, because the mortality benefit is the byproduct of doing the things that you are already going to do. Now, why I said it's going to cause poor decisions is because a lot of people are training for looks. And because of that, they pay attention to the wrong things anyway, even when they're training for looks, because they're thinking short term, they're measuring the wrong things, they're looking at body weight instead of, let's say, body composition, or they're looking at their pump or the sweat or the soreness or the size of just their biceps instead of how their numbers are progressing, and so on and so forth. Now, I want to give you the actual dose here because specifics matter. Okay. I want you to train for muscle. And the research on resistance training and mortality is very encouraging here. Any resistance training at all compared to none is associated with a 15% lower risk of death. The sweet spot, okay, this is the this is the point of maximum benefit, lands at around 30 to 60 minutes a week, a week. After that, the curve starts to flatten out. So when we talk about dose response, what we mean is the more you do, the more benefit you get. But the but the caveat being the benefit becomes more incremental or marginal, right? To where it's not worth, it may not be worth it to you given the amount of time in the gym and the amount of stuff you have to do, right? That makes that makes sense, I think, to a lot of you. So you don't get dramatically more longevity benefit from training six days a week versus a couple focused sessions. Now, you might train more than that for other reasons, like to build more muscle because you enjoy it, to get stronger. All of that is phenomenal, and that's a lot of what we talk about. But the floor for the health payoff is that shockingly low amount of 30 to 60 minutes a week. So practically, here's what that looks like. I want you to train all your major muscle groups at least twice a week. Use progressive overload, meaning you're trying to do a little more over time, more weight or more reps. Get enough protein to support it. I'd aim for the minimum of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, and you can only go up for that from there depending on your goals. And by the way, even that minimum, if you're nowhere close to it, you can get to it over time, you know, over a short period of time. You don't have to do it instantly. And then recover enough so you can keep showing up in the gym. That's that's the whole thing, right? Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, whatever, twice a week, getting a little stronger over time, fed well, and recovered. There's a reason I call my program Eat More or Lift Heavy, because essentially the essence of it is that. Now, the other piece, which could be the most encouraging thing today, it's never too late to start. There's a famous set of studies done with nursing home residents. Their average age was late 80s. Some of them were in their 90s. They were frail. Come on, you've been to nursing homes. It is very depressing. It's very sad. I've known people who basically lived the rest of their life in a nursing home for one reason or another, died there. It was very, very sad. And all I thought is if I could just spend an hour a week with them, like as a personal trainer, and maybe I should volunteer to do that if they would have let me and get on a resistance training program, you would have gotten the benefit that these people did in this study. So they put them on a program, actual progressive

  Why it is never too late to build muscle

  Philip Pape 26:01

  lifting, where they increased the numbers over time. And guess what? Their strength went up an average of 174%. Now that is people in their 90s. Also, the speed that they could walk increased. Their muscle grew. New muscle, bigger muscle in your 90s. Come on, this is incredible. So if you're 45 like me right now, or 55 or 65, you're listening to this and you're like, I've missed my window. Heck no, that is not an excuse. I'm sorry, I'm taking that off the table for you. The windows right now, it doesn't matter if you're male, female, what age you are. By the way, I'll say it again. Women build muscle at the same rate as men. They have less to start with. That is what it is. That's puberty, testosterone, whatever. It doesn't matter. But once you start growing your muscle, it's the same rate as men. And it doesn't matter the age. So your body will respond to that signal. It's not like anything changes. You're still a human being till the day you die. So it will respond. Now, listen, I'm not saying lifting makes you immortal. That would be awesome. Like if everybody lifted weights and we lived to be 200 years old. I'm not saying muscle cancels out terrible behavior like smoking or bad diet or never sleeping. Of course not, right? You've got to do those things. I'm not saying you should panic about grip strength or go get a death risk score and like start to spiral about it or rant and rave at me. Please don't do that. I'm not saying the research proves adding muscle directly causes you to live longer. All this research, most of it is observational. There's a chance that some can go the other way, that like being sick makes you weak rather than weakness making you sick and stuff like that. But good studies try to account for all of that. And the overall signal has held up so well. You know, I'd be lying if I told you anything was a closed case in science. Like that is science. You can never fully prove anything, can you? So nuances everything. What I am saying though is across an enormous body of evidence, muscle and strength track with living longer and surviving all the things that kill most of us. The mechanisms behind them make biological sense at the human body level, not just in a rat, right? Or in a petri dish. And the intervention is simple and something that you have complete control over. And hopefully we're going to do anyway, since you listen to wits and weights. So you might as well train like it matters, because it absolutely does. And you don't have to change a thing about your program to collect the benefit. You just have to keep lifting. In fact, adding more and doing more and trying to optimize really benefits the other things like the muscle and the physique and the strength. So just know that the health stuff is a pretty low threshold. So there's no excuse not to get in the gym. All right, before we wrap up, remember I'm going to give you a 30-second strength test you can do at home to just kind of give yourself a wake-up call in case you need to get in that gym. If this episode has hit you, if you're walking away thinking, okay, I really need to train and I need to approach my life differently because this is more, this is more important than anything right now, especially if you don't train. It's not just for vanity. It's the single most controllable lever you have on how long and how well you live. If you want to make sure that lever is moving in the right direction, that your training and recovery are producing the muscle you think they are, just to know that you're doing the right thing, even if you do it for a few months. That's why I built my app Fitness Lab. I want you to just check it out, see if it's right for you. I think it's helping a lot of people. It is a daily coaching layer. It looks at your data and tells you what to do. It's very empowering and helpful and holds you accountable. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. We have a discount through Friday, July 3rd, 20% off. Witsandweights.com slash app. Okay, here's the test. It is a classic test to test your strength. You don't need any equipment. It is called the sit to stand test. You sit down in a normal chair, you cross your arms over your chest. So, you know, you can't use them, you just pin them to your chest like a mummy. And then you stand all the way up and sit all the way back down as many times as you can in 30 seconds. Now, you might want to do this alone. If you think people are gonna look at you askance, like my kids do when I tried it, or you might make it a fun family experience. Up to you. You're gonna count your reps. You're gonna stand up, sit down as many times as you can in 30 seconds, count them.

  A 30-second strength test you can do today

  Philip Pape 30:06

  For most adults who are in this midlife range, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, somewhere in the low teens is average strength. The higher you go, the better your lower body strength, and the better that tracks with longevity. And people who are who just lift weights on a regular basis can like slam out dozens of these. Like there, there are no issues, like no question whatsoever. But if you're in the teens, low teens, so like let's say 15, 10 to 15, that's average strength, meaning you have a lot of potential to get stronger. And if you're lower than that, then you're pretty darn weak. And that's okay to acknowledge that. That's what the data is telling you. And that's even better reason to get in the gym. And that's okay. Like just admit it to yourself, okay, I need to do something. Right? It's it's a place to start. Wherever you're at, it's a place to start. And what's cool is if you do it and it's really low and you start going to the gym and do it just like a week later or a month later, see how fast that number goes up. That itself could be really, really empowering. So do it today, write the number down, retest it, I'll say in four weeks and eight weeks. And if the number is going up, then you're basically getting stronger. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the muscle you build for the mirror is the same muscle keeping you alive for a long, healthy life. So train it, train it, train it like your life depends on it because the data says it just might. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Biggest AI Mistake People Make With Fat Loss Over 40 | Ep 481

You have access to more fitness information than any previous generation. ChatGPT, Google, YouTube, social media, and of course this podcast can answer almost any question about losing fat or building muscle in seconds. So why are so few people over 40 actually getting better results?

The problem was never a lack of information. Most people are using AI to solve the wrong problem entirely. The generic plans you ask for rarely change your body, and this is explained in the behavior research. 

Knowing what to do is not the same as doing it... adherence has always mattered more than the plan you choose.

AI becomes useful when you treat it like a coach instead of a search engine. Feed it your own training logs, nutrition data, and biofeedback, and it helps you make better decisions instead of collecting more advice.

Later in the episode, I also share a simple prompt that gets honest feedback from any AI tool instead of agreement.

By the end you will know which jobs to hand AI, which to keep for yourself, and how to use it for execution instead of just more information.

Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that reads your data, coaches you on your patterns, and keeps you consistent for adults over 40 who want to lose fat and build strength. Summer special is 20% off through July 3:
https://witsandweights.com/app

Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Why more AI isn't giving you better results
4:22 - The real bottleneck is behavior, not information
8:13 - The gap between intending and doing
11:06 - Where AI actually helps you change
12:42 - Spotting patterns in your own data
14:30 - Accountability, stakes, and the human factor
19:58 - Coaching that works with your data
23:40 - Bad AI prompts vs. better coaching questions
32:36 - The one prompt that makes AI stop being a yes-man
35:20 - The real reason most people stay stuck

• Transcript

  Why more AI isn't giving you better results

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You now have access to more fitness information than any human in history. Every answer about how to lose fat, how to build muscle, absolutely free just in seconds using AI. But ask yourself how that's working for you. You're probably not more consistent than you were a year ago, two years ago. You're not any leaner. And today I want to show you why AI, as you're probably using it, is not really much of an upgrade over a Google search. It might even make things worse. How to actually use AI so it's helpful and effective for you, and a few specific examples of the right and wrong ways to put it to work for your training and nutrition. 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, Philip Abe, and this is an episode I've wanted to do for a while. I think the timing is perfect because everybody and their mother is now using AI for their health and fitness, from Chat GPT to Claude to just random Google searches and everything in between. There's Buco tools and software being generated that use AI. You're asking it, how do I eat? How do I train? Is my plan any good? And I think it's really, I think it's awesome that we have technology to play with like this. And depending on who you are, if you're over 40, if you're navigating perimenopause or menopause, if you're lifting weights, you're trying to lose fat, trying to hold on to muscle, you've probably used AI by this point and asked it a question like, hey, what is the best workout for me given XYZ? Or hey, build me a meal plan given my macros. Am I am I right? Am I right? And if not, you're probably like, oh, I can do that. Let me go try it out. But I bet most of you have done that. And I want to be totally careful and walk the line on this episode because I am definitely not anti-AI. Not only do I use it all the time in my business as a power assist to save tons of time, especially on tedious type of work, but I built an AI coaching app. So I use these tools every single day. It this is not the, you know, robots are coming. This is Skynet Terminator taking over the world episode. And it's also not, hey, I, AI is the best and most amazing thing that will solve everything. Oh, and the last thing, it's not. I'm not gonna get into like how much water it sucks up and how expensive microchips are going to be and how the billionaires are gonna take over the planet. I'm not getting into any of that stuff. I'm gonna try to keep the focus narrow. I think AI is a useful tool. That's it. Like any other tool, it's tool. It's probably one of the most incredibly game-changing advances that we've seen in such a short period of time. And that can be highly dangerous in many of our minds, of course, when there's not appropriate, you know, boundaries on it. We saw this recently when Claude had to walk back the release of their latest mythos class model. You don't have to know what I'm talking about, but basically they said, yeah, this is too dangerous. Like people can create bioweapons or whatnot and you know, hack into banks and if they use it. So we're gonna turn it off. So I totally get all of that. Like I'm pretty educated in what's going on there. I love tech. I'm into all of that. But what this episode today is is about the gap between what AI can do and what most people use it for and how they use it. And we're gonna kind of explore that gap so you can take advantage of the tool for yourself because ultimately I want you to be able to use the tool in an educated way to help you out. That's it. I want you to also stick around to the end of the episode because I'm going to give you a prompt. It's a one-line prompt that you can paste into any AI chatbot that actually helps it help you better by pressure testing your plant rather than just totally agreeing with you. A concept called sycophancy, AI sycophancy, which, you know, South Park made a really funny episode about that a while back. You should look that up. But a lot of people, a lot of people aren't aware that they can they can train or they can update settings in their AI to help it, help it do better for you. And it just takes a few seconds to set that up. So stick around for that. But here's where we're going today. I'm gonna show you the bottleneck that has nothing to do with information. I'm gonna show you four things that AI is genuinely good at that can move the needle for you. And I'm gonna show you the difference between using it well and using it more like a search

  The real bottleneck is behavior, not information

  Philip Pape 4:22

  engine, like a lot of people use it. Okay. So hopefully this is a great episode for you. And as always, I love to start with hey, what is the conventional wisdom? What do people talk about? What do people claim that is true and maybe it's not? And the information's been out there when it comes to health and fitness and all of this stuff. It's been out there for over a decade. I mean, I got into podcasting in my own personal journey because I was able to get access to great podcasts and books and videos. And this was all before AI. And if you think about it, everything you need to know, to know, okay, information to lose fat, to get strong, to do all the things we talk about, to improve your metabolic health, has been sitting on the internet for free, even since before some of you started your fitness journey, even going back to like the bodybuilding forums and going back to the early days of the internet. How to set up protein and get enough, how to structure your lifting, progressive overload, energy balance, like all that stuff. And if anything, we have more so much information now that it's confusing, right? Like it's who who's telling the truth. We have influencers, we have social media. None of it is secret, I'll say. And if it is purported to be a secret, they're probably trying to sell you something. So, so none of it is gated behind a paywall. You can find all the studies, you can find all the information. You could have learned every relevant principle even 10 years ago without spending a dime, even though the science continues to get refined, is pretty darn close to what you would need to do. And of course, we know this because people have been successful improving their health and fitness for much longer than we've had the internet. And of course, we've now gotten just better and better at it. So the question that should really bother you here is okay, if information is the thing standing between me and what I want, the body I want to be lean, to be strong, to be healthy, to stop binge eating and to get rid of food noise, whatever it is, you'd already have it, right? You'd already have it. You you'd be done. Like you would have solved the problem, you'd have your plan, you'd execute, you'd be good. Everybody who has a smartphone, which is like the entire world, would have what they want. We'd be lean and strong. They'd they'd be millionaires, billionaires, whatever. Right. And you, I know you've heard this argument plenty of times, right? Everybody has access to the same information today. Information is as cheap as it's ever been. It's more democratized than it's ever been. You know, started with the printing press and it just went from there. And now we have the internet and now we have AI. But that doesn't matter, apparently, because many of us are still struggling. That's why you're listening to this podcast, because you're trying to figure out, okay, what is the secret or what is the thing I need to do? So information was never the bottleneck. And that's important because AI, the way most people use it, ChatGPT and Cloud and all of these, is a machine, a highly intelligent, you know, neural network machine learning trained, you know, whatever tech behind it machine for producing more information. Now you might not like that, that's the case, because that's really what it's doing. It's taking all of the knowledge that we have in human existence that it has access to and it's processing through that using very intelligent algorithms that are self-learning in many cases. And I know that scares a lot of us, but it's faster, it's, I'll say, cleaner, it uses better grammar, it's personalized to your exact question. I mean, now when you go to Google and you search, Google's smart about it. They use Gemini to just to give you the answer at the top. In fact, a lot of a lot of businesses don't like it because now there's sponsored results or their links at the top, people don't go to them anymore. They just get the answer right from Google. But it's still more information. And it's still, it's like Wikipedia, it's kind of like what Wikipedia has done in a way, where you guys, you know this. You go to Wikipedia and you search up something and then you can follow through with all the the references. So if information was never the problem, then more information, even if it's better delivered, is not the solution, is it? I mean, you tell me. It has it solved things for you? Or is it a marginal or maybe even large upgrade on something that was never really the problem?

  The gap between intending and doing

  Philip Pape 8:13

  So I want to talk about the actual problem. Okay. There's a researcher named Pascal Sheeran who did a big review of health behavior studies. And across studies on exercise, on screening, on all kinds of health behaviors, he found that of the people who had a genuine positive intention to do the thing, to do the thing they wanted to do, they wanted to do it passionately. They planned to do it, whatever that thing is, the median proportion who then did not follow through was 47%. 47%. So almost half of the people who intend to act don't. And so I want you to sit with that because there's a lot of judgment today about, well, you just gotta do it, right? You're just, I don't even want to say people get accused of being lazy, but we think of obesity and things like that. Even if behavior is a part of the equation, okay, okay, let's say it is. Are you able to follow through on that behavior? Right. And and as soon as you judge somebody else, like put point the finger at yourself and think of anything that you failed to follow through on in your entire life. There's probably millions of things. Okay. The constraint was never knowing what to do. It's that vast canyon between intending to do it and actually doing it. Not only that, but consistently, especially on the days you don't feel like it, because that's how you get consistent. The days you feel like it, you're gonna do it. But there are probably more days you don't feel like it than there are that you do. So knowing and doing are two completely different problems. And AI, especially when it's used as a fact retrieval machine, only really solves that first problem, the knowing part. And that's not really the problem that you have. Does that make sense? So, and okay, by the way, we have good data on the doing side as well, like actually following through. There's a famous diet study by Danzinger, where they put people on four completely different popular diets: Atkins, Ornish, Zone, and Weight Watchers. Now we're going back in the time machine, aren't we? Okay, let's see. I've tried two of those, Atkins and Zone. And so they're completely different diets, different mechanisms, different macros, whatever. And what they found is no meaningful difference between the diets. What predicted whether someone lost weight was not the diet they were on, it was whether they stuck to the diet. Adherence. Okay. Broken record, guys, if you ever, if you've already been following my podcast, you know this is a tenet of what we talk about is adherence. That is the key. It's not the mechanism, it's not the plan, it's the doing, the doing, the doing. Okay, do it, just do it. Okay. So if you've been treating AI, I don't know why I'm in a good mood today, but if you've been treating AI as the thing that finally gives you the answer, I want to gently suggest to you that you're solving a problem you don't even have and you're ignoring the problem that you do have. So we're gonna get into that now. All right, so if information is not the bottleneck, behavior change is the bottleneck. Let's

  Where AI actually helps you change

  Philip Pape 11:06

  talk about why this matters for how you use AI, because this is where I think it gets interesting. AI is really, really good at some of the behavior change stuff, but it's not what a lot of people use it for. All right, and I'm gonna piss off a lot of coaches, a lot of behavior change specialists who think you have to have a human in the mix all the time to help people change their behavior. That's absolutely not true. Okay, well, follow, follow me on the logic. There's a study out of out of a team at Google. Now take that with a grain of salt, a team at Google where they took a large language model, so that would be like a chat GPT type software, and they they directed it at activity coaching. So activity coaching, coaching for activities. And they tested on things like is the advice actionable? Is it realistic? Is it empathetic? Does it motivate? And what's so telling is that the model itself got significantly better at being actionable and realistic when they set it up well. Okay. In fact, big jumps in those two areas, but on empathy and motivation, the gains were not even statistically significant. So the machine got better at the practical translation stuff, and it stayed pretty weak as a model or as a tool at the human stuff. And so from that point, we can say, okay, so there are things that need to be kept with a human. Like I just said, empathy and motivation. There are now, having said that, there's a way to marry the two and kind of amplify the two. We're gonna get into that, but first we need to understand the AI side of the equation.

  Spotting patterns in your own data

  Philip Pape 12:42

  So what's it what's AI good at? I think there are four things. Four things. And a lot of you aren't even using it for any of these things. Number one, and I think this is the big one, is it can recognize patterns in data. Makes sense, right? It can take a lot of the more data you give it, the more it can act on it. It's really powerful for that. So instead of when we think of food, not what should I eat, it's here's what I actually ate. So here's my food log, macrofactor, whatever. And I've given it to you for the last three weeks of data. What patterns do you see in my eating to help me decide what to eat? Now that's a very different question, isn't it? Because now it is working with your reality instead of giving you a generic answer. So it's using data, which makes a lot of sense. And this can be used for a lot of things, like your lifting, right? You can put in your workout logs, you can put in your biofeedback data, you could you could do everything that I have clients do as a coach, everything that they track, body measurements, weight, like you name it, you can give it that data. In many cases, these tools are now integrated with Apple Health and whatnot, and it makes it even easier to do that. And a lot of tools are being developed to take advantage of that as well, right? Same thing with something very specific like your protein intake and looking at the patterns and saying, oh my goodness, it looks like my protein falls off here and here, and here's why. Because if you're just tracking it in a food log, like let's say Macrofactory, you can kind of see that visually and figure it out on your own. But what if there are things you can't really see as easily? And I think the AI is great for that. It can catch it in you know milliseconds or seconds. So finding a signal out of the noise, as we say, in a pile of data. And the more, and the bigger the bigger the pile of data, the better. So that's what's great is you can feed it so much data, lab work. I mean, just dump it in there. All right, number two is accountability

  Accountability, stakes, and the human factor

  Philip Pape 14:30

  and a check-in structure. Now you might say, well, isn't that the human part? Well, no, again, we're talking about activities. We're not talking about like empathy or motivation per se, although I'm going to argue that a lot of our motivation is intrinsic motivation that does come from checking in and accountability. So let me get a little more precise on this part, on the accountability part, because it there's nuance here. AI can scaffold a check-in, let's say. Let's use the word scaffold, right? Like a scaffolding around a building. It can ask you the right questions on the right cadence. What it cannot do, it doesn't care whether you lied to it, it doesn't know. There are no stakes, there's no aspect of like empathy to it. It's just cold calculated. And it's like, if this is the check-in you want to do it. And let me let me elaborate on this because there's there's a a data set in the research where they had 65,000 people using a coaching app and they compare people who had AI coaching alone versus people who had AI plus a human coach. The group with a human with the AI lost over 74% more weight than the group that just had the AI coaching. And it was the same app. The only difference there was a human in the loop. And the mechanism here is that the people with a human coach, they actually logged their food and their weight more often. And it's not like the human had secret knowledge, the human just created stakes that made them actually do the thing. So that's that's what's kind of interesting. That's a motivation piece. That's pretty cool, right? That's why humans are gonna be important for a long time, hopefully for the rest of eternity. But I wanted to talk about that difference, right? So, in other words, AI can be incredibly useful, humans are incredibly useful, and men put them together and you have a very powerful combination. Number three is a customized application of a general principle to your specific situation. Anyone take physics, right? Or, you know, you've heard of Einstein, where we talk about general relativity versus special relativity. So think about that. All the principles you read about or hear about on podcasts or this show, they're general principles. At least I hope they're talking to you in terms of principles and not telling you this is the answer, the one answer. Because there is no one answer. There are principles, and then you have your specific situation. So, like the principle of eating around 0.7 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight, everybody knows that. But what's your body weight? What's your goal? What is your schedule? What are you capable of eating? Are you vegan, vegetarian, blah, blah, blah? You know, are you dairy-free? Like, how do you hit that number? You know, all those things are the you parts of it. Are you in fat loss or not? This and that. That's where a real person gets stuck. That's where people get stuck. Okay. The translation, the translating that principle to your messy, chaotic real life, AI is great at. It's actually great at because it's not just retrieving a fact, it is taking all the data that you've told it, finding the patterns like we just talked about, and then translating it to you. And you actually don't need a human for that per se. Okay. Now, that's like there's a caveat on that because obviously if the AI is not asking the right questions or you're not feeding it all the data it needs, it can give you a garbage answer. Whereas a human might say, Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I need to know this and this as well. But that doesn't mean AI can't do it. Okay. Understand the difference. It has to be good enough to do it and you have to use it the right way. And then number four is AI is good at asking the questions that you don't know to ask because you don't know what you don't know. So, as an engineer, I come from the world of requirements for a product, and there's things that you know, there's things you know that you don't know, and there's things you don't know that you don't know. So instead of like, hey, what's the best exercise to get bigger glutes? Because I want a big butt, you say, Hey, what am I not considering about my training or my protein as I go through menopause and given my program right now because I want a big butt, right? Or something like that. Like giving it that context and then have it give you what the blind spots are. You know, notice what I just said. What am I not considering about dot dot dot? Great prompt right there. What am I not thinking about? Right. And so that would turn AI kind of like into a coach that asks you questions that you wouldn't think to ask of yourself. So those are the four things pattern recognition in your data, an accountability structure, applying principles to your specific situation, and then uh kind of surfacing up these blind spots that you're not thinking of. Now, what does every single one of those have in common? Well, they all require you to bring something to the equation. That is your data, your plan, your situation, your context. I mean, until the day that AI is like hardwired into our brain, God help us all, you have to bring that stuff. Now, I just I mentioned before, sometimes it's integrated with Apple Health or Aura rings or whatever. And granted, that is kind of an automated way to do that. I'm not saying it doesn't have to be automated, just you have to bring that stuff. And so the good uses of AI, in my opinion, are a conversation about your actual life and getting some help on the blind spots and structure accountability, all that stuff. Whereas a bad way to use AI would just be a generic search, a generic question, using it as kind of like an advanced Google. Does that make sense? This

  Coaching that works with your data

  Philip Pape 19:58

  is honestly right now the perfect place to mention the thing that I've built that's out there that I think takes advantage of all of these in a very thoughtful way, where AI is the application layer. It's not an information fire hose. It just dumps information at you. It really is the this intelligence or interpretation on top of your data. And that's called Fitness Lab. This is my app. I'm giving you a shameless plug for it because it does exactly what I've thought through AI can do well, that can help in the fitness and training world, that also is pre-trained with lots and lots and lots of good evidence-based data, as well as my entire podcast, all my guides, all that fun stuff. It's all trained into there. Exercises, you name it. What I've found is that people are kind of sick of just having more trackers, more tracking apps, right? For training and nutrition, what do we need? Well, we need a way to track our workouts, a way to track our nutrition. And then we probably want to track some other measurements, right? Our weight, our measurements, our photos, things like that, body fat. And most people are tracking with a few of these apps. Some people have app burnout. That's what I find a lot. But even when you're doing all that, you don't have a way to bring it all together unless you have a coach. And we've talked before about human coaching, right? It's expensive, it's hard to get a good coach. It's getting more and more where it's, it's, you know, it's a tough industry, let's just say, for on both sides. Okay. And yet if I said, hey, I just want to use another yet another app, here's another tracker. You're just tracking, tracking, tracking, tracking. Even if you're tracking in a notebook, how are you using that information? Even if you're doing something like starting strength and you're using a notebook and tracking your lifts, do you truly know what decision to make at your next session based on that data? That's what Fitness Lab does. It is not trying to be your tracker, it can definitely track lots of things. It integrates with Apple Health, all that good stuff. We tried to reduce as much friction as possible on that side. But if you still are tracking in other apps like MacroFactor or a workout app, it can work alongside it in a really cool way. And it does what we talked about before. The more data you have, the better it can actually use that data to help you do what you need to do. So, what it does is the four things I talked about. It look at your patterns, it looks at your biofeedback, like sleep and hunger, et cetera, at things like your protein. If you've been feeding it meals, not like a tracker, but more like an analysis tool. Your training, it tells you what's going on. It tells you here's what, here's the pattern, and here's the questions I want to ask you to make sure you do the right thing next so that you don't have to stress about it. So basically gives you daily coaching. It gives you activities each day. It adapts to you. You can talk to it anytime and it can adjust any of those activities based on what you need. If you're like, man, I'm burnt out. I don't want to track, it'll say, okay, let's just limit it to one or two activities a day and we're still going to make progress. All right. Right now, we're running a summer special from June 23rd through Friday, July 3rd. If you're hearing this afterward, I want you to reach out to me. I can probably get you a secret discount. But during the promotion, it's 20% off going to our link witsandweights.com slash app. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. As of this episode dropping, you've got about five days left. And if you've been listening to all of this, you're like, okay, I get it. I need that application layer to do something productive with the data. I don't need more information. I want to lose fat. I want to get rid of that belly fat. I want to know how to train. I want to progressively overload and get stronger. I want to deal with my sleep issues. I want to deal with my food noise. All of that, it's going to help you with that. Go to witsaweeits.com slash app and grab that 20% off discount. I would recommend signing up for the year subscription because you'll save even more doing it that way versus the shorter one. Go to witzawaits.com slash app for fitness lab today.

  Bad AI prompts vs. better coaching questions

  Philip Pape 23:40

  Okay, let's get back to it and talk about okay, how do you use AI? I think the fastest way to fix this is with a few examples, right? A bad use versus good use of AI. So a bad use of AI is opening it up. And again, any AI I'm talking about. Heck, even my own app, if you just ask it this way and you say, like, what's the best workout for a woman over 40? Or weight loss for women in perimenopause is a super common search. Well, you're gonna get a perfectly reasonable, totally generic plan that you will not end up doing. That's that is the honest answer. You'll just see it, you'll say, like, okay, that's nice. Kind of like an article in the newspaper. That's nice. You see this, honey? Okay, moving on. I'm gonna go have my uh oatmeal now. All right, now why aren't you gonna do it? It's because it has nothing to do with you, your lifestyle, your equipment, your dieting history, your particular issues, right? We've we've kind of nailed this or hammered this to death, but you know what I mean. It's an answer to a question that unfortunately has a thousand correct answers, kind of like the infinite universes, the multiverse, right? Spider-Man, the multiverse. Anyone watching Nick Cage and Spider-Noir, awesome show on Prime. Uh, when do I find time to watch TV? I I'm only one episode in. So anyway, it's a thousand permutations of an answer, and it's not going to help you. That's the information fire hose. That's more plan, but no more progress. We don't want that. A good use of that would be pasting in your current program, the one that you're actually running right now. So it could be a screenshot from your workout app. You can type it in, you can take a photo. There's lots of ways depending on what you're using. Like if you use Fitness Lab, you can go into the chat and you could do audio or what you could do video or files or text or whatever. And you say, okay, here are my constraints. I train three days a week. I only have dumbbells. I don't have any micro plates, my knees are cranky. Like, what's the weak link here? That's a great way to question, ask it. Like, what are the blocks? What am I missing here in my plan? I mean, you could say, hey, just give me a better plan, but I love to start from finding the weak spots. Right. So now that helps you learn where the plan doesn't stack up and improve what you're following for the things you just told it are your constraints. And that's super powerful. And you could have all sorts of constraints, right? The days of the week that you can do it, like anything, you know, you hate doing this exercise, whatever. So, do you see the difference between those two? In the first one, you get a generic answer based on information, but the second one is diagnosing you and giving you the blind spots and how to improve. And by the way, you're gonna learn in the process as a human. You're not hopefully not just blindly following it and moving on, but it's like, okay, now I understand why it's working. And again, my app, Fitness Lab, is is kind of cool because it it talks to you like I would, if you will, for better or worse. And it kind of tries to explain it in an accessible way. Here's another, here's another bad example, right? Or bad versus good. You say, is creatine good for women in menopause? I don't know why I keep hammering on the women in menopause, but it's probably because I hear a million questions in about that. So is creatine good, right? And and honestly, that's a question I get, I get that question over Instagram or people had just found the podcast. Hey, is creatine, should I take creatine? I'm like, really? That like that's your question. Sorry, I don't mean to judge people, but like we need to, we need to put more effort into our questions, but I get it, I get it, because maybe you've never heard of creatine you just heard about, you're like, what is this creatine thing? Is it good to do? I would say a good use of AI or asking a question would be, hey, I'm I'm thinking of starting taking creatine. Here's my goal, here's my routine, here's my other supplements, how much do I take, or how do I remember to take it every day, or how do I know it's working? Like there's a lot of ways. I'm not telling you that there's one right way to ask the question, but almost pretend like it's a coach in front of you that you're picking their brain. That's really what you're trying to do. All right. You're not just trying to get a generic fact, you're trying to find out how it's gonna work for you. And again, the more data you give it, the better. I hope this episode isn't going too long, but I do have one more. This is this is for all of us here. Why am I not losing weight? Okay, well, it's an interesting question, right? Because some people say, Why is my metabolism too low? Why am I not losing weight? One of the most common questions. And as a coach, I would say, Well, I need to learn a lot about you right now, based on that. In fact, people sign up for coaching calls with me just to dig in and kind of figure the heck out of this stuff. Because last I counted, there are at least 13 specific reasons for a plateau. And I've built them into like the tools that I create to help people understand where your plateau is coming from. But then even to get to one of those 13 answers, you need like 1300 pieces of information. I'm I'm I'm exaggerating, but you know, you need data indicate data out. So if you just ask the question generically on Google or AI, you're gonna get all a list of all the things. Now you have to go figure out, okay, which of those lists apply to me? Calories, sleep, stress, right? The usual suspects. Or you're gonna get fear-mongering, like, oh, it's your hormones, it's cortisol, right? It menobellies called by cortisol caused by cortisol or something like that. So it's generic, it's useless. And look, you already know a lot of those, don't you? Yeah, I think you do. Or if you listen to the show, you do. Maybe maybe you don't. That's fine. Basic information's cool, it's good education, but it's not gonna help you. A good use of AI for this, if you're not losing weight, is take three weeks in a row of your data. Now you're like, oh crap, I don't actually have data. Well, listen to my podcast for a while, folks, because you're gonna learn how much I love tracking. And if you feel like tracking is a chore, there are easy ways to do it that are low friction. It's a problem we deal with all the time. Okay, but if you don't track, how the heck can you tell what's going on? You've got to track something, right? You've got to track something. So, and maybe this will motivate you to do it. Knowing that you can get an answer may motivate you to do it. So take three weeks of your food log, your training, your weight trend, your biofeedback, like your sleep, and then you paste it all in. Maybe you have lab work too, but I would keep lab work to the side initially unless you really suspect something. And then ask the AI, hey, what patterns do you see? And what would you change first if my goal right now is to lose weight or to lose fat? Okay, and if if you're using Fitness Lab and you ask it, it might even push back and say, hey, we're not trying to lose weight, actually, we're trying to lose body fat. It's gonna, it's gonna mansplain to you, but actually in a general uh gender neutral way, I guess. But I'm joking, kind of. It will then help you understand. Ah, okay, here's the thing that's the most important for you right now. That's pretty cool. That's pretty amazing. Like if you all you have to do is have data, and I get it takes work and effort to track data, but really not that much, guys. Not that much. Okay, just a few things can be very powerful. So the through line on all of these, I've heard the word through line lately. It's like jargon buzzword I hear everywhere. Maybe it's because of AI. I don't know. The through line on all of this is that every good use of AI or a human coach, but we're talking about AI today, starts with you giving it some good data. Your plan, your goals, your data, your constraints, all of that fun stuff. The the incorrect use of AI is without that. It's just asking questions, but not, and it's lazy. It's a lazy use of AI that's gonna give you a lazy answer that's gonna result in you not getting any progress. Okay. So I am I am not saying that AI is useless for fitness. I clearly don't believe that. I built an entire tool around it, Fitness Lab. We talked about it. I'm not saying information doesn't matter. It doesn't, it does. If you are genuinely like at a zero out of 10, you got to learn stuff. You gotta learn the principles. Go ahead and use AI to learn them. That's fine. Be a little bit cautious and careful on where the data is coming from, right? Again, that's where if you had Fitness Lab, you can learn as part of the process. In fact, in Fitness Lab, every day there's a briefing that teaches you something. That's pretty cool. So that helps you level up on your knowledge. I'm not saying you should trust AI blindly. That absolutely you shouldn't, because the tools tend to want to agree with you and like give you a pat on the back and say, like, hey, great thinking there, even when it's terrible thinking, I'm sorry to say. And there is good research showing that they still have a strong tendency to just go along with what you say, even when you're wrong, because they're built to be that way. So they're not a substitute for an actual human coach who's gonna give you, I'll say, tough love, something that you don't want to hear. Now, caveat on that, we're gonna get back to at the end of the episode. Can you train your AI to give you some tough love? Yes, you can. So hold on. I'm also not saying AI replaces a human. I mentioned that 74% improved results when you had the human with the AI. And I get we can't all afford a human or whatnot. So pick the best combination of tools for the job that you could afford that fits within your life. That's what I'm saying, right? The bottleneck for almost everyone is not the information, especially who listens to this podcast. You got the information. It's applying it and doing it consistently. And AI is a phenomenal application tool, but it's like a mediocre information toy. I mean, it's great for information, but what I mean is it's not going to do anything for you just by having the information. All right, before we wrap up, I did promise you a one-line prompt that can train your AI and turn it from a yes man into something that will help

  The one prompt that makes AI stop being a yes-man

  Philip Pape 32:36

  you more. I'm gonna give you that in a second. But if if this episode has surfaced all the things you've been thinking about and wondering about AI, and you're like, yeah, now it makes sense that, you know, I've got all this information, I follow so many people, but I don't have the results. That is the gap Fitness Lab was built to close for you. I am so passionate and supportive of what we did here. I think it's a fantastic tool. People are using it, love it, and they keep renewing because it's helping them. Those who actually use it, it's helping them. It is that layer that looks at your data and it coaches you on those patterns and it helps you keep consistent instead of just handing you more information. And again, we have a summer special right now. Go to wits and weights.com slash app, 20% off. When you go to that link, you take a very short two-minute quiz and it gives you what your plan would look like if you decide to use the app and you don't have to then use the app if it's not right for you. So it's a really great zero risk way to check it out. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link will be in the show notes. Okay, here's the one-line trick that changes how AI will talk to you. So if you ask AI, hey, is my plan good? Or what do you think of my plan or spot check my plan, it's basically gonna agree with you. It's kind of the default setting. Depending on how you ask it, it might go a little bit deeper than that, but you have to force it out of that. And this is where prompting is very important. Now, in some tools, depending on your account, what you have access to, like Claude or Chap GP or whatever, you can go into your profile, into your settings, and you can give it instructions that it always looks at. In other words, it's like global instructions all the time. And I actually have some of those. But even if you don't use that and you just want to type it right into the chat, what I would do is, you know, paste your data in and then you add, put your question and then put the following act as a skeptical coach. Argue against this plan. Tell me the three things most likely to fail and why. That's it. Now, if you guys want to know what I use in my instructions, I have a very detailed uh set of instructions on like, hey, don't sugarcoat it, don't tell me what I want to hear. I want you to push back. Like, I have all this stuff because I've learned over time how to make it more and more tough on me so it's a more realistic. But just in the chat, do what I just said, go back and listen. I'll repeat it right now, actually. Act as a skeptical coach, argue against this plan, tell me the three things most likely to fail and why. That's it. That instruction turns it from this sycophant, this cheerleader, into a critic, like in a good way. It's gonna give you helpful critique, and that's where the gold is, right? That's where the gold is. That's what you need to hear.

  The real reason most people stay stuck

  Philip Pape 35:20

  Okay. So I hope that was helpful. I hope this whole episode was helpful. I know I pitched my app in there a lot because I truly believe in it and I think it does what we are talking about. It's why I made it. I hope this tool, this episode helped you in even just day-to-day use of AI. And just go forward and conquer and get those results, please. I'm rooting for you. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the answer was never the thing you were missing. The doing is. I'm Philip Pate, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

How to Eat 400 Fewer Calories a Day Without Trying (Abbey Sharp) | Ep 480

Body recomp, weight loss, and nutrition get harder when hunger runs the show. What if the problem isn’t your macros, but how your meals are built? What if you could lose fat without battling cravings all day?

Registered dietitian Abbey Sharp, author of The Hunger Crushing Combo Method and host of Bite Back podcast, breaks down the satiety science behind protein, fiber, and healthy fats. We talk about why protein matters for muscle building and metabolism, why fiber is a game-changer for fullness and gut health, and how to include “naked carbs” without triggering food noise or binge cycles.

You’ll learn why tracking macros can be useful without becoming obsessive, how strength training protects muscle during fat loss, and what GLP-1 users need to know about nutrition, protein, and long-term results.

Get Fitness Lab now 20% off through July 3, to become your healthiest after 40 with the most personalized fitness app. Daily coaching that adjusts to your energy, recovery, and schedule. No calorie counting, no guesswork.
https://witsandweights.com/app

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence. 

Timestamps

0:00 – Five signals your body sends
2:49 – Hunger-crushing combo basics
8:56 – Protein hype and marketing traps
10:53 – Fiber, fullness, and gut health
17:02 – Restriction, cravings, and food noise
21:49 – Where naked carbs fit
24:46 – Tracking without obsession
35:36 – Rebuilding metabolism through muscle
40:08 – Eating well on GLP-1 meds
45:44 – Family food skills that stick

Episode resources

• Book: The Hunger Crushing Combo

• Podcast: Bite Back with Abbey Sharp

• Facebook: @AbbeysKitchen/ 

• Instagram: @abbeyskitchen/ 

• YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen 

• Transcript

  Five signals your body sends

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You've heard me say it a hundred times on this show. Eat enough protein, track your macros, be in a moderate deficit for fat loss. And that's all true, but what if you're doing all of that and you're still struggling through every afternoon, still thinking about food constantly, still one bad day away from a binge that wipes out a week of progress? My guest today is a registered dietitian who has spent a decade studying why even well-designed nutrition plans often don't work. And that's because there's a foundational skill we're often ignoring. It's not about eating less, it's about building meals that crush your hunger. And when she shows you the data on what happens when people get this right, including spontaneously eating 400 fewer calories a day without trying, you'll understand why I invited her on. So stick around to learn this powerful approach that will change the way you put your meals together forever. 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 I've invited on Abby Sharp. She is a registered dietitian who built one of the largest evidence-based nutrition platforms in the world. She's the author of the best-selling book, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, host of the Bite Back podcast, and works with women every day who are stuck in that cycle of unsustainable eating and insatiable hunger often. And that cycle is what this episode is about. Now, most of us, most of you dear listeners, are adults who lift weights. Many of you are over 40. Many of you understand the basics like protein, calories, fiber, micronutrients. And Abby and I are going to explore the satiety science underneath all of that. Why do hunger and food noise really get in the way of the best plan? Why is the combination of macros or compounds in each meal important when it comes to hormones that control hunger? Why is food composition and satiety important to fueling your body to give it both what it wants, also what it needs? And of course, we want to love our food and what we eat. Abby's going to show us how to build every meal so that hitting your goals feels more spontaneously effortless than just white knuckle boxing mats with your hunger and cravings, like we're all familiar with. Abby, welcome to the show.

  Abbey Sharp 2:20

  Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. That introduction was just what a great start to my day. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

  Philip Pape 2:29

  Thanks for coming on and thanks for what you do. I think your podcast is awesome. And I think the listeners are going to get a lot out of this because we are very much aligned. And, you know, it's not that we're in an echo chamber, but there are things that surprisingly people still aren't familiar with that can really help them, that can really help them out. Yeah.

  Abbey Sharp 2:45

  Absolutely.

  Philip Pape 2:46

  Yeah. And, you know, protein, of course, you call it the

  Hunger crushing combo basics

  Philip Pape 2:49

  king of the satiety hierarchy in your book. I completely agree. And my listeners mostly get, if they're they've heard a few episodes of the podcast, how important it is. But you argue that protein by itself only gets you part way there. And that people are missing, I guess, the whole picture, the other compounds that complete this picture. What is that full formula? What is the secret?

  Abbey Sharp 3:09

  Yeah. So, I mean, just to give you kind of a little bit of a background on this method that I call the hunger crush and combo method. So, you know, essentially, you know, we know most of those kind of crash diets, any of the diets that we see come up in our feeds every single day, all of them are telling us to cut something out, to restrict something. And you and I both know that our bodies like fight tooth and nail against deprivation with all these different compensatory mechanisms, you know, physiologically and psychologically. And that psychological piece is so important because when we put ourselves in a state of scarcity mentality, it almost always triggers this hyperfixation and obsession and food noise and binging. And then eventually we just throw in the towel because this is just not sustainable. So the hunger crushing combo method flips that script because it's working with our biology and our psychology to focus instead on adding nutrition, not always taking away. This is a really important mindset shift. And so we're specifically going to be adding fiber protein healthy fats. And so if we want to break each one down and why they're so important, you know, protein, as again, many of your listeners may know, you know, there is this kind of collective obsession right now with protein. And I think for for one, good for good reason, but nobody needs like protein candy. But, you know, when it comes to like most of our goals when it comes to weight management or building muscle, you know, A, protein slows digestion. So it's going to keep us fuller longer. It's going to help to stabilize our blood sugar. So we're not riding high, crashing low, looking for another quick fix. It boosts our satiety hormones like GLP1, peptide YY, you know, really important for staying full. Three, it has the highest thermic effect of food, meaning it burns the most calories out of any other food component just to break it down. That's about 20 to 30%. So if you are, let's just say, consuming 100 calories worth of pure protein, you may only actually be kind of utilizing or absorbing 70 to 80 calories of those because it takes so much energy to actually digest and absorb it. And then of course, it builds and supports lean muscle mass preservation because we don't just want to lose weight, we actually want to lose fat. And when you're in a calorie deficit, our proteins are going to be very high to protect that metabolic muscle. So protein is one, two, fiber. Now, fiber is really key because it stretches the stomach because it's volumous, which can activate our fullness signals. It boosts so satiety hormones, it quiets our ghrelin or our hunger hormone. And what's really cool about it is that it has the lowest calorie density out of any other food component, meaning you get to eat a lot of food for not a lot of calories. And it's really cool. I mean, if you just think about that, like you, yeah, you could eat a third of a cup of Ben and Jerry's or you could have 30 cups of spinach, which I do not recommend anybody does. But the the the point I'm trying to make is that there's really cool research showing that the volume of food we consume every single day is actually relatively consistent, even if total calories change. Meaning if you are typically only full when you eat a dinner size plate of food, you are gonna have a hard time duping yourself into feeling full eating a salad plate of food, even if the calories are the same. So the fewer calories we take in in each bite, the fewer calories we consume in a meal across the day over time. And that means basically we're getting the best satiety bang for our caloric buck. Also, fiber nourishes our gut microbiome. And I can speak to this afterwards, but you know, the gut microbiome also affects our weight. So that's the fiber piece. Then there's healthy fats, and this is where people kind of get tripped up because they're like, especially when they're trying to lose weight in a calorie deficit, on a cut, whatever, they're like, well, fats have the most calories out of all food components. That means like I've just got to cut out if it's if it's high in calories, it's gonna be bad for weight loss. No. Healthy fats and fats in general give food staying power and satisfaction. It literally carries flavor and provides the mouthfeel that makes a meal feel complete. Because if you just think have you if you've ever had to try to try to have this a salad with no dressing, no cheese, no nuts, no avocado, like it leaves a little something to be desired. So, you know, fat also triggers the satiety hormones, it slows digestion. But because it is higher in calorie density, my kind of takeaway in the hunger crushing combo method is that we want to choose what I call whole food dual citizen fats. And that means the healthy fats that contain fat, but also contain either protein or fiber. So that could be salmon, for example, has healthy fats, has protein. Or it could be something like, you know, avocado, which has the healthy fats and it has the fiber. So that's how these things are working together: fiber, protein, healthy fats. You know, and generally what I say is one at a meal is essential, two is better, all three is gonna hit like tick all the boxes.

  Philip Pape 8:22

  Yeah, I think that's awesome. And and I know we didn't even get into secondary effects here on like maybe blood sugar or energy regulation, things like that.

  Abbey Sharp 8:30

  That's a whole other huge piece.

  Philip Pape 8:32

  All right. So you mentioned protein candy, and it made me think of like protein water. And I go, if I'm in like Target in the grocery aisle and they'll have high protein bars that have five grams of protein, you're like, Come on, people, what are you doing? Like, I like that they're like thinking about protein, but then it creates this backlash too, where I've heard mainstream podcasts talk about protein as a fad. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. It's just like you're saying here, Abby, it's additive. You're adding protein

  Protein hype and marketing traps

  Philip Pape 8:56

  because it's a sufficiency thing and it's an adequacy thing, let alone satiety and all the other stuff. Whereas restriction is really what happens with fad diets. You cut things out and you eliminate. So just to make that point clear, because you you kind of touched on the obsession with protein, but also that we're adding it into additive nutrition. So kudos. Yeah, yeah.

  Abbey Sharp 9:17

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that the protein craze thing is getting out of control. And like you said, like it's frustrating for those of us who've been singing the praises of protein all this time. And now suddenly we have everything slapped with a protein label on the shelves. And unfortunately, because marketing is so persuasive and the and these health halos are just so easy to basically overlook any other of the nutrition components of those foods. We have protein cookies that, yeah, might have 15, 16 grams of protein, but people are not turning it around and seeing that that protein cookie is also coming with 450 calories. It's not efficient at all. Right. At the end of the day, like, yeah, they might have a few more grams of protein than the original recipe, but it still has not got basically what I call like a good protein to calorie ratio. And so that's what we're talking about with the Hunger Crush and combo method is getting the best satiety bang for your caloric buck. And let's be real like a protein candy, a protein cookie, a protein, you know, whatever it might be, is a Pop Tart is not a replacement for a chicken breast on your salad.

  Philip Pape 10:25

  And they don't taste that good either, trust me.

  Abbey Sharp 10:27

  No, they don't.

  Philip Pape 10:28

  They don't as something like that. I mean, what did I had today? I made an omelet with leftover chicken thigh, and it's just, oh, you know, just so good. So then the fiber piece, again, that that's a whole that could be a whole episode itself. What I want to target on the fiber, and not just the satiety and the stretching and and all of that. But what about the health benefits or lack thereof in the context of people who think you don't even need fiber?

  Abbey Sharp 10:51

  I mean, we have plenty of data

  Fiber, fullness, and gut health

  Abbey Sharp 10:53

  that like really colon cancer rates are on the rise. And what is the one of the major reasons for that? Not getting enough fiber. Fiber is so important. It's not just the poop nutrient, right? Like it's this is not just, I know we always think, oh, you need fiber to poop, but we also need fiber to essentially like feed that good, the good bacteria in our gut. And our gut microbiome is associated with the health of every other body system: blood sugar management, hormone regulation, mood, you know, immunity. The list goes on, including our weight. And this is a really interesting area of research that I think I want to kind of tell you a little bit about because you know, I think again, a lot of folks, when they're kind of in the diet space, they just might think, oh, well, calorie is a calorie. Like as long as I'm hitting my macros and I'm hitting my calories, nothing else matters. Fair, calories are king. Let's be clear about that, but they're not everything. And so I think what people have to realize when it comes to that argument is that, you know, the number one determinant of long-term diet retention is appetite management. And what's one thing that fiber does really good? It keeps us full for very few calories. And the interesting thing that that fiber does when it comes to the gut microbiome is that let's say naked, what I call naked carbs or unrefined, like, you know, or sorry, refined kind of low fiber carbohydrates are not necessarily absorbed and digested the same as fiber-rich carbs in the gut. So the calories we get in a day is not based on what the package of the food says or what my fitness pal says it has. It's actually based on how many of those calories we uniquely can absorb from those food. And so when a food is higher in fiber, basically, and also when our gut microbiome is healthier and more vibrant because we are feeding it with fiber, we actually basically absorb fewer calories that we consume. So essentially, naked carbs or sugary carbs or refined carbs are absorbed very rapidly in the upper GI tract. So we actually absorb more of the available calories in those foods. But high fiber carbs travel down to the large intestine where our gut microbes kind of await their feast. And we, if we have a vibrant, healthy gut microbiome, it's gonna gobble up more of those available calories in those foods. So we end up absorbing fewer calories overall. So, in other words, if we consume 100 calories worth of apple juice, for example, which has the fiber strained out of it, or 100 calories worth of a whole apple, we might consume close to the full 100 calories of juice, but hypothetically, we could absorb, let's say, 80 calories worth of the apple. And if you're tracking calories and macros to a T, this, you know, people were not accounting for this. And there's a really interesting metabolic word study where they were carefully measuring the inputs and outputs via poop. And they gave one group a highly processed diet with lots of what I call naked carbs, highly refined carbohydrates, you know, very highly processed foods. And the other group got a calorie-matched diet with high fiber whole foods, exact same calories in, and then they tracked basically how many calories were kind of quote unquote lost in the poop. The high fiber group lost 200 and 400 calories in their poop compared to the low fiber, kind of highly processed diet group who only lost 100 calories. And so this actually can make a real difference, not just in your fullness capacity, so how satiated you feel on your diet, how well your appetite is managed, but even if you were to muscle through the discomfort of feeling hungrier on a lower fiber diet, you're actually just absorbing more of those calories. And so this is one of the unique ways that fiber plays a role in weight management. It's really fascinating.

  Philip Pape 14:59

  I'm glad you talked about that because both protein and fiber have these unique elements where simply jacking them up to some sufficient, I'm gonna say sufficient. People are way woefully under malnourished on these, can help with all these other things, including your intake, just ad libitum, as they say, right? Just like spontaneously. And the fiber thing's interesting, right? So people listen up because like that is a game changer. And actually, Abby's whole philosophy here is based on the idea of making these simple changes so you don't have to, you don't even have to track macros and calories, although I like I love them as a lagging indicator at least to see what's happening when you do this. For sure.

  Abbey Sharp 15:34

  Yeah. And there's just such interesting, like, this is exactly that the philosophy is like, how can we make this effortless and intuitive? So that exactly these calorie deficits are essentially happening spontaneously. And there was one study that found that when folks went from a diet of 10 to 15% of their total calories from protein, which is the standard North American diet, when they basically doubled that to be 20 to 30% of their total calories from protein, they saw a three-fold bump in fat loss. And another study that found that going from 15 to 30%, they spontaneously, effortlessly just slashed 400 calories. They weren't even thinking about it. Not even like, oh, I'm on a diet, which again triggers that scarcity mentality. They just did this ad libidin. And then with the fiber, similar kind of outcome, simply adding 14 grams of fiber to their day just naturally slashed 10% of their calories without trying. So this is the magic of thinking about adding, not, oh, I'm on a diet, can't eat this, have to cut this out. It really does make a difference.

  Philip Pape 16:38

  It does. It does. Okay, so here's the interesting thing. You mentioned psychology and physiology. And I've always thought the interplay between the two is fascinating because there's definitely a bi-directionality going on there. And some people are more affected by one or the other more than others. Like when we look at the weight loss drugs now and you look at food noise, which is something you talk about, you know, you talk about it as this like all-consuming,

  Restriction, cravings, and food noise

  Philip Pape 17:02

  inescapable, debilitating racket in the brain that could only be quieted temporarily with food. But then I believe you go on to connect some of these principles of eating and food choice with the ability to reduce the food noise as opposed to some psychological or genetic or brain-related solution or some exotic thing. Does that make sense?

  Abbey Sharp 17:24

  Yeah. I mean, the really like when we are in a state of of restriction, just food becomes more salient and more, and so the food noise will ramp up. This is, we have tons of evidence that, you know, one of the biggest predictors of a binge or really over-consuming food is restriction. We put ourselves in that state of scarcity mentality. I can't eat this. Oh, I shouldn't have had that. That food noise is gets louder and louder. And I mean, yes, we do have growing evidence that there are some folks who may just biologically or neurologically experience food noise even when they're not restricting. But again, for the for the average bear who is probably listening to this podcast, that food noise and those incessant food cravings are coming from a history or current state of deprivation.

  Philip Pape 18:15

  Yeah. Yeah. I think in one of your recent podcasts, you talked specifically about food noise, and you mentioned just the underfueling and the malnutrition and the deprivation and under-eating causes it. And it what's interesting is I could see someone who's gained a lot of weight or is overweight saying, How's that possible when I've been gaining weight all these years? Like, what would you tell somebody in that category? Who has just been consistent gaining weight? The vast majority of people who are obese and maybe consider GOP1 drugs and they have food noise, but and then they hear, oh, it's because you're malnutrition or under eating. And they're like, How's that possible? Because I'm I've been gaining weight. Yeah.

  Abbey Sharp 18:52

  And you know what? A lot of the times we are gaining weight. And again, like I don't want to pigeonhole people because there are, like I said, a lot of folks that we've now discovered there are some genetic predispositions, some specific, you know, gene pathways that may predispose people to over, you know, overwhelming food noise. Having said that, a lot of folks who are finding themselves kind of gaining weight over the years have been essentially on these kind of crash diets on and off, on and off. And with each kick of the can, you know, chances are we're gonna see a little decline in metabolism each time. And we've probably lost some muscle mass because let's be honest, most of these crash diets are not, they're not like thinking about, oh, I've got to be, you know, go low and slow, I've got to make sure that I'm getting enough protein. They're just like, how do I lose weight as quickly as I possibly can? Once we lose that muscle, very hard to get it back. Muscle burns three times as many calories at rest compared to fat. So our metabolism is going to slow down each time. And so it becomes harder and harder to keep the weight off and basically kind of find a way of eating that is actually something that they can stick to long term. And that's really what I'm trying to shift for folks is getting out of that. Oh, I need to cut out all the things, which let's be honest, most of us cannot stick to again, because that's scarce mentality. And find a way of eating that is sustainable long term. And so that is one of the kind of common pitfalls and cycles that I see people get into and get stuck in. And we're really trying to unlearn that now with this gentle kind of additive framework of the hunger crushing combo.

  Philip Pape 20:33

  Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. There's a seeming contradiction that isn't really a contradiction when you look at the yo-yo pattern. You look at body fat overshooting, like you said, you're gonna lose muscle, gain fat, lose muscle, gain fat. There's the fact that you probably never even let your body recover out of these diets. Exactly. Like so your metabolism is suppressed and and all of those things. So now if you can shift to the protein and the fiber and the healthy fats, like you said, and then even including the naked carbs for fun, like you said, for to enjoy your food, balance is really important. So, what about those naked carbs? Because there's the people who use the word carbs kind of blanket, right? Carbs, donuts are carbs, pizza is carbs. I'm like, no, those aren't carbs, those are carbs and fats. But even you make a distinction between naked or refined carbs and the high fiber carbs, like you just mentioned. Where is the place for naked carbs?

  Abbey Sharp 21:24

  Yeah. I think it's really important that, you know, part of the reason for the hunger crush and combo method being so successful for folks is because we are doing away with this kind of black and white, good, bad, like, you know, off the diet, on the diet. It's again, we are getting out of that obsession with food needing to be put into these dichotomous categories as this is a food that I'm allowed to eat. This is not food I'm

  Where naked carbs fit

  Abbey Sharp 21:49

  not allowed to eat. And so, you know, I'll kind of give you a little bit backstory on how this was born. But essentially, when I was in my late teens, I was struggling with an eating disorder or withhrexia, kind of basically clean. Eating taken to an extreme. And as part of my recovery, I was basically putting myself through exposure therapy. And my kind of fear food naked carb was like sugary cereal, like frosted flakes, and you know, lucky charms. Lucky charms. I can name them all. I grew up in a lot of them, right? Like, so if I had them in the house, I was going to just binge that whole box, like in a flash. And then so I started to just allow myself to eat a whole bowl of Lucky Charms by itself, naked carbs in the birthday suit, like and just see how that felt. Very, very quickly, I it kind of lost its allure, it lost its power over me. It was no longer something that I was like, oh, I like, you know, I needed to binge on because I was just like, this is just a normal food. And then I was starting to listen to how my body was responding to that big bowl of naked carbs. I was hungry again soon after, obviously, because A, they're not very, very satiating. My blood sugar was spiking, crashing, and I was looking for another sugary quick fix. So I started to realize, okay, I'm not gonna put the sugary carbs, the cereal on the no-no list again because we know where that landed me. I'm going to dress them up and I'm gonna start with protein. I've got a bowl of Greek yogurt. Okay, protein there. I'm gonna add some fiber, some berries on top. Cool. I'm now gonna add maybe some seeds or some, you know, a little bit of sprinkling of almonds or some hemp parts. That's my healthy fats. Then I'm just gonna add a little handful of the lucky charms on top. So I'm no longer gonna allow myself to get into that state of scarcity mentality, but I'm anchoring those sugary carbs, those naked carbs with the hunger-crushing compounds. That is gonna keep me fuller longer. It's going to stabilize my blood sugar. So I am not riding high, crashing down, and then looking, you know, for a donut basically an hour later. It is going to completely get rid of that food noise and those cravings because I have the sugary food that I like obsessed about basically on my plate already. It's not on the bad foods list. It's not on the off-limits list. I'm eating it regularly. And that alone helps me stick to the plan long term.

  Philip Pape 24:10

  I love that. So great strategy. I really love that because it's it's flexible, but it's not not only flexible, it's intentionally including the thing, which is important because a lot of people don't talk about that. So, okay, given all of that, a lot of this sounds like food selection and plate construction. What about tracking these things? What are your thoughts on tracking and the different flavors of that? Because there's like calorie counting, there's apps, there's like general awareness. Like, where are you on that spectrum?

  Abbey Sharp 24:40

  Yeah. Listen, I think like tracking macros or calories, like it's really just one tool in the

  Tracking without obsession

  Abbey Sharp 24:46

  toolbox. And ultimately it can be very helpful for some folks, but it can also be a slippery slope. So I think it's very helpful when it's used more as like a teaching tool to really help you learn what is in your food, like help you build some general awareness to inform your day-to-day meal planning. And also ultimately, it needs to feel like neutral and flexible and not obsessive. So I think it's it's it can be helpful to combine it with like food journaling to help you in a non-judgmentally, like very objective way to collect data on how foods make you feel. So, kind of like what I just spoke about, where I was like basically eating bowls of lucky charms. I didn't track the calories or the macros in that because I just assumed, okay, that's just pure naked carbs. But I was able to very quickly collect data objectively without judgment. And this is the important part without judgment. Okay, I don't feel great when I just eat the lucky charms on its own. So, you know, for example, you could be tracking to see, okay, when I have the bagel and cream cheese and it's only got like 10 grams of protein, maybe I feel a little lethargic after my workout. But when I add in like a Greek yogurt cup on the go, I'm in a rush, I feel better. My recovery feels easier. And actually, with the hunger crushing combo method in the book, I have a very comprehensive kind of cheat sheet of different protein and fiber and healthy, fat-rich foods and they're vert, they're kind of visual portion sizes to help people basically meet some of the meal recommendations that I they share in the book for these kind of macro recommendations. Where I think it becomes more counterintuitive or a slippery slope is when it's overriding your innate body wisdom, just to kind of meet whatever, you know, arbitrary numbers that were spit out by your like My FitnessPal or whatever app you're using. And I know we talked about in a moment ago about like basically the discrepancy in calorie absorption, which could easily affect your just like perfectly calculated calorie deficit that you figured out on your My FitnessPal calculator. But there's all a lot of other reasons why just like these meticulous, inflexible calorie counting can be just wildly inaccurate. So, for example, food manufacturers are legally allowed to be off on their package numbers by 20%. So that means if you think you are eating a 500-calorie meal, you could actually be eating a 600-calorie meal. And over time, this could easily undo the calorie deficit that you just like so perfectly thought you were crafting. So I think that's where things become counterintuitive and counterproductive and not actually helpful when you're going against what your body is telling you, just so that you can, you know, meet the macros on your app.

  Philip Pape 27:32

  Yeah, that sounds a lot like my thinking has evolved as well over the years, right? Like I still, so I used to do that macros, if if it's your macros, like as a leading indicator, and then realize, hey, you know, this is it's a great lagging indicator. Like you do the things, you listen to your body, your biofeedback, which I love, and there's different types of biofeedback. So we to kind of put it all together, now we have specific populations who listen to this show. And I know in your book you've talked about some slight nudges in different maybe ratios or amounts of these compounds, like for perimenopausal women. What's the logic behind shifting the amounts for people? Like, how would people even know what the right amount is, besides just listening to their body, which might be enough?

  Abbey Sharp 28:14

  Yeah. And I mean, ultimately, that that is the that is you should be your number one indicator, your body. Because yeah, I can communicate what the data says is best practices, which is what I do in the book, because I believe we I don't censor science and I believe in communicating, you know, evidence-based care. But at the end of the day, like we could be wildly off based on what the data tells us is the best kind of, you know, amount of protein per kilogram of body weight for you to get the best results for you. So I want that to be kind of like top of mind. This is, these are like the guidelines that if you are working with a registered dietitian, that they would start with and then we would tweak based on what we see in terms of what's going on with your results. So I think, you know, just to give you some examples, like weight loss. Okay. This is probably a lot of folks who are trying to specifically lose fat. I always like to kind of clarify that because we don't, I know we kind of just like colloquially we say weight loss, but really we're talking about fat loss because I don't want you to lose your muscle. I don't want you to lose your bone. And losing water is just like whatever, useless, to be honest. It just motivates you for a day and then it's over, and then you feel like you've plateaued. So weight loss, and so you know, when we look at the best practices in the data, it's showing between 1.2 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight when you're in a calorie deficit. And the reason for that, like protein is really just like the the king of this entirety hierarchy. What I like people to focus on when it comes to weight loss mostly is the protein and the fiber piece. Protein because we need to protect metabolic muscle mass when we are in a calorie deficit. Fiber because it offers the best calorie bag for a caloric buck, the lowest calorie density. When it comes to diabetes, often there's also kind of a fat loss element to that as well, right? So, you know, a lot of folks who have diabetes, not all, but a lot of folks are also trying to maintain or manage their weight and prevent excess fat gain because we know that that can play into insulin resistance and blood sugar management. So it can be roughly the same amount, but fiber is really important when it comes to diabetes management because fiber can, you know, of course, slows down the absorption of carbohydrates, helps to reduce the glycemic load of the foods that you're consuming. So I really do urge folks that are managing, you know, insulin resistance, diabetes, PCOS, make sure you're really thinking about fiber because only 10% of North Americans are getting enough fiber, period. Meaning most of the people listening right now are not getting enough fiber. And I don't really want to promote you just eating like fiber bars. For the same reason I don't want to like, yeah, like the same reason I don't want you to like just focus on getting like those like protein enriched snacks, because yeah, and a pinch of fiber bar can be fine, but a lot of the fibers that are being added to these bars are a very bloating, like hella bloating. And they're not going to offer you the whole food matrix of whole food fiber-rich plants, which come packaged with all of these different antioxidants, micronutrients that can support overall health, but also offer variety of different types of fiber to support satiety, blood sugar management, gut health, you know, all of those kinds of benefits. Oh, muscle gain, that's another one. Obviously, with muscle gaining, like there's often an element of fat loss, but you need more calories when you are trying to gain muscle. So while you might have a slightly higher, you know, gram per kilogram for protein, for example, maybe up to 2.2 grams per kilogram, you know, your overall calories are higher. And so you might actually have a smaller percentage of total calories, right? Coming from protein compared to fat loss, because you also need more carbs. You also want to get those carbohydrates in there as well. So, you know, and then fat, of course, can take a bit of a backseat when it comes to muscle gain.

  Philip Pape 32:25

  So, a couple of really great things we should dial in on. First of all, the the percentage of protein, I always think about that and laugh about it because when you say, hey, increase your protein, people, I can't get that much, right? You've heard women say, I can't get 120 grams of problems. Are you kidding me? Until you do it and you get used to it and you realize it's no big deal. But as a percentage of calories, you're right, it's only 20%. You've gone from 10 to 20. So it's not like a high protein, it's like adequate protein. It really is. It really is. And then when you're in fat loss, it tends to be a much higher percentage of your calories, like 30, 40, even 50, depending. But that's an important point. Now, the fiber types, you said something really important is the types of fiber. So I joked about fiber tortillas because I do occasionally buy these like tortillas because I like tortillas and I might as well get the ones that have extra fiber. But you don't want to rely on that. And like you said, there are not just the types of, or not just the compounds that are in those fruits, many of which aren't on labels, right? You don't see on a nutrition label everything chemically that's in the thing, but also like polyphenols or whatever, but also the types. And we've had some gut experts on like actual scientists, not the influencers, who talk about just like you literally don't need a fiber supplement or any like a seed or one of those types of probiotics either, if you're getting enough different types of different fruits. Like, for example, try to eat different colors and types of apples, different breeds. So you kind of alluded to that. I don't know. Do you talk about that in the book?

  Abbey Sharp 33:50

  I do. I in detail actually, because that is one of the benefits of the hunger crushing combo method again. Because again, like most of these diets out there, they overcomplicate nutrition, where you now have to think about did I get enough of this micronutrient? Did I get enough of this macro? Did I get a did I cut this food out? Did I cut that food out? No, you're really only thinking about these three things: the fiber protein, healthy fats. And with those foods comes the whole food matrix, including when we are getting a variety of plant-based foods through plant-based proteins and also fiber-rich fruits and vegetables, you know, nuts, seeds, all of the kinds of foods that the Hunger Crush and Camo method promotes, we are going to, by default, get in a variety of different fiber types. And so we need to get a variety of fibers in our diet from different types of foods through, you know, whole grains, through nuts, through seeds, through fruits, through vegetables, different types of fruits, different types of vegetables. All of those have a very unique kind of fingerprint of nutrients. And when we're getting a variety, our gut is going to get a variety. And for our for us to have a vibrant, varied gut microbiome, we need to have a varied diet of these plant-based foods.

  Philip Pape 35:11

  Okay. So one other thing you mentioned. You mentioned muscle gain, and that got me thinking about just recovery and gaining in general. So one of the micro problems that people experience a lot when trying to recover from all these years of dieting is a fear of weight gain, which implies that they care about the scale, which is the fat loss versus weight loss thing. Like maybe you shouldn't be focusing on the scale. Yep. But, you know, and you also mentioned water is part of your lean mass, right? You've got your organs and your

  Rebuilding metabolism through muscle

  Philip Pape 35:36

  bone and your water and your muscle. So you're going to gain some weight potentially when you go through this process. How do you deal with that problem that people have?

  Abbey Sharp 35:44

  Yeah, I think that, you know, low and slow is always key here. I mean, Afghan, there's definitely situations where we can't afford to go slow. But I think that being kind to your body and just trust, trusting the process. I know it can be really hard and scary, but know that you are actually trying to rebuild your metabolism, which is going to serve you long term, right? Muscle and bone is so critical to longevity. I know we're we're having this like longevity conversation moment, which is all like situated around peptides and these like supplement stacks. I'm like, babe, longevity comes down to muscle and bone. Lift weights. That is really the longevity secret sauce here. And so, you know, we need to be investing in not just what our body looks like today, but what our body is going to look like and feel like and be able to do most importantly in the long run. And so that is going to take some rebuilding. And yes, you may, you may gain fat in the in wet in the process of trying to, you know, restore your metabolism, restore your stores, your organs and your muscle and bone and and lean lean tissue, but that is going to, you know, do dividends long term for your health. And once you have regained that muscle, which again is going to require you probably needing to eat more calories, like hard stop. You can't really like cheat your way around that. Once you've regained that muscle, that is then going to increase your metabolism. Again, I mentioned earlier it burns three times as many calories at rest compared to fat, which again is going to help with long-term body composition goals.

  Philip Pape 37:29

  Yep. We need to hammer that message home over and over again. And it's not that we're saying you have to bulk or you have to be in a large surplus. In fact, the evidence has become a little more conservative on that to be able to still gain a ton of muscle, but you do have to be fed and fueled and do all the things you're saying. So, but let's say we do want to go into a a little bit of a bigger surplus. We alluded to it briefly. It's more calories. And I'm guessing that you're going to push us to for more density, more calorie density in some way, perhaps. Maybe more naked carbs or more fats and stuff like that. What are your tactics there?

  Abbey Sharp 38:03

  Yeah, I mean, and that's the really cool thing about the hunger crushing comma method is that it can be applied to any goal at any time in any stage of life. And so, yeah, when we are in a kind of more kind of bulking situation, we're going to need more carbohydrates for sure, especially compared to the kind of more weight loss or fat loss goals. And so, you know, carbohydrates could be 45 to 65% of total calories. We're going to be bumping up those calories. We're going to be choosing more, you know, perhaps fat-rich protein sources. Protein's going to be important, of course, if we're trying to gain muscle, but we can have more fats, less the tiny bang in some cases for our caloric buck because we need less hunger crushing. Right. A little less hunger crushing. And but we are still utilizing the bones of this framework, knowing that this is the key to getting the best nutrient bang for our caloric buck as well. So, really important that, you know, but my goal is to help people reach their goals in the healthiest, safest way possible. And that's why this method really does work for so many people, because it teaches them the tools for long-term, not just the in like the immediate goal or body kind of composition that they want right now.

  Philip Pape 39:23

  That's the key. And what I take from that is like it's your scaling up and down and you're shifting between them, between this flexible framework. Dirty bulks, like I did one or two in my life, and they're kind of fun, but you actually do feel it like when you're eating not great food, like you said, your body's telling you, and you have a little more resilience against it because you're gaining, but you also can feel so I like that you said that. Now, there we have the opposite problem in the GLP1 community where the hunger is suppressed chemically, and it often comes through a different mechanism than just, I mean, GLP one is obviously a gut hormone, but it also affects the brain and the food noise aspect of it. And so one of the problems I see is when people want to change their lifestyle and want to eat better, it's hard almost because now they're trying to eat more volume,

  Eating well on GLP-1 meds

  Philip Pape 40:08

  but they can't. And also for some people on GLP1s, they re find processed foods kind of revolting, which I guess is a good thing, but then when they get off of it, a lot of that reverts. So how do you handle that population?

  Abbey Sharp 40:22

  Yeah. There is unfortunately this thought, like, oh, if I'm on a if as long as I'm on a GLP one, then like nutrition doesn't really matter. But in fact, it actually matters more than ever. And because every bite counts. And this is what I talk about in the book is that, you know, we have to maximize nutrition at a time when our appetite is at its lowest and we're like not interested in food and nutrition, but we have to think harder about it. And the reality is that, you know, GLP ones, while all folks are on it, if you come off, you know, the research shows that, you know, people regain about two-thirds of the weight back. And so we have to learn the skills while we are on these medications. So, you know, this is again where protein becomes king in small, regular, consistent doses. If we're really struggling with our appetite, eating a mountainous salad with like zero calories, it's not gonna get us the nutrients that we need because we actually see malnutrition on these medications, where up to 40% of the weight loss is coming from lean tissue, which is not what we want. And so I think it's really important, again, to think about protein when we're choosing fiber-rich carbs, which is very important, not only for overall gut health, for satiety management, for blood sugar management, but also for dealing with some of the side effects of GLP1s like constipation and bloating. We wanna be choosing those that are offering the best nutrient bang for a caloric bug. So think about avocado, for example, which is gonna get you fiber, but it's also gonna get you some healthy fats, which is very important. We need healthy fats still in our diet for hormonal regulation. Thinking about things like sweet potatoes, for example, which again, we're not pop, we're probably not gonna be able to eat a lot, a big portion, but it's still gonna give us some carbohydrates, some extra nutrients, the calories that we still need to not be malnourished, and also those fiber, the fiber in there. So, you know, I think people like to just assume that, oh, nutrition doesn't matter. I can just live off as few calories as humanly possible and just ride this low appetite so I can drop those, those, that weight fast, it will backfire. And so again, low and slow is actually important here, as long as, you know, work with your doctor, of course. But if you're finding that you physically do not have an appetite to eat, you know, if you're and you're eating 800 calories, you are not gonna meet your nutrient needs hardst. You're not gonna meet your protein needs. And so it might be worth talking to your doctor about, you know, adjusting dosage so that you can still meet those base core needs.

  Philip Pape 42:57

  And sometimes that's a good problem to have if it's a sign that you are shifting that diet. And of course, you the implication of what you said, you've got to be lifting weights too. I mean, I just almost at this point, it's implied when I talk on this show, but like I forget there's new listeners tuning in. I know. I've 100% like, no, no, you gotta be lifting weights because the 40% you just talked about muscle loss is just because you're not lifting and you're going at this rapid rate of loss. So yeah, it's an interesting one. What about the brain receptors for pleasure reward? And I know there's a lot of stuff that's out, the jury's still out on addiction and those aspects because I had a guy on the show, Jamie Seltzer, he was like almost 700 pounds, he's now under 300 pounds. He did it through GLP ones and lifting weights and changing his nutrition at the same time. But he feels like he will always be on those because of how crazy the food noise was and and like a brain related thing. When we introduce fiber and the variety and protein and all this, is there a correlation with that uh that kind of overrides those signals? The the retrains your brain with the the the receptors for. Pleasure, reward, you know, the dopamine and all that stuff.

  Abbey Sharp 44:03

  Yeah. So the amazing thing is that these nutrients, I mean, for protein, for example, we have some good evidence showing that it does actually reduce food cravings, for example, later on in the day. You have a protein-rich breakfast, you just actually have less food noise, less food cravings later on in the day. And protein does boost GLP1, which is the hormone that we're talking about, that people are putting into their bodies as a injection. And so, yeah, like there's no one should ever be making a claim that diet is some kind of dupe for a powerful, you know, anti-obesity medication like a GLP1 receptor agonist. However, when we are overlapping these things, especially as we are titrating down, coming off these medications, we need to utilize the power of the hunger crushing combo, fiber protein healthy fats, which do have impacts on our satiety hormones. Certainly not to the degree of a medication, but they absolutely do help. And so that is really critical. These are skills that are critical to learn while you are on these medications. So that as you come off them, these are already habit stacked, as this is the way I eat.

  Philip Pape 45:19

  I'm glad you called them skills because that's what they are. They take, they take time and effort, but you build them over time and they become skills for life. You know, I get a lot of books from people who come on the show, but this is one of one of my favorites so far because honestly, Abby and I are highly aligned, and I would definitely get the hunger-crushing combo because there's a lot of stuff we didn't cover in here. There's supplements, there's all the specifics about the foods. If you go to the menus in the back or even the lists of foods,

  Family food skills that stick

  Philip Pape 45:44

  it's all the delicious things you want to eat anyway, but it just gives you those ideas. So given that, and given today's context, Abby, is there anything else you want me to ask you or anything I should have asked that you want to bring up before we wrap up?

  Abbey Sharp 45:56

  Oh, uh, you know what? Like there's a lot of overlapping goals. And the in the book, The Hunger Christian, Calma Method, we have chapters for weight loss, for blood sugar management, for paramenopause and menopause, for sports nutrition goals, and just also like feeding a family and how you can apply this framework for, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are women with kids, and they themselves, who may be on a fat loss or a weight loss or a body recomp journey, are also thinking, okay, how do I raise my kids in a way that's not gonna mess them up in this diet culture ridden world? While I am also trying to make peace with my body or even change my body in some kind of way. And so I do offer a lot of practical advice on that as well, because we are living and breathing in this skinny talk, you know, pro, you know, eat as little as possible era. And it's just gonna become harder and harder to be able to make sense of it all. But this is such a bible that allows people to learn those skills and then also pass those skills on to their kids if they have them.

  Philip Pape 46:59

  For sure. I mean, you're a hypocrite, I think, just being frank. If you're a parent who doesn't walk the walk and now you want their kids to learn something else because it's not gonna happen. I have a 12-year-old and 14-year-old daughter, you know, and and again, they see everything, they absorb everything. No judgment on people. It's just just take it, you know, take take up the mantle and do what Abby's suggesting and really try to improve yourself in conjunction with your kids. So, Abby, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're gonna point people to the book for sure, but where else do you want them to connect with you?

  Abbey Sharp 47:26

  Yeah, you can listen to my podcast, Bite Back with Abby Sharp. I've also got a YouTube channel, Abby's Kitchen, and I'm on TikTok and Instagram at Abby's Kitchen as well. So you can find me in all those places.

  Philip Pape 47:37

  All right, we're gonna throw all that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Abby, for coming on and sharing your wisdom. I had a really good time just reinforcing, but also learning some new things with our audience together today. So thank you, Abby, for coming on. Thank you so much.

Rapid Fat Loss vs. a Long, Slow Cut (Who Aggressive Dieting is For) | Ep 479

When does a fast, aggressive cut (rapid fat loss) beat a long, slow one?

The answer depends on your body fat, your training, your timeline, your history with dieting, and whether you are perimenopausal or over 40.

This episode revisits rapid fat loss and the case for a strict, short diet when the slow-and-sustainable default doesn't work as well for you (or simply because you want to use it). Make sure to download my FREE Rapid Fat Loss guide to follow along with the episode.

We examine the research on how to lose fat quickly without losing muscle, including studies on rate of loss, protein during a steep deficit, and protein needs for people lifting weights. 

Learn what a structured protein-sparing protocol with built-in refeeds actually involves, why strength training and protein are so important for preserving your muscle (and thus losing fat), where metabolic adaptation fits in, and the clear line between a smart aggressive cut and a crash diet.

This episode is designed for adults over 40 who lift, track their food, and want to know whether they are the exception to the "slow" fat loss rule.

Download the free Rapid Fat Loss Guide with my step-by-step 14-day protocol. This is an aggressive dieting plan for serious lifters only who know how to build muscle and track their food. It includes everything you need to know to lose, on average, 3-5 lbs (or more) of pure fat in just 2 weeks:
https://witsandweights.com/free

Timestamps:

0:00 - Slow fat loss and the adherence problem
4:57 - The case for moderate fat loss
8:05 - When going slow stops working
10:46 - What a structured aggressive cut looks like
12:38 - Protein and carbs as muscle insurance
15:47 - Scheduled refeeds and how they work
18:05 - Strength training during a cut
19:16 - Water loss, fat loss, and using it as a tool
20:30 - Step-by-step rapid fat loss guide
21:54 - Preserving muscle on a steep deficit
26:12 - Refeeds, diet breaks, and metabolic adaptation
28:33 - Who an aggressive cut is for (and NOT for)
32:25 - Considerations in perimenopause and over 40
34:12 - Bonus: Deficit to make your fat loss easier

Mentioned:

• Eat More Lift Heavy - the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life, where we can guide you through any fat loss phase (rapid or not) and make sure the results LAST

• Transcript

  Slow fat loss and the adherence problem

  Philip Pape 0:00

  When it comes to fat loss, we often talk about going slow, being patient, using a small calorie deficit, and playing the long game. And for most people, most of the time, that is the right call. But for some of you, the long game is what is holding you back because you get about six weeks in, maybe you get bored, maybe you start to drift off track, and then you quit. And so it becomes an adherence issue. Today I'm making the case that for some, a shorter, stricter, more aggressive cut, aka rapid fat loss, can sometimes beat dragging out a moderate deficit for several months. Who it actually works for, what the research says about sparing your muscle when you are dieting hard, and the line between a smart, aggressive cut and a crash diet, which are not the same thing. 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 today we are revisiting rapid fat loss. If you've been around this show for a while, or really around any evidence-based corner of the fitness world over the past few years, you've probably absorbed the key message for successful fat loss, and that is slow and steady, use a moderate or small deficit so that you don't lose too much muscle and you can stick with it, lose maybe a half pound to a pound a week. You know, it depends on your size and your metabolism. Be patient. You want to build the habits, you want to play the long game. And I've said that versions of that myself, right? The long game is sometimes the fastest game because for many, if not most people in most situations, that's the right call. Now, recently we did do an episode about mini cuts and mini books where I push you more on the aggressive side to say that some people benefit a little bit from short duration fat loss phases that are a little more aggressive. And today we're gonna go even further than that. We're gonna get a little uncomfortable and poke at our own orthodoxy. And in reality, I've I've talked a lot about nonlinear approaches and the fact that everyone responds to different things, both physically and psychologically. And so that's why that's why it's good to have a spectrum. So the slow or moderate approach, it rests on an assumption, and that is that the hardest part of dieting is sustaining it, right? When we say sustainability, that's what we mean. Adherence. Can you stick with it to be successful? And so then the move here is well, let's make it a little gentler, let's make it a little longer. And for certain types of people in certain situations, that assumption doesn't always hold up. And for those people, going longer sometimes kills the diet or it causes you to bounce back and forth and never really quite get what you want out of it. Now, to be really clear up front, because I think this gets highly weaponized online on social media. I'm not here to sell you on crash dieting. I'm not saying that this is at all something a beginner should do. I'm not telling you, hey, eat 800 calories a day, even though that that number could be the number for you at a very short duration based on your current maintenance calories. But I'm not just gonna make a blanket statement. What I am gonna do is take a protocol that actually exists, that has structure, that has evidence behind it, show you who it fits and who it doesn't, especially for those of you who, hey, maybe you're perimenopausal, post-menopausal, and you have recovery issues. Maybe you're on the older side. We really wanna understand what you've been doing in your lifestyle to this point and what you're doing right now to see if it works. It's all about context. And then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a simple rule at the end for how to set your rate of loss on any cut. It's a very simple way that I use with clients and our members and eat more lift heavy, where you can get a little creative about how you approach the beginning of the diet and then as you get into it. So we'll talk about that at the end. You could use that on your next fat loss phase. But for today's episode, here's what we're going to cover. The first thing is why slow is usually the default, but then when it stops working for a subset of you out there. What an actual structured aggressive cut or rapid fat loss phase looks like, because you've probably heard of lots of folks out there, like Lyle McDonald, for example, and different protocols. I'm just gonna keep it simple and straightforward. I'm gonna give you a version that has the protein sparing aspect to it and built-in refeeds, not a let me starve you to death version, because there's a difference. Also, what does the research say about losing fat quickly, but not losing muscle? And then I think the maybe the part that matters the most here is when is an aggressive cut a bad idea and how to tell if you are the exception to that rule. So I know it sounds like a lot, but it's all gonna come together. I want to start with why slow and sustainable is kind of the default and not create

  The case for moderate fat loss

  Philip Pape 4:57

  any straw men here, right? The case for moderate fat loss is a really, really strong one that I strongly advocate for a lot of folks. And when I start with a person who's never quite done this before, that's generally the approach we take. It, however, the duration itself can still be its own challenge in terms of a variable, even when you are going slowly. So when you lose weight slowly, when you have a smaller deficit, we know that it's much more easy to hold on to most, if not all, of your muscle. It's easier. It doesn't mean it's going to happen. Conversely, going aggressive doesn't mean you're going to lose muscle, right? I want to be clear about that. There is a classic study by Garth in 2011 that gets cited a lot where they took elite athletes and they split them into a slow fat loss group, losing about seven-tenths of a percent of body weight a week. So that's 0.7%. And then a fast group losing 1.4% per week. And it was the same total weight loss. Both groups are lifting weights, both eating, you know, enough protein. The slow group increased their lean mass by about 2%. The fast group basically flat on that without gaining any lean mass. So the slower the fat loss, these the you know, assumption is or the conclusion is that it's more sparing of your muscle. And you might even gain a little bit if you're newer to this. And that's not super uncommon when we look at body recomp scenarios. Beyond that, slower dieting seems to protect your metabolic rate a bit better. And it's just a function of the aggressiveness. It's not like a magical thing. In other words, the math all works out whatever way you look at it, because what you're trading off by going slower is just slower fat loss, right? So if we look at, for example, this 2020 meta-analysis by Ashtari Larkey, they pooled a bunch of the research together and found that when you match total weight loss, the gradual dieters, the those who take it slowly, held on to about 97 calories a day more of their resting metabolic rate than people who went very fast, right? So 97 calories. And it's not that big of a difference, maybe, and you know, it depends on how big of a difference the aggressiveness was here, but we tend to see a difference. And it kind of makes sense, but again, you're trading off faster fat loss, right? Then there's the behavior part of this, which is probably the most important, almost bar none, the most important from everything I've seen. And that is that a moderate deficit is easier for people to deal with with their real life, right? You can go out to dinner, you can practice the skills of eating well, portioning your food, hitting your protein, navigating like the planning for restaurants, restaurant menus, going to parties, social events, all that stuff that you need, those skills that you need forever, those skills that are honestly the bread and butter of what we tend to help people with in our programs as well, because that's what pays off. That's what allows you to get that independence and know how to sustain and live at maintenance and have that long game, right? And that is the good argument for this. And then when you want to do a fat loss phase, it's just a matter of scaling some of those things, you know, bringing down the carbs a bit, maybe shifting the nutrition

  When going slow stops working

  Philip Pape 8:05

  density of the foods. So, why am I doing this episode? Well, we've covered rapid fat loss a couple of times in the past, and it comes up a lot, and there's a lot of assumptions and misconceptions about it. If we think of slow and sustainable, it assumes that the binding constraint, right, the thing most likely to fall down in this chain of variables, let's say, is your ability to keep going, your adherence. So then the fix is we need to make it easier, make it gentler, make it longer. And for a lot of people, that works really well. But for some of you, that's not the constraint. For some of you, patience, engagement, interest is the constraint. You start really strong, things start to move, you're very excited and motivated. And then usually around week six, I will say, about a month and a half in, the novelty is off, the progress slows down, and you start to get frustrated, you start to drift, your tracking gets sloppy. I see this all the time. People are like, oh, I'm sorry, I actually haven't tracked for the last two weeks. Okay, what are you doing, man? Or woman, what are you doing? The weekend bleeds into the week, especially if you're doing the same calories every day. So it gets kind of boring. And eventually you're not really dieting, you're kind of uh thinking about dieting, and maybe you're tracking, maybe not, and you're kind of trying to, but you're not quite doing it, and you're sort of at maintenance now, right? So for that person, the long moderate deficit maybe not is not the best choice. Also, there's a corner case of folks, like, for example, some women I've I've had as clients, maybe they have thyroid issues, maybe they don't, but they're over-responsive when they go on a diet where their metabolism drops pretty quickly, and then they're like, they have to keep up with it by trying to cut calories again. And it's this frustrating thing of, oh my gosh, I can never actually lose weight. And it's not that you can't, it's just you have to go more aggressively. Sometimes you have to go way more aggressively, but for a short duration. And this actually aligns with some of the research Dr. Bill Campbell has done lately, like very recently down in South Florida, putting women on a very, very aggressive deficit with a lot of movement. Now, his protocol is extreme, but it's extreme for a purpose. It's kind of to prove out whether, you know, a woman who has the menopausal symptoms more severe than other women can actually lose weight. And of course they can, right? Like if you just starve yourself, you're gonna lose weight, but that's not the necessarily the way we want to do it. But it gives us a lot of clues as to what might work. So the just go slow can can be a problem for a subset of people. And again, staying engaged is very important here. So ironically, sustainability for some means going faster and then getting out. So getting in, getting out, and doing that multiple times over the year or over several

  What a structured aggressive cut looks like

  Philip Pape 10:46

  years. So now let's talk about the aggressive cut. Okay. If if longer is a problem, then the alternative is shorter and more aggressive. So again, we've got a couple of variables we can play with. The duration, how aggressive, like how big of a calorie deficit, which means how how little are we gonna eat technically? And then the the variety within that. So, like, do you shift the calories around and all of that? Okay. And we're actually gonna hit on these. So I don't mean wing it and starve. I don't mean doptavia, optavia or whatever it's called, 800 calories a day of packaged foods that they ship, like none of that nonsense. I mean an actual structured protocol because structure is the point. Planning ahead is the point. Being in control is the point. We've talked on this show about how two groups of people who have refeeds. So, in other words, they are dieting and then let's say on the weekend they eat more, the people that treat it as a cheap meal will actually be less successful than the people who are completely on top of planning it out. Like they plan it as simply a higher day that's a refeed. It's not a cheat day, it's not a, you know, let's let's just have fun and eat whatever. And we see that. So there is a psychology behind this. And this idea has been around in the evidence-based world for a long time. Lyle McDonald wrote about it a version of rapid fat loss years ago. A lot of people reference him. A lot of my clients are into his stuff. He's great, he's very grumpy, grouchy guy. You know, you gotta love him. And a lot of what he says holds up and are great models for how to do this. We've also done our own rapid fat loss challenges and episodes. And I have a guide based on when Dr. Bill Campbell was on here and a settler did an experiment based on one of his protocols. So I'm gonna walk you through that today, but it doesn't matter whose protocol you use, the principles are what matter in terms of doing a smart aggressive cut

  Protein and carbs as muscle insurance

  Philip Pape 12:38

  versus like a crash diet. Okay, so let's go through those. Let's go through those. Principle one is you're gonna have to go into a very aggressive deficit, yes, which means you're just gonna eat a lot fewer calories, but you are gonna anchor it to a really high amount of protein. Okay, protein and fibrous foods is the second piece of that, but it's really about the protein sparing your muscle and then eating in a way that minimizes the hunger, but you can't get rid of the hunger at this level. You're going to have hunger, okay? The version that I like is you go into about a 45% deficit. So you take your maintenance calories, that's the amount of calories you actually burn, which you need to know that. So you have to be tracking ahead of time and be kind of at maintenance for a while before you do this. And then I recommend the tool MacroFactor. It's my favorite app. Use code Wits and Weights, all one word, get a two-week free trial, try it out. Okay. You need your maintenance calories and then you go 55% of that. So a 45% deficit. So it's about half. I mean, it you could you could say roughly half, but it's a little more than that. So if you burn 2,500 calories, you're gonna be around 1,375 on your deficit days. And that's very aggressive. Now, a lot of you are starting way lower than that. You're starting at 1800 calories, and now you're gonna go down to something like 950, right? Or maybe even lower than that. And that's why you could be at seven or eight hundred calories for an individual, but that that's the point is it's gonna be extremely short. Here's what keeps it from being a crash diet. You're gonna set your protein really high. You're gonna set it to at least a gram per pound of body weight, but it could go higher, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5. It could be pretty much exclusively protein, things like white fish and shrimp and chicken breast, right? And vegetables. And I know it almost sounds like paleo or something like that, but that's the point. It's very, very short. You're gonna keep those amino acids flooding in, you're gonna keep strength training, and that is going to hold on to the muscle because that's what we want to do. We want to lose fat and not muscle. Principle two. So principle one is the protein. Principle two is we're gonna keep the carbs in, but we're going to use it as refeeds for the most part, depending on how many carbs you have to play with during the week. You might have some carbs during the week, but you're gonna be eating mostly fibrous vegetables and including a little bit of fruit is what I would recommend. So when we look at starvation diets or crash diets, oftentimes they just cut carbs, right? Things like keto, you know. And that can be counter-counterproductive. We know carbs are muscle sparing, they give you a little bit of energy, but they are gonna be highly limited. Let's just admit it, because you're taking up most of the diet with protein. When you run out of carbs, your body's gonna start pulling from other sources. So it's gonna try to pull from fat, maybe a little bit from protein, converting to glucose, and from a it's not going to rebuild muscle. In other words, muscle protein breakdown outpaces muscle protein synthesis. So it's not that it's like eating your muscles if you are lacking in protein and carbs. It's just that your body will not have what it needs to rebuild the muscle. So we do keep carbs in the picture. They end up moderate to low, just like the fat ends up being pretty low. Protein is taking up the vast majority of

  Scheduled refeeds and how they work

  Philip Pape 15:47

  a calorie budget. And then the principle three we're gonna get to now with refeeds, that's where you're gonna really take advantage of carbs. So principle number three is schedule built-in refeeds. And the way I run it, you go four days in a deficit, then one day in a refeed, four days in a deficit, one in a refeed, four more days in a deficit, and you're done. So that's 14 days that include two refeeds. Now, there are different protocols. Again, Lau McDonald has his protocol. You can look it up. There's lots of different ways to do that. Some people get creative and mix it around. It's fine, right? Some people stretch it out a little bit and they might do four days, two days, or they might do a typical like seven-day period of five days, two days. That's that's also pretty common. So on the refeed days, what do you do? Well, you bump your calories back up to maintenance almost entirely with carbs. And, you know, I like carbs like fruit and starches, you know, rice and things like that that are pretty easy to just jack up carbs and consume them because you actually might, even though you're probably hungry and you're looking forward to the food, you also don't want to stuff yourself and get distended and feel like really terrible. So you tend to go uh and pick, you know, the right types of carbs that kind of balance a sweet spot between satiety and ease of consumption. And so your refeed days are up at your maintenance calories. So if you were burning 2,500 calories and you're dieting on, what did we say, 13 something, now you're going back to 2,500 on those days. Now, there are some camps that say, look, if you don't feel like you need all that amount, you know, go part way there, go two-thirds or 80% of the way there. You're gonna have to experiment with yourself to see if that gets you all the benefits or not. For some people, it's like not enough. And then they feel like they've never quite had a relief. For others, that's actually beautiful because then it actually gives them a little bit more of a deficit as part of the process, right? The goal here is top off your muscle glycogen. It kind of really gives you a little boost for the next training day, but mainly it gives you a psychological breather, a day that you can look forward to, but in a planned way, not in a cheat way. Um, and that helps you get through the two weeks. Two weeks doesn't sound like a lot on a podcast, but when you're actually in this thing, this is a challenging thing to do. And by the way, you could stretch this out to three weeks in different ways. You can have a slightly less aggressive deficit, you can have two extra refeed

  Strength training during a cut

  Philip Pape 18:05

  days in there. You know, there's different ways to do this. The fourth principle is the training, the strength training, right? And we've talked about this in the past. When you go into fat loss, a lot of people want to train a different way. You want to do like lighter, more reps, add a bunch of cardio, et cetera. No, you're not gonna have much energy. So the best way to burn fat to hold on your muscle is a high stimulus, keeping the intensity or the weight on the bar or on the dumbbells or machines high. So, whatever you're already doing, probably just keep doing that because we're only talking about two weeks. We're not trying to hit PRs necessarily. So rep range, auto-regulated type programming tends to work well here. But for most of you, you're probably already doing something like that. And you might might lose a touch of strength because of the low energy, but you know, you hit it hard, get close to failure like you normally would, even if it's a few reps less less. Keep the weight up there, keep the load up there. Don't deload, don't bring it down. In fact, that's the worst time to combine with the delo. I always tell people when they're gonna deload in their normal course of their lifestyle, that's actually a good time not to be dying in. That's actually a good time to eat more, not the opposite. But anyway, heavy lifting, high protein, keep that muscle and burn the fat. That's the engine that's going

  Water loss, fat loss, and using it as a tool

  Philip Pape 19:16

  on here. So, two caveats here so that I don't oversell this to people. The first one is that when you run this, and your scales, your scale is probably gonna drop a lot in the first few days. It may or may not. Like people respond differently, but if it does, most of that it's gonna be water and stored carbs that are leaving your body. The real fat loss over, say, the two-week protocol we're talking about here is more like at most three to five pounds. Now, that is excellent for a mere 14 days. That really is. And that's why you can string together, say, three of these in a year, and now you've got nine to 15 pounds of fat loss within that year just for six total cumulative weeks of diet, and that's not bad at all. That's kind of what we're going for. The second thing is this is a tool. This is not a lifestyle. It makes your overall life more sustainable for some people to be able to only have the two weeks of aggressive dieting, but the dieting itself is a very defined, structured block with a start and finish, and then you come back out to maintenance deliberately, you don't extend it. One of the biggest mistakes people make is hey, Philip, I'm feeling okay. I just got you know, some fat off. Should I keep going? I'm like, probably not. Probably not. Can you extend it by one week?

  Step-by-step rapid fat loss guide

  Philip Pape 20:30

  Maybe. You've got to look at your biofeedback, your performance, all of that stuff. You know, maybe, but don't push it too hard or you're gonna start losing muscle, it's gonna start messing with your hormones, all that other stuff. So I just gave you the principles, I just gave you the broad numbers. If you want it spelled out, like exactly what do I eat on each day, how do I do the math, and all that. I do have a guide, my rapid fat loss guide. I've had it for a while. I'll put the link in my show notes. If you go to witsandweeights.com slash free, you can see all of my guides, including rapid fat loss. But I will put the link in the show notes to the rapid fat loss guide. This is one of the more detailed guides I have. It's Google Doc that actually walks you through everything and it step by step. It does the calorie math, it gives you the protein, it gives you the structure, the four four one one-off structure, tells you even how to set it up in macrofactor. There's lookup tables, you can find your body weight, maintenance calories. There's a whole bunch of really good stuff in there. Again, I'm saying that rapid fat loss is not for everyone, but it's it's good to look at it and see what it would take for you to do it. And if you are one of the people that is a good fit for this, we're going now to talk about who that is so that you could just be educated and make the right choice. Okay. So again, go to wit'saways.com slash free if you want to find the rapid fat loss guide or click the link in the show notes. So the protocol is very structured, but does it does rapid fat loss work as you would expect?

  Preserving muscle on a steep deficit

  Philip Pape 21:54

  Can you actually hold on to your muscle? Because you probably heard, you know, oh, if I go more than 500 calorie deficit, I'm gonna start. Losing my muscle. No, there's a dose response factor and there's also a high training stimulus factor. I will say generally, what I've found is if people are really consistent at training hard with the proper effort, okay, just like we talked about, I think it was our last episode about what actually builds muscle. If you are doing that with enough volume and effort, you have a lot of leeway on dieting if you keep the duration short. Even if you are a 45, 50-year-old woman with declining progesterone and estrogen, all the fear-mongering out there about menopause, you can't lose weight anymore, and this and that. If you do this, you can have very good results. And this may be what you need as either a jump start or a little bit of you know boost to get it done if you do it right. There are two things it depends on the protein and the lifting. So it really comes down to that. And that can be challenging though. The lifting, not so much if you once you get into it, like you just keep doing it. But hitting that amount of protein when it's mostly just that protein, you've got to be very dialed in. Like you can't be eating ribeye and 80% ground beef for the most part during this phase. You could eat scallops and seafood. Seafood's great, like whitefish, you know, chicken breasts, things like that, some forms of pork, maybe. But the the reason the protein's so important, we've known this from studies. There's one back in 2016 by Longlin, where they took young men, they put them on a 40% calorie deficit, which is aggressive by any standard. They did it for four weeks. They did hard resistance training and intervals. And then they split them by protein. So one group had moderate protein intake, one had about up to 2.4 grams per kilogram. So the high protein group on the 40% deficit gained two and a half pounds of lean mass and lost 11 pounds of fat. So they actually body recomped on a huge deficit. The lower protein group just held on to their muscle and they lost less fat. So it's the same deficit, different body composition outcome. The only difference was the protein and the fact that they train hard. And I will say we're gonna do an upper another another episode soon digging into that whole protein phenomenon about how magic can occur when you increase your protein in terms of fat loss, even when you're in a deficit, or I should say, even when you're in a surplus, and then all of a sudden you start to lose fat. And it's like, this doesn't make sense, does it, based on calories and calories out? It does, but it's kind of a secondary effect that occurs on the energy outside of the equation. So anyway, protein is very important. And the muscle loss that everyone is worried about, it's not really about the size of the deficit. It's whether you are lifting hard, keeping the protein high, and keeping the duration short. And there's a whole body of work from Eric Helms that goes back to 2014, so a decade, where he basically, to just to paraphrase, the leaner you are and the more aggressive the deficit, the more protein you need. So in practice, for a lifter, that's where we get to the gram per pound of body weight. Now, the minimum you really need in general is like 0.6.7. It's not nearly that much. But when you're in an aggressive deficit, that's where we need to create a higher floor. So the floor I use in the protocol is just one, but I've definitely seen people be more successful jacking that up. Okay, jacking that up. It helps with satiety and all the other things as well. And it really does move the needle on body composition for some people in a in a surprising way. Now, remember earlier I mentioned the difference between those two groups with the aggressive versus not aggressive, and they were their metabolism dropped faster in the more aggressive group. Well, in that study, the problem is the rapid groups were usually they didn't have very high protein, and in many cases, they weren't lifting weight, lifting weights. So of course they're gonna lose muscle. So a lack of protein in training will itself accelerate your drop in metabolism as well. And look, a lot of you when we talk, forget rapid fat loss, just talk about life in general. You get into your 40s, 50s, where like, oh, my metabolism's not what it used to be. That's what's happening. You're losing muscle mass. You need more protein as you age, not less, and you probably didn't have much to begin with. You're if you're not even lifting weights, that's the biggest piece of all. That's the biggest piece of all. So whoever you are lifting weights, eating enough, eating enough protein, it solves most of these issues, guys. All right, now what about the refeeds and diet breaks?

  Refeeds, diet breaks, and metabolic adaptation

  Philip Pape 26:12

  Okay, the the structured higher calorie periods that are in these protocols. Well, I would say the evidence is still mixed. It's really hard to tease things out. There's the famous Matador study where they did the blocks, the intervals that we've talked about. I think it was like two weeks on, two weeks off. And it seems like they had better results, but it could just be an adherence thing. We've had studies that compare continuous dieting to dieting with breaks that did not find a difference between fat loss, muscle, metabolic rate. So I think the strongest case for a refeed and why we include them is adherence and the psychology of it, right? Knowing that refeed is coming up in four days, it helps you get through those four days. However, there may be a physiological benefit as well. And this is again where you will have to experiment and see. And this is why you may not need the full maintenance calories. That was my point. Like if the only benefit is adherence, then that logic means you don't necessarily have to get fully up to maintenance on those days, right? Because the whole leptin argument that has been debunked. So, where does that leave metabolic adaptation itself in this conversation? Well, it's probably gonna happen, but it's not gonna be that big and it's temporary anyway. So don't worry about it. In fact, when I run people through a two or three-week rapid fat loss phase, we're not really even paying attention to what happens to our expenditure during that time because you can't really have that level of precision. Even if you are using macrofactor, it's too short of duration, and then you're done with the diet. Well, what can you do with that information? You're not gonna change your calories as a result because you're already doing these big swings anyway, from dieting to refeeds, right? The size of the adaptation on your meta in your metabolism tends to track with the size of the deficit, how much fast you lose, fat you lose, and the duration. But then it's going to bounce back. All of your metabolic rate is gonna come back. And the only change will be if you are lighter on the scale than before the diet, you're gonna burn fewer calories from that. But if you have more muscle, you'll burn more calories from that. So I would use the smallest deficit that gets you the loss that you want. But then in this case, what we're talking about today is that deficit being extremely high, but for a short duration for those who have trouble, sticking with a longer, slow diet. That's really what I'm talking about. So, who is this for? And who isn't it for? This is very important. And as always, I like to be direct here. So

  Who an aggressive cut is for (and NOT for)

  Philip Pape 28:33

  knowing that this protocol exists and works in a certain context is different from you should do it, because I know everybody listening, especially if you've heard this for the first time, you're hearing this for the first time, you're like, oh my God, I didn't know this exists. I don't want to do a crash diet, but yeah, I would love to do this rapid fat loss phase. I can drop like five pounds of fat. Let's do it. All right, here we go. So I think this is ideal if, for example, you carry a lot of body fat to start with. So it's kind of like you have fuel in your body already. I think it's great. If you are, you know, quite overweight or even obese, perfect. Okay. I would say if you have a deadline, an event, a trip, a specific date, and you're just trying to do a quick cut for that, as much as I cringe a little bit on time-based constraints for these things, for some people, they're like, okay, I have the day, I might as well do it the right way. And assuming you've already done proper, set up your nutrition properly ahead of time and you've been training, go for it. Don't do it though if you've never done a fat loss before phase before and you haven't done all the things you're supposed to do for a fat loss phase, like strength training. Okay. If you know yourself well enough that longer diets are really hard, but you actually can do really well for a short duration aggressively and be disciplined and all that, you could be this could be perfect for you. A short block, clear finish line to you might be more sustainable, right? Over the macro period, like over the months, over the years, to have those short bursts in there. And I think the research backs it up. There's actually a study I found by Purcell in 2014 that was kind of counterintuitive. People losing weight rapidly were more likely to hit their target and less likely to drop out than a slow group. And it's because of this psychology of humans love to go after things and like to have events and goals. A clear, fast, defined push toward this goal, it kept more people in the game. And that finish line is motivating, right? So that's not just me theorizing about psychology that we do have evidence for this. And then one more thing on the rate of loss, where coat guys like Brandon DeCruz talk about this a lot. The right rate of loss is not even necessarily fixed across a single cut. Now, a rapid fat loss phase is so short, you're not even worried about the rate of loss. You're just setting up the deficit and doing it and you're done. But if we're talking a little longer, like a mini cut or longer, you don't have to stick to the same thing the whole time. We're gonna touch on this again in the end of the episode because this is where I think people don't think out of the box, and we should, and it would make things easier. Also, though, you should not do an aggressive cut. Okay. This is so this is the this is who it's not for. You should not do an aggressive cut or rapid fat loss phase if you have any history of disordered eating, period. Not worth worth the risk. Not worth the risk. I just had a call with somebody yesterday who has a history of very low calorie binge restricted cycles. She's actually in a muscle building phase, which is awesome. Okay. And I said, let's let's crank that out for like six months. And then when you're ready for a fat loss phase, we're gonna do it very moderate and we're not gonna do it for that long. And I said, who cares if it's like five pounds? It will prove to yourself you can do this in a sustainable way. So that's a different situation. She's not gonna do rapid fat loss. I would never recommend it. If you're already pretty lean, it's hard as well because I think you have a higher risk of muscle loss. If you cannot or will not hit that protein level while you're lifting hard, obviously you got to do that. It's probably not for you. In other words, you if you already struggle to hit your protein not on a diet, you're not ready. You've got to get there. You have to be ready for it and go to maintenance and successfully build those skills, right? That's something we do and eat more lift heavy. Just to throw my program out there is build that skill, those skills of each of those things. How do we track? How do we eat our protein? How do we solve all the problems in our own lives first? And then we can go to fat loss, whether it's rapid or not. Now, if you're a lady, if you're a woman in perimenopause and menopause, a lot of you listening, you're over 40. I would say for some, the downside risk is higher. And for others, this is exactly ideal. It's really individualistic.

  Considerations in perimenopause and over 40

  Philip Pape 32:25

  Okay. When you're concerned about things like bone density and energy availability and stress and holding on to estrogen with lower or holding on to muscle with lower estrogen, all that stuff. As long as you are lifting consistently and with the proper effort and volume, and you can hit the protein like we've already talked about, and you're the type of person who's not really super responsive to longer diets, give it a shot. Why not? Like go for it. However, pushing energy too low is probably gonna have an impact on your hormones, like thyroid output, on your recovery, your sleep, your mood, your cycle. And it happens very fast. So my honest position is be very careful about setting yourself up for success during this, following the protocol the way it's supposed to be, doing the prerequisites. Don't be be honest with yourself that you are ready for it. But it could be a great tool. So the difference between a proper aggressive fat loss phase, rapid fat loss phase that works well is really in this level of precision, monitoring, protein, training, and then just watching how it works for you and tracking whatever you can so that next time you do it, you know what things you want to adjust. Should I go higher on the protein? Should I add another refeed? Should I go shorter or longer? Should I go more aggressive with the deficit, et cetera? So to put the whole thing together, slow and moderate is still the right default for the vast majority of you here. I would say 80%, 90% of the time. Another 10% are probably better off with mini cuts. And then maybe 5% of you, 10% of you are good with these rapid fat loss phases, just as a default. Anybody can do the rapid fat loss phase or experiment with it, of course. But listen through this episode again and go download my guide and just walk through the protocol. Wits and weights.com slash free or use the link in the show notes. Get the rapid fat loss guide. Okay.

  Bonus: Deficit to make your fat loss easier

  Philip Pape 34:12

  So before we wrap up, I promised you a rule for setting your rate of loss that's out of the box that's going to help you out. And again, the resource today is a rapid fat loss guide. Go to wits and weights.com slash free. Get the link in the show notes. If you need more help than that, reach out, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com and see how we can help you develop the skills needed to get ready for successful fat loss, whether it's done this way or not. That's eatmorliftheavy.com. All right. Here is what I call the descending deficit. And it's something that I stumbled across randomly while working with clients and doing it for myself. And then I noticed folks like Brandon DeCruz and others talking about this. And it is stop picking just one rate of loss and trying to hold it the whole way. Instead, plan out a very, very aggressive rate of loss that then titrates down as you go. Because what's good, what it's going to do, it's going to feel like you're actually eating more food because you are eating more food as you go into the diet, which sounds counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Because at the start of a cut, your motivation's super high. You don't have any diet fatigue. You're carrying the most fat you're going to carry for the phase. Your muscles at the lowest risk it will be for muscle loss. That's when you can push. That's when you can jack it up to say 1% of your body weight a week. Or for some of you that are larger, even more than that. And then as you get leaner and the fatigue starts to build, you ease it off down to 0.75, down to half a percent a week as you're getting lean. Now, these are for longer diets, maybe not a it's not for the rapid fat loss phase, but it's an little tip that I think is super helpful if you're planning a longer diet. It's fat, you're doing it faster when it's easy, when it's safer, slower, when it gets harder and risky. And then you actually, you know, you're eating more food as you go. You're actually increasing the calories up into a smaller deficit. And it's interesting, right? Psychologically. A lot of people do the opposite. They start kind of cautious, they dip their foot in, they're like, I'm gonna go with a moderate deficit because I've heard I need to hold onto my muscle. And then they just kind of like barely get going, right? And then they start to get tired. And, you know, then you try to get more aggressive because you're making up for it, but now you're getting more metabolic adaptation and more diaphysic. It's the wrong way to do it. So try very aggressive and taper off to less aggressive. And by the way, when you start very aggressive, if you find that you can stay there for a little bit longer, go for it, right? It'll kind of tell you where your limits are. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the right speed for fat loss isn't slow or fast. It's the one that matches what you're capable of to stick to it and get the result. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

What REALLY Builds Muscle After 40 | Ep 478

What REALLY builds muscle after 40?

The honest answer comes down to 3 things: sufficient effort for growth, how many hard sets you need each week, and recovery.

This episode covers mechanical tension as the proximate cause of muscle growth, what the research says about training close to failure and reps in reserve (RIR), the how many weekly hard sets (volume) drives muscle growth (hypertrophy) vs. diminishing gains, and how sleep, protein, and recovery enable muscle growth.

Plus, what changes for lifting weights over 40 and for women in perimenopause and menopause, and a 30-second test you can run in the gym to find out how hard you are training.

Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that works alongside the tools you already use to calibrate your effort, dial in your training volume, and tell you what your data means for building muscle and losing fat over 40.

Timestamps:

0:00 - 3 things that build muscle
6:39 - Mechanical tension and mechanotransduction
9:30 - Size principle and proximity to failure
11:19 - Reps in reserve and calibrating your effort
14:28 - Volume as the dose for hypertrophy
15:52 - Hard sets per muscle per week
17:45 - What makes a set count
18:44 - Building your week of training
21:50 - Effort tracking and programming over 40
23:24 - Recovery as a permissive factor
25:18 - Sleep, protein, and strength training over 40
26:21 - Building muscle through perimenopause and menopause
30:21 - Bonus: 30-second test for whether you've hit "failure"

• Transcript

  3 things that build muscle

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've been changing up your exercises, chasing the perfect rep range, switching programs every few weeks to keep your muscles guessing, and you're still not seeing the muscle you'd expect for how hard you feel like you're working, this episode is for you. Today I'm going to show you the three things that actually build muscle and why everything else that you've heard about on social media or elsewhere is more for optimization. If you can get these three things right, the rest really don't matter as much as you think. 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, Philip Pape, and I'm over 40. Many of you are as well. You're probably lifting weights, and maybe you've been doing it for a while. Maybe you are a gym rat. I don't know your situation, but you've heard maybe a hundred little rules about how to build muscle and different rep ranges. What range is best? How heavy should I go? Is eight to twelve hypertrophy versus say, you know, one to five is strength? You do you have to mix things up to confuse or to challenge the muscles? Do you have to switch your program every X number of weeks following a D-load? What exercise selection do I do so I'm not wasting my time? What about effective reps? What about training close to failure? And the list goes on and on. And I think the fitness industry is just making a ton of money selling you all the variables to optimize this stuff, all the programs you need. And I'm sure you've poured a lot of your hard-earned cash into these things, or at least a lot of time on social media. So the problem I see with a lot of you, and I've dealt with this in the past for years and years and years until I finally figured things out with the help of some amazing people, is you're working incredibly hard. Now, if you're not even going to the gym at all, okay, fine, let's stop right there. You're gonna have to train, you're still gonna take a ton away from this episode. In fact, you're gonna be ahead of the game. But many of you are spending your effort and your attention on variables that do not move the outcome, or you're going to the gym and not even progressing at all, and you're just moving weights around. Yeah, you feel good. Maybe you get a sweat. Maybe you're just kind of hold on, you know, holding on to what you have, but you're not really making any progress. And that can be very frustrating. But really building muscle comes down to just a few key principles. Okay, that is what we're gonna talk about today. Everything else is optimization, everything is dialing in, maybe, but we're gonna focus on what matters. I'll say that this is not a beginner episode necessarily. Like we're not gonna talk about, okay, step one, here's how you train. Step one, right? This is really, if you already know the basics, you know what a deadlift is, you know what a squat is, you've been already listening to podcasts, reading articles, et cetera. And maybe you're a little tired being told, okay, here's another thing you have to do. Maybe you listen to Mind Pump or something like that, which I love these shows, but they can confuse you because there's just so many things that they throw out there as information or tips. But it's more liberating sometimes when you just have simplicity. So we're gonna try the two, we're gonna try to do that today. And then if you stick around to the end, you know, I always like to throw in something special at the end of the episode. Today I'm gonna give you something to do in the gym to tell whether you're training hard enough and also whether you're training close enough to failure versus what you think you are. We're gonna do it very objectively. A lot of people would get that part wrong and it kind of holds you back on progressing the right way. Today you're gonna learn the one thing that's the actual proximate cause of muscle growth. It's just one thing. Also, why proximity to failure matters more than weight on the bar. I know shocking to hear me say that. How many hard sets per muscle you actually need in a week, because there's a lot of confusion there, and then the role of recovery, which may have some surprises in store for you today. So let's start with what most people believe building muscle is about. Okay. If I ask the average dedicated lifter, Jim Goer, what they're focused on, I will hear specifics like, okay, I'm doing these rep ranges, these are my exercise selection and variation. Sometimes people talk about, you know, mixing it up and making sure they're trying to hit all the muscle groups. You know, we talked about muscle confusion in a recent episode. Go look that one up. It's actually a pretty cool discussion. I hear about sometimes time under tension and tempo, about mind muscle connection, about this split or that split. Now, those are tactics. None of that is worthless. I would say it's you've got to learn, you've got to find what works for you and understand that there's a spectrum of stuff tactically that influences muscle growth. But all of these are downstream. They are like the trim on the house. And we want to focus on the foundation of the house, not the paint on the wall, but the frame of the house, the foundation. So I want to reframe, pun intended, this whole concept today using the way that I like to think about things, which is an engineering problem. When you have a system that isn't producing the output you want, you've got to fix the system. You don't fiddle with the dials. You identify the constraint. What is the one bottleneck that is limiting the results? And then put all your resources there. That is a very efficient approach. For most lifters, especially as we age, we're over 40, over 50, and you're not building muscle the way you want. The constraint is almost never exercise selection, guys. And yet that's often the top of the list. Oh, what exercises should I do to X, Y, Z? It's almost never the rep range. Oh, should I be working in five to 10 or 10 to 12? I get that question a lot. The constraint for most of you is this you are not training hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week. That is it. That is the whole game for most people. Listen up, I'm gonna repeat myself. You're either and either or not training enough, hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week. Now, notice actually, neither of those is technically volume in and of itself. It's effort and frequency that leads to volume and ultimately will tie to the one principle that glues it all together that we're gonna talk about. So those are the things you're gonna want to nail. Now, I know you're a lot of you are saying, wait, I do train hard. I'm wiped out when I go to the gym. Well, hold that thought because we're gonna test that out. All right. Getting wiped out, being sore, being, you know, and sweating is not a primary variable. Those aren't primary variables of what actually drives muscle growth. So if it is not, let's say, rep range and it's not exercise selection and it's not variety, then what

  Mechanical tension and mechanotransduction

  Philip Pape 6:39

  is it? Well, the answer that we definitively know at this point is mechanical tension. Mechanical tension is the proximate cause of muscle growth. It is the cause of muscle growth. That is the thing that your muscle fibers respond to. It's not the burn or the pump, not the soreness, not any of those things. Although those can come along for the ride. They can be there for sure for different reasons. But the signal that tells a muscle to grow is high tension, mechanical tension on the fiber, repeated and accumulated over time. So it's not a one-off, but repeated and accumulated over time. And here's why that matters in plain terms. When a muscle fiber is under high mechanical load, that physical force gets converted into a chemical signal inside the cell. This is fascinating. The science term is mechanotransduction, mechano, as in mechanical, transduction as in trans, you know, transduces or uh changes or converts into chemicals. The upstream part of how the force becomes the signal is actually still not understood, guys. That's why I use the term proximate cause. The upstream part in your body of how that force becomes that signal, even by people who study this for a living, tell us we don't quite know. But the downstream part is very clear. That signal, right, from the mechanical tension into the chemical signal, that signal then ramps up your muscle protein synthesis through a pathway called mTOR. And that's what builds new contractile tissue. And I think there's a newer name for mTOR today, but we're gonna go with mTOR because that's what everybody knows and loves. Now, for a long time, we talk about or we have talked about three drivers of growth mechanical tension, metabolic stress, which is like the that burning feeling you get when you lift weights, and then muscle damage, which often is correlated with soreness. That's what we used to talk about. Over the last decade or so, the field has consolidated to no, it's mechanical tension. That's the one that matters. That is the one that matters. So please consider this an update in your scientific library. The other two, the burn and the soreness, they mostly seem to matter to the extent that they help you produce more tension, or they are just byproducts of the work. The source, soreness is never the goal. It's like a side effect of sometimes what you're doing correctly here with mechanical tension. But the question is, how do you produce high tension on a muscle fiber? Because what we care about is what do you do? As a human being, going to the gym with a fitness lifestyle, what the heck do you actually do? So let's get practical. Your body recruits muscle fibers in a specific order. Smallest and weakest first, biggest and strongest last. It's called the size principle. The fibers with the most growth potential,

  Size principle and proximity to failure

  Philip Pape 9:30

  growth potential, the high threshold ones, those only get called into the game when your effort gets high. And that's either because you're lifting something genuinely heavy as a percentage of your max, or listen up, or because you fatigued the smaller fibers enough that your body has to recruit the bigger ones to keep the set going. So do you see what this means? It means that the last few reps of a hard set, the ones that get difficult, the ones that, let's be honest, you are attempted to not do because it's getting hard, right? Those are the reps where the magic happens. Those are the reps that put you your most responsive fibers under the real mechanical tension. If you stop a set when it starts to feel hard, you're actually walking away right before the part that grows the muscle. Now it's it may not be as close to failure as sometimes claimed. So there's a little bit of a window there for sure. Okay, we we can talk about that nuance, but it's the principle we're talking about here. And so this brings us to the single most important number in this conversation, and that is proximity to failure. Like if we need a metric, it is proximity to failure. How close are you actually training to the point where you can't do another rep? And the research here is pretty consistent. Muscle growth increases as your sets get closer to failure. You don't have to go all the way to failure, and I'm gonna come back to that, but you have to get close. And by failure, I simply mean, again, you your form would completely break down and you literally can't do another rep. The most useful way to think about this proximity to failure is reps in reserve, R-I-R. Now, there are two systems there's rating of perceived exertion, RPE,

  Reps in reserve and calibrating your effort

  Philip Pape 11:19

  and then the inverse of that is R I R. We're just gonna go with IRR. R-I-R, it's a really easy way to think about it because it's how many reps are left in the tank. RPE gets confusing, so we're not even gonna go there. So let's say if you have five more in the tank, that's five R I R. And so as you can see, the smaller the IRR, R I R, the closer you are to failure, all the way to zero R I R, which is complete failure. And the closer you are, generally with a dose response that is mitigated somewhat by how much fatigue you're getting in the set, we're gonna talk about that, affects how you build muscle. Now, this should affect how you train significantly if you weren't doing it right the first time and if you're not getting a result. Now, we take somebody like Dr. Eric Helms, who I very much respect, and his colleagues, they've done a lot of work on this. And there's a finding that keeps coming up in the research. Most people, especially less experienced lifters, which I know a lot of you are. Heck, I've been training now for about five years pretty well. And I consider myself pretty experienced when I compare my form to, say, someone who's newer, but I have a long way to go and a long way to learn. I'm always trying to improve. So let's just assume we're all less experienced. Many of you dramatically underestimate how hard you're actually training. You think you're one or two reps in reserve, but you're actually five or six. This is very common. In one set of studies, when trained people were pushed, okay, trained people, people who already resistance trained regularly, when they were pushed by a coach, they got an average of five, two, six more reps than they predicted on a load or a weight on the bar that they thought was their limit. So that's five or six more that they were able to get. That is a lot. That's a difference between a set that really does effectively grow muscle and one that's kind of on the edge, or maybe it's not even really moving the needle for you. It's just burning calories, makes you feel like you did something, but now you're gonna need a lot more volume or time to get where you want. And if you're let's say in a bulk or a maintenance or body reconp, you're just not getting everything out of it you can with your training stimulus. So that's why I'm sharing this with you guys. This is so important. That's why this episode is called What Really Builds Muscle. I think I think it's after 40, but it really is for everyone. So we've established a mechanical tension as the driver, and that the effort you put in that gets close to failure is how you produce that tension. Now we have to talk about how much because that effort without enough repetition, without enough volume, does not get you there. You're gonna get detrained. You need to continue to challenge your body to continue so that it adapts onward and upward. I mean, that makes sense, right? Like if you have the best gym session you've ever had in your life, you train hard, you're in the gym for two hours today, and then you never train the rest of your life, well, obviously you're not gonna keep building muscle. Okay. So the framing I love comes from Brad Scheinfeld uh and others like him. It's basically this if intensity, okay, intensity in this case is proximity to failure, I apologize because we also use intensity to mean load on the bar. But if if proximity to failure is the drug, if we're talking about dose response and that's the drug,

  Volume as the dose for hypertrophy

  Philip Pape 14:28

  that's the stimulus, then volume is like the dosage. Okay. You need both of them together. So it's not that volume in and of itself is anything special, it's that volume at high mechanical tension is special. So then what is that dose? What is that volume? Well, when we talk about volume for muscle growth, we typically count hard sets per muscle group per week. It's a nice, easy metric that you can quantify. Not the total time or tonnage or how trashed you feel or how sore you are, not even how many days in the gym, right? Because you can you can at work, you can get a good volume from three days or from six days. It's hard sets. Okay, and the research is really clear on this. A recent large analysis that pooled dozens of studies, so we call that a meta-analysis, found that more volume reliably produces more growth with essentially 100% certainty in the direction, but with diminishing returns as you go up. So the curve starts to flatten, diminishing returns. So when we talk about dose response in fitness or nutrition, it almost invariably is an asymptotic curve for my math nerds out there. In other words, it it increases, but by less and less as you go. So the marginal increases get smaller. It's not a linear relationship, it's more of a curve. Very important to know because then you want then you can find like that sweet spot

  Hard sets per muscle per week

  Philip Pape 15:52

  where you get a lot of the response, but you don't have to put in significantly more effort for a little extra, which also, by the way, has negatives in terms of fatigue and recovery. Okay. For most people, what does that look like? Well, the responsive range of volume is around 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle per week. If you are newer to lifting or if you're short on time, you could get a lot out of that low end, that 10 sets. That 10 sets. In fact, if you look at the dose response curve, you can go as low as five and still get a response. You're just leaving some stuff on the table. That's my point, right? You going from zero to five is a massive improvement. And then five to ten is another big improvement, but then between 10 and 20 is a decent improvement, and it depends on how much you want to put in. And if you're newer, you're gonna get a huge responsiveness anyway, even with fewer sets, which is why I don't focus as much on volume for new, new for uh newbies for beginners. I focus more on, hey, get in the gym three days a week and do the main lifts for a decent amount of, you know, for like three sets, and you're you're generally covered. If a specific muscle is a priority and you're recovering well for that muscle group, then you might say, okay, I need 15 to 20 sets on that upper range. I'm gonna do a little specialization. One of my all-time favorite coaches, Andy Baker, he puts it simply, he's like, look, if you want to get bigger arms, you got to do it twice a week, two different exercises, which, you know, depending on the number of sets, can put you around 15 to 20 because you also have a lot of indirect work generally hitting those muscle groups, right? So specialization in one exercise, you just got to think about the number of sets. Beyond that, beyond the 20 sets, the evidence is a little murky. It's also very individual. And for a lot of us who are older, this is where the over 40 piece, the recovery is really an important variable. And if you're training too much, you could just be constantly fatigued and underrecovered, let

  What makes a set count

  Philip Pape 17:45

  alone if you're not sleeping well, if you're stressed, and if you're not eating enough. Right? Those stack on. Now, we take everything I just talked about, and now let's tie this together because what does it mean? Well, a set only really counts toward that volume if it was hard, which means reasonably close to failure. If you had 20 lazy sets with the same, I hate to say pink dumbbells, but whatever weight you did last time, and it's five, six, seven, eight, nine reps in reserve, every time, even if you feel like you got some work done because you're sweating, you're just not gonna get the same result. In fact, you might not be getting, you might not be putting pushing the needle enough to get stronger over time and actually increase the weight. And next time you go to the gym, you can't do any more until you train harder. So it's not just about counting the sets, it's counting the ones that are hard. Now, for those of us logging, you're gonna count all your sets. The point isn't to only count hard sets. The point is make sure that all your sets are hard. Okay, that's my point here. All right. Warm-up sets don't count. In other words, you should track your warm-up

  Building your week of training

  Philip Pape 18:44

  sets, in my opinion, so you can kind of repeat them next time, but only the working sets that are close to failure. So let's say you go to the gym on Monday or whatever your next training day is, you're gonna pick the movements that you can load up and repeat week to week and actually progress on. You don't need 12 exercises per muscle. You don't need to do body maxing or whatever you want to call it here, full body maxing. You just need a handful that you can develop skill on and get better at because there's a neuromuscular piece and then there's this the muscle piece. And you're gonna take, I'm gonna say, all of your working sets to within one to three reps of in reserve. Bigger lifts tend to be farther, like three, maybe four reps from failure, whereas smaller lifts, isolation work, bodybuilding type accessory work is gonna be closer to one rep in reserve, maybe even zero. I'm generally working around one to two for almost everything. If I'm doing major squats, major benches, something like that, I might have a set. My first set might be three sets or three, maybe four reps shy from failure, but generally three. So that's kind of my thought there. And then you're gonna count up your hard sets per muscle across the week and aim for that 10 and up range. Now, you should do this ahead of time by planning out your workout that way. If you're following a decently designed program, it should cover those bases. One thing I noticed in the program I built for myself recently is somehow I totally forgot to put in lateral delts, even though I'm trying to build up my shoulders again since my surgery, and I had too much rear delt work. Now, rear delt work is great when you've had rotary call surgery, but I had like way too many sets of that and very few of lateral. So I'm getting very specific in terms of muscle groups. You don't have to do it that way. You can generalize to shoulders, upper legs, arms, right? It depends on, you know, back. You could do it that way as well. But you've got to find where you're responsive, what you need, and then you're gonna build from there. So that's kind of the program. Notice I didn't tell you what exercises, when, what order, none of that. Those are tactical details. The point is 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week. That is what works to give you mechanical tension, repeated enough so that you keep getting stronger and building muscle. It's not about muscle confusion, it's not about the perfect rep range, because like I just said, mechanical tension can occur at a wide rep range. It can occur anywhere from like three reps to 30 reps, believe it or not. And I know it sounds crazy, but if you do something for 25 reps, yes, it's a lot lighter. But man, if you are one rep shy of failure on that 25th rep, you're still hitting those muscle fibers we talked about before, and you're still going to get the mechanical tension. It's pretty mind-blowing in a way. Now, we're not talking about strength, we're not talking about specificity. Those are different. We're not talking about bone density and some of the other benefits of lifting heavy, heavy meaning more down in the four to six rep range. Okay, that has its own unique benefits. We're not talking about that today, but there's a lot of overlap that you can take advantage of when designing programs for efficiency. Now, you're listening to this,

  Effort tracking and programming over 40

  Philip Pape 21:50

  you're like, okay, I'm sold on this, but how do I know if I'm hitting one to three reps in reserve? How do I track my heart sets across a week? How do I design my program? What program should I? Build. And we have an app called Fitness Lab that solves that for you and will give you exactly what you need. Fitness Lab is my AI coaching app. It is not a tracking app that stores your numbers. It works alongside tools that you have. It integrates your data. If you have an iPhone, it connects to Apple Health. And it can prescribe for you workouts across any combination you can imagine. And it could even work with you if you have a trainer or your own workouts. So it can do either mode. And it's, I don't want to say vibes. I hate that term. But it asks you questions about how the session felt, how close you got to failure, and things like that in plain English. So it's beyond like, okay, for example, macrofactor workouts and boost camp are two of the workout loggers that I like as well, personally. But they're much more numbers-based, they're objective. Fitness Lab does that plus the subjective piece, like you had a coach, and you're like, hey, this is how it felt. This is what I did. By the way, here's a video of my lift. Give me a form check, and we have amazingly advanced AI that will give you feedback on your form. Now, isn't that incredible? I think it is. I think it's awesome. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. And you know what? I thought I wouldn't do this, but I will. We are not in a promo right now. But if you send me a

  Recovery as a permissive factor

  Philip Pape 23:24

  personal email, okay, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, and reply and say, hey, I want your discount. I can give you a private link for 20% off. So that's witsandweights.com slash app to check it out. But again, send me an email if you want a special link for 20% off. All right, so we've covered tension, effort, and volume. There is a fourth piece here, very, very, very, very important. And that is, you guessed it, recovery. I want to give the right frame on recovery though, because I think a lot of people put the cart before the horse. Recovery does not cause muscle growth. Training causes muscle growth. Recovery is permissive of muscle growth. It allows your adaptation to occur. Okay, think of it this way: your training is like the seed. If you were to plant something in your garden, recovery is the soil of the garden where the soil doesn't grow the plant, right? It gives it nutrients, but it doesn't grow it. If you plant a seed in bad soil, you don't get a plant, but you still have to have the seed, is my point. So training is the seed. Is that I hope that's a good analogy? Because like without training, it's there's nothing. You have to have the training. So you have the training, that's the seed. You have your recovery, that's the soil. When the soil is bad, when you don't have good sleep, when you don't have enough protein or calories, when you're stressed to your gills, the same hard workout results in less of a result. Does that make sense? So you did this work and you don't get to get the result. I don't like that equation for you guys. I don't. And that is exactly what makes people quit, besides a lack of consistency or it's not enjoyable enough or whatever. The biggest reason is, man, you're just tired, you can't fit it in, you don't get enough sleep, you're not eating enough, you don't get the result, you start to get sore, your joints start to hurt. A lot of that is a recovery issue. And I think the biggest levers are sleep and protein, or I should say sleep and calories. It really depends on who you are. Some of

  Sleep, protein, and strength training over 40

  Philip Pape 25:18

  you, some of you are getting enough protein, but not enough calories. Carbs, I would put off to the side, although I'm a big fan of carbs, that's usually not the main issue for folks. It could become an issue if other things are dialed in as an optimization. Again, going back to the big rocks versus the small optimizations here. We know that a single night of bad sleep can drop your muscle protein synthesis by up to 20%. Okay. We also know we have to have enough calories and protein to support our muscle building. And protein at least 0.7 grams per pound. There's also evidence is as we get older. Again, this episode is titled After 40, because as we get older, we tend to be a little bit less responsive to protein and training. And that's not an excuse not to do it at all. No. It just means, hey, you've got to be getting that protein and you've got to be getting the right training, but not so much training that it impedes your recovery. So that's why it's a nice little balancing act that we have to do. That's why tracking, that's why being time efficient, that's why using compound lifts, all of these things are super effective to master the fundamentals. And it's

  Building muscle through perimenopause and menopause

  Philip Pape 26:21

  where I see people go wrong as well. Because they're trying to do a lot of things that like a 25-year-old would do. All the pillars here, you know, get 15,000 steps and get nine hours of sleep and then, you know, train six days a week. You can't do it all. You can't do it all. So you need to be efficient. And then for the women, the ladies who are listening in perimenopause or post-menopause, okay, this is in this is really encouraging. Okay. I'm not a fearmonger about this stuff. Resistance training builds muscle and strength just the same, regardless of your age and your hormone status, as a percentage of your current body mass, as when you were young and as when you're old. It's all the same. In other words, the relative gains you're going to make are the same, even when you weren't in menopause, and they're the same as men. Yes, you have less absolute muscle to begin with, but so what? The change, the amount you can grow and build, the rate is the same. Now, the falling estrogen might make the job a little bit harder and recovery a little more sensitive, but it doesn't take away your biggest tool here, which is training. You can't afford to coast on effort, no matter who you are. And that's not sexy and it doesn't sell programs to say you need to work hard. But it really comes what comes down is it's really what it comes down to. But when you do that work and you get the result and you're 55 and looking better than ever and feeling great and functional, and knowing that no, you're not gonna end up in a nursing home. No, you're not gonna end up having trouble getting off the toilet. No, you're not gonna have trouble playing with your kids or grandkids and being active. Holy smokes, isn't that so empowering? Because you put in a little bit of extra effort and you actually feel so good about it that the effort is something you start to look forward to. Now, I'm not saying rep ranges don't matter. I'm not saying exercise selection doesn't matter. A lot of that matters for other reasons. It might matter because of the equipment you have, it might matter because you enjoy something more than others. Like some people say, Oh, I don't know if I could lift heavy. When you start lifting heavy, you sometimes find sets of four are more enjoyable than sets of 14. You know, even though they're super heavy, there's a difference, mental difference as well. All right. Also, you don't want to go to complete failure on everything because that's gonna create a lot of fatigue. So almost never going to complete failure except for on the small movements, one to three basically captures all the growth from that mechanical tension at a fraction of the fatigue cost. All right. Now, if you're an advanced competitor, if you're an athlete, you're trying to squeeze out the last 5%. This episode's probably not for you anyway. You know this stuff and you know that you need to take it really right to the edge and maybe even a little bit beyond. Let's be honest. If you're a competitor, if you're an athlete, you're gonna sacrifice and make some trade-offs. You're gonna, you're gonna live with some pain. But that just is what it is. I'm watching the documentary about Rafa, you know, Rafael Nadal, tennis. I'm not a tennis guy, but it's incredible to see how much he makes himself suffer and how much intensity he puts into the game. And that's why he's successful. And I'm not saying that's for you. Those of us listening, we just want a really, really great result and we want to feel great and look great. And you're going to, if you if you listen up and follow the principles in this episode. All right. So this is the foundation. Stop worrying about the trim of the house. Worry about the foundation of the house. Train each set close to failure, accumulate enough hard sets across the week. That's 10 to 20 per muscle group. Sleep and eat to support it, and rinse and repeat. It is not exciting, but it works. Not exciting, but it works. All right, before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a 30-second test to see if you are training hard. Okay. I'll give it to you in just a second because it's super, super helpful. If this episode reframed how you think about building muscle, I want you to do things. First, hit follow so you get more episodes like this. If you're not already a follower in your app, just hit follow. Second, if you've got a friend who is frustrated or they want to learn, or you know this can help them, just send it to them. Please text this to a friend. Say, hey, check out Wits and Weights. I really love this. Or give them your favorite episode. And I would be super, super grateful. We we need more people to learn this stuff and go to the gym and really get the results they're looking for. All right, here's a test you can run on your next training session. It

  Bonus: 30-second test for whether you've hit "failure"

  Philip Pape 30:21

  takes 30 seconds on your last set of an exercise. So I want you to do this like on a machine or cable or isolation type exercise, something safe where you're not gonna get pinned or super heavy. I want you to first predict how many more reps can you do or do you think you can do when you would normally stop? All right, how many more reps do you think you could do when you'd normally stop? Like, is that two reps? Whatever it is. So you're pre-logging your R your R I R right now. Then doing the exercise, when you get to that point, instead of stopping, keep going and do what's called an am wrap, as many reps as possible. And take that set to the point where you cannot do another rep, absolutely bar none, complete failure. I don't want you to get into bad form, tweak your back or anything like that. That's why you picked like a simple safe exercise here or a safer type of exercise. And I want you to count how many you got. So this is the am wrap technique. And I do this a lot on first sets as well, sometimes if I'm starting a new program just to kind of calibrate. But this is more to see what true failure is for you and compare it to what you thought it would be. So if you guessed that you would be too RIR, but you got five more reps, well, that just taught you something profound. You've been leaving more in the tank than you realized every time you lived. So that is like muscle gains you're leaving on the table, and you can start to close this gap. That's it. You can recalibrate. Now you know what the effort really is. Now you can get yourself to push a little bit harder. Now it helps to have a training partner or a coach sometimes for some of us to push us to do that. But try it out and let me know how it went. All right. And you can let me know by the way on Instagram at wits and weights, or you can send me an email, go to witsandweights.com slash email, get on my list, and then reply to any of my emails. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, you do not build muscle by finding the perfect program. You build it by doing the basic things hard and then doing them again. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Retatrutide Promises 28% Weight Loss (What About Muscle?) | Ep 477

Is retatrutide, the new triple agonist GLP-1, the next big thing in weight loss (or even rapid fat loss)?

That depends on how the drug works, what the results are, the reality between the headlines and the evidence, and what happens to your weight when you stop.

This episode breaks down retatrutide, the GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon triple agonist behind the largest weight loss numbers ever recorded in this class. It covers the Phase 2 obesity trial and the Phase 3 Triumph results, plus why cross-trial comparisons to semaglutide and tirzepatide deserve skepticism.

We examine the body composition data (or lack thereof), and why a bigger number on the scale just amplifies the stakes for muscle mass, weight regain, and the off-ramp. Especially relevant for adults over 40 who are taking, considering, or planning to come off a GLP-1.

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life, including support for lifestyle changes needed while taking GLP-1s (and to come off them if desired).

Timestamps:

0:00 - Retatrutide and the biggest question for GLP-1 users
3:08 - How this new triple agonist works
4:46 - Phase 2 and Phase 3 weight loss numbers
5:38 - Cross-trial comparisons and their limits
6:23 - Fat, muscle, and what the trial did NOT measure
8:30 - Strength training over 40 and accelerated muscle loss
10:07 - Building the lifestyle (alongside using the drug)
14:10 - Resistance training and protein
16:00 - Rate of loss on a powerful drug like retatrutide
17:30 - The off-ramp when you stop
18:23 - Weight regain and body fat overshooting
22:03 - Retatrutide access and the gray market
24:11 - Bonus: 3-question test to keep your results

Episode Mentioned:

• Sometimes More Is More (The Sedentary Lifter Problem)

• Transcript

  Retatrutide and the biggest question for GLP-1 users

  Philip Pape 0:00

  There is a new weight loss drug in the headlines right now. It is a triple agonist called retatrit. Some people call it retatutride. And the numbers are the biggest that we've seen so far, up to 28% of body weight in the latest trial. So if you're on a GLP1 or you're thinking about one, you're probably wondering, does this change anything for me? Today I'm going to show you what the data shows, what it doesn't show, and one thing that this huge amount of weight loss is not actually going to fix, no matter how good the drug gets. And I'm not talking about muscle. 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 a few weeks ago, we did a full episode on GLP1 medications as a category. The whole picture, miracle drug versus is it cheating, what the body composition data says, all that stuff, the science behind it. Today we're gonna get a little bit more narrow and very timely, very trendworthy because there's a specific drug, retatratide. And by the way, pronunciation can go both ways. Eli Lilly and their CEO call it retatrotide. A lot of people will say retatrutide, like semaglutide, because of some linguistic, you know, rules, let's say. I don't care. I'm gonna say retatrotide because a lot of the guys I follow call it that. It's been all over the news. The phase three trials came out, and the weight loss numbers are the largest ever recorded. I have some former clients and even current clients who have experimented with it on their own, not under my supervision, and report, you know, incredible results. There are things about it that seem to go above and beyond weight loss as well, potentially for liver fat and stuff like that. Uh, but I'm getting a lot of questions about it. People want to know, you know, is this something I should do? There's a lot of or consider, there's a lot of discussion in Reddit and in the body composition forums about like rapid fat loss. It's kind of an interesting, you know, designer approach to rapid fat loss among bodybuilders. Very interesting, uh, the way, the way it's being talked about compared to the other ones. And then, of course, there's the whole muscle loss issue, right? Which we'll address briefly, but you know, it's not gonna be the main thing here. I really want to do two things today. First, I want to separate what the data shows from what I think it means very deliberately with nuance. They're different things. A lot of the coverage in the news just smears all this stuff together. It's very surface level. And then I want to give you a framework, right? Not a hot take, just a framework. How do we think about this drug or any other drug that's coming down the pipeline? Because more are coming. I think retatrotide is not the last one. There's other drugs on the other side of the spectrum for what do you call it, you know, preventing muscle loss as well, that we're looking at, like myostatin blockers, et cetera. Then I want you to stick around to the end of today's episode. I'm gonna give you a 30-second self-test to tell you whether you've done what you need to do to keep the weight off after you stop a medication like this. And honestly, a lot of these things are things you should be doing regardless of that. But I think it's important to ask yourself these questions so that you could actually maintain your results.

  How this new triple agonist works

  Philip Pape 3:08

  All right, let's talk about what this drug is retatrotide and the weight loss and all of that, because the mechanism is important. You've heard of semaglutide, that's osempic, that's wagovi, that's a single agonist. It hits one receptor, GLP1, that is a hormone that your gut releases that tells your brain that you're full. And then it slows down how fast your stomach empties. And by the way, side tangent, if you take, if you eat a lot of fiber, you're gonna get a lot of that naturally, just FYI. Okay. Then there's terzepatide, which is Manjaro and Zep bound. That's the dual agonist. It hits GLP1 and a second receptor called GIP. So that is two targets. And in the trials, it outperforms semaglutide on weight loss. And again, semaglutide, semaglutide, doesn't matter. Retatrotide is then the next step, which is a triple agonist. It hits GLP1, GIP, and then a third one, glucagon. And that's the interesting part. And I want to explain why. The glucagon is really interesting. The first two receptors, GLP1 and GIP, they work mostly on the energy inside, right? They turn down your appetite. But the glucagon piece, the third piece for retatrotide, is theorized to work on the energy out side. It acts on your liver and it's thought to increase energy expenditure and burn liver fat directly. So, in theory, you've got here appetite suppression on one hand and a bump in how much energy you're burning on the other. And we love talking about metabolism and how important that is. And that's why this could be so powerful. And so when you look at the numbers, it backs

  Phase 2 and Phase 3 weight loss numbers

  Philip Pape 4:46

  it up. In the phase two obesity trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, people on the highest dose of retatrotide lost 24% of their body weight over 48 weeks. So that's just less than a year. And it wasn't, it didn't plateau by that point. It was still going when the trial ended. And then the phase three trials came out, they call it Triumph 1. And the highest dose, they got 28%, but that was over 80 weeks. And then there was an extension group that had even more severe obesity and they got past 30% weight loss. So if we put it in context, semaglutide in in the big trial that we know about there got to people, got people to about 15%. Terzepatide got to 21, maybe 22%. And now we've got a drug flirting with almost 30%. So that is a huge amount of weight loss just from the drug. Now, a real important caveat that's going to apply to the rest of the episode.

  Cross-trial comparisons and their limits

  Philip Pape 5:38

  The comparisons I gave you were like the 15 versus 21 versus 28%. These are across different trials, right? They're different people, different starting weights, different lengths, different decades of life, et cetera, which it means they're not head-to-head, which for practical reasons you could understand why. There are different drugs being tested under different, maybe different protocols and different groups and so on. So there's never been like a head-to-head trial for tatrotide against trusepatite, semaglutide. So when you see the comparisons, just you know, put a little skepticism on any of these claims because these are cross-trial comparisons. I don't know. That's just a caveat I thought I'd mention again, because we like nuance here. So that's the drug, that's how much weight loss. And now what we want to do is dig down a little bit deeper.

  Fat, muscle, and what the trial did NOT measure

  Philip Pape 6:23

  So when you lose 28% of your body weight, the obvious question, I think this is potentially the most important question, right? Is what was the weight that you lost? Was it fat, was it muscle, and how much of each? That is what we care about on this show when we talk about body composition, health, physique, you know, muscle mass, is that when you lose weight, you want to lose body fat. You don't want to just lose weight. And when you look at the biggest trial, the one I mentioned in the New England Journal of Medicine, they didn't measure body composition. They did there's no DEXA scan, no lean mass data, no fat mass data. And it kind of floors me a little bit that they wouldn't measure those things because they're so focused on just weight loss, which I'm not saying weight loss isn't massively important for moving the needle for so many people when it comes to their health, because it is. I'm also not saying that it isn't helpful for the reasons why people struggle to lose weight, right? With like the food noise. Super important things. I get it. But when you hear retatrotide being talked about on body composition and bodybuilding forums and Facebook groups and whatever, and saying, hey, this is more muscle sparing, there's no evidence for that. There is zero evidence for that. It's the same as any other form of weight loss. You're gonna have to do the right thing to preserve your muscle, which is lift weights. Uh, you know, eat protein, yes, but mostly the training stimulus is what holds on to the muscle. And the the only retatrotide body composition data actually comes from a smaller group in a separate trial. It was a diabetes trial, and they did get DEXA scans. And guess what they found? The proportion of weight losses lean mass was similar to other obesity treatments. Not any better than it wasn't, it didn't protect their muscle mass or whatever. So just I want to get that out of the way right now because you may have seen that kind of misinformation online already. And if we look across the GLP1 drugs, when you don't strength train and you don't pay attention to protein, you can lose somewhere around a quarter to up to, in some cases, 40% of the weight is lean mass. Now, not all of that is muscle, that's lean mass. Some of it's water, some glycogen, some of it's your liver getting smaller, which is actually a good thing in this case, but a huge

  Strength training over 40 and accelerated muscle loss

  Philip Pape 8:30

  chunk of it is muscle mass, right? The contractile, metabolically active tissue that we really, really love and care about. So if we think about the math, if retatrotide loses, you know, causes a loss of lean mass at the same proportion as the rest, but it takes you to a bigger total weight loss, then of course, the raw, absolute pounds of muscle you're gonna lose is even more in the same amount of time, right? Now, I again I mentioned like a former client who experimented with this, and we're at a place where you can only experiment with it until it's approved and available. And you know, he was lifting weights. So, of course, he got the benefit of the fat loss piece of it. The appetite side is obviously super important for a lot of people. And so just changing the energy in, and then now the potential energy out can be, of course, very powerful. And I just wanted to sit with this for a bit because it's super important, you guys listening. Most of you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s beyond listening to this show. We have a lot of women who listen to the show, probably two-thirds of the audience. If you're in your 40s or 50s, if you're going through perimenopause or past that, if you're already fighting the accelerated muscle loss that occurs with age, and that's why you're listening to the show because you want to lift weights, you want to have a better uh lifestyle, and you want to, you know, feel better in your body, you want to have better energy and function, then listen up, right? Because, you know, if your estrogen is dropping or testosterone's dropping, it's harder to build and keep muscle. Well, it's not harder to build muscle, it's harder to keep it if you're not building the muscle. Let's just put it that way, and you're at most risk of that accelerated muscle mass. Now you then go on to this drug and you're not already doing something to preserve that muscle. Now I think you can see the problem, right? So that's that's kind of the gist on retatrotide.

  Building the lifestyle (alongside using the drug)

  Philip Pape 10:07

  And, you know, one thing I like to tell people is look, that doesn't preclude you from working on your lifestyle while taking these drugs. In fact, you need to, you have to work on the lifestyle. We help people with this all the time in what's called eat more lift heavy. And I know I talk about my program a lot, as you would expect, because it's our program and we bring you this content for free. And this is the way that we support the podcast and our business. But when you're on tursepatite, or in the future, I'm gonna see more people on retatrotide, there's an interesting phenomenon that happens. Your appetite is highly suppressed, right? And now you're starting to lose straight weight, and you maybe you're a little bit excited. Maybe you are lifting weights, but then you start to have issues because you sometimes you can't eat enough or you can't eat enough of protein, and you're not in touch with their hunger signals as much. And so now it's this weird limbo kind of you know, middle ground of, okay, do I titrate down a little bit as I'm building in the lifestyle? You know, some people have such severe appetite issues that they don't, it doesn't actually cause a concern. They could just stay on the drug and they can eat enough and they can, you know, lose fat and weight at the right glide path, let's say, while they're lifting and getting their protein locked in and all of that. But what we like to help people with is figure out from your own data, from your own hunger signals, from your food, how you're logging it, where the issue is. And just this, just the last couple of weeks, we have someone in the group who talked to their doctor and they say, you know what, we're gonna slowly get you off this drug because you may not need it anymore. You you're on Phillips program and something magical is happening to you. What's going on? He's like, Well, I'm lifting consistently. I'm tracking my food, I'm trying to get enough protein, I'm eating more fiber, and I'm losing weight, but I'm almost losing it too quickly. And I don't have enough appetite to eat the minimum that I need to eat to stay at the right level of fat loss. Isn't that crazy? So if you go to eatmoriftheavy.com, you'll learn all about what we do. Um, it's a very guided, structured approach over a six-month period where each week we drop a little nugget of knowledge to help you move forward. And it's not information, it's actually do this this week. Do this this week. And it helps you set the skills up for the tracking and the lifting and the eating and all the other things. And so if you're on GLP1 or, you know, a trazepotide or maybe or tatritide, you've got to have a structured approach to put in the lifestyle in parallel. And that's really my key message with any of this stuff when I talk about GLP1s. It's not that they're a shortcut or, you know, you didn't have the will to do it yourself or you didn't know how to modify your behavior. It's like, no, okay, you chose to use this tool for one reason or another because you needed it, wanted it, your doctor suggested it, you struggled with something, whatever. Doesn't matter. I don't care. That's great. You're a human being with your own struggles, like we all have. Now let's work to incorporate the lifestyle you need. It doesn't guarantee for you as an individual you're gonna completely come off the drug. You might have such massive food noise and emotional eating issues that it's necessary and helpful for that from a medical perspective. But for many, it helps you titrate down and sometimes get off of it completely or use it as a tool when you need to. And then from a budget perspective, it can be helpful because these things are darn expensive. So let's that that's kind of the climax of the episode. But, you know, the fix for retatrotide is the same fix for every other drug. There's no special GLP1 protocol. Don't get scammed into like a special GLP1 diet or GLP1 book. I do know a couple of folks in the industry who I respect who have come out with GLP1 protocols and I'm a little bit kind of cringe or I feel a little icky about it, right? Because it it's kind of like the preying on women who are in peri and postmenopause where your body's broken and it doesn't work anymore. And so I'm gonna fix everything for you. We need to balance your hormones. It's that kind of language, which I don't like. I'm perfectly fine saying, hey, if you're in perimenopause and your hormones are declining, now's the time to step it up and lift and learn to eat better for your body. But we would do that anyway, whether you're in perimenopause or not. But like now's the time to do it, but without preying on the fears. And I think the same thing goes here with like the GLP ones. You don't need a special protocol. What do you need

  Resistance training and protein

  Philip Pape 14:10

  to do though? Okay, four pieces. Number one is absolutely resistance training. This is the biggest lever in your life for the rest of your life that has to be part of a routine. That has to be part of your routine. It's more important than cardio, probably more important than steps and movement. In fact, I would say it is because you have to do it. In other words, if you had to pick lifting or steps, I would pick lifting. Of course, it's not a mutually exclusive thing. I don't want you lifting and sitting around all day. We just did an episode about the sedentary lifter one or two episodes ago. So go check that out. But lifting is the number one lever because the stimulus for your muscles is the only thing that prevents muscle loss when you're losing weight, but also helps you preserve and build muscle even when you're not losing weight as we get old. So that's number one. Number two is having a certain minimum amount of protein. Now, the more and more I talk about this and the more evidence we find, we see that number one, the amount you need isn't a crazy amount. Okay. Yes, we talk about up to one gram per pound of protein, but the minimum is more like 0.6, 0.7. And if you're there, you are in great shape. You've got like 90, 95% of the benefits. Total protein for the day, 0.7 grams per pound of goal body weight is really the idea here. So if you're quite overweight and you're trying to lose weight, you don't have to quite get 0.7 grams per pound of your current body weight. It could be toward your target body weight. But don't pick a ridiculously, you know, 100 pounds less body weight, just something reasonable for the next, say, six months where you're gonna get to. So that's kind of the floor. And the problem when you're on a GLP one drug is your appetite is lower and protein is very, very filling. So if you are now bringing it up and you're on these drugs, that's where you might run into the wall of, oh my God, this is too much to eat. I mean, we see it all the time in eat more lift heavy. You come in and they're like, okay, I know I need to get this much protein. I

  Rate of loss on a powerful drug like retatrutide

  Philip Pape 16:00

  even know what foods make it up, but I can't physically do it, Philip. I'm too full. How do I do it? Yeah, I've tried the shakes. Yeah, I've tried more frequency. Well, sometimes you just actually have to lower the drug dose. And that's a great problem to have if many of you see that as a place you want to get to. But protein's very, very important. Uh, number three is how quickly you are losing weight. So with one of these drugs, especially retatrotide, which is so powerful, you can lose weight faster than your body can handle without it losing muscle. And again, number one and two, training in protein are gonna massively mitigate that. But there is a cliff that you can go off of here where you're just losing way too fast. Now it depends on the duration. Depends on the duration. So this is why I think retatrotide comes up in the rapid fat loss discussions, which we're gonna do an episode on that topic pretty soon. Is that bodybuilders are like, okay, I'm gonna go on retatritide for like four weeks and I'm gonna lose a massive amount of weight, but I'm gonna keep my, I'm gonna do like a protein-sparing modified fast, and then I'm not gonna have the hunger. And you know what? I can't, I can't argue with the logic. I really can't argue with the logic. So the problem is right now is you can't get these drugs legitimately. And somehow people are talking about retatrotide as if it's special versus the other two. It's special in the sense that it has a third agonist that affects glucagon in your liver. That that's actually pretty cool. And that could move the needle in its own way. I totally acknowledge that. But it's not special in

  The off-ramp when you stop

  Philip Pape 17:30

  terms of the weight, in terms of like the muscle mass preservation part. So just take that with a grain of salt. Okay, so that's a third is the rate of loss. And then the fourth piece is the off-ramp. What happens when you stop, not just on the drug, but even when you're not on the drug? What happens when you stop a fat loss or weight loss phase? Well, why don't we dig into that? Okay, so let's dig into that one for you guys, because I think that is important to sustaining your results. And I, you know, I keep mentioning our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, but my goal with that was to take what I've learned with me and my clients who get to sustain, who get to fire me and never have to come back again or hire another coach, is how the heck do I sustain my fat loss and stay lean for a life? If that is your goal. Now, many people they get lean and now they're like, okay, great, now I'm gonna go in a muscle building phase, pack on some more weight, but do it for the right reasons. But how do you maintain whatever you want to maintain? All

  Weight regain and body fat overshooting

  Philip Pape 18:23

  right. So if we look at the drugs like semaglutide in the big trial for that, there was an extension part of the trial where they tracked people when they came off the drugs. And within a year, people regained two-thirds of the weight they'd lost. And then the metabolic improvements that came with the weight loss, blood pressure, blood sugar, those went back to where they started as well. And now, if you think about retatrotide, you're just ramping that hole up. You're you're just amplifying the that amount. You're losing up to 30% of your body weight, and say two-thirds of that comes back. You know, the bigger loss, the more there is to regain. And again, if you're not protecting your muscle and lifting weights, you're gonna regain mostly fat. That's called body fat overshooting. You're gonna be worse off than when you started. You're gonna have a higher body fat percentage than when you started, even if you're at the same weight, right? And the problem is these drugs, they do something powerful. They suppress appetite while you're on them, but they don't give you any specific skills, behaviors, or habit changes. They don't teach you how to eat, they don't teach you how to build lift weights or even to lift weights, they don't give you the skill of navigating weekends or vacations or stressful weeks, you know, without the the wheels coming off. Let's say, you know, the training wheels. It it completely takes over the appetite piece, which is great until it's not, and you realize you didn't do the things you wanted to do. And not only that, you you know, you may have lost muscle, et cetera, like we've already talked about a million times. So the deceptively simple fix, the premise of this show is this that the time that you're taking these meds, that is not, I'll say, the end goal. That is the window of opportunity where your appetite is quiet enough now, your food noise is quiet enough that you can build the skills while it's easy for you. And you're gonna need those skills later when it gets a little bit harder. And the funny thing is, when I say hard, when you build the skills while taking the drug, you actually make the hard moderate or you make the moderate easy. Does that make sense? Like now that you're having more protein, you're eating nutritionally or nutritiously, you have more fiber, you know how to track and how much you eat, you know how to lift, you're getting more steps and movement, hopefully. You have structure and planning around your food and your routine. All of that, you build those skills while taking the drug. Then when you come up, now you have the behavior. The drug gave you, you know, a lower appetite, but now when you get off it, you get to see what your true regulated appetite and hunger signals are. And you could do that in a titration way. You can slowly come off or you can go off big time. I I one of my earliest clients, she was like in her mid-60s, she hadn't lifted weights before. She took Ozempic for diabetes. And I saw this when we went into a fat loss phase. Her hunger was non-existent. I thought it was incredible. I'm like, okay, let's take advantage of this and keep the gas pedal down as aggressively as possible so you don't lose muscle. She was lifting three days a week. She was doing deadlifts, squats, all that fun stuff. First time in her life, doing amazingly. And then she went off the drug kind of cold turkey overnight while in a fat loss phase without me knowing. And then her next check-in, she's like, oh, I have a lot of hunger all of a sudden. Like, yeah, that makes sense because we hadn't gotten to the point of build finish building the skills, plus you came off a cold turkey, plus you did it while in a fat loss phase. So there's like three things stacking on top of each other. So my suggestion is to do one thing at a time, right? Build the skill, start to titrate, not be in a fat loss phase, and then come off. Something like that, right? And I'm not a medical doctor, it's not medical advice. This is just a suggested Approach that could be uh sustainable. Okay.

  Retatrutide access and the gray market

  Philip Pape 22:03

  All right. So a quick word of caution before we wrap up on the science. Again, retatrotide right now, as I record this, is not approved anywhere, not by the FDA or anywhere, as much as you might trust the FDA or not. You can't get it at a pharmacy. The only legitimate way to take it now is in a clinical trial. So for the rest of you, taking it, buying it online from a peptide site, from a compounding source, just like with peptides, it's a Wild West. You are taking a risk. There's no guarantee of the dose, the purity, the safety. So please, I'm not your doctor, but the term gray market or black market applies here. And whatever risk tolerance that means to you, please take that to heart. Just take it to heart. That's all I can say. All right. Before we wrap up, remember, I'm going to give you three questions for 30 seconds. It tells you whether you've built what actually keeps the weight off. I'm going to give you that in just a second. But first, if you're one of my listeners who are taking these medications or you're considering taking them and you're worried about the off ramp and the lifestyle, man, that is what we help with in Eat More Lift Heavy. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That is the whole design of it. The reason that it is 26 weeks long and not a quick fix or just a course. And it builds the behavior while you've got the appetite working in your favor. You've got two human coaches in there. Carol and I will take you through getting your nutrition dialed, getting strong. And then by the back half of the program, we start to hand the controls to you. In other words, you build independence. That is the off-ramp. We built it that way on purpose. That is the difference between losing weight and getting it back on and losing fat, getting lean, strong, healthy, feeling great, and staying that way. So if you want to be the person who still has their results a year, five years, 10 years after they stop, and you don't need to hire another coach again, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com and take a look. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. And look, if you have questions, just reach out to me. It's Philip at witsandweights.com. Philip with one word at witsandweights.com, but go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.

  Bonus: 3-question test to keep your results

  Philip Pape 24:11

  All right, here's a 30-second test you can run on yourself right now. It's three questions. I love these little quizzes at the end of these episodes. Question one, if the drug disappeared tomorrow, like if you didn't have access to these at all, do you have a nutrition plan that you're confident with right now, especially hitting protein? Do you even know how much of protein to hit and how to hit it and do it consistently? So that's question one. Question two, have you trained by lifting weights using resistance training at least twice in the last week, challenging your muscle, not just moving, but challenging and pushing each time in the gym? Question three, do you have a plan for when things get hard, like a vacation, a stressful week, the holidays, where your structure is there even when your motivation is not and everything is changing? If you answered no to any of these, that is a good sign that you might have trouble keeping your results. Those are skills. And again, this is whether you're on the medication or not. It's just very important because if you are on them now, you want to have these skills in place before you come off. That's just my opinion on that. The drug handles the appetite, but all of these other things handle your life and how you deal with this going forward. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that a bigger weight loss on the scale is not the hard part. The skills that you build, that is the real story of success here. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

5 Signals That Your Body's "Off" Even When Your Labs Are Normal (Dr. Stephen Cabral) | Ep 476

You’re lifting weights. You’re eating well. Your labs look “normal.” So why do you still feel exhausted, bloated, wired at night, moody, or like your body is aging faster than it should?

Dr. Stephen Cabral helps us decode why fatigue, bloating, poor sleep, and mood swings can show up even when your labs look fine. We talk about the five signals your body sends through sleep, energy, digestion, mood, and skin, plus how they connect to hormone health, metabolism, inflammation, and recovery.

You’ll learn why sleep comes first, how digestion can drain energy, why stress and gut issues can affect mood, and how to build a rhythm that supports evidence-based nutrition, lifting weights, and long-term wellness.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build strength, lose fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Learn to eat more and lift heavy with confidence. 

Timestamps:
0:00 – Five signals your body sends
2:10 – Dr. Cabral’s personal health journey
8:05 – Foundations before advanced protocols
12:42 – Sleep as the first lever
21:14 – Energy, cortisol, and daily rhythm
27:44 – Digestion, bloating, and gut signals
35:32 – Mood, inflammation, and overwhelm
40:06 – Skin, hair, and biological age
47:00 – The weekly rhythm reset action

Episode resources:

• Website: stephencabral.com 

• Podcast: The Cabral Concept

• Facebook: @drstephencabral 

• Instagram: @stephencabral 

• YouTube: @stephencabral 

• Transcript

  Five signals your body sends

  Philip Pape 0:00

  Perhaps you have a pretty good training and nutrition routine, you're getting decent sleep, and your blood work is fairly normal. Yet you still feel exhausted, your digestion is off, you have restless sleep or insomnia, perhaps unexplained mood swings, or your hair is thinning and your skin is breaking out. My guest today has run over 300,000 clients' consultations, and he says we need to pay attention because everything I just mentioned is your body sending five specific signals. Many of us have learned to ignore, suppress, or even medicate or supplement away. You're going to learn what the five signals are, what each one is correlated with inside your body, and the order of operations to follow before you spend another dollar on supplements at home lab panels or the next protocol promising to fix you. 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 the gap between, hey, my blood work is quote unquote normal, and I'm not actually feeling so great. So what is going on? Specifically for active adults like you who are potentially doing the work, lifting weights, moving your body, trying to eat well, maybe getting enough hours of sleep, and yet you still have symptoms like fatigue or bloating, maybe your sleep is restless, mood swings, skin issues, the list goes on, and there isn't a clear root cause. My guest today is Dr. Stephen Cabral. He is a board-certified doctor of naturopathy who has trained thousands of practitioners through the Integrative Health Practitioner Institute. Before that, he's done a ton, he's had quite a career, but he was also a strength coach who ran his own training studio for over a decade. He was an award-winning trainer, and his new book, Personomics, argues that symptoms are signals. They're not problems. And if we can understand them, we can unlock what's next and maybe work on and fix them. So there are five specific signals we should all be paying attention to, and we're going to get into that today. You're going to learn what they are, how to tell which underlying issue each one is correlated

  Dr. Cabral’s personal health journey

  Philip Pape 2:10

  with. Understand kind of the order of operations so we can respond to maybe the most important thing your body's telling you without necessarily jumping into some advanced tests or random supplements. Stick around to the end because Dr. Cabral is going to tell you the single most important thing you can do at home this week to start to better understand and address your health concerns. Steven, welcome to the show.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 2:32

  Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

  Philip Pape 2:34

  So before we get into the signals, which I know everyone wants to know about, I'm really curious how you narrow down the list to begin with, because I understand that is really the premise of the personalized health paradigm that you talk about.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 2:46

  Yeah. So for us, it, I mean, it really started with my own understanding of health and medicine. So when I was 17, I woke up one morning and literally swollen glands over my entire body. My mom takes me to the pediatrician, just like she did, probably a half a dozen other times a year for whatever common cold I would have. And what I didn't realize was this day it wouldn't get better. So it would be a 10-year journey into trying to heal my body. And ultimately, what I ended up having was Addison's disease, an autoimmune issue. I had something called POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So basically, walk up a flight of stairs, heart rate's going like 150 beats per minute. Like you literally are not able to control your vestibular-based system as well. I had high histamine level, so mast cell activation syndrome, and I had type 2 diabetes. So I had a whole host of issues, allergies, insomnia, et cetera. And they kept giving me labels like, oh, you have rheumatoarthritis, you have type 2 diabetes, you have addicts, you have acid reflux, or whatever you want to call it, GERD. And each one of those, all it allowed them to do was put me on another medication. So I was on Prilosec for the acid reflux, fluorinef for the POTS, I was on Cortef for the Addisons, and like it just kept going like that. I was on Benadryl for my allergies and Pseudafed in the morning. And it was, it was just, again, it was a terrible way to live. I felt awful. I had flu-like symptoms every day, brain fog, all sorts of hormonal issues. And what I realized was just over time, I started, especially this is in the later 90s. So I just slowly started to understand more about natural health and meet with other practitioners. What I realized was that diseases are nothing more than a pattern of symptoms we give a name to, so that we can then have a medical code, which can then be given to prescribe a pharmaceutical. And I'm not saying there's not a time and place for pharmaceuticals. They can be life-saving, but they will never fix a chronic health condition. And almost every chronic health condition can be overcome. So it took me 10 years to find the right practitioner. But when I met Dr. Pete, it actually took me 10 years to fail enough to finally be ready to get well. That's kind of partly true. And I meet my mentor, Dr. Pete, and I'm better in six months. No more rheumatoid, no more type 2 diabetes, no more Addison's, no more of any of these things. Allergies took another year or two to solve, but then I was better. So no more diagnosed diseases anymore, which means it's not just your genetics, it's not just the environment itself, it's how we rebalance the body at a fundamental and foundational level.

  Philip Pape 5:16

  So the body is so complex. And what I'm hearing you say is the best we can do in the medical industry, and this is before we had AI, machine learning, and everything, because who knows if we did it from the ground up today, is we take all of these symptoms and we correlate them to a pattern and then basically try to fix it, fix the end of that chain, let's say, with medication.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 5:37

  And it simply masks the symptoms, exactly. So we don't want to fix the underlying root cause because if you come off the medication, the disease is back. So we're just masking the symptoms, not fixing the disease itself.

  Philip Pape 5:50

  So then you talk about symptoms as being signals, which appeals to me in the term of biofeedback and data from our body. So mechanically, I guess, mechanistically, physiologically, I don't know what word we want to use. Like, what is the body doing as we walk around every day living our lives? That then leads to all of these complicated factors that gives us these signals. If that makes sense.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 6:12

  Yeah, it does. And so the second book, personomics, is how to like literally brass tacks, because I am a brass tacks individual. How do we just figure out what's wrong with you? So that comes down to deficiencies and toxicities. Your body has too little of something. So it doesn't have literally the raw material to be able to mount the immune attack or whatever it might be, right? And then toxicities is your body's so overwhelmed with heavy metals, environmental toxins, microplastics, viruses, like whatever it might be. It's just weight, mold, right? It's just weighing on the body. So we have to reduce that toxic load and bring up your deficiencies. Personomics is literally how do we figure that out? Now, the first book, though, the rainbarrel effect is what we're talking about now. I published that eight years ago. It's still prevalent to this day, but it's basically like the prequel. So it's here's how we get sick. And over time, your body's telling you that it's not right. So when I was growing up, I had allergies, I had insomnia, I had brain fog. Like those are signals my body is sending me that something's not right. Like though, that is not a natural human state, it is one of energy in the early part of the day and then less energy at night so that we fall asleep. So cortisol is up and then cortisol comes down in rhythms with the sun, right? We are diurnal beings in a diurnal world. Nocturnal animals come out at night. We are not nocturnal. We better hide at night because we can't see in the dark to it like a nocturnal animal, right? So the signals that I talk about in personomics are what we need to be more aware of. Now, I wear an aura ring. Again, I'm not sponsored by them. I wear different biometric devices that make it a little bit easier to also keep track of these signals. But there are primal signals that we should be looking at and we can break down. One is digestion, the other is overall energy, another one is our sleep, another one is

  Foundations before advanced protocols

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 8:05

  our skin, and the last one is our mood in no particular order. And we can break them down however we want. But you will find over time, typically as children, all of these should be on point. And then things can happen. We took antibiotics. Would this happen? And then they start to go downhill. That is your first sign and signal that your body is not optimal.

  Philip Pape 8:24

  Now, before we get into that, so yes, we're going to get into the signals and then what to do about it. One overriding factor, I guess it's tied very much to skepticism of this whole industry, as well as the idea of the 1%, the idea that a lot of people are not doing the basic fundamentals for their health. You know, they're sitting around all day with desk jobs, they're not moving, they're not exercising, they're not eating well to begin with. And I'm always curious like this is a bi-directional thing sometimes. How much effort and value should be taken to shore up those things first and rule out 80% of potential issues, I don't know what it is, and then deal with this as maybe the 1%, or is it more integrated than that and kind of there's a parallel approach to it?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 9:08

  Yeah, it's a great question. So in our practice, literally forever, over two decades, what we've always done is we said, if you have more than 30 to 40 pounds to lose, we're helping you lose weight. And the reason is this, because I started, just as you mentioned in the intro, I started as a personal trainer and nutritionist. Literally, I just started at 18 with an ACE certified personal trainer and NASM. And then I got my C SCS and then like I just kept going, right? But like that's how I started. And here's what I found I didn't know anything about health. I helped people lose weight, and like all of a sudden they got healthy, like, hey, I don't have a high blood pressure anymore. I'm like, oh, that's I that's cool. I had no idea, right? So the big thing is like what you need to do in order. Again, I don't want to, I'm not talking negatively about GLP1 drugs, but they are not doing the things that got you there in the first place. They are a shortcut, and sometimes when you take a shortcut, again, not speaking negatively about them because we might recommend them in cases where someone's a hundred plus pounds overweight, but we need a long-term plan because we don't want to end up, this person doesn't want to end up with osteoporosis. And I could go on and on, right? Potential thyroid issue, potential vision issues, et cetera. So what we say is this though. What we need to do in order to lose 30 to 40 plus pounds over your ideal weight may just fix all of your health issues, right? But if they don't, and now you don't need to have six-pack abs. That that's not a you know prerequisite. Now we work on wellness. If there's anything left, we're working on the autoimmune issues, the hormone imbalances, et cetera, et cetera. Because we know we can help you lose 30 to 40 pounds, I'm sure, just like you, in six months. Like we we we know we can do that. Okay, so now that's done. Anything left in six months? Yes, there is. Okay, because yeah, weight loss doesn't solve everything. Then we work on that. We run something called the big five labs, or we get more specific. We find out what's this person's deficiencies and toxicities, then we fix that. Now there's one more part, and this is the part where everybody's jumping to too quickly: longevity. They're doing, they're using nicotinamide ribozino, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and spermidine and transveritrol, and all these great things when they haven't fixed the foundation yet. And that's the biggest issue. You need to earn longevity or it's not going to work. So that's that's our model, and hopefully that that answers your question.

  Philip Pape 11:24

  It does. It does. And it it's it makes a lot of sense. The the losing weight part, given the correlation with metabolic disease and a lot of the other issues people have. Where does muscle mass come into that before we get into the signals?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 11:36

  So we would never have someone use a GLP one or start a weight loss program without doing at least two days a week of strength training. It's okay, short-term, like that's, but again, we live in a world of short-term wins. And believe me, when I was sick, I wanted to get well yesterday, not in six months from now. So, like, I totally understand that. However, you you really don't want to go out on a boating trip with a boat with holes in it, right? Like it's like that's a disastrous, it's going to sink eventually. We just don't know how quickly. And so, but inevitably we know it's going to happen. So the strength train strength training twice a week is table stakes. That's for every human. Ideally, when I ran all my practices in person, we still do it to this day, we just make virtual programs. It's three days a week. And the reason is that you could do a Monday and Wednesday, but now it's nothing on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We've got four days off. Metabolically, that's too long to go without stimulating the furnace and the machine. So we like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And then we'll move in cardio or sauna or other things on top of that. So that's

  Sleep as the first lever

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 12:42

  built into our weight loss programs. And you don't even need a lot besides that, besides your nutrition and your strength training in terms of cardio, just walking, right? But what is really important is sleep. And I don't know if you want to go there now, but like that's critical. Or you could have elevated blood sugar levels, dysregulated testosterone, and et cetera, et cetera.

  Philip Pape 13:01

  Right, perfect. So that's a segue into the signals. I have them in order of what's in your book, but if we're talking sleep because it's so important, why don't we just jump into sleep and just talk about the main, you know, this is like the dashboard for our body. So people have heard about sleep before, but really, what are they looking for?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 13:16

  I think uh myself included, everybody's looking for like that magic number. There is no magic number for how much sleep you need. The more output, and that's not just physical, it's also mental, the more recovery you need. And the older you get, the more that becomes important. So when, you know, I was giving advice even at 22 years old or 18 years old, it's like, well, it's hard to understand someone that's had three kids, two working two jobs and whatever. Like, you can't recover from grueling boot camp style workouts if you're not eating well and getting sleep at night, right? So it's like the the output also needs to match the sleep. And we want strong output. Like we want to be able to do metabolic resistance training. We want to get that body going. But in order to do that, to maximize that, we need to actually start the night before. And so sleep is really the foundation, I would say, which is crazy over nutrition or movement. And it's because if you don't have that, the other two can't be at their maximum. And so seven to nine hours are what most people need, but it's not seven to nine hours in bed. It's actually seven to nine hours of sleep. So if you're tracking it, then it breaks down to okay, like we can really get granular. Are you getting 75 to 90 minutes of deep sleep? That's on an aura. On a whoop strap, they always give you above two hours. It's just way too high. Again, nothing against whoop. I just think it's a little exaggerated in terms of deep. Um, REM should be above two hours, but then there are other factors. Like you actually want to see your heart rates drop within the first four, three to four hours in bed, and you want to see your body temperature come down at least 0.2 degrees. And so these are all really nice factors to look at, or you're recovering. Now, I will give one caveat: nobody's perfect. And that's why I say for me, two nights a month, probably not gonna have a great night's sleep. And that's okay. But the other 28, that's what I need. That's what I'm good. When you start to see multiple nights strung together, that's when we start to get a little bit more worried because inflammation is going to be higher, recovery is going to be poor, testosterone's going to dip in men, and we're going to start to see as the cortisol rises, we're going to start to see blood sugar elevated as well.

  Philip Pape 15:26

  So, you know, I want to take this from the signal to the fix. And you you jump to the fix, which I love. Like, not just the fix, but you you told us what we want to measure in terms of deep sleep and REM and everything else. Is there something, even if you're not tracking those things, that the signal is ever present, like restfulness, how many times you get up, you know, insomnia, any anything like that, like that that jumps out.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 15:50

  Yeah. So I mean, for men, if you're getting up more than once a night to use the bathroom to urinate, you know, there's there's real inflammation there, maybe not just with the prostate, but inflammation in the body. So that's an important one. Now, maybe it is too much fluid consumption within three hours of bed. That's possible, no doubt about it. But we're looking at, you know, kind of the overall picture. And the older you get, potentially the more inflammation, you know, there is and the more swelling in the prostate. Like prostatitis is pretty common in men over 45 years old. Not prostate cancer, but some level of inflammation. But beyond that, for every individual, if you're waking up and you're groggy and you need coffee or you need caffeine, that means you didn't recover. Like there is a definite deficit and you've just become accustomed to it, right? Like you've just gotten used to it. That, well, of course I'm going to be groggy in the morning. It's not in a course. Like within 30 minutes of waking up, you should get the cortisol awakening response. And that should be enough energy that your body gets going. The problem is when cortisol is too high on the other end of the night, it suffers in the morning. So we get this inverse ratio, elevated at night, lower in the morning. And we see that all the time. You know, that's that's one of the biggest ones we test for. It's what we call the stress metabolism test. But again, let's say you can't do any lab testing. So you're looking for grogginess. Caffeine is something that you need to give your body basically a kick, give your adrenals or HP axis a kick to get going. Another one is brain fog in the morning. That's a big one too. So the brain and body don't have the energy they need. Reaction time, people literally, clients of mine, they were like, like, I drop things. I never used to drop things before. And it's like, okay, like the reaction time is part of it, like how quick you are reflex-wise. And I would say then cognitive recall. You know, when cortisol levels are too high or too low, recall and memory suffer. So one is there's brain fog, your cortisol levels are too low. The other one, you're in a heightened sympathetic nervous system straight state, and you just can't literally remember because you have such tenal vision where you put your keys or who the person is that you just met. So those are like my foundational ones. But also in terms of training, if you're sore every day, if you're inflamed every day, maybe you are overdoing the gym, but also maybe you're just not getting enough sleep and especially deep sleep, which happens in the first four hours of the night, typically between like 10 and midnight, 10 and 2 at the latest.

  Philip Pape 18:12

  Is there any like newer evidence or evidence that you are aware of of the downstream effects of sleep deprivation? We, you know, we don't talk about too much that are pretty insidious.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 18:21

  Well, the the first one that I still think is not mainstream is that if you get less than seven hours of sleep per night, real sleep, not just not in bed, you're most likely going to have a higher fasting glucose level than someone, all other variables the same. They just got an hour extra sleep. So now you're battling pre-diabetes or a road to diabetes, type 2 diabetes, just from sleep alone, not carbohydrates, not anything like that. And so that's a really crucial one. The second one is I work with a lot of men that are using TRT, trying to come off, or they're trying to boost their testosterone levels naturally, or they're trying to work on fertility. And I test them, and their free testosterone might be like a 75. And ideally, I want it somewhere around 110 to 140, right, for their free testosterone, naturally. And so when I look at that, I say, okay, you're weightlifting three to four times a week. You're eating, you know, plenty of protein. So like you're you're doing those things right. There seems to be enough vitamins and minerals that your body needs, the zinc, the vitamin C, all the things that your body needs, right, to make testosterone. Oh, but you're sleeping six hours a night. Okay. Can we fix that? And if the answer is yes, great, then we do that. And six weeks later, testosterone's surging again. Like it doesn't take a lot to reboot. Um, so inside of your brain, you have something called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the master regulator. It then signals the pituitary gland to send out signals to the individual glands. So the master one would be the HPA axis, so sends a signal, hypothalamus pituitary to the adrenals, right? The adrenals, are we stressed or not? Hopefully, we're not stressed all the time. Hopefully we're not in chronic stress, right? And hopefully cortisol is low at night so that melatonin can rise. So if melatonin rises and cortisol is low, then testosterone can then rise the next morning. But that doesn't happen if you don't get good sleep and cortisol stays elevated. So then the next one, though, is the HPT axis. That's the thyroid that's affected. Happens in more women, about double the rate, right, of low thyroid than men, but it does happen in men. And the last one is the HPG axis. That's the hypothalamus pituitary gonad or gonadal axis, ovaries in women, testes in men. So you throw off the first one, the HPA, it throws off the other two, and that includes testosterone production.

  Philip Pape 20:34

  Great. Yeah, people need to hear this. People need to hear this.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 20:37

  So it's a little complex, but the truth is that, but like it's like so those are real underlying root causes, right? Yeah. Elevated levels of stress with not enough sleep being aka recovery leads to low testosterone. And so if you do test low testosterone in your 30s, it's my opinion, but having done this for 26 years, longer with part-time, you don't need testosterone in your 30s unless there is an actual medical condition. And then we could talk about that. Because once you go on it, it's not as easy to come off as people think. You can, but so I'm just saying, use it when you need it, when the time is right, if you choose to, but let's try to stave off that as long as possible if we can.

  Energy, cortisol, and daily rhythm

  Philip Pape 21:14

  Right. Because we're concerned about endogenous production and all that when you start going on it.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 21:18

  The root causes as to why it was low in the first place, right? So you can go and test ostolone in your 30s and 40s, and trust me, you will feel better. But you never fix the things that may cause heart disease or type 2 diabetes in your 50s. And guys are susceptible to heart disease in their 50s. That's legitimate.

  Philip Pape 21:34

  All right. So that's sleep. Now that I get a I guess a good corollary would be one of uh would be energy, because it's kind of some for a lot of people, it's somewhat in the same ballpark or there's a little bit of overlap there. So maybe we let's go to energy. What do we mean by that? Because it's kind of a nebulous term. Do we mean like that afternoon crash? Is it related to cortisol? Like we've been talking. Is there something bigger than this?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 21:53

  So when it comes to energy, what we want to look at is that normal diurnal rhythm. So what that means is that cortisol, so that's the Energy hormone produced by our adrenals, sometimes called the stress hormone, but it's really important because when I had Addison's disease, it means you can't produce cortisol. No cortisol, no anti-inflammatory. So when you think of taking pregnisone, which is a steroid, but it's a catabolic versus anabolic, you're basically decreasing inflammation. Well, one of the reasons why I felt like I had flu like symptoms all the time is that I wasn't producing cortisol. So it isn't very necessary. So cortisol is typically produced between six and eight in the morning at its highest peak. And then it just slowly falls through the day. And its lowest point is based on the sun and based on the season, but it's usually around 9:30 p.m., which is a signal to us as to when we should really be in bed, right? So we don't get that second wind as it starts to rise again. So, in terms of energy, we sometimes we have unrealistic energy expectations. So I believe we should have energy all day, but it doesn't mean that at like eight o'clock at night or even seven o'clock at night that we should be rearing to go like we were at seven in the morning. That would be stress-based energy, not natural production of energy. So naturally, we want to start to wind down with the sun. Literally, that is how our hormones are built into nature around us. And it would be very apparent if we still lived outside. So let's say you just say we lived in, you know, tents or anything like that. When sun rises in the morning, cortisol rises, melatonin drops, we're waking up. It's just the way that it is. And then as the sun starts to set, we're getting tired. But also, think about all we have is maybe a fire for light. How much are we really going to do? Not a lot. Work's done for the day, right? So we tell stories, we chat, we commune, then we go to bed, and then we wake up with the sun. That's a normal diurnal rhythm. Now I know some people work overnight, they've got night shifts, they have all those things, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily healthy. So you do that for as long as you need to. And then ideally, if you can start to shift into a more normal routine, we want that. So, yes, no energy post-lunch is not ideal. No energy, brain fog, grogginess, all of that in the morning, not ideal either. We'll talk about the no energy post-lunch, because that then feeds into digestion. That remember, digestion takes like a third of our energy for the day. And if you have weak digestion, even more, which is zapping your energy. So the goal is what takes out our energy, what brings it in? When I work with clients with energy-based issues, I said, I want you to look at your life and all the activities and ask yourself this does it bring in energy, like a walk, a nice conversation, meditation, relaxation, bineural beats, sauna, parasympathetic things. Or is it giving out energy? Hard workouts, maybe even cold plunge, which excites the nervous system, all the different things that gives out energy. And then we say, for right now, we want to do as little of the things that give out energy and more of the things that bring it in while working on the deficiencies and toxicities.

  Philip Pape 24:49

  I like that concept because there's this additive symmetrical piece to it that I think we don't talk about a lot, which is that bringing in part, where I think oftentimes we think food is energy, but like nothing else brings in energy because we're existing and metabolizing and burning energy all day, even if you are meditating or walking. So tell us just a little more about that, how it brings in energy. Is it a function of the two types of the sides of the nervous system? You know, is it another component related to cortisol? Like physiologically, what are we doing there?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 25:20

  So when we look at all the activities that I name, binaural beats, breath work, sleep, walking, those are all parasympathetic nervous system inducing. So you named basically the autonomic nervous system or specifically the central nervous system, which then branches to the sympathetic nerves, that's fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, which is rest, relax, digest, right? Repair. So anything that shifts us away from the fight or flight allows us then in a repair mode, because our body knows how to heal. We need to get there. And that's why sleep is really so important that when you're sleeping, ideally, you're always in parasympathetic nervous system. So that's when you heal. So when you're not feeling as well or you're an athlete that's training for hours a day, like I work with triathletes, I mean, their average race is like 10 to 13 hours with the people that I work with. That they're training for three plus hours a day. You need a lot of sleep. It's not seven hours of sleep for a triathlon for a triathlete.

  Philip Pape 26:16

  If sleep is dialed in, let's say you're hypothetical, let's say sleep is 100% dialed in, you could still have energy issues, correct? And then what are those caused by?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 26:25

  Oh, 100%. So I work actually, I work with a lot of women in my practice. And what we'll see is we'll see lower levels of progesterone, lower levels of cortisol production, lower levels of thyroid production. And all of those are needed in order to have proper energy as well. So they'll end up with estrogen dominance. Low thyroid is basically low metabolic rate. It's not just low metabolism, it's not just weight gain. Your metabolism is so much more than your weight. It's literally your metabolic function, your cellular function. So we look at everything from mitochondrial issues with ATP production to the thyroid itself to estrogen progesterone, low levels of testosterone will lead to low, low energy. So, besides the vitamins, the minerals, if you're low calorie, low carb, you could be low energy. So we look at that as well. I mean, everything goes into energy, right? Like that is how your body's functioning. And if you're depriving it of nutrients or you're zapping it of nutrients because there's too much of the sympathetic nervous system with not enough of the nutrient ad back, that can be detrimental. Meaning, like most people don't do well with a one meal a day diet once they're past their like 20s. They simply don't have the reserve capacity to be able to work all day on fumes. That's a pretty tough one. But I will say at the same time, and I know that we'll eventually get there,

  Digestion, bloating, and gut signals

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 27:44

  some people feel better not eating, and they feel better not eating because their digestion is so bad that they cause an inflammatory event and so much energy being used to break down food. So for them, like, no, I have more energy when I don't eat, right? With no calories coming in. Well, what are you living off of if there's no calories, right? It can't be ketones alone because that's not enough.

  Philip Pape 28:04

  Let's go to the next one because you did mention post-meal type energy and how it's tied to digestion and maybe elimination. And that brings up the gut and you know, bowel movements and gut health in general. So let's go there.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 28:18

  Yeah. So digestion does encompass just what you said right there. So when you eat, you should be able to digest your food without bloating in gas. Like that's a big part to it. You shouldn't be burping, you shouldn't have a lot of gas, you shouldn't have bloating. Now, if you have those things, that's a signal. The signal is there's some breakdown in digestion, not enough hydrochloric acid or acid production in the stomach, right? Not, and we can talk about acid reflux and all that, which is very rarely from too much acid, or unless it's from a histamine-based issue, et cetera. There can be issues with the lower sulfageal sphincter, so not actually closing when you're eating, that can lead to acid reflux. There might not be enough enzymes, there might not be enough bile dropping from the liver, you might poor job food combining. There simply might be too much volume of food at the meal that it's literally overstuffing the stomach. That can be an issue as well. So then, you know, as you said, eliminating, are you having bowel movements at least once or twice a day? If you're not, you're either under-eating or you're constipated in some way, or there's another breakdown again with bile production, et cetera, that we're not getting all of this moving down. There's not enough peristaltic movement potentially from tension, or you're dehydrated. There could be so many different reasons, but you should be eliminating at least once or twice a day. If you eat three times a day, you should be eliminating at least once or twice a day. And so we look at that. And then digestion should not also cause fatigue. If digestion causes fatigue, it could be it could be a food sensitivity issue, it could be an immune issue, it could also be that your body is not balanced from an autonomic nervous system standpoint. You're in fight or flight. All of a sudden you put food in, your body's like, now we need to digest. And it switches gears too much. There's too much of a pendulum swing from sympathetic nervous system to parasympathetic. Now you're in all parasympathetic nervous system. You might even see like more pale color in your face, and you're exhausted. And so that is not a normal functioning HPA axis or even vestibular system, which keeps the body balanced. So that's how we look at overall digestion. You should be able to eat food, digest it well, it's in and out of the stomach in just a couple hours, and you have proper elimination on a daily basis. It doesn't cause acne, it doesn't cause skin rashes. Those are all the things we look for.

  Philip Pape 30:36

  So that's a lot. If you were just to simplify and say, like, what are most people not doing that's pro or doing that's contributing to that? What have you seen?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 30:43

  Well, one of the biggest issues, so there's five main things, and I know five seems like a lot, but it's only five, which is really great, right? Because then you can just do process of elimination. So you can have candida overgrowth in your gut, typically from taking antibiotics. The second one is you can have SIBO, usually from taking antibiotics or high levels of stress. And I can talk about why that might be caused in a second. You can have parasites, very common, like 25% of people have a parasite, right? Could be from salad bars, undercooked meat, sushi, et cetera. And then the next one is H. pylori, very common bacteria that like 25% of the world has as well. Okay. And it's the same place you can get it. And then the fifth is food sensitivities. So food sensitivities, though, usually come after the gut's already inflamed and permeable, where the immunoglobulin A, M, and G can basically come in, start to attack what's inside the gut or the gut wall, or as it starts to move out, when people say 80% of your immune system is around your gut, it's true. That's where the gut-associated lymphoid tissue is that's essentially responsible for everything that comes out of that gut wall. Now, in an ideal world, we're just essentially excreting all the healthy things for the body: amino acids, individual glucose molecules, fatty acids, nutrients, et cetera. And then it's being processed through the liver and other parts of the body. So that's healthy. Unhealthy is that gut's permeable, lipopolysaccharides are coming out, essentially this bacteria that sets off the immune system. The immune system is now inflamed, and that is now where your genetics get set off. That's when the autoimmune issues happen. There are almost no autoimmune issues without gut issues. Almost none. 90% of all autoimmune issues have at least some origin in the gut. Now, there might still be heavy metals and high levels of stress and other things, no doubt about it. But the gut in the immune system, obviously it makes sense, 80% of the immune system there has a level to do with the inflammation and immune system in the body.

  Philip Pape 32:35

  It makes a lot of sense when you see that often the solution is to do an elimination diet and start to reintroduce certain foods. At least you see that in the simple if this then that kind of medical advice. So candida overgrowth, SIBO, parasites, H. pylori, food sensitivities. So then, as far as like dealing with this, is there is there something, is it diet related or something else, or is it integrated with these other things like stress that a lot of people can benefit the most from as they're trying to address these?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 33:04

  Mindful eating is a huge one. So basically, just literally just stop and do three minutes of breath work, usually resonance breathing. So breathing in as you see the circle expand, breathing out as the circle shrinks, best thing that you can do. It's very simple. Free YouTube videos, it's all over the place. Elite HRV app, your Apple Watch, they all have a breath work type thing for bioresonance breathing. So now you already moved to the parasympathetic, and that will allow for better digestion. It still won't get rid of the Candida overgrowth and the SIBO and the parasites and the H. pylori if you have it. So there is no way that diet alone takes care of that. And we know that because people will go on a keto diet or carnivore diet because they do. They can't have carbs because the carbs are feeding the yeast and the bacteria. Not all carbs, but they're, you know, they don't know specifically what ones, right? And so I get it, I totally understand. But once you have carbs again, it's just going to grow back in kind because you didn't repopulate and rebalance. So that is why I tell people so forever, Ayurvedic medicine, 6,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine, 3,000 years old, and we have other forms of amazing medicine as well. They all use something to help the gut. So you do have to do something. We do what's called something called a CBO protocol, and it rebalances the gut over 12 weeks. It's a gentle approach, it works. What do they use hundreds and thousands of years ago? Oregano, cloves, thyme, uva ursi, like all of these things help to kill pathogenic bacteria in the gut. But again, like you can use those, but it's better to use a protocol that's structured and kind of proven to work. But everyone for the history of time, Amazon medicine, et cetera, have always used herbs to be able to remove what's there. The difference now today is we also use enzymes that remove the biofilm where a lot of these heavy metals and parasites can live as well.

  Philip Pape 34:48

  That makes a lot of sense. And we're gonna we're gonna leave the T's on that one for folks to check out your CBO protocol, right? When we connect them with you in the interest of talking about the other two symptoms. Because this is just the tip of the iceberg, guys. I mean, there's so much behind all of this, but it starts with education and awareness that I do like, you know, starting with the signals and understanding there's something you can do about this. There's something your body's telling you right there. You don't need special devices. A lot of this, like you said, is grounded in, you know, I'll say ancient medicine, but it's really just human knowledge that that persists to this day, is a better way to put it.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 35:18

  So ancient medicine that's now clinically proven on PubMed. Like that's the nice thing. I mean, that's the amazing thing because I have a like I am very much still skeptical and science-minded, but all I do is just look at what do they use? What do the clinical

  Mood, inflammation, and overwhelm

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 35:32

  studies show? Oh, lo and behold, like they work, right? And so, like, that's the great thing is that we're able to now prove these things to be clinically true. Because the alternative is okay, you take rife or you take diflucan or nystatin, right? For these for these yeast or bacterial overgrowth, but the relapse cases are quite high because you never repopulated the gut as well.

  Philip Pape 35:51

  Yeah. All right, so let's move on. We've got two more signals to talk about. I think the next one, uh, mood and mental clarity is a good one as well, because again, this could be a little bit nebulous to understand what we mean by this. So I'm sure you'll help us uh make it a little more objective and a signal that we can read.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 36:06

  So, one of the biggest things I've seen with people, with often with fatigue as well, is that over time it leads to irritability, overwhelm, and usually worry. So, but you don't know why. Just all of a sudden now you're someone that's just more irritable and overwhelmed and anxious, and that's not you. And so when you look at that, you say, why is that happening? A lot of it is from your body being inflamed. There might be gut issues, and there's low energy. So if we kind of step back again, we say, okay, well, what else has its own brain? Well, the gut does, right? And the enteric nervous system. And it sends signals, right, through the vagal nerve to the brain. Now we've got an inflamed gut, an inflamed body with low energy and poor digestion, telling the brain something's wrong. How does the brain register it? It can't get the direct signal. They're not talking, they're sending signals, something's wrong. We react with, okay, I have no low energy, I'm in low mood, right? But now I'm inflamed, I'm irritable, and now everything is overwhelming because you no longer have the same ability to respond to life. And when you can't have the energy, and everything, again, is so much on your body because your rain barrel is overflowing, you're irritable and overwhelmed. And so I see this all the time in my practice, and there isn't a medication for that. The solution is to figure out what caused the overflowing of that rain barrel so that your body, which then your mind can be less overwhelmed. So literally, we're trying to empty the rain barrel, and now there is no overwhelm or overfilling of the barrel. So that's how mood plays in. And it is usually gradual. It's usually not one thing, although we know a lot of people who, you know, got, I'm putting that in air quotes, got long COVID, which is, by the way, been around for decades. It's called post-viral inflammatory syndrome. Like we've already known about it. It's just we gave it a fun name for the media called lone COVID, that immediately leads to low mood, low energy, low libido, all the lows, plus irritability overwhelm because your body's so inflamed. It can't, everything is now too much for the body. When you're in survival mode, you're not focusing then on thriving. And so everything makes the shift. You don't have the same get up and go, the same interest in life. You don't look forward to vacations or set big goals for yourself because all you can do is get through the day. And I was there. I mean, I was literally there for a decade. And so I totally get that and empathize with my clients. There's no hope for the future because the present is so dim.

  Philip Pape 38:49

  Yeah. And anybody who has any, anybody who has experience with a physical ailment, let's say I have personal experience with shoulder issues where you can't train or you can't do this or you're limited in life, we know that it cascades to mental issues and your mental health. So it totally makes sense. Even when it's deep inside, almost hidden inside you, except it's not hidden inside you because you're listening to this podcast and Steven's telling you how to how to read the signs. So leading to the case.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 39:19

  But now that the mind's feeling it, it sends signals back to the body and it makes you even worse. So that's why it's a vicious cycle because your psychology affects your physiology, like your physiology affects your psychology. And so that is why we need to work on both. But if it didn't start in the mind, which most likely it didn't, it started most likely in the nervous system or the proprioception of the body. That is ultimately where we need to figure it out, which will then help the mind. And yes, in the short term, the ashwagandhas, the phospholocerines, the Lthenines for calming, or the rhodiolas and liquor shrub, et cetera, for the getting going, great. You can use those, but they're not underlying root causes, right? Because you don't have a chaga or liquor shrug shortage, right? That wasn't that wasn't the cause.

  Skin, hair, and biological age

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 40:06

  So, but they're good. Don't get me wrong. I definitely, Ayurveda's recommended them, so has TCM for thousands of years. Who am I to go against that? What I'm just saying is we need to figure out what the real issues are in terms of the deficiencies and toxicities.

  Philip Pape 40:18

  100%. We want to flip that around too and take that vicious cycle and make it a positive upward spiral, which because it goes the other way too, which is great. So the final signal, skin, hair, and nails, it's an interesting one. I was listening to, oh geez, probably it was my wife listening to a podcast with a an aesthetician and talk. They asked her, you know, do guys, most guys you talk to care about anything you you care about? They're like, pretty much no. Like guys will just use shampoo as soap, and they don't most of them don't think about their skin and hair now. So I always see something like this, and I like want to kind of put it to the bottom, but I know it's super important as well as a symptom and a signal. And I want to understand why.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 40:56

  Yeah, so it's interesting because again, I'm probably like a lot of guys, I don't have a seven-step face protocol. I like to get in and get out of the bathroom as you know, as quickly as possible. But that doesn't mean that how we appear in the mirror is not a signal for what the inside of our body looks like. Meaning the more inflammation, which by the way, inflammation always has a root cause, and the more degeneration or catabolism taken on inside of the body shows itself on the outside. So if we have, and again, losing your hair is not a sign of poor health. I just want people to know that. It can be, but there are many people due to genetic presusceptibility, androgenic alopecia, which is the specific type of convert, higher conversion to DHT, it doesn't mean that you're unhealthy. But like I said, but it can be that that is something to look at. But when your skin starts to really wrinkle and thin out, and you start to get age spots or skin tags or things like that, they are real signs that inside the body there is damage and you're not repairing it as quickly as you could. Now, do we all get wrinkles? Yes, without a doubt. Does all of our skin get a little bit thinner? No matter what. By the time now, this might change by the time you and I get to 80, but for right now, all of us age and we can't stop it. We can slow it. So what we try to do is just say, well, what does help with collagen production? What does help with inflammation inside of the body? And hopefully then we are not looking our age. That's really about like I don't have a particular issue with people getting older. I'm not one of those individuals. I'm gonna get older and I'm totally okay with that. But I don't need to be older than my time, and it is probably an expression of my biological age because they show people that look older, they have an older biological age than their chronological age or at least a one-for-one. My goal is to always keep my biological age at least a decade younger than my chronological age. I so far have been able to keep it at about 15 years younger. Now, maybe with a viral illness or something like that, it might change for those months or so because that does actually take a hit on the body, but you recover and that's what you want to maintain. So let's say that your skin, sorry, let's say that your hair doesn't grow very quickly, or your nails don't grow very quickly. That's often a sign of catabolic nature, low vitamin mineral potentially content, low protein intake, et cetera. So I do, or even low thyroid. So I like to share with people these are signals, not that we need to, you know, try to, as they say now, look smacks or anything like that, but do things that are beneficial more for the inside than the outside. All the creams and all that are not going to help too much in the long run. What really matters is what's going on underneath the skin.

  Philip Pape 43:41

  So give us one or two of those, right? You mentioned protein intake. Let's just maybe mention one foundational thing that a lot of our listeners are probably eating enough protein, but maybe not. One of those, and then maybe one that's a little more counterintuitive or people aren't aware of.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 43:54

  Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of people are going to get their protein requirements met, and this might be controversial. Commercial at about 0.6 grams per gram of body weight, that will go up the more you train. And it will go up, like you'll do it higher if you're on a low carb diet. And it will go up if you're an athlete. So, like again, I have some people at one gram per pound of body weight. They're athletes, they're doing specific things. Okay. But we do need to make sure that that's at least met. On a 160-pound person, it's still 100 grams. And a lot of people are only getting 50 to 60 grams. So certainly they're not getting enough, right? So we need a certain amount of protein to meet our requirements. And the more we train hard, the more that we need to recover, the more protein we need. That makes sense. Okay. So we have that. Then we do really need not a specific amount of carbohydrates, enough to meet our needs, but we need the brightly colored fruits and vegetables because they provide the polyphenols that ultimately improve overall inflammation in the body. So that's really important. And then fats, fats vary widely, part of it based on genetics, part of it based on metabolism. And that can be anywhere from 10% to 30% of your diet. Again, it varies on some people. Now, of course, if you're on a keto diet, you're at like 70%. But I would say, and I would argue all day long, that that's not a great long-term diet. Maybe you use it in the short term, but not long term. So it is balanced, but it's really healthy, clean proteins, brightly colored fruits and veggies, and then quality fats. And the best quality fats, without a doubt, are olives, olive oil, and avocados. So you can eat other fats, not that you can't, nuts and seeds, great, et cetera. And you'll get fat from meat. You don't need to add more necessarily there. But the mono and saturated fats are one of the best things that we can do for overall heart and inflammation of the body.

  Philip Pape 45:33

  Yeah. I can't argue with any of that. And we were joking how I first heard you on Mind Pump. And I'm, you know, those guys are all about balanced and macros and everything. And, you know, the it's nice to hear these concepts repeated again just for intake because people tend to be confused. But that 0.6, 0.7 grams per pound of protein, 30% of fats, of calories from fat, you know, mono and polyunsaturated fats, you know, unlimit your saturated fats. And then carbs are great. And we love carbs, especially if you're trying to build muscle, but definitely have the fibrous, colorful fruits and vegetables in there. Love it. Okay. Good stuff.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 46:03

  I just want to say carbs are the only thing that cut cortisol. Right. So, like, yes, if you want to look at like if you're stressed and you're low carb, that's a recipe for just destroying your thyroid and further aggravating your adrenals and poor sleep. You have a little carbs at dinner, sleep's already better. So it's like, because it helps produce more serotonin and GABA. And so, you know, all that calms the nervous system. So carbs shouldn't be the enemy. I'm like, I mean you may be on there as well, but like on an island over here being like carbs aren't the enemy, you know? And so, because when you look at like you legitimately unbiased, well, here's the thing: if your main goal is body transformation, I get it. You're gonna go higher protein, higher fat, a little lower carbs. Totally get it. I've been doing that for years with my clients, right? So makes sense. But ultimately, if it's about wellness and longevity and you don't need to be single-digit body fat, we can start to look at it a little bit differently. We say, okay, well, if max fat's about 30% and protein is about 20% of the diet, because like just depending on how many calories you're eating, okay, then what's

  The weekly rhythm reset action

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:00

  carbs? Well, we just do the 50%. Oh, 50%.

  Philip Pape 47:02

  Yeah, exactly.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:03

  Exactly, right? And then it could just be lower glycemic and it could be veggies, and anyway. So, but yeah, that's that really is. If you just it's I know it's a generalization. Now we're looking at the Mediterranean diet, which is has the most foundation around it, and you can just tailor that for your cut your specific needs.

  Philip Pape 47:20

  Okay, maybe the last thing here then is you know, people are hearing all this, you've got all these signals. Is there anything someone can start with this week to maybe make it less overwhelmed if they're feeling stressed hearing this, like, oh my God, everything's wrong with my body? It's let's flip it around. No, these are things you can learn about your body. And and and there's these just five things. How can people start this week and take one action that would really benefit them?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 47:41

  Well, if we put sleep in the superposition where everything gets better if you get good sleep and everything's worse if you get terrible sleep that night, then we have to talk about sleep first. So, what I say is this, and I'm not the first one to mention it, but three, two, one sleep formula is a great framework. Three hours before bed, no more eating. Two hours before bed, stop drinking any fluids, maybe just a little bit with your supplements if you take any before bed. And then one hour before bed, no more blue light. Blue light blocking glasses, but really you got to turn the lights off unless they're like wrap around blue light glasses. And then, you know, read a good book or something like that, or meditate or breath work, anything to calm the central nervous system is excellent. So, what our clients do is basically in an ideal world, I know we don't all live in an ideal world, stop eating around six, seven if you have to. Don't eat again for 14 hours. Most of our clients, the perfect formula is six at night to eight in the morning. By eight in the morning, you're getting going. You need to fuel the day. They eat at eight, around 12:30, around 5:30. And like it's a nice formula for three meals per day. Glucose levels might rise a little bit, then they fall before the next meal, up, then down a little bit. Now, for me, I do a peri-workout nutrition shake, which is late afternoon, only like an hour away from my dinner, like right before it. But that's then customized for you. That's what I'm saying. You have a framework, like the Mediterranean diet, and then you customize it. Like I follow the Mediterranean diet for the most part, but I don't eat a lot of bread, right? So it's like you don't have to, that doesn't have to be part of your diet, right? You can eat other whole grains if you would like. So that is my biggest takeaway for people is that you need a rhythm to your day. When you eat, when you go to bed, when you wake up, once you start to create a rhythm, your body knows what's coming next. You automatically start to have more energy, even if there's other things still off in the body. So creating a rhythm is my top recommendation.

  Philip Pape 49:25

  I love that. Yeah, it creates that safe environment, that predictable environment, a routine structure, just so many benefits. Love that. Steven, this has been awesome. I'm glad we were able to get through those. I want to connect people with you in the best way possible so they can then learn more, continue to implement, continue to take action, and improve their lives. Where can they do that?

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 49:42

  Yeah, I appreciate that. So it's stephencabral.com, just my name, Steven with a pH. You'll find the new book there, the podcast, the Cabral Concept, social media, all of those things. And for me, I just love to teach. So if you can you want to learn more, you can check out the book, you can check out the podcast, and of course, you can let us know if there's any questions where we are here to help. But I appreciate everything that you do in your community and spreading what I believe to be the truth. I think we're on the same page for the majority of things. And I think it's all really backed by science without any hype. You know, there's no real like marketing hype behind us. Like it's not, it's not a special diet, it's not a special workout program. We can customize it for you, but these are the things that we know to truly work.

  Philip Pape 50:21

  Yeah, education number one, I learned today. So that's one of my goals as well, selfishly. And I'm glad the listener can learn a ton and takeaway today. So thank you again, Steven, for coming on the show. We'll send folks to stephencabral.com, put that in the show notes, and it's a true honor and pleasure.

  Dr. Stephen Cabral 50:35

  Thank you, Philip. Appreciate you.

Brain Aging and Barbells (How Lifting Weights Slows Cognitive Decline) | Ep 474

Can lifting weights slow how fast your brain ages?

A new study used brain scans to measure exactly that. The results show that resistance training is a uniquely beneficial tool for brain health that works through different pathways than cardio.

Lifting weights can make the brain test younger on functional MRI, and the benefits may keep compounding even long after you train. 

Learn what brain age measures, why the prefrontal cortex matters for Alzheimer's and cognitive aging, the muscle-to-brain signaling system activated by strength training, and how heavy lifting compares to moderate intensity for protecting the brain after 40. Plus a quick self-check for strength-related dementia risk, especially after 40. 

Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lift heavy, build muscle, lose fat, and stay strong and sharp for decades. 

Timestamps:

0:00 - Lifting weights and brain aging
0:47 - Dementia risk and strength training over 40
3:58 - Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus
6:00 - Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling
7:48 - Recent study and brain age scans
10:21 - Brain age gap and dementia risk
11:30 - Results across both lifting intensities
13:12 - Myokines, irisin, and BDNF
16:57 - How to build skills for lifting weights
18:30 - Lifting protocol for brain health
20:45 - Entry points for new lifters
24:15 - Grip strength and dementia risk

• Transcript

  Lifting weights and brain aging

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've heard for years that aerobic exercise is what protects your brain from dementia, a brand new randomized controlled trial might give you a new perspective. One year of lifting weights made people's brains test almost two years younger on a functional brain scan. And then the effect kept growing for a full year after the training stopped. And the brain regions involved are not the same ones targeted by cardio. Today I'm walking you through what is happening inside your skull with your brain when you lift weights, why it works through pathways more associated with lifting weights than cardio, and a dead simple lifting protocol with the most evidence behind it if you're trying to improve your brain age. Welcome

  Dementia risk and strength training over 40

  Philip Pape 0:47

  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, Philip Pape. And if you are aging, which we all are because we can't go back in a time machine, especially if you're over 40, over 50, you know, I'm 45 years old. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. There's dementia in our family, there's dementia risk in my genetics. And you, maybe in the back of your head, there's a worry about dementia or Alzheimer's. And maybe it's a parent or grandparent that has it. You have personal experience. Maybe it's, you know, just you walk into a room and you forget why you walked in, or somebody asks you a question, and you forget what you were going to say. Maybe it's all the headlines about Alzheimer's and the anxiety behind that. And every time you, you know, hit the Google machine about what to do about it, a lot of the advice is super generic because a lot of this is cutting edge right now. The research into Alzheimer's, and a lot of it is more bio more about the biology and the pharmaceuticals and things like that. Or you see advice like, hey, you've got to just move more, you've got to walk more, you've got to run more. You know, just general, generic, kind of worthless advice, in my opinion. And so I'm all for encouraging people to move. I definitely think the vast majority of the older population is way too sedentary, and it has led to the frailty and the lack of strength and also often lack of function, polypharmacy, you know, all the things we're trying to avoid in general, but it also affects your brain massively. You know, things like muscle mass affect your brain massively. We're going to be talking about lifting weights today, but really the brain is so important. I mean, just doing this podcast and the work I do and being an engineer and all that, having a family, trying to solve problems, wanting to live a long life, wanting to lift weights. I'm like, if I didn't have my brain, where would I be? And the research on resistance training and the brain has been building over the last few years. I'd say the last decade and a half, uh, we've seen some more studies. And there's a study that came out a few months ago that's really strong evidence, yet again, I will say, that lifting weights uniquely does something for your brain that nothing else, including aerobic exercise, can replicate. And it's not just like one area of your brain, like the hippocampus, it's not just memory. It's it's how the front of your brain kind of wires together, the whole, you know, neurostructure of the brain, if you will, if that's even a proper word. Forgive me, I'm gonna butcher a lot of probably fundamental science here for the neurofolks out there, but I'm gonna do my best. So today I'm gonna walk you through that study. I'm gonna show you the mechanisms that make it work, and I'm gonna give you a lifting protocol that is evidence-based that can go along with all of this. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to share a 30-second self-test that might give you a little bit of a read on your own dementia risk having to do with this topic. I'll tell you the muscle metric that we really care about the most, a statistic from one of the biggest cognitive aging studies ever done, a specific stat that you want to care about, and then what to do if you don't like what the information is telling you.

  Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus

  Philip Pape 3:58

  What do we need to do differently, guys? Okay, so I'm gonna give you a little history here because this is one of those situations where I think the advice is probably outdated or there just isn't good advice. So, starting in the early 2000s, a group of researchers led by Art Kramer at the University of Illinois, they ran a series of randomized trials and they showed that aerobic exercise, especially walking, increased the size of the hippocampus in older adults. Now, that's the part of your brain that handles the formation of memories. And then their 2011 study in adults over 60 found that one year of walking grew the hippocampus 2%, which is very meaningful when the typical trajectory with age is a one to two 1 to 2% shrinkage per year. And so that study and a bunch like it became the foundation for the exercise protects your brain message that you hear everywhere now. And that's a good message, right? Walking is great, cardio is great. I'm definitely not anti-any of that. We need to move more. Almost everybody listening to this podcast probably has to move more in the right ways, let alone also lift weights. But where I think a lot of this gets oversold, which could be detrimental, let's say, is that, you know, because it's easy to standardize aerobic exercise and research and it gets more studied than lifting. And because the assumption is, okay, the brain is all about blood flow and oxygen delivery. So of course cardio is going to be aligned with that. I would say the resistance training side just didn't get studied to the same level for a long time. And so, you know, it's it's more of an omission, let's just say, or a lack of study. It's kind of like women's health, you know, where there's a lack of a lot of information because certain populations of women just aren't being studied. So I would say there are three things I want to challenge with some of the research to date so that we can lead into talking about the topic. The first one is the brain is really, really complicated. It isn't just one tissue, right? It's

  Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling

  Philip Pape 6:00

  a very complex structure that we still don't know a lot about. And the hippocampus is one part of it. And I think, you know, looking at the research, cognitive aging and the hippocampus has been tied together quite a bit. But there's also the prefrontal cortex, and that's right behind your forehead, a different, completely different part from the hippocampus. That part handles decision making, planning, your working memory, it's called, and impulse control. And it's also the part that we look at that tends to fail early and the first thing that goes in Alzheimer's, as well as in just normal cognitive aging. And it responds to different stimulus in the hippocampus. So again, now we we add to some of the nuance. The second thing I want to challenge is that muscle, muscle mass is just incredible and does things to your body that we did not know about 10 years ago. For example, when you contract your muscle against load, against resistance, it releases proteins called myokines into your bloodstream. Now, myokines by themselves are incredible. Some of those proteins cross the blood-brain barrier. Some of them support the growth and survival of brain cells. We have discovered an entire muscle-to-brain signaling system we didn't know existed not long ago. And it's primarily activated by lifting weights and having muscle mass. So, and this is just a tiny scratching the surface. I'm gonna do an entirely separate episode soon, very soon. It's on my list, about why you need to bring build muscle and it and it's gonna cover the holistic view of it, you know, well beyond just general health and fitness. The third thing I'm gonna challenge is, or not challenge, the third thing I want to bring up is that we now do have resistance training studies. And I'm gonna walk you through the new one that I mentioned earlier. So here we go.

  Recent study and brain age scans

  Philip Pape 7:48

  The study is a Danish trial published in the journal GeroScience in February. So February 2026, I'm recording this in late May 2026. It's out of a group called the LISA study. LISA stands for Live, Active, Successful Aging. And I did come across this study again through Bill Campbell's Body by Science Research Review. I love that guy. I love Bill. He was on Lane Norton's podcast recently too. That's a great episode you guys should check out. And if you don't subscribe to his review or really any reviews and you're into this stuff, consider it because it's a good way to get the latest and greatest studies that's kind of filtered through some of the good uh evidence-based academic guys today. So, anyway, Bill Campbell's been on the show. He's a great science communicator, and it was him, his review that turned me on to this. So, what they did is they took 309 adults aged 62 to 70, they randomized them into three groups for an entire year. Okay. Group one had heavy resistance training three times a week on machines, and it was supervised, so they were working in the 70 to 85 percent of their one rep max range. And they did six to 12 reps per set. Okay, so good heavy traditional resistance training. Group two did moderate resistance training, so they did mostly bands and body weight, and it was just one supervised session a week, plus two at home, in the 50 to 60 percent rep range or yeah, one RM. So lighter, right? Light, lighter work. And then group three was the non-exercising control group. They were just told to keep doing what they're doing. And so they did this for a year, they trained for a year, or didn't train for a year, depending on which group, and then they stopped and then they checked everyone again later. Oh no, then they checked everyone a year after that. So it's like a two-year arc to the study. Now, here's the wild part, okay? They didn't just measure strength or body composition, they actually put everyone in an MRI scanner and they ran a machine learning model on their brain scans. And the model had been trained already on over 2,400 other brains. It looks at how different regions of the brain communicate with each other. So the patterns of functional connectivity between the brain, and then estimates how old the brain looks compared to a typical person of that chronological age. And then the difference is called the brain age gap. So I wanted to set it up this way so you guys know this is some pretty serious science. It's not just some random, you know, DNA test or something like that. Now, I want to explain

  Brain age gap and dementia risk

  Philip Pape 10:21

  why this matters. I'm gonna let me slow down on this for a bit. Okay, so first, the brain age gap. Let's just explain that real quick. It's been linked in multiple large studies to dementia risk, to mortality, to Alzheimer's risk. There's a 2025 paper that looked at the UK Biobank. This is over 38,000 people, and they found that every one-year increase in brain age gap was associated with a 16% higher Alzheimer's risk and a 12% higher all-cause mortality risk. So a younger-looking brain is actually a healthier brain when it comes to things like dementia Alzheimer's. Okay, so back to the study. They scanned everyone, they ran the model, you had the two-year time frame. So, what were the results? All right, the heavy lifting group, their brain age dropped by 1.4 years after the first year of training. The moderate group, it dropped by 1.39 years, so almost exactly the same. So 1.4, 1.39. So it's 1.4. And then the control group had no change. So both lifting groups at both intensities, they they

  Results across both lifting intensities

  Philip Pape 11:30

  cut a year and a half of their measured brain age a year later, you know, within a year. And then I would say one of the surprises from the research is that when they checked again a year later, after everyone stopped the formal training, the brain age reductions actually grew. So the heavy group was now even younger with their brain, 1.8, 40 years younger. The moderate group was 2.26 years younger. So the brain kept getting younger after they stopped lifting. This is just so good. I mean, think about that for a second. Okay, it wasn't just the benefits in the moment or right after they were done, but they continued, they compounded. How often do we talk about that principle when it comes to health and how much good you're doing for yourself by starting now? It's never too late. And then there's another piece of data I want to give you for the practical stuff today, in that the researchers looked at which brain regions change the most. The heavy lifting group, only the heavy lifting group, right? Not the moderate, definitely not the control group, only the heavy lifting group showed significantly increased functional connectivity in a big cluster of brain regions, primarily the prefrontal cortex, the exact part of the brain that handles executive function, working memory, decision making. Like we mentioned earlier, the part that tends to degrade first in aging, in dementia, in Alzheimer's. So both intensities of lifting weights helped reduce the brain age. And then only heavy lifting also reshaped the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex. And that's gonna be useful when we come back to the protocol a little bit later in this episode.

  Myokines, irisin, and BDNF

  Philip Pape 13:12

  So let's talk about why this works. I think the mechanisms are really cool to understand. This is where I nerd out, and I hope you enjoy this podcast for this reason. Muscle is an endocrine organ. It's an endocrine organ, something that we didn't even really frame it as like a decade ago. When you do a heavy set of squats or rows or pulldowns or whatever, your muscle fibers contract and release a bunch of signaling proteins into your bloodstream. I mentioned the myokines earlier. And the two that get the most attention right now in brain health research specifically are irisin or ericin, I think it's ericin, I-R-I-S-I-N, and cathepsin B. So iricin is really, again, I don't know if I'm pronouncing these right, guys. So iricin is released from the contracting muscle and crosses the blood-brain barrier. And in animal studies, boosting the levels of iricin in your brain actually retrieves memory or recovers, helps memory recover in Alzheimer's models. And in humans, erizin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid are actually lower in people with Alzheimer's. This was, I think this was published in Nature Medicine in 2019, if you want to look it up. Cathepsin B is another myocine and also crosses the blood-brain barrier. It directs directly supports the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. So that's what we call neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adulthood, and it's driven by muscle contraction. I mean, that is so cool. I'm smiling as I record this because I just love how we have control over this, guys. We really do. Just by using your body as it's meant to. And I think this paper was from cell metabolism in 2016. So these are legitimate publications, legitimate scientific groups, you know, oftentimes, well, these aren't randomized controlled trials, but they're high quality, let's just say. And then there's BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. You probably heard about this on lots of different podcasts. I've talked about it on the show before. It's like miracle growth for your brain. Other than maybe that's a bad analogy because then we think of pesticides and stuff. Don't think of that. It's like steroids for your brain. That's not a good analogy either. Anyway, it supports the survival of neurons, and it also supports the growth of new connections between neurons. There was a 2024 meta-analysis of 35 randomized trials in older adults, and they found that resistance training raised the resting BDNF levels with an effect size larger than aerobic exercise did. Okay. So the mechanism, like summary, it goes as follows. If we would put all this together, lifting weights tells your muscle to release these chemicals, these myokines. Those chemicals tell your brain to grow. Aerobic exercise, right? Cardio does some of this too, but not all of it and not always to the same degree. And the prefrontal cortex connections and structure, that seems specifically responsive to heavy mechanical load from resistance training. So not only lifting weights, but making sure it's at a high enough level, which is interesting because I've been talking about osteoporosis as well and how some of the benefits of preserving bone density come from higher loads. So it's not just about hypertrophy. If all you care about is muscle size, fine. A lot of this wouldn't necessarily apply. But if you care about the other 90% of things that affect your health and dementia, brain risk, all of this, then lifting heavy occasionally could actually be its own unique benefit. So doing cardio for your brain, no longer the whole picture, right? There's this entire signaling system activated by resistance training and muscle mass. And this is just one study that's a pretty good piece of evidence that lifting weights is good for your brain.

  How to build skills for lifting weights

  Philip Pape 16:57

  Speaking of lifting weights as brain medicine, if you need a little bit of help with lifting, how to lift, how to progress, how to support your lifting with your nutrition and the other things that support your brain and your lifestyle, everything from sleep to stress, whether you're in perimenopause, menopause, over 40, dealing with hormonal changes, you've tried things before and they don't work, or what you did in the past doesn't work anymore. That is what I created Eat More Lift Heavy for. This is our six-month program. It walks you through building skills one week at a time, and we help you hit your goals in a sustainable way so you can maintain them. Not only that, by the end of the program, we will have taught you how to judge your own data and approach so you really never need a coach again. That is the ultimate goal. And if you want to accelerate your results far more than what you can get just by absorbing information on this podcast, I encourage you to check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. The reason I bring it up in this episode is because, you know, the women and men in EMLH are not lifting to look a certain way necessarily. Of course they want to look better and they're going to look better. I mean, they like the muscle, but the deeper motivation is what we're talking about today. They want to be sharpened to their 60s, their 70s, their 80s. They want to read books and play with their grandkids. They want to keep their independence. And lifting heavy, now heavy is a subjective term. We can get into that on another episode, is how we do that. So eat more liftheavy.com. Check it out.

  Lifting protocol for brain health

  Philip Pape 18:30

  Now we're gonna get to the protocol, right? So you've heard the study. What does the research show? What are the mechanisms? Now what do you do? And the answer is pretty simple. You want to lift weights at least twice a week. Three if you can swing it. I generally tell people three is a good solid minimum to get the most of the results, but two will get you a lot of results. And honestly, one will get you far more results than zero as well. But I really hope you strive for at least two, if not three. Anything less than twice a week from the brain perspective, we're just not sure. But in general, I would say you need a bit of frequency to stimulate your muscles to grow, to get enough mechanical tension from the volume, et cetera. Okay, so that's the amount per week. I would say full body sessions are perfectly fine and sometimes quite effective as opposed to splitting it until you get a little bit more advanced. Today we're talking about brain health. So I want something that is, I'll say the minimum you will absolutely do the shortest sessions you could do, again, at a minimum, to get your muscles moving and also to give them the load they need. And so this is where things like compound movements, variations of squatting and deadlifting, you know, hip hinge, pushing, pulling are hugely beneficial. You don't have to do the power lifting variations of those, like the conventional deadlift per se. I'm gonna do another episode in the future talking about why most lifts are safe if you do them right. So that's not the concern here. It's just a function of what you want to do and why. As far as the actual programming, that is an episode in and of itself. But if you're working in, say, the six to 12 rep range and the last two to three reps feel genuinely hard and you are, you know, two or three reps shy from failure, or even as little as zero to one if it's a smaller movement, that's gonna give you the mechanical tension you need to support strength and muscle growth. And so if you could do two or three sessions a week, 30 to 45 minutes, it's a great protocol to start with. And that is the whole thing. Now, obviously, I have lots more resources behind this. If you join Eat More Lift Heavy, we give you

  Entry points for new lifters

  Philip Pape 20:45

  all sorts of training templates. We give you the protocols on breathing and bracing and adjusting programming and all that, but that is the basics. Now, you might be saying, Philip, I am listening to your show. I'm 55, I've never lifted a barbell, or I've never lifted out lifted weights, or I'm really not sure what to do in the gym. It sounds intimidating. All right, two things. First of all, the LISA subjects or the participants in the LISA study were 62 to 70 years old, and the moderate lifting group that still got a benefit from the brain age. And remember, they were using bands and body weight. They weren't even using barbells or going to the gym. So it's still far, far, far better than not lifting weights. That's that's the first thing I'm gonna say is like, what is your entry point? It doesn't have to be barbell squats per se. The entry point is like showing up and getting some load that is difficult for you so that you can grow and difficult in a good way, right? It challenges you and you're gonna get stronger and progress over time. Start where you are. Number two, I'm gonna say that heavy, heavy is relative. Heavy doesn't mean a ton of weight or more than the next the person next to you, or you know, strong for your body size or weight. No. Heavy means it's challenging for you on this day, and for someone. Who's never lifted, you've got to test that out as you get started. It's okay to go too light and then realize, oh, that's too light and easy. And now I get it. I get what Philip's saying. I need to get to where I don't have too many reps left in the tank. Okay. And there's lots of ways to test that and push that and ever. But as long as you're progressing on the same lifts over time, you're going to be able to find where that is and start to hit those walls that make it feel heavy enough where you know you're at that point. All right. Now that said, remember the heavy group got an extra advantage with the prefrontal cortex. All right. So there are definitely advantages to lifting heavy loads, and there's ways to do it safely. And there's a payoff to all that, including bone density, including strength, et cetera. Function, we can go on. But I want you to start where you're at at least two or three times a week, full body, compound movements, make the last few reps hard. Do that for six months. And I'd love to hear how that affects your brain, especially if you're on the older side and starting this out in your 60s, 70s, maybe 80s. I mean, look, people have built muscle mass in their 90s who didn't lift before. We've seen it in some of the literature. Before we close out, I promised you a 30-second self-test for your own dementia risk. I'm going to share that in a second. But, you know, quickly just another reminder: if today's topic landed for you, if you've been hearing me talk about lifting weights for your brain and for your bone health, for body composition, for visceral fat, all of that stuff. And you're like, okay, where do I even start? That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is for. I mentioned it earlier. I mentioned it one more time. Just check it out. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. It's a nutrition and training program that includes human coaching, includes live calls, and includes tons of support and accountability, but it helps you build skills. It doesn't just help you get quick weight loss, it helps you build skills. And that is the point. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, take a look, see if it fits. Doors always open. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. So here is a finding from a study called the Rush Memory and Aging Project. This is this is the thing I promised you, okay? Researchers followed over 900 older adults for four years and they measured their muscle strength at the beginning. And then every one

  Grip strength and dementia risk

  Philip Pape 24:15

  standard deviation increase in muscle strength was associated with a 43% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's. Now, the most, I'll say accessible, the easiest way to measure your own muscle strength is grip strength, in terms of if you're trying to compare it to uh charts and data points and studies and things like that. It's not something that I train. I don't ever, I've never told anybody to train them grip strength. Some old school, you know, factory workers and manual laborers and like our grandpa probably had stronger grips just from their day-to-day job. And it predicts a lot of things, including dementia, mortality, recovery from illness. I know that when I had my, what was it? One of one of the first surgeries I had, they had me test my grip strength later on. I think it was for my shoulder, right? For my rotator cuff, uh, by squeezing this device. And I remember how, you know, the physical therapist is like, okay, we never have to do this again. You've got more than sufficient grip strength. And that's because I had already trained for years before that point. I stayed strong. I started training after I had surgery right. And it's a good, you know, the fact that they're telling me to test that, and there's some expectation that some people will not have good enough grip strength tells you there's a link there. And you don't need a fancy device to do it, though. You can hang from a pull-up bar and see how long you can hold and then kind of like progressively overload that, if you will, which comes with strength. You can, you know, obviously, if you know that it's hard to open a jar or something on a good day, like that gives you a signal as well. There are grip strength little devices you can get, like at Amazon or whatever. But regardless, my point is you're not trying to fix your grip specifically. You're just trying to get stronger generally. And so if you start lifting, if you do it regularly, if you do all the different parts of, you know, exercise all the parts of your body, build that engine, your grip strength will also go up as well. But I'm just telling you that this is a good sign that if you feel like you have a very weak grip, you're probably not very strong and you have a lot of potential. That's that's where I'm going with that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your muscle strength and muscle mass isn't just about looking good in the mirror, being generally healthy. It protects everything else, including your mind. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The Satiety Diet (How to Lose Fat Without Fighting Hunger) | Ep 473

What does a fat loss diet look like when you build it around satiety (fullness) instead of restriction or willpower?

The answer is based on the biology of post-diet hunger, 5 satiety levers that decide how full you are after a meal, and the targets you can set at your next meal.

Most fat loss attempts fall apart around week 5 or 6. The reason is rarely willpower. Hunger is a measurable physiological state that intensifies the longer and harder you diet, and most nutrition plans don't account for it.

This episode covers a study on hunger hormones that stayed disrupted a full year after dieting, the five satiety levers, from how calorie-dense your food is to how fast you eat it, and a simple way to audit your own meals for fullness without counting every calorie. It is built for adults over 40, especially women navigating perimenopause and menopause, who lift weights and want to lose fat in a way you can sustain

Ready to build a fat loss diet around fullness instead of willpower? Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lose fat, build muscle, and manage their physique for life. 

Timestamps:

0:00 - Hunger as the price of fat loss
3:11 - Hunger as a biological signal
5:30 - Hormones a year after a diet ends
9:06 - Engineering a diet for fullness
9:54 - Energy density and food volume
12:58 - Protein and spontaneous calorie intake
15:01 - Viscous fiber and gut hormones
17:20 - Eating rate and fullness
19:58 - Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket
23:09 - How to design your satiety diet
24:45 - Satiety targets per meal and per day
27:18 - 2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals
32:07 - Bonus: 200-calorie reality check

Episode Resources:

• Download my favorite nutrition app MacroFactor and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS for an extended 2-week free trial

• Transcript

  Hunger as the price of fat loss

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You've probably heard that along with fat loss comes some level of hunger, and that you have to sit with it sometimes, sometimes you have to push through, and it is the price of admission. I've seen many fat loss attempts fail because of this willing acceptance for hunger. And today I want to walk you through what a fat loss diet looks like when you instead design it around fullness. There are five big satiety levers that the research tells us can really, really help when it comes to adherence with your diet, which ultimately is the thing that will make you successful. So we're gonna go over that, the specific targets that you can hit at your next meal, and a 200-calorie reality check that's gonna change how you evaluate what is on your plate. 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, founder of the Fitness Lab app, and today's episode comes from basically a lot of the misunderstandings I see relative to fat loss phases and appetite. If you're over 40, especially, if you're a woman in the perimenopause or post-menopause transition, you've probably run the following experiment. You decide to lose fat, you of course cut calories to go in a deficit, you have some level of discipline for the first few weeks, you're motivated, and then maybe around weeks five or six, the hunger starts to increase more and more. It gets really loud. You start thinking about or even obsessing about food more than you want to, and then you start to slip. You eat a little bit extra at night, maybe you sneak in a snack here or there. Maybe the foods that you go for are a little bit more calorie dense than you anticipated. And then it starts to stall or push back or slow down your fat loss phase or end it all together. And on one hand, yes, you should have some level of feeling of hunger or some appetite because your body is trying to draw from its energy stores, from its fat cells. And there's going to be hunger that comes along with that. There are a lot of hormonal changes that occur. But also, we shouldn't look at hunger as this like character test, you know, that we like, okay, you've just got to be in this massive level of hunger. That means it's working. That's the thing I hear all the time. It means it's working. This is a measurable physiological state that you should be in that scales with how long and how aggressive a deficit is. And that's fine, but why don't we work with that as best as possible and minimize the effects? Because a lot of you, the way you're eating, whether you're in a fat loss or not, is not really contributing toward the most satisfy or high satiety, I should say, full diet that will make fat loss a bit easier. And by easier, I mean not just that you get through and adhere. That's obviously very important, but you can manipulate the variables, like how aggressively you can go, and maybe you can then shorten the duration because you've made it a little bit easier on yourself, let alone some of the more aggressive experiments like a rapid fat loss phase, which we're gonna be covering in an upcoming episode as we revisit that topic.

  Hunger as a biological signal

  Philip Pape 3:11

  So we're doing three things today. First, the actual biology of post-diet hunger, including a study where people were still hungrier and had altered hormones 12 months after the diet ended. Second, we're gonna talk about the five satiety levers. These are the big variables that research pops up when we think about why do some meals leave us full for many hours and some just don't satisfy us. And then that's when we lead to the midnight snacking or what have you. And then third, we're gonna give you some practical targets that you can set or target or audit for your next meal. I'm not talking about calories, macros, I'm talking about around satiety. And then at the end of this episode, I'm gonna share a 200-calorie reality check. These are just some different foods that are 200 calories each, so you can compare in your head differences in calorie density and nutrient density that will help you with fullness because that's the principle of all of this. All right, so let's start with the framing here that okay, fat loss requires hunger. Eat less, move more, push through the discomfort. You need to be in calorie deficit, energy balance, all that's great. And yet you've heard me talk about the value of behavior change where discipline and willpower are very difficult things to rely on and motivation, right? We don't want to have that. We want to kind of engineer our approach to work with the reality of the situation rather than trying to push through the reality. So when you treat hunger like a thing you have to have and a hat you you have to expect it during fat loss, it also becomes its own moral signal, which is interesting, right? Sometimes we talk about food as good or bad, but also I've heard I've seen on social media talking about hunger as like it's a sign of weakness if you can't outlast your hunger because that's necessary for the fat to come off. Now, this isn't always the framing. A lot of the framing is actually quite the opposite, like, oh, you're not gonna have any hunger at all, and you could lose fat so easily. Well, I think that does a disservice as well. Uh, but but hunger is not a moral thing either. It's just a biological output of your energy state, driven largely by hormones, driven by some other things, but primarily by hormones. And that it gets louder and louder the more that you restrict and the longer you restrict. It's a feedback signal. And for some of you, it's stronger than

  Hormones a year after a diet ends

  Philip Pape 5:30

  others, right? We have brain-related genes. This is why the GLP1s, for some people, when they go off with them, they immediately go back to their prior behavior. And for others, it kind of they can titrate off or even change their behavior while on them. But anyway, I want to share a study with you. Okay, this is Smithran or Sumithran and their colleagues out of the University of Melbourne. And this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 2011, so about 15 years ago. And it's it's a phenomenal piece of work, in my opinion. They took 50 overweight adults, put them on a 10-week diet, and they lost about 13 kilograms on average. Okay, so far, so good. Then they followed them for a full year. And what they found at the 12 months mark after the diet, a year after the diet ended, was almost every hormone that regulates hunger was still abnormal. So ghrelin, the hunger hormone, was still elevated. Leptin, the fullness and energy storage hormone, was still lower, uh, peptide YY, GLP1, cholecysokinin, all the natural satiety signals were all depressed from their previous state. And also the subjective hunger ratings were much higher than they were before the diet started. So that's 12 months after the diet. Now you think about that, the body was still acting like it was being starved, and the hunger wasn't going away. And these were people who were not actively dieting anymore, right? So this is interesting because it's a measurable state of biology, your biology or physiology that could seem to persist after a deficit ends. There's another piece of research I want to share here. It's Rosenbaum and Libel, and this is at Columbia University. And they've been doing some good obesity research for maybe the last three decades. They did some fMRI research that showed that your brain's response to food images literally changes after weight loss, where the reward regions light up more, the prefrontal uh control parts of the brain that say, like, you know, no thanks, I'm full, I'm I'm good, light up less. So when you've lost weight and then you, you know, go back, go past that bakery that you like the cannolis from, and I'm not talking from personal experience, am I? Uh, it's not that you've also be all of a sudden become weaker or something. It's that your brain is processing that smell of those foods with a little bit of a different signal than before. And when in the study they gave leptin to restore the leptin to pre-diet levels, the patterns normalize. So it was the biology, it was the hormones driving the behavior. Now you're like, oh my gosh, that means I shouldn't go into a fat loss phase. I shouldn't diet, I shouldn't lose weight, because then it's gonna be worse. Well, no. What do we do with this information? Obviously, you can lose fat. People do it all the time. I've worked, I've worked with people all the time, clients, people and eat more lift heavy that lose it, and they're actually far better off than when they started, both from a health perspective, but also in managing things like their hunger signals. What I am saying is that just trying to fight willpower is not gonna help you long term when other things are amplifying your hunger all the time, sleep, stress, changes to hormones and things. So I think the best move here is to design your diet so that you trigger less hunger per calorie of deficit in the first place, and you normalize these things and eat in a way in your diet that you would eat not in a diet. The only difference being some of these things are scaled down. Calories are scaled down, maybe a protein scaled up, maybe carbs are scaled way down during a diet, just to, you know, be in the proper energy

  Engineering a diet for fullness

  Philip Pape 9:06

  balance. So if you want to engineer a diet for fullness, the question becomes so this is the title of the episode the satiety diet. What are the variables you have to manipulate? When you look at satiety research from the last 30 years, and I'll tell you, listening to a lot of other experts on this over the past couple years, it's very difficult to tease apart real conclusions. Let's just put it that way. It's it's a mess. Okay. But there are there's been a lot of activity in the last even five years that we can maybe look at. And it seems like five things I'm gonna talk about today really move the needle the most. And those five things are energy density, protein, viscous fiber, the rate at which you eat, and then what we call hyperpalatability. So we're gonna focus on those five

  Energy density and food volume

  Philip Pape 9:54

  things. All right. So the first one is energy density, and this is the calories per gram of food. How many calories are packed in the same volume of food? Barbara Rolls at Penn State, she has been this, I guess, volumetrics person when we talk about volume, volumetrics for decades, really. She built this stream of research, what I'd call the seminal stream of research here. The bottom line is that humans eat to a relatively fixed weight of food per day. Interesting, right? Like we tend to want to eat the same quantity, physical quantity of food. We don't eat to a calorie target. We eat to a volume target, which means, by definition, hey, if you can lower the energy density of what's going in your mouth, what's on your plate, you can eat the same physical amount of food and ingest fewer calories without feeling deprived. Okay. Many of you are like, yeah, I've heard that before, or I know that. That's that seems to make sense. Well, what am I going to do in this modern food environment, right? No. So when we look at specific numbers, very low energy density would be considered less than 0.6 calories per gram. So what is that? Most non-starchy vegetables, that would be broth-based soups. That'd be fruits like melon and strawberries. That's very low energy. That's why I think broth-based soups, for example, are great during fat loss, you know, vegetable soups, fruits like berries. Okay. Then that's a very low. Now, low is 0.6 to 1.5. So that would include fruits, starchy vegetables, low-fat dairy, beans, whole grains, like cooked whole grains, lean meats. So now we're we're expanding to a lot of the wonderful, delicious whole foods we love to eat that include carbs, fats, or carbs and protein primarily, and a little bit of fat in there, but not much. Okay. So then medium energy density, we get up to one and a half to four calories per gram. This would be like the typical Western diet sandwich and meat and cheese zone. Okay. So you're starting to introduce more fats, more fatty forms of the different foods, higher fat dairy, you know, meats, et cetera. Then high energy density is like four to nine calories per gram. Now we're talking about processed foods like crackers, chips, cookies, but also whole foods like nuts and chocolate, which are very energy energy dense. And then the most energy dense is like pure oils, so pure fats and butter and things like that. That's nine calories per gram, which is just fat. Okay. Fat is nine calories per gram. So like a pure fat source is gonna be, by definition, the most energy dense. So if your daily average for your whole meals or your whole uh food log for the day is two to two and a half calories per gram, then you're gonna be eating a small physical amount of food for your calorie budget versus if it's like closer to one to two, right? And hopefully you're if you're and if you're sitting much higher than that, then then you've really got low-hanging fruit, pun intended, to go after here, right? And so these all matter because of things like stretch receptors and your gut hormones. So that's the first big lever, is simply energy density. Lever

  Protein and spontaneous calorie intake

  Philip Pape 12:58

  two is protein, protein percentage. Now I know what you're thinking. You're like, okay, I lift weights, I already eat my protein. This isn't new. I hear about protein all the time. But I want to talk about the satiety data specifically here, okay? Let alone all the other benefits of protein, which we're going to have an episode soon about some counterintuitive aspects of protein, like, hey, you might be able to actually eat more protein, all things equal, and not gain weight or fat and actually lose fat. Anyway, that's beside the point. Let's talk about satiety. So there's a study by Wagel and colleagues in 2005. They took people from a normal diet at like 15% protein. You know, most people don't get very much protein, and they bumped them to 30% protein. But they said you could eat whatever you want, you just have to hit the protein. So all they're tracking is protein, hit your protein. Their spontaneous calorie intake dropped by 441 calories a day without any conscious restriction. The body just said, hey, I don't need as much food. I don't need as much food because you increased your protein. Now, if you look at the average American, you know, at around 15% of calories from protein, that's like the control group that was inadequate. So for many of you, if you're not deliberately upping your protein already, then this is a big lever. Okay. And the practical target we often talk about here is 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of body weight. But 0.7 is more than sufficient for most people, for the average person. If you like to eat more, if you want to eat more, if you can't eat more, go for it. Nothing wrong with it, unless it's so high that it crowds out carbs or fat. But it tends to be kind of on an average diet, eh, 30% of your calories. We don't think percentages for protein. I usually tell you, you know, grams per pound because it's gonna depend on your body size and your goal. But aiming for 30 to 40 grams per meal is usually the way to get there. And we often see that front loading that at breakfast can give you extra benefits. There's also the benefits of, you know, how much leucine you have and hitting muscle protein synthesis and all that. But all I care about here is total protein. Okay, so that's a good one to just to re uh iterate.

  Viscous fiber and gut hormones

  Philip Pape 15:01

  Lever three is interesting. It's viscous fiber, viscous fiber, not just any fiber. Okay, we're talking about a high satiety diet, viscous fiber. Now, this is fiber that thickens the water in your gut. So this would be oats and beta glucan, which beans, legumes, uh, psyllium. You know, some of you actually do use cilium husk as a supplement, chia seeds, flax seeds. Okay. A 2019 meta-analysis by Sally and colleagues looked at the effect sizes of different soluble fibers on subsequent calorie intake. Guar gum had an effect size of negative 0.96, which is actually huge. Beta glucan was negative 0.42, pectin was negative 0.22. So you don't have to understand exactly what that means, just that they are highly correlated with reducing how much you eat subsequently. And when we look at the mechanism, viscous fiber slows the rate at which food empties from your stomach. So it slows gastric emptying, as they call it, and therefore your stomach stays full longer. It also slows the rise of blood glucose. Again, we've talked about eating more balanced meals that include fiber, and that tends to slow down your increase of blood sugar in addition to walking after meals. So as it ferments in your colon, it produces short-chain fatty acids that trigger your gut to release more GOP1, more peptide peptide YY. These are your natural fullness hormones. You know, the GOP1. We know that is the same thing that weight loss drugs are trying to replicate. And again, again, we we don't want to compare them to the drugs. The drugs are far more powerful in terms of the dose. But the average American gets not very much fiber at all, about I think 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day. And we want you at 25 to 40, you know, more for men than women, just due to size and how much you eat. And if you could aim for, let's say, eight to 15 of those from viscous sources, like if you want to be very specific based on this tip in your high satiety diet, look at foods that have higher viscous fiber and make those a per uh a good chunk of the fiber you get every day, not to mention increasing fiber in general. Don't do it overnight. If you get low fiber, don't go from low to super high. That could be not great on your gut. You know, titrate it up over, let's say, a

  Eating rate and fullness

  Philip Pape 17:20

  week. All right, lever four is eating rate, how fast you eat, how fast food enters your body. And this is wildly underrated. And for those of us who love to shovel food down our mouths or love to eat while watching TV or looking at our phone or not eat mindfully, listen up because this could be your biggest lever. Ford and colleagues, they took pooled data across 327 foods and they found that unprocessed foods, so unprocessed foods are eaten at about 35 calories a minute, whereas processed foods are eating eaten at 54 calories a minute. Ultra processed foods at 69 calories per minute. So an ultra-processed meal will be eaten and go into your body twice as fast as a whole food meal. Why does that matter? Probably a little bit obvious, but let's get into it. Your gut takes about 20 to 30 minutes to send a fullness signal to your brain, like a true hey, I am full. Okay. If you front load 800 calories in like 12 minutes, then you're not gonna get that signal until you're already done eating, and now you're thinking of dessert. Okay. So this could this is gonna hit on both mindful eating and calorie density that we already talked about. There's a 2024 crossover trial out of Japan by Habano and colleagues, where they fed people the same calories and macros, same protein, fat, carbs, but in one week the food was ultra-processed, and in the other week it wasn't. So on the ultra-processed week, people ate 813 calories a day. So that's that's a lot of food, just you know, we're talking about the the one meal. And the mechanism behind that was the chewing frequency. There was fewer, there was less chewing, faster eating, and so they consumed more food. So the the lever here for you is really texture, solid versus liquid, intact food versus I'll say pureed or processed food, fibrous versions of food, whole grains and such versus refined foods. And then the mindful eating part as well, like setting your fork down between bites and not being distracted while you're eating. You know, I'm sorry, these are boring, like long-tested pieces of advice, but they're gonna work for slowing down your eating and increasing your fullness just from that. And look, when you're in fat loss and you're not eating very big meals, maybe not even as many meals, wouldn't it be nice to just actually enjoy what you're eating and not just scarf it down and be like, okay, now the hunger starts to hit and I'm trying to lose fat? So it's a very important one.

  Hyper-palatable foods and the supermarket

  Philip Pape 19:58

  The last lever here for a high satiety diet is hyper palatabil hyper palatability. And this kind of overlaps the most of what people think of as junk food and highly processed food, but I want to be careful here because hyper palatable foods, okay, that's a term, I think it comes from Terra Focino at the University of Kansas, based on what I could discover. Hyperpalatable foods are foods that combine fat with sugar, fat with salt, or carbs with salt at specific concentration thresholds, right? Hence they are super palatable. They're so super delicious. Okay, we're we're separating this out from calorie density, which was lever one, even though there can be some overlap here. About 62% of items in the US food supply meet the definition of ult of hyper palatable. Okay, that's 62%, that's like two-thirds of what's in the supermarket, which isn't surprising if you go into a supermarket, but it's still insane. And when we talk about the food environment and engineered foods and the nutrition science and all that behind all this stuff, where the foods are engineered deliberately to bypass your fullness signals. And I think they're trying to even amp that up further since people are eating less on GLP1s, you know, without going into conspiracy theorists, capitalism and the drive to, you know, give people something that's delicious so they buy more of it. I mean, if we buy it, they're gonna make it, is what it comes down to. I'm not gonna blame them. If we're gonna buy it, they're gonna make it. Now, there's been research that that looks at, you know, when you control for energy density, that was lever number one, and then hyperpalatability, hyper palatability, it's not that foods are labeled as ultra-processed that's the problem. It's how it's engineered, one food's engineered versus the other. So, for example, some ultra processed foods are low in energy density and they're not hyperpalatable. And so I put them under the, I'll say, fine condition from a satiety perspective. And then some so called whole foods, whole foods like trail mix or granola are densely caloric. They have a lot of calories and they're engineered for palatability. And they will absolutely get past your fullness signals and you can eat too much of them very easily, which honestly is why people seek them out for going on a hike and having a lot of energy on your hike. It's easy to eat, doesn't fill you up too much, and you get a lot of calories. So if you're trying to lose fat, if you're trying to control for that, you've just got to be aware of hyper palatability in particular, independent of whether it's an ultra-processed food. So those are your five levers: energy density, protein, viscous fiber, rate of eating, and hyperpalatability. Palatability. Now, two meals with the exact same calories can produce wildly different hunger depending on how they score on these variables. A 500-calorie burger and fries versus a 500-calorie, say, chicken, beans, sweet potato vegetable plate are probably going to feel different. You're going to probably be hungry after the burger and fries. I mean, anybody who's ever eaten Chinese food probably feels hungry like an hour later. All right. So before I move into the practical fix here, I want to address something because I know what you're thinking.

  How to design your satiety diet

  Philip Pape 23:09

  You're like, okay, this sounds great, but how do I figure out where my current diet falls on these levers? What do I do? How do I know if my protein percentage is where it needs to be, my average energy density, the hyperballiathy, all that? Well, I do want to mention something that we have. It's a program called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's 26 weeks of skill by skill by skill. And in phase one, we actually set up how you measure these things. Not just calories and macros, but measuring your fiber and energy density and really comparing it to some other things going on, including your biofeedback, like your hunger. And we don't, you don't have to track all of these things and look at all of them. All you have to do is log your food, compare it to how you're feeling, and see where the correlations might be, and then start to tweak the right variables. So that's something we help you with. Obviously, you can do these things on your own if you, you know, apply all these systems, if you have a system, but we give you that system. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Um, you get human coaching in there. Carol and I are inside providing coaching. There's live calls. There's the one focus per week that you learn and apply and get accountability from. And we help you become independent when it comes to these things. And I'm all about that. That is my mission is to help teach all of you to become independent in this world without having to become a nutrition scientist. So go to eatmorliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. By the way, when you go in there, you'll see there's something called dialed in, which is closer to a personalized one-on-one coaching experience we have as well. And honestly, I think it's far more affordable than typical,

  Satiety targets per meal and per day

  Philip Pape 24:45

  a typical one-on-one coach because of the systems and tools we put in place. So go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All right, so now we have the five levers. How do you use them? I'm gonna give you some specific targets for these, and then you can decide. You know, do you want to track all of these? Do you want to go after one at a time? That's generally what I would recommend. Do you already know which one is the biggest lever that you could attack right now? So let's talk about the meal level for the targets. I would say 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal, eight to 12 grams of fiber per meal is gonna take you very far. And within that fiber, per today's episode, some of that being viscous fiber, like maybe aim for half of it to be viscous. So that the total energy density is ideally under one and a half calories per gram. You're like, I've got to do math. It's pretty simple. Like log it in your in your tracker. I love to use macrofactor. Please, if you want to support the show, download macro factor and use my code WIT's and weights, all one word, and you get your a nutrition summary there, and you can easily tell how many calories per gram based on the total gram weight of the food. And you don't have to do this every time. I would say do it occasionally to kind of audit yourself. Also, slow the rate you eat and don't have a ton of hyperpalatable foods, even though you can have some, because again, we don't demonize any particular foods on this show. There is no one bad food on the planet, not seed oils, not sugar, not any gluten, none of that. Okay. And we talked about that on a recent episode. Now, what about at the daily level? So that's at the meal level. You know, at the daily level, it really comes down more to your macros. Are you getting enough protein? Are you getting that 0.701 grams per pound? Are you getting enough fat? For many people, that's 20 to 30 percent of their calories, the rest of their calories from carbs. And then specifically within those carbs, are you getting a good chunk of fiber, 25 to 40 grams of fiber, depending on how much you need, and 8 to 15 of those as viscous. So that's on a daily level, which again, you could do it at the meal level, the daily level, whatever makes sense for you. This is something we help help you analyze on an individual basis and eat more lift heavy if you need that kind of support. But you're looking for the average daily energy density of your food, again, in that like 0.8 to 1.5 calories per gram range. And of course, you got to have enough sleep because I know we didn't even talk about that, and I was hesitant to do so, but sleep is gonna actually affect hunger a lot, a lot. All right, so the rule to apply this,

  2-to-3 swap rule for your worst meals

  Philip Pape 27:18

  okay. I don't want you to get overwhelmed and panic that you gotta do this every single meal, every day, all the time. There's something what I call the two to three swap rule. Okay. Two to three swap rule. Audit your current diet, just audit it. Find the two or three meals that score the worst on these levers. So if you if you log for like a week, you've got probably 21 or more meals to choose from. And there's probably a few that you know are just like not as great when it comes to these things, like maybe they have a lot more fat or processed foods or something. And find the two or three worst meals. Heck, you could probably use AI now. Take the macrofactor export, throw it into AI and say, hey, do what Philip just suggested for me. Okay. And for many of you, it's gonna be breakfast where you've got like a granola bar with like the processed yogurt that doesn't have much protein, right? Or a lot of sugar in it or whatever. And again, sugar's not bad. It's just what crowds out what. Maybe it's a snack, right? So, hey, you went for a bag of crackers because they're sitting on the counter. Maybe it's lunch where you have a sandwich. We have our habits, don't we? We have our habits. So find the two or three meals and just replace those with versions that hit these different targets, right? If you're already eating great dinners, like maybe it's fish and some grains and vegetables, it's fine, right? Pick the worst ones and just upgrade them. That's how you kind of slowly shift the whole thing where you want to be. We're adding then the things you want. We're not saying what you have to cut out. So, a concrete example is like if you have this granola bar at breakfast or something equivalent of it, where it's hardly any protein, it's a ton of sugar, it's easy to consume super quickly. Well, swap that one out. Take a couple scrambled eggs with cottage cheese. And when I say with cottage cheese, oh, it's so great to combine them. Delicious, you'll get fluffy, almost like cheesy eggs with a lot more protein, or you can add egg whites, or you can have the cottage cheese on the side. I don't care. However, you want to eat it, and then a piece of fruit, for example. Right? We're talking about swaps here. We're not talking about going perfect and ideal or optimizing. No, we're just talking about swaps. And it's the same amount of calories, but now you've gone from, say, four grams of protein to 30 grams of protein. You've put in something that you have to chew, you've got some fiber from the fruit, the energy density of the meal drops. Now you hit like four of the five levers and you didn't add any calories. Now, sometimes you might add calories. So what? As I mentioned before, sometimes when you add protein, you actually consume fewer calories later in the day because of the satiety. So that's that's a big piece. And then the last thing I want to mention for this is like your mental model each day. Are you comfortably full? Particularly when you're at maintenance calories, like when you're not in a deficit. And then once you've got that set up successfully, I would do that before you ever you do a fat loss phase. Then in a fat loss phase, you probably have some mild hunger per meals between meals, which is fine. That's your biology, but it would be less than it would otherwise. And or it allows you to gain maybe go maybe more aggressively on the on the fat loss phase because now you can handle a little a little bit more hunger, if that makes sense. Right. If you're feeling ravenous though, especially if you're not in fat loss, I mean, let alone in fat loss, go through the questions and ask yourself again about protein and fiber and the you know calorie density and how fast you ate and and then other things like did you sleep enough, et cetera. Okay. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning of the episode I was gonna give you a 200-calorie reality check. And I'm gonna do that in just a second. But again, if if everything I described today felt useful, but maybe a little overwhelming, that is the problem that we solve with eat more lift heavy. And I'm really serious about this. I'm very genuine about this because we used to have a program where people would come in and be overwhelmed. And I feel like a lot of people working with one-on-one coaches sometimes feel overwhelmed because on day one, they're like, you've got to increase your steps, you have to train, you have to increase your protein, you have to do this, this, this, this. I prefer an approach where each week you focus on one small thing and build it up slowly over time so that the fast approach is the slow approach, if that makes sense. In other words, taking a reasonable skill-building approach results in long-term success and sustaining what you're trying to do. So eat more lift heavy. If you go to eatmoriftheavy.com, you can read all about it. No pressure to sign up, just check it out. It's a 26-week guided coaching program. And in the very first phase, this is where we help you set up the measurement system. Figure out, hey, where does my current diet actually fall across the levers that we covered? Some are relevant to you, some less so. And then you start to execute to that and build and build and build. You start to master your protein, you start to understand your patterns, you know how to get around plateaus, how to get the fat loss, whether you're going for 10 to 20 pounds of fat loss, how to see your muscle definition, and so on. Okay, eatmorliftheavy.com. Go to eatmorliftheavy.com. All right, so here is the 200 calorie reality check.

  Bonus: 200-calorie reality check

  Philip Pape 32:07

  We are going to give you five foods that are all 200 calories, so you can visually in your mind or on a plate compare them so you see the difference in energy density and chewability, okay, which are a couple of the levers we talked about. So, 200 calories, what does that look like? That is a full pound of strawberries or half kilogram of strawberries. Takes you like 15 minutes to chew a pound of strawberries. Okay, I wanted to start right there just to kind of set the baseline. Similarly, broccoli, what about broccoli? What does 200 calories look like? That's five cups of broccoli. I mean, I almost never, ever, ever have 200 calories of broccoli on my plate. If there's broccoli for dinner, if I cook it or my wife cooks it, it's almost hardly hardly any of the calories in there. In fact, more calories probably come from the little bit of olive oil we baked it in. So five cups of broccoli to 200 calories, you probably would distend your stomach and you wouldn't even eat that much. But I'm just, you know, giving you it as an example. Potatoes, three medium boiled potatoes. Now, think about you ever cook potatoes, you know, and you chop them up. Imagine three of those big suckers, you eat them. Okay. By the way, this is the highest scoring food on the satiety index. So you would be stuffed, and that's only 200 calories. Now, what about almonds? Well, okay, 200 calories is only two ounces of almonds. So that's a very small handful. Chomp, chomp, chomp, you're done. All right. Now, I always think about tree nuts and the fact that like our ancestors would have to actually pick them and like shell them and all that, which would slow things down. But we don't do that. We just buy them all ready to go, salted often, sometimes dipped in chocolate, and boom, in your mouth. And you can you can apply that to peanut butter as well. Like 200 calories of peanut butter is just a tiny amount. And then finally, olive oil, tablespoon and a half of olive oil. All right. So that's not a surprise. And olive oil is great, but a little goes a long way. And so you've got to be aware of these calories. Um, and sometimes set things like salad dressings and sauces are full of oils, so they're very energy dense. So that's 200 calories visualized across some very different amounts of uh foods, some that would make you really full, some of them you would hardly notice, like the almonds or the oil. And really that's the premise of the satiety diet in just like a minute. It's the same energy coming in, but it's a way different level of fullness. And that can be the game changer for you when it comes to fat loss. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, hunger is just engineering your diet and working with your signals. It's not a matter of morality or character or gutting it through. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

Brain Fitness, Micro-Habits, and Your Health (Thoryn Stephens) | Ep 472

Why is it so hard to stay consistent with nutrition and fitness, even when you know what to do? What if the answer is not more discipline, but better systems?

Thoryn Stephens joins me to talk about why adherence is the real bottleneck in behavior change. We cover how to build simple health protocols around nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, connection, and metabolic health without getting buried in data or overwhelmed by tracking.

You’ll learn why friction matters, how wearables like Oura and Garmin can help when used correctly, and why recovery, HRV, resting heart rate, and even unitasking can support better performance. We also discuss longevity, dementia prevention, brain training, and how small daily actions can influence long-term health.

Join Eat More Lift Heavy to build muscle, lose 10-20 lbs of fat, and learn what works for your body, 1 week at a time. Eat more and lift heavy with confidence:
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Timestamps:

0:00 - Why consistency breaks down
2:40 - Six pillars of health protocols
5:46 - Connection and longevity benefits
11:58 - Micro habits and adherence
17:11 - Choosing daily non-negotiables
20:48 - Tracking without overwhelm
28:41 - Dementia prevention through lifestyle
33:30 - Brain training and neuroplasticity
40:48 - Unitasking and cognitive performance

Episode resources:

• Brain.One

• Instagram: @ragearea 

• Transcript

  Why consistency breaks down

  Philip Pape 0:00

  You've heard of lifespan, you've heard of health span. There's a third one most people aren't aware of called mind span. It's the longevity and performance of your brain. And it might explain why you keep falling off your nutrition and training plan every few weeks, even when you know exactly what to do. Usually when that happens, your first thought might be, I need to track more closely, get more accountability, plan ahead better, follow a stricter schedule. Any very smart, capable person who is building a career or business, maybe raising a family, that advice seems like it should work. And yet this often works for only a few weeks before you're back at square one. My guest today has a background in molecular biology and knows a lot about the human brain. He's going to tell us what mindspand actually is, how microhabits and cognitive capacity connect to your training and nutrition, and the surprising and counterintuitive fix for inconsistency. 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 if you've ever fallen off your training or nutrition plan and tried to fix it by adding more, adding more structure, more tracking, more accountability, more planning, today's episode is going to challenge that thinking because we're going to talk about something called mind span. The idea that your brain's performance and longevity is an important variable in and of itself, because in fact your brain and your cognitive capacity might be the real bottleneck in your ability to be consistent. My guest today is Thorin Stevens. Thorin started in molecular biology, spent over a decade in data science and analytics. He now runs Brain One, a platform focused on brain fitness and behavioral protocols. He's all about neural performance and how to optimize human health to increase things like focus, energy, resilience. Today we're discussing mind span and why it matters for your physical health and fitness, how things like microhabits and cognitive capacity connect to your ability to accomplish your goals and strategies to make your routine even more sticky and sustainable. Thorin, welcome to Wits and Waits.

  Thoryn Stephens 2:15

  Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

  Philip Pape 2:17

  So we often describe consistency as a behavior problem, right? And I think what I've learned from your work is that you might say it's more of a brain-related or cognitive problem in terms of your ability to even execute those behaviors. Is that a fair way to characterize it?

  Thoryn Stephens 2:31

  I think humans are immensely complicated. And getting a human to do one small thing routinely is very challenging in itself. So I

  Six pillars of health protocols

  Thoryn Stephens 2:40

  believe there's rigor you can put behind how people learn new habits fundamentally. So I think there's definitely opportunity there.

  Philip Pape 2:47

  So let's let's go a little deeper on that then, because you're all about the brain and brain fitness, right? So when you talk about the rigor of setting up those behaviors, are we talking about a system, a structure? Is it more about I mean, what is it? Yeah.

  Thoryn Stephens 3:00

  Yeah. So just super briefly on my background, I'm a molecular biologist, went into data science, and then I started doing marathons and Ironman's and were using essentially health protocols to organize how I was training. And that really applies to other areas of my life as well, you know, relative to like my day-to-day health protocol. You know, when you get up in the morning, what do you do? And so when we talk about brain optimization, what we've seen through our own testing and research and also just looking at, you know, thousands of longevity papers and so forth, I mean, you have to really start with the basics. So ours are nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, connection, some sort of metabolic, you know, just optimization as well. Those are kind of like the six pillars that we generally see. So if you're not sleeping, then you're not going to be neurologically active. It doesn't matter what nootropics you're taking or, you know, what magic pills. You really have to start with the foundation. And then from there, layering in a, you know, additional microhabits is what we call them, just small structured, you know, incremental things that you do that then have, you know, bigger sustained game over time.

  Philip Pape 4:03

  Okay. So I got three things out of that I want to dig in. One is the longevity connection. The two is the sixth or the fifth and sixth piece of those pillars, which you imagine connection and metabolic optimization. And then three is this layering on. So starting with longevity, why is longevity important in and of itself? Because I know there are short and long-term goals. And sometimes, you know, I know when I went through my nutrition coaching, right, you learn that there's these trade-offs between physique and athleticism and longevity. And so why is that important?

  Thoryn Stephens 4:34

  I think it depends on the human, right? I look at things such as this as a spectrum. And like over here, you have Brian Johnson, who is doing everything he can to optimize his biology to live longer. You know, most humans are kind of over here. You know, they know they want to live for a long time, but you know, maybe aren't making changes. You know, I don't know, maybe we're maybe over here a bit, following some sort of a structured plan. I think it depends on on the human and ultimately their own motivations. Not everyone wants to live forever. And, you know, as you look at these protocols for this, you know, supposedly to add, you know, additional years on that health span, those remaining years of your life, does that impact your quality of life, you know, and the things that you love to do? So it's in my mind, it's always a balance in these these things.

  Philip Pape 5:14

  And is the balance between health and lifespan or is this extra mind span variable layered in there now?

  Thoryn Stephens 5:18

  I mean, I think it's kind of all of the above, you know, like again, doing the things that you love, anything that you love that's done in excess generally is you know negative relative to your mind span, health span, all the above. So I think you know, the balance of it is really important.

  Philip Pape 5:34

  That's a good way to put it, right? Anything in excess, because that's often what we talk about is doing too much handing that back. Putting extra weight, yeah, exactly.

  Thoryn Stephens 5:41

  Everything of course. So, but yeah, those are some of the principles that

  Connection and longevity benefits

  Thoryn Stephens 5:46

  we really try to, you know, round around, basically.

  Philip Pape 5:48

  Okay. Yeah. Well, I I like principles. So when you meant you said you start with the pillars and then you lay around microhabits, and we talk ad nauseum on this podcast about nutrition and training and sleep and stress. You did mention though, connection, which I assume you mean like human connection, community, things like that. Is that what you're talking about?

  Thoryn Stephens 6:05

  Yeah, I mean, I would expand it a bit. You know, so I'm a molecular biologist turned data scientist. So, you know, my life has revolved around data, but you know, I'm not obsessive about these things. And I went and met with the Center for Brain Health out of UT Dallas a couple years ago. I was just starting Brain One and you know, had this vision. And I met with uh one of the founders, Dr. Sandra Chapman, and I was like, you know, Dr. Sandra, we have all this amazing data sets, and I'm looking at my bar markers and my, you know, my my wearable data, and then we're amalgamating it and I'm seeing all these patterns. And she's like, Yeah, Thorin, that's really cool. You know what's really cooler? Connection. And humans that have connection, whether it's to themselves, it's to the higher power, it's to their family, you know, it's to their community, live longer. Like, period. I mean, the data absolutely suggests, you know, how much longer? I don't know, 10 to 15%, depending on the study, you know, but a number of years. And so people ask, like, what is the secret of life? I think it's fundamentally simple. It's waking up and doing what you love. And if you are doing something you don't love, you'll wake up and then you'll be disgruntled and so many impacts there. So as we think about those things, you know, waking up with, you know, a an inspiration or just a desire to do something, you know, whether whatever that is, again, spending time with your family. And community is an integral part of that, you know, quite literally. And then there's other small things. It can be a book club, it could be chess club, it could be, you know, playing soccer with the friends, whatever it is. But there's absolutely a connection both to longevity, but also just neurological optimization relative to community and connection.

  Philip Pape 7:35

  I think it's underrated. Uh I definitely, you know, because we don't we don't measure it, right? So like you kind of assume there's this black box or this myopic kind of view of wearables and measurement and everything. And it's like, who I mean, I do know people in different spaces who have that as a thing that they track, right? Which some would say, Oh, that's crazy. Why would you track these squishy things like relationships or how often you talk to your wife? But you know, I mean, it's sometimes you have to have targets and goals, right?

  Thoryn Stephens 8:00

  Uh I think that's very, very interesting. How are they tracking those relationships? Just curious.

  Philip Pape 8:04

  I mean, there's different approaches. There's, you know, uh a rate yourself on one to ten in a context of like 10 things you care about, those kinds of things, right?

  Thoryn Stephens 8:12

  Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, there's also the social side of all of this, which I think can be a bit nefarious, how you think about your social circles, connect things. But yeah, so I would say the measurement behind this is what's been the most interesting to me throughout my career when I was in biotech initially, and then I went into user behavior research and you know, so forth. That's really been the thread line, is the measurement of these different attributes.

  Philip Pape 8:34

  So I'm curious what the on the connection side, because I have a small background in applied psychology, Martin Seligman Seligman, right? And then the follow-on work where they talked about flourishing and happiness and how connection was like the number one related variable to happiness.

  Thoryn Stephens 8:47

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape 8:48

  When we think about connection, you mentioned a bunch of different examples, but like when someone is trying to improve themselves, today we have, and you said nefarious, and I don't know if you're talking about like social media and and some of that when you said nefarious, but how does self-motivation theory, I think SMT, right? Which has relatedness as one of its factors, how does that factor into this?

  Thoryn Stephens 9:09

  Yeah, that's not my area of research, just to be honest, but I can tell you what I've seen anecdotally. Again, you know, people who wake up and have that connection and that spark are more emphatic and generally feel and live longer, ultimately. So what is that based on? I mean, I think that's a great academic uh question. I would also say, you know, going to the prior point, yeah. I mean, we generally think about you know the world in microhabits, small incremental changes, protocols, and then programs that you can build, you know, to reach that desired objective, you know, such as connection. So that's why I appreciate your thoughts around, you know, how to measure that. I do believe on the other side of the coin, when you talk about things like social media, I think that's personally entirely negative. As a data scientist, when I was looking at this user level data, this is back in like, you know, 2012 through 14, 15, back when like Facebook had an open API, Twitter had an open API. And, you know, we could see in the data, you know, which was guised as connection, you know, you're connecting to children from your childhood and you know, people from your past and so forth, but not really the case, you know, and how that data can be used very nefariously to optimize your behavior through an algorithm, you know, which is what we're seeing now. And so all the recent, you know, press around meta being find with you know young adults, you know, this was all known a decade ago. This was not new. I mean, again, the data was already there. It's unfortunate, it's taken this long, an entire generation of humans, you know, to have been so susceptible to this because it's really preying on some of the negative sides of that connection and game theory, and you know, you get like the number of likes and all those pieces.

  Philip Pape 10:45

  And the dopamine, yeah, yeah.

  Thoryn Stephens 10:48

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape 10:48

  Yeah, a friend of mine, you know, was telling me about where he's sending his kid to school. So we homeschool our kids, they used to, but now they're in public school. But it's, you know, he he went out of his way to find a school that didn't use technology because you're seeing that pushback as well among public schools. And one of the anecdotes was that the Chromebooks led to more cyberbullying just because of the easy access to emailing each other and stuff like you're just like, man, the world has changed, and yeah, that stuff is not almost never positive.

  Thoryn Stephens 11:15

  Yeah. Yeah, but again, it's a balance. You know, we can't expect our children, you know, or community to like live out in the forest be a Luddite. Yeah. Quite literally. So, you know, my feeling I get it asked is constantly, you know, it's like my my feelings on AI, and I feel like you actually need to truly understand it and you need to learn these tools. You need to see what's happening with Claude because it's moving so fast. And otherwise, you know, then you're going to be making your decisions, maybe not based on the most empirical data. So I think it's great to know these things and you know, expose, but again, you know, always in moderation.

  Philip Pape 11:48

  Yeah. So before I lose the audience with some of the some of these tangents, which I I enjoy academically, but going back to the microhabits, let's get into that because we've had a

  Micro habits and adherence

  Philip Pape 11:58

  lot of guests on here that talked about habit theory. We've gotten in atomic habits and and you know, the how long it takes to build a habit and having either, you know, very hard and fast rules to take you out of temptation from coming off a habit and lots of different approaches. Just what lane are you in that's supported academically by the research you've seen?

  Thoryn Stephens 12:16

  I mean, we follow a general CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapy type of framework, right? You know, where it's Q reward fundamentally, which is in line with like James Clear and the atomic habits of framing. You know, what I've found in this research is again, it's really about motivation. You know, we have a platform called Brain One. We work with clinicians, we work with individuals, and one of the metrics we track is adherence. You know, you ask a human to do a thing to improve sleep, weight, you know, metabolic health, whatever it might be. Do they do the things that you ask them to do? And I'm sure you've seen this in your training. It's incredible, like so the technology here I find very easy. You know, we can build easy, accessible technology to help support this. The challenge is the human behavior. Like that is the crux of all of this. And getting one human to do one thing regularly as a new, you know, again, microhabit, you know, part of their day is just incredibly challenging. So what I've seen again, it's that cue reward, those are rewards and ultimately those motivations.

  Philip Pape 13:12

  So let's get into that. Somebody I heard maybe a year or two ago, Dr. Karen Norden. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's a bit in behavior change, and she was the first one to say, and maybe this is just a contrarian way to present it, you know, when it comes to nutrition or training, let's talk about training and exercise. You know, the act, that whole systemic act of having your exercise routine itself is not a habit because it's at two too large a level, it's too macro. And the habits are the automated things that go down all the way to what you said, the Q reward system. So how do we find that level? If you agree with that, you know, tell how do we find that level that truly is a habit that becomes automatic versus this systemic combination of habits? Yeah.

  Thoryn Stephens 13:55

  Yeah, that's interesting. I'll definitely check out her research. What we've seen empirically, again, I think humans are more successful if they have a structure behind it, period. So my personal example, I was athletic as a youth. I went to a high school for snowboarding and US ski team, Olympians, and so forth. But then when I went to college, I studied biotechnology. And then after college, you know, I was kind of just debating on what to do next. And long story short, I started running. And it started off with Susan G. Comb and 10K, and then a half marathon, marathon, and then I went to triathlons and Ironmans and so forth. And it was through that experience I began to use what we call a health protocol. And so we'll break down the protocol, which again are just the things that you do, you train, take case of triathlon, swim, bike, run, weights, but then your nutrition. And nutrition is such an integral part of these types of races because you're in real time optimizing your health, you know, using things like heart rate. That's really where I started back when we had these giant chunky garments that were like, you know, the size of your. So generally that's how we think about the world. Again, microhabits, you know, things that you do, nutrition, the building blocks, a measurement, which could be wearables, it could be other different types of measure, you know. And so I think it's really critical to understand in each of these areas, you know, what is your baseline, and then how are you going to improve, and then how are you going to measure that? And, you know, to that regard, like I've been, you know, I came out of biotech and I've been using protocols to synthesize DNA. I've been using protocols to, you know, do these like long distance, you know, triathlons and so forth. Fundamentally, your protocol is just your daily routine. It's the things that you do, you know, when you get up in the morning. And so what we found is putting that into a system can be helpful and it drives adherence. Some people come every day and track, some people don't, and that's okay. Just getting it on paper is the first step, you know, really beginning to understand where you can improve, and then you're layering the data on top of that, and then you can work towards a plan. But, you know, some people will never look at an app, you know, period. So you really have to meet them where they're at.

  Philip Pape 16:29

  Yeah, and and I'm people know I'm a huge data nerd. I do love tracking, and I do find that on day zero, if you can track the challenge I found for folks is what to track, how to measure it, which you've kind of implied so that you have something to baseline and actually improve. And where my mind goes with that is the body is complex and there are direct things we can measure and there are proxies for things, and then there's things we may not even know quite how to measure. So, for example, nobody's gonna do doubly labeled water tests to measure their caloric expenditure, but we know that you eat food and you gain or lose weight, and therefore your body as a black box burns calories. And then we say, okay, well, now the composition of what you eat is important. So we're gonna measure protein

  Choosing daily non-negotiables

  Philip Pape 17:11

  and on and on, right? So, like, just how do you think about that to not overwhelm somebody who like should they even get to that step before they're doing some of these pillars at a rough level? Or do you need this at the beginning at a very light level to do the pillars, if you know what I'm saying?

  Thoryn Stephens 17:28

  Yeah, I think it's probably the latter is you know what I've seen in our own research anyway. I think it's really good to, again, starting with the goal of what they're trying to achieve, but what are the non-negotiables? You know, like what are the things that pretty much all of us should be doing every day? An example could be circadian regulation, you know. So we all generally have challenges with sleep. You know, we hear sleep, anxiety, and gut are the three nonstop, right? And so they're all related, of course, but you know, when you talk about sleep, it's not necessarily all your preparation at night, it could be your preparation in the morning. And so, how much direct sunlight do you get? You know, what does that do to cortisol? And then ultimately, you know, really just the your hormone, you know, throughout the morning and then the rest of your day, it's so critical. So that would be like a non-negotiable. And that's hard for some people. I mean, I'm you know, myself included, I live in the mountains in Colorado. We don't even actually get direct sunlight until about nine, obviously up at six, but you do the best you can, you know, and that would be an example is getting as much direct sunlight as you know early in the morning as possible. Another could be a hydration, another could be, you know, prayer gratitude, you know, depending on the human. So we have a set of non-negotiables we try to try to follow, but they also are completely in line with the core pillars of you know, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, community, metabolic health, and those pieces. So all related.

  Philip Pape 18:44

  Yeah, they're all related. So you said it starts with a goal, and even that could lead to not an argument, but a discussion I've had with people about, you know, do we even set a goal before we set a timeline? Maybe we have a timeline, then a goal, whatever. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Actually, you start with a goal. So let's say your goal is just you want to feel and look better, right? Like you're the average person who is generally dissatisfied with the habits they've developed over many years. They're probably in their 30s or 40s at this point because that's when things start to catch up physically and energy-wise, and of course the hormonal decline and all that fun stuff. People listening to this podcast and they're like, hey, Thorne, I just want to look a little better, feel a little better, lose that belly fat, and just kind of maybe live a little longer and be healthy. Like a lot of people just state that as their general goal. Do you work on them to hone that further first?

  Thoryn Stephens 19:32

  You certainly do. I mean, we have a system that helps support them. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, we try to be as specific as possible, I guess I would say. You know, are you really like relative to neurological optimization? Is it, you know, your decisioning? Is it your executive function? Is it just memory? You know, what's specifically there? Or, you know, relative to other indications, sleep as an example. And then what's the baseline? How do we measure it? How do we build a plan around it?

  Philip Pape 19:57

  Okay.

  Thoryn Stephens 19:57

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape 19:58

  So then where does the mindspan concept come into this? I didn't have a lot of time to research this, but I understand it's related to cognitive capacity and brain health overall. Like where does that fit in?

  Thoryn Stephens 20:09

  I mean, it's not so personally, I would say an example of my pursuit of mind span will be three through, like microhabits like consciousness. You know, how are you thinking about consciousness, consciousness expansion? I've spent a lot of time with plant medicines and psychedelics over the years. So that is one of the tools that I personally use, which I don't necessarily advocate. But, you know, if someone's curious, happy to have a conversation.

  Philip Pape 20:33

  Okay, and that's it. Okay. I was hoping for a little more, right? Like with the whole mind span thing, just because it seemed to be a key piece here with as like a holdup or root cause behind why some people might have trouble executing on these microhabits.

  Thoryn Stephens 20:47

  Okay.

  Tracking without overwhelm

  Thoryn Stephens 20:48

  Not something in our research, to be honest. That's not something very focused on. But yeah.

  Philip Pape 20:52

  All right. So yeah, yeah. No, no, for sure. So then we get into the intersection of okay, so you're trying to develop these microhabits. You identified what you want to measure and improve. Now, how do you do it? Like, how do you make it stick? You mentioned Q reward, like what are the practical ways to do that?

  Thoryn Stephens 21:05

  Yeah. So we have again a structured framework that we follow and that we've developed. Really, at the end of the day, it's a tracker. And it is, again, understanding the high-level goal that you're working towards, and then what are these small microhabits, these incremental changes that you're doing to actually get you to that goal without overwhelming the human? I mean, that's the number one thing that we hear. And that's why so many of these plans, I think, fail, is because people get overwhelmed and there's too many things to do. And just getting one human to do one thing regularly is a massive accomplishment, let alone, you know, a select category. But it also depends on, you know, the types of people out there. Like if you've ever done any competitive, you know, athleticism marathons as an example, then you've probably followed some sort of a training plan. But that type of discipline, and that's another really integral, I don't even call it a microhabit. It's almost like a non negotiable, but you know, following these types of plans that are outlined that have some level of reward. And then I'm also a big believer in In the data without having the person be overwhelmed, or you know, you can also have like analysis paralysis where people get so obsessed with the data that's actually negative. You know, when you wake up in the morning, you look at your phone, you're like, oh my gosh, my readiness score from aura is like it's only a 45, I'm gonna have a horrible day. But you actually could have had a great day if you just took a minute to really, you know, connect yourself and see how you feel.

  Philip Pape 22:23

  So yeah, those are some of the small things that I'm laughing because I have an aura ring and some days I'm like, I can predict what it's going to say. And I'm like, I don't know how it's helping me. I just you know, I drank I drank last night, I haven't drunk in two months. I know it's gonna be well, but it helps.

  Thoryn Stephens 22:36

  So you know, I hear that a lot too, and it's interesting, right? Because some people then stop using the wearables because they're like, oh, I already know what it's gonna say, which is true. But even just having that baseline data, I think is absolutely critical because it's something you can measure against. And the old quote, you cannot manage, cannot manage what you can't measure. I mean, I agree with that, you know, and so having at least some understanding, but you know, it also should be intuitive. It's like, how do you feel? You know, you know when you wake up in the morning, the data helps support it. You know, I look at certain metrics regularly, like resting heart rate and HRV. You know, those are kind of my go-to relative to my recovery, my parasympathetic nervous system, and just, you know, all the things going on in my life. I definitely see a direct connection, you know, both on the behavioral side as well as, you know, if I just have a glass of wine, how does that impact, you know, literally?

  Philip Pape 23:24

  For sure. Yeah, we talk about those all the time. Those are really even just resting heart rate because it's so easy to measure and changes so quickly within days based on your activity. So and there's another one I've been talking to people about. It's just a simple heart rate recovery, like in real time, like an acute heart rate recovery, right? Like if you're if you're exercising, for example, how fast does your heart rate recover? And I don't know if what does your anything you do measure that? No, I'm actually not familiar with that matter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, where you could you could shorten that time over time and as as a measure of cardiovascular fitness. But anyway, yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned rewards, and and that's another thing that comes to mind is are we talking intrinsic, it's extrinsic, or it kind of depends? I think it depends.

  Thoryn Stephens 24:04

  Yeah. Depends on the human, depends on ultimately what they're trying to you know achieve. Yeah.

  Philip Pape 24:08

  Okay. Yeah. Cause the habit thing with the data, you mentioned an so we talk about an aura ring, and I think, okay, what I like about something like an aura ring or step track or whatever is it's automatic. It like zero friction, it's capturing the data for you. How much is friction as a variable to be considered when you're setting up these systems?

  Thoryn Stephens 24:27

  Oh, I think it's everything ultimately. And again, it really that's where you have to hone in on the persona, age is a big factor. We work with certain clinicians that have an older population. You can build the best app tracker in the world. It doesn't matter, they're not going to use it. So we've looked at other mechanisms, even like just having notebooks and you know, paper trackers people can follow. I think that's interesting. SMS, you know, how do you but truly meet the person where they're at? So that's a really kind of integral part in all of the.

  Philip Pape 24:55

  Yeah, man. I could I I could relate. I I love spreadsheets, and a lot of people don't. Here, use this spreadsheet. Even like the best.

  Thoryn Stephens 25:04

  But you know, for a normal human, it actually might not be, you know, ultimately. Yeah, we we've been testing adherence with just a single text message. You know, you get one in the morning, like, hey, these are your three microhabits for the day. If you want more, you can click on it, it takes you to the platform or not, you know, and at least you know, at least you have a framework, you know, and I think there's just there's so much value in that getting it on paper. And again, even if you don't do it every day, and you shouldn't be too hard on yourself, but you know, do the best you can and ultimately have the measurement to try to reach whatever you're trying to achieve.

  Philip Pape 25:32

  So you just said something interesting there every day. And that that's another argument I've had with folks because let's say you want to lift weights, right? And we know you could train as little as one or two days a week, all the way up to six, or if you're crazy, seven days a week, lifting weights. And and there's like a school of thought that says, well, even if you're gonna lift three days a week, the other four days you have something in that block or something to kind of check off as part of your fitness routine, like a walk or something. What are your thoughts on that theory of like seven days a week theory versus these less frequent things?

  Thoryn Stephens 26:05

  Yeah, I would say I I now that said I'm a highly aggressive human relative to my exercise. Yeah, I live here in Colorado, try to ski snowboard almost every day, you know, during the winter, in the summertimes, it's trail runnings, it's cycling, it's mountain biking. So I am out all the time. My core routine, I do hot Pilates. So I get the sweat plus weights and then, you know, some cardio and so forth. And that's at least three to four days a week. So personally, I mean, I would say I always listen to my body first and foremost. I mean, I try to do Pilates every single day, but if I wake up and my HRV is dipped because I hit it too hard the day before, I'll listen to my body and just not go to that class, you know, fundamentally. But I think in all things, I mean, again, going back to you know the brain and neuroplasticity, you know, you want to have periods of recovery. I mean, that's absolutely as critical as actually doing the exercise yourself yourself. And as you know, that's literally when you know the muscles actually rebuild is during that recovery period.

  Philip Pape 27:00

  So absolutely Yeah, true. I agree. Sometimes we talk about recovery as like the overriding variable for all of this, and then it you back into. But kind of what I was really asking very poorly was with brain science and stickiness and discipline, is having the daily habit, whether even if it changes. So like I have a daily movement habit, and it might be training this day, it might be hot yoga this day, it might be walking slowly this day. Does that lead to more success or stickiness with your habit than not?

  Thoryn Stephens 27:30

  I think we've seen both in our data. Again, I think it depends on the human. I mean, some people do really well with like strong structure, six days on, one day off, you know, whatever it might be. But I I feel that it really does vary. And again, I go back to the motivation of the human, what they're trying to achieve. But yeah, I mean, that's the that's the hardest part in all of this, Philip, is that behavioral piece like period. Again, the rest of this, the plans, the technology, you know, we're in biometrics, biomarkers, we just added face scans. So we get 40 biomark or 30 biomarkers off of a face scan as an example. Interesting, you know, what we can now do with that data to look at the time series. But if the human's not doing the thing that they want to do or whatever their objectives, their goals are, then you know, ultimately we're failing.

  Philip Pape 28:12

  So yeah, just always curious about this stuff because there's, you know, if if you cherry pick any particular study, then you you go down a rabbit hole where things conflict. Like I remember learning about a study maybe two years ago that looked compared five days to seven days of weigh-ins. So it wasn't even looking at like frequent weigh-ins versus infrequent, it was looking at five versus seven, and it found better, you know, sustaining of weight loss results when it was seven versus five.

  Thoryn Stephens 28:37

  That's interesting.

  Philip Pape 28:37

  Right. You see those little things, and I'm like, well, that's an interesting, right?

  Dementia prevention through lifestyle

  Philip Pape 28:41

  The variable changed just a little bit.

  Thoryn Stephens 28:43

  Exactly.

  Philip Pape 28:43

  Yeah. So, and I know there's some folks that that subscribe to that, but but maybe it is individualistic, just like study data is based on a population and you can be an outlier or whatever.

  Thoryn Stephens 28:51

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape 28:52

  What was the other thing you mentioned about? I'm totally off track of all the original stuff I was going to talk about because it's very interesting.

  Thoryn Stephens 28:58

  I mean, if you think we dive into a little bit more is again around the concept of these microhabits and behavior change, and that I always come back to so my background's in molecular biology, but gene expression, in that I think this is a really important point people don't necessarily understand, like dementia prevention, right? Everyone listening to this is terrified, maybe for themselves, maybe for their parents, their grandparents. And so there are, there's a paper, uh, it's a Lancet 2024. I might include it or share it with you, but it outlines essentially 14 different behavioral modifications. These are things that you can do, we can do, our grandparents can do to help prevent dementia. And again, there's no silver bullet here. It's not like this is going to help prevent dementia for every single human. I think the statistic was roughly about half of global cases. There's about 55 million globally. So it's a significant amount. And the the thinking behind this is again, you can have a genetic predisposition for something like Alzheimer's. Now, if that's the case, you know, you're not going to, through lifestyle, prevent the onset of the disease. But what you could do is start to stave off some of the impacts relative to the progression, basically. And we've seen this in the data, and I think that's pretty tried and true. But the the overarching point, then something like dementia, where you know, you do have an opportunity to help, you know, really again support, you know, the onset of the disease through some of these microhabits. And like a couple examples. So one, connection, actually, is on the list. You know, that's a very prominent one. You know, it could be things like hearing loss in your old age, it can be education, but all of these things essentially that we have the opportunity to improve. And so from a gene expression perspective, you have your genetic blueprint, you have what's called your proteione. So you have your DNA, and then in between you have RNA, which I think more and more people know about now. And then you have things like methylation or genomics, epigenetics. You know, essentially that's the regulation of your DNA, RNA, and ultimately to proteins. And we are an expression of our proteins or proteome. And so it's just interesting to think that we have the opportunity to optimize, you know, essentially a good chunk of our DNA. What's the number? It depends on the tissue, depends on a number of factors, but maybe 30 to 50 percent-ish, you know, of your DNA, you actually can impact based on your lifestyle and based on microhabits, all the things that we've been talking about. And so, you know, I'd like to think that's a bit empowering. You know, people feel like, you know, this is my DNA. I'm stuck, you know, and this is my life. I can't make changes when, you know, there is a level of optimism and that we can positively change these things.

  Philip Pape 31:32

  Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, epigenetics is fascinating. I I feel like we didn't know. I mean, I was born in 1980. I I know it it wasn't something we talked about growing up. It wasn't until the last like couple decades that the general public became aware of it, but it gives you more power, like you said. The Lancet thing, is that the one that they added like three more items to last year? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. I should do an episode on that because you're right. There are a lot of factors in there. It reminds me almost of there's like 13 cancers that are related to lifestyle as well.

  Thoryn Stephens 32:02

  100%. Yeah. Yeah, I'd be happy to give you a protocol you can give away to the audience, you know, for these things.

  Philip Pape 32:06

  Uh, yeah, for sure. We'll throw that in.

  Thoryn Stephens 32:09

  What these microhabits are, and then the impacts on, in that case, dementia, or you know, in other case it could be cancers.

  Philip Pape 32:15

  The evidence that would be awesome, actually. Yeah, and I might even rip up an episode kind of going over that for folks. That would be cool. Oh, we could totally do that.

  Thoryn Stephens 32:22

  Yeah, I'd love to love to partner or support in any way possible.

  Philip Pape 32:25

  Because again, yeah, go ahead. No, that's fine. You go.

  Thoryn Stephens 32:29

  No, I it's just, you know, we're an artifact of our behaviors, the people we surround ourselves with, the conversations that we have, you know, and so much that you know, our environment, literally, where do we live? You know, I've lived in big cities, I'm much more happy out in the country. Everyone's different, you know. But whatever that is, and you know, really listening to that, getting a tune, I think is really important.

  Philip Pape 32:49

  I think you'd you'd like it out here too. We're in Connecticut, like five acres, got the woods in the back. It's really nice. Quiet.

  Thoryn Stephens 32:55

  Yes, I appreciate the quiet.

  Philip Pape 32:57

  I remember the first night we moved out here and there was there were no street lights or sound. It was just it was amazing, but it was also a little bit eerie, you know. You could get used to that. And I like reading dystopian fiction too, which has that too, but not in a good way. Yeah. We're in it's like the mass border, so Connecticut Mass border. Yeah. And you're in Connecticut, or you're in Colorado.

  Thoryn Stephens 33:15

  Colorado, yeah. Cool. Out in the mountains. Got another couple weeks of snow, and then it's officially spring.

  Philip Pape 33:20

  Are you at risk of wildfires where you are or no? Oh, yeah.

  Thoryn Stephens 33:23

  Yeah, pretty much.

  Philip Pape 33:24

  I hear that a lot from friends out there.

  Thoryn Stephens 33:26

  So California, not good.

  Philip Pape 33:27

  And yeah, yeah, yeah. And very volatile

  Brain training and neuroplasticity

  Philip Pape 33:30

  politics too, but we won't get into that. We're not so all right. So, you know, we mentioned the Alzheimer's thing, and I think you and I were talking about like brain training. That might have been even before we recorded. And like how much value do you place in some of those? Because I've heard mixed results.

  Thoryn Stephens 33:44

  Yeah, I think some of them are great. I think some of them are scandalous, you know, which has also been proven out in the data. I don't know if I'll name any companies offhand, but you can probably do the research. I think brain HQ does a great job. I sat down with a founder not too long ago. Again, we would think of brain training as a microhabit as part of your overall protocol. So it's great. I mean, I think everyone really should be doing these types of exercises, especially in your older ages. And they had some great recent paper, I believe it was the neurotransmitter was acetylcholine. They were seeing like a, you know, positive results and a very specific neurotransmitter based on these brain training games. I mean, that's awesome, especially as people are getting older. So I think those, yeah, I think brain training is great as part of an overarching lifestyle and you know behavioral uh protocol.

  Philip Pape 34:28

  Yeah, and I think that the result you're talking about was a very specific subset of the training. So it's like you really have to know what you're looking at and looking for to potentially get the benefit, I would imagine.

  Thoryn Stephens 34:37

  I think they hopefully they've made it, they've productized it and made it easy. You know, so you don't even need to think about it. You go, you do, but yeah. I mean, again, even the concept of brain training, and to your point, epigenetics. I mean, these things, brain training's been around for quite a while. Epigenetics has only been around, or at least really studied the last couple decades. So a lot of this stuff is, I would say, generally new. And you know, humans don't think about neuroplasticity or the fact that their brain is an organ just like your bicep. You know, just like your bicep, you need to regularly exercise it, you need to allow it to rest and recover, all of those pieces.

  Philip Pape 35:09

  So I'm laughing because there was just today. Speaking of social media, Dr. Mike Isertil posted what seemed like a very serious question. He's like, I have a very serious question for you guys. Do you want bigger biceps or bigger triceps? So I'm like, Do you want a bigger brain or bigger? I'm just thinking about that.

  Thoryn Stephens 35:24

  Yeah, you should add that in there. I mean, exactly. You know, I mean, I guess it's all of the above, but yeah, people generally don't think about their brain as something that they exercise. And I think that's something we're hopefully trying to start to shift.

  Philip Pape 35:38

  Good, good. Yeah, hopefully we some of the our our podcasts helped do that too, just by making you think differently. So, okay, one question I did have that came back to me was so if somebody's somebody has a specific goal, like, okay, I want to start lifting weights. I know it's good for me. I know I want to lift at least three or four days a week, but I don't do it right now and I never have. Like, where would you start from that point to break down to the microhabits?

  Thoryn Stephens 35:58

  So they want to work out, I guess, what is their, you know, what are they trying to achieve? I mean, specifically.

  Philip Pape 36:02

  Let's say they're trying to just get stronger.

  Thoryn Stephens 36:05

  Yeah. I mean, what we could literally do is we could essentially take their information, run it through our AI, and come up with a protocol and see how it compares, you know, cool. Something we, you know, we've been working on the last year, year and a half. And it's actually pretty shocking how accurate it gets. We had one woman recently who she, you know, created a protocol, re-ran it through it, and she's like, Oh my gosh, honey, look, it's the it's like 10 of the 12 microhabits I just listed on my like last night. And he's like, Oh my gosh, honey, you're correct. So side note, that's one of the mechanisms we can get there. Yeah, I think again, starting small is critical, you know, like they want to work every day, understanding their motivation. What is it about that human, you know, that you can help motivate them relative to the thing, the reward, you know, that they're working towards. Humans love instant gratification, of course, which is why in some of the tech that we're developing, we you know, this new facial scan that we've added, you can actually see changes in your HRV in, you know, like pre and post-breath work as an example. So that's cool. You know, you actually do breath work and you can see how your parasympathetic nervous system is is impacted. But those types of like small wins, you know, I think are are really important. How you look in the mirror. And again, I don't focus as much on the weight training side, but it's all related.

  Philip Pape 37:19

  So yeah, you know, the thing about the getting the immediate feedback is really helpful. I know that could go awry if it's not the right thing, right? If you're not measuring the right thing, but we hear a lot about gamification and streaks and stuff. And I I just recently dived into that for an episode. And it was interesting how much of how things are gamified isn't effective, right? For changing your behavior. But something like that where there's actual progress seems to be effective. So again, the listener should, you know, should look into this stuff and become curious. I like the idea of starting with a goal and working back not only to what the protocol could be, but what is your motivation and then tying that together. Full disclosure, I have an app, I have a it's called Fitness Lab. And one of the things you do in week one is a future, a future vision exercise. Awesome. Because that's so powerful, right? Because we've seen that so powerful. So I love that you're saying that. When you said that 12 microhabits in the example, would your would the app or protocol then decide what the best three are, or two or one to start with?

  Thoryn Stephens 38:20

  Yeah, we can. Again, it depends if the human's working with a clinician, they're working with a practitioner, you know, a coach, whatever it is, and then just meeting them really where they're at. You know, most part of that again is like their experience level. So novices, we would never give 12, you know, maybe three to start, maybe even one, just depending on the human, or upwards of you know, a dozen, depending. And that could include things, you know, like peptides, you know, potentially, or people use this as a peptide tracker. We have another use case with like even stem cells. So we're really focused on the measurement, whatever it is. We don't really care the intervention, any of those that I just mentioned. But but ultimately having that baseline and then understanding the you know time series improvement.

  Philip Pape 39:01

  Okay.

  Thoryn Stephens 39:01

  Yeah.

  Philip Pape 39:02

  Yeah. No, that makes sense. And peptides and stem cells, two very controversial areas that have like very polarizing people out there because there's some great stuff, but it gets so muddled by so much junk and slop in in the wellness space. But I love that you mention it because there are some bright spots in there. What was I gonna ask about that? Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead.

  Thoryn Stephens 39:23

  No, no, go ahead.

  Philip Pape 39:24

  Totally interrelated. But as you were talking about the microhabits and doing like one or two or whatever, is it do we know for sure it takes a certain amount of time to make a habit sticky? Because it I used to think 21, and I I feel like James Clear mentions that, but then recent research I've seen is 45 because there seems to be two tripping points to the human brain's need to get back to like what it used to do. And like the first one's almost a false success point, and then you could revert easily until you get past the second point. Uh, is that BS what I'm saying, or is there something to that?

  Thoryn Stephens 39:56

  I think there's something to that. I think we've seen that in some of the data for sure. Yeah.

  Philip Pape 40:00

  Okay. So is it like six weeks? I mean, is there a number?

  Thoryn Stephens 40:03

  I don't know if I have a number. Uh we can definitely look at that. I mean, I would say four to six weeks is kind of anecdotally what I've heard, but and it also depends on the microhabit. And then it really depends on the human, you know, like what are you actually asking them truly to do? So I think there's a number of variables there.

  Philip Pape 40:17

  All right. And then you just a couple of personal questions, like besides mind altering stuff, what's another microhabit that you do like every day?

  Thoryn Stephens 40:25

  Yeah, I'm again pretty rigorous. So a really big proponent of the sweat. And so whether that's a sauna, you know, we have one here, or I do the hot Pilates where I guess I get both well sweat, I get some cardio and I get weights. So I do heavy weights, like 50 pounders. So that's one of my like non-negotiables. Try to go three or four days a week. And then other microhabits.

  Philip Pape 40:46

  Do you measure sweat? Do you measure like how much you sweat,

  Unitasking and cognitive performance

  Philip Pape 40:48

  or what do you measure?

  Thoryn Stephens 40:49

  Well, I measure I actually have water bottles that do have measurement on them. So like per class, I average about two liters of water, you know, at least. So, but again, I'm not that obsessive about it. Like I just always go with how I feel, you know, fundamentally. Another microhabit that we don't talk about a lot, but also is is related to cognition is the concept of unitasking versus multitasking. And again, this kind of goes in that non-negotiable category because it's not something you're like doing every day, but it's one of those things you can kind of put into your protocol that you can just try to adhere to. And so, you know, we're very much caught, you know, like you're you're constantly, you know, in the hustle and you have your, you know, your phone and your laptop and the TV and the kids running around. But when you're trying to focus on very specific, you know, tasks at hand, if you're trying to do four things at once, you're because of cognitive drag, you're actually going to be less neurologically optimized and probably get them done, you know, not only well, less efficiently, we could say. Um, so that idea of again, unitasking versus multitasking, I think is another really interesting one. Is that related to like the Pomodoro technique where you focus on one thing at a time or I don't know the pomodoro technique specifically, but it's probably it's that idea that again, when you're focusing on something and then you shift to another, even if it's small, just like looking at your phone and then going back, you have cognitive drag. And it takes milliseconds, you know, to then reorient yourself on the conversation, whatever it might be.

  Philip Pape 42:12

  So that is so true, man.

  Thoryn Stephens 42:14

  That is so true. Well, and you know, where it's like it's kind of the antithesis of what we're taught, you know, in the grind. You know, gotta hustle and like not really. If you just are more efficient with your time, then you actually will be, you know, higher efficiency longer term.

  Philip Pape 42:27

  Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so even though you don't obsess about this stuff, you definitely are I know into wearables. And you mentioned the aura ring. Is there another wearable you use that maybe is unique that we we can learn about? Not unique.

  Thoryn Stephens 42:37

  So I use my favorite actually is aura for sleep and then Garmin for activity, just relative to resolution. I like Aura because it's you know very small. I've been training with Whoop. I don't love it personally, but we and we have integrations with over 300, so we're kind of agnostic. I mean, at some point it doesn't really matter what you use as long as consistently and you're looking at the trends. You know, your HRV in Aura is absolutely going to be different than in your Apple Watch, which is okay. But again, as long as you're looking at the trends, it doesn't really matter. But yeah, those are kind of my my go-tos, you know, on the day-to-days, Aura and Garmin. And then, like I said, we've been doing some interesting testing with facial scanning and then also voice, so voice biometrics, and then looking at your voice. And we've seen high and medium correlations to HRV through your voice, basically. So if you're stressed, you're gonna hear in the voice because it might be a little bit higher pitched and you know, da-da-da. It's all this stuff we kind of inherently know, but now we're actually able to start to see it in the data. And the reason why these metrics are or these you know, outcome measures are important again, whether it's a face scan or a voice, is because if a human doesn't have a wearable, then they could just use the system and then get a biometric from it immediately. So that's really cool too. So those are some of the newer modalities that we've been been testing.

  Philip Pape 43:46

  I love that stuff, man. And combined with machine learning and AI and everything, it's just insane. Like we had the founder of Spranton, and and they do like, you know, just a quick visual of your body composition, your anode gyneod ratio, all that stuff, literally just. From a photo, right? And none of these suits anymore and special measurements you had to do in the past. It's crazy.

  Thoryn Stephens 44:06

  Well, I mean, in the inferences as well. I mean, that you can now learn from this data. Like on the face scan, it's measuring the microcapillary fluctuations of your face. And you know, it's just it's pretty crazy. And in what we've seen is it's very, you know, very highly correlative to both like HRV and even blood pressure. So that technology is only going to get better and better. I think where a lot of these companies though fail, and this is something that we're really razor focused on, is what do you do with that data? It's like, okay, your HRV is, you know, whoop, I think is like one of the worst. It's like, oh, your HRV is down 35%. You know, take it easy out there. And you're like, okay, but like really, is there nothing more I can be doing to help support my parasympathetic? Like maybe, you know, a cold plunge, you know, another microhabit that I do, or breath work, you know, another great microhabit that you can do anywhere for free. So yeah.

  Philip Pape 44:54

  That is a very fair critique. That that's probably where my brain was going when I thought, what am I gonna do? Because it the advice really isn't that high quality there. But it's like, okay, take the data and put it into this other system over here to figure out what to do. Now that's friction, you know. So I know.

  Thoryn Stephens 45:09

  And that's this is when we're trying to solve the same problems. Yeah. It's and and so to your point, again, it's making it as frictionless as possible. And that's where I think it's also in part meeting people with where they're at. You know, how do you collect the data? That's why we like, you know, some of these scans where if someone doesn't have a wearable, and then ultimately what do you do with it? And how do you drive action from it? You know, that's the most important.

  Philip Pape 45:29

  How do you drive action? The friction part's interesting with apps because so like my favorite food tracker is macrofactor, and people have heard me mention a billion times because I'm an affiliate and like I use it, my clients use it. But they actually, one of the things they tout as a differentiator is their speed on certain actions, and they've done the testing, and it's like getting everything down to as few taps as possible and as fast as possible. And then when you look at like your time screen time for the day, it's like two minutes, you know, for logging your food, whereas in some other app it might be 10. And that alone could be the difference.

  Thoryn Stephens 46:00

  Everything 100%. Yeah, no, we we very much agree with that type of optimization methodology. It's nice. What we talk about is actually time to protocol. Like how long does it take for a clinician, practitioner, or just a human to create a protocol, literally? And what does that look like? It could be a list of microhabits, it could be, you know, Taylor Swift's protocol they found online that they want to upload. I mean, whatever it is, and then literally, how do they then have a tracker that they can follow? So make less, especially in this day and age with you know the declining attention deficits, you know.

  Philip Pape 46:31

  Oh, I know it because people are they can't wait, and it's like, I'm just gonna go to AI and get the answer. It's not always the best answer, depending on how you ask it.

  Thoryn Stephens 46:38

  Yeah, which is terrifying in itself. That's a whole other episode. Exactly.

  Philip Pape 46:42

  All right, man. Well, we we've covered a lot of really cool things. You know, I didn't know where this would go, but I definitely think there's a lot of practical lessons, I guess to tie it up in a bow before we tell people where to find you and all that is like given all the data you've analyzed for both issues that people have, you know, the challenges that people have, like sleep you mentioned versus the microhabits, is there a couple that just float to the top all the time with people you see when it comes to like challenges that they're trying to fix and then microhabits they tend to have to use.

  Thoryn Stephens 47:12

  Oh, yeah. I mean, again, like sleep, you know, gut, which related to nutrition, depending, and then stress. I mean, those are like the three ultimately. I think every one of us, you know, to some degree could improve upon. So, and then from there, you know, getting into yeah, the specifics, you know, so things like again, stress, you know, exercise for me. I mean, that's one of my biggest, that's why I do the hot Pilates so frequently. And then the, you know, cathartic release physiologically that you're getting from the sweat specifically, but from the exercise. So when I come out of that Pilates class, I'm a different human, you know, side note. So again, it and I know these things sound fundamental. It's like, oh yeah, exercise, great. Another exercise recommendation. But how and where, and again, the plan that you follow, I think is also part of the difference. And then further, if you can start to measure it, that really shows the progress. So yeah, I think that's great.

  Philip Pape 48:04

  No, I you're right. There's like the principle of it and the benefit you get from it, but the how, where, and plan is the tailored to you. Here's your life, here's your schedule, here's you know, your body. I just had two an extra day off from training because of travel, and it wasn't worth like trying to fit in the hotel and all that. So when I worked out today, it was cathartic. Like you said, I just the body, my body was like, Thank you, you know, like thanks for doing this again because you get in that habit. And I think, you know, I was gonna ask you, like, does time of day matter that that? But we're gonna get into detail those are details. Like, I think it could maybe, but it depends on who you are and your schedule and all that.

  Thoryn Stephens 48:38

  Yeah, I mean 100%. Like, I mean, I get up at five and that's when I do my best thinking. You know, my wife is working until one in the morning, she's more of an artist and creative. So I think it it definitely depends. But, you know, to the prior point, you know, again with exercise, I feel personally I'm more neurologically optimized after the exercise, you know. So all these things are related, you know. And then of course you have like sleep as like the you know, longevity hack. Everyone's looking for like, oh, what can I take to you know live longer and be healthier and look younger? It's like sleep. That's it, like one thing, you know, let alone obviously the other pillars that we discussed. But starting with starting with the big picks.

  Philip Pape 49:16

  There was an analogy I heard someone you might have heard it. He was talking about like, what did he say? Something like if you went to a college and everybody was doing drugs, you'd be like, these people are insane. Like, but if you went and everybody was not getting sleep, you'd say, Oh, that's normal, but they have the same effect. Or you know what you know what I mean? Yeah, I think something like that. Or something, maybe it wasn't drugs, maybe it was alcohol. I don't know, but it had the same effect, right? Right. But we don't put it in the same category. Okay, man. So I know we're gonna share something that lets people identify some microhabits or a protocol you mentioned earlier.

  Thoryn Stephens 49:46

  Sure, I'd love to. Yeah, I mean, I have a dementia prevention uh protocol I can share with you that you can disseminate to the audience. That's great.

  Philip Pape 49:52

  And besides that, where do you want people to look you up?

  Thoryn Stephens 49:54

  Yeah, so they can check out brain.1. That is our neurological platform. And then we also have peptides.one with an S. And that's what we built around peptide measurement for all of our friends and family that are struggling with measuring if their peptides actually work.

  Philip Pape 50:10

  Got it. So brain.1, peptides.one, we'll get everybody the protocol. Look for those in the show notes. And this has been awesome. Thank you so much, Thorne, for coming on wits and weights and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge and your energy as well. So thank you so much.

  Thoryn Stephens 50:22

  Thank you, Philip. Really appreciate it.

"Broccoli Is Making You Fat!" (Why Single-Food Blame Is Nonsense) | Ep 471

Can broccoli make you fat? Or cause inflammation? What about sugar, carbs, seed oils, dairy, gluten, lectins, fructose, or ultra-processed foods?

Why does every fitness influencer blame a different food for your health problems? Learn about the composition fallacy in nutrition, where we blame one food for what the whole diet (or lifestyle) is responsible for.

This episode covers the logical error underneath every single-food blame claim, the evidence on the 4 loudest food villains right now, and how to think about food without organizing your diet around fear.

We examine studies on linoleic acid and inflammation, plant oils vs. butter,  ultra-processed foods, flexible vs. rigid dieting, and the prevalence of orthorexia. If you're over 40 and navigating fat loss, body composition, and decades of contradictory food advice, learn to avoid rigid food rules, binge cycles, or wellness panic.

Join in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life, WITHOUT restrictive food rules.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Food villain claims
2:57 - Composition fallacy
8:01 - Seed oils, linoleic acid, and inflammation
10:36 - Sugar and the Twinkie diet experiment
13:28 - Ultra-processed food and how fast you eat
16:44 - Celiac, gluten sensitivity, and carbs
18:48 - Skills vs. food rules
19:56 - Energy balance and food quality
22:30 - Sumo wrestlers and Paracelsus
25:10 - 80/20 flexible eating framework
27:30 - Orthorexia and binge eating cycles
29:16 - Bonus: 3-question food villain test

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  Broccoli is making you fat. I'm not kidding. Eat too much of it, drowned in butter and cheese sauce day after day, and you probably will gain fat. All right. That claim probably sounded ridiculous initially until I added some context to it. But I've actually heard the claim that broccoli is going to be a problem, just like seed oils are a problem, just like sugar is a problem. The list goes on and on. Carbs, you name it, it's the same logical structure as every food villain claim you've heard. Lectins, gluten, dairy, processed food, take your pick. Today I'm gonna show you why this entire category of advice is a logical error called the composition fallacy. What the actual evidence says about the top demonized foods, and a three-question test that you can run on the next person who tells you that a single food is the source of all your problems. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts popular fitness advice under the microscope, finds a 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 are trying to lose fat, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to eat healthy, you've been told for years that some specific food is the reason it's not working. Maybe it was sugar as far back as when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, then carbs in the 90s to the 2000s, starting with Atkins and then later on keto. Dietary fat before that, going way back to like snack well and olestra. And now it's seed oils and ultra-processed food. Every few years, a new villain rotates in. The old one gets a little half-apology, like, eh, we weren't quite right about that one. And then you're supposed to feel like, okay, now I know what's truly right as we move forward. I'm not gonna tell you whether seed oils are good or bad. I'm gonna show you the logical structure underneath these claims. Because once you understand that, you can make the decisions for yourself from an informed position and not listen to a podcaster tell you what is right or wrong. Stick around to the end because then I'm gonna give you a three-question test I call the food villain test. So the next time anyone, usually a podcaster or influencer, tells you that a single food is insert claim here, making you fat, making you inflamed, causing you any sort of issue, whatever it is, you can turn to this three-second test and know whether to take that seriously or not. And hint, probably not most of the time, but it's good to know what questions to ask. All right, so for today, we are gonna talk about the logical error in every food villain claim and why it's so sticky from a psychological perspective. The actual evidence on the four biggest food villains right now, which it's it might surprise you on one of them, so stay tuned for that. And then a model for how food affects body composition.

  Philip Pape: 02:57

  Okay, so let's start with the logical error. Philosophers call this logical fallacy the composition fallacy. Now, I don't know a lot about logical fallacies other than what I've learned from my own kids because we homeschool our kids. My wife has spent several years helping them learn about logic, and they are always calling out politicians and conspiracy theories and things that sometimes I don't even notice, like in marketing. And that's where these fallacies come from. So the composition fallacy is simple. You take a feature of one component of a system, and then you blame that component for the behavior of the whole system. That's the composition fallacy. So I'll give you an example that is outside of nutrition. Imagine I told you the steering wheel was the reason that a car crashed. The steering wheel is part of the car. Now, was it involved? Of course it was involved. It's part of the car. Could a bad steering wheel cause a crash in some cases? Of course, theoretically it could. But in most crashes, the steering wheel is probably doing what steering wheels do, and the crash happens because of how the car was driven or how another car was driving, or the road, the speed, the brakes, all of it working together as a system. So it would take some investigation to understand if truly the steering wheel was the cause of the accident. Now, food works the same way. Your body's a system. Calories come in, calories go out. You've got your hormones that get modulated, you've got hunger that goes up and down, your sleep, which affects recovery, your training, which affects everything, insulin sensitivity, nutrition, partitioning, whatever you name it. And then the result of all of that stuff coming together is how you look, how you feel, how you perform, right? Your physique. So when somebody points at a single food and says, ah, that's the reason that you're stuck, that's the reason you're fat, that's the reason you're inflamed, that's the reason XYZ, that is the steering wheel thing. They're taking a component and assigning it the behavior of the whole system. Now, sometimes a specific food is truly involved, the way steering wheel sometimes is, but you always have to zoom out and you have to look at it and understand the constraints. And far more often than not, it's more systematic than that or more complex than

  Philip Pape: 05:06

  that. So, why is this so psychologically sticky, as we say sticky as in it just like something we just latch onto? Well, the first reason is it gives you a villain. We love villains, we like boogeyman, it gives you an answer, it makes it simple. Before you've done anything else, you feel like you have something to go after, right? That you've made progress, you have an enemy to go after. The second thing is it gives you control. So a single food is something you can avoid today. And this is something I've dealt with for many years in the past, right? Cutting carbs, I can control that. Like literally just cut them out, don't buy them, don't put them in the fridge, don't go to the grocery store and get them. It's easy, okay? But it's easy, and it's easy in comparison to the things that actually work, which tend to be harder. Like energy balance is harder to manage, hormones are hard to manage, sleep is difficult. So the simplicity of the action substitutes for the difficulty of the real problem. And then the third piece, which I think is underrated, is it gives you a tribe to belong to. And you know this is true. Like, am I really calling you out? No, I admit myself, I've been in tribes. If I was in the CrossFit tribe and the Zone Diet tribe and the Paleo tribe and the keto tribe, right? All the tribes, the cut the running tribe. Once you are anti-seed oils, oh, you are with the other anti-seed oil people, and all the others are like, man, they don't know what they're talking about. Like, I feel I feel bad for them. I'm gonna pray for them. Or what they say in the South, bless their heart, right? There's a whole community that is waiting to embrace you on villainizing seed oils. And then once you've publicly declared it, whether you're an influencer or even if you're just listening and you've told all your friends and neighbors, hopefully you're not, I don't know if you're talking to your neighbors about this stuff, but walking back from that is very hard to do. As human, we're it's hard to admit that we're wrong and it it costs you what's what's called social capital. And people don't want to do that, right? So it's not, it's not people being stupid. This is a logical error. It's psychologically engineered to feel like it's correct. And calling people out or ridiculing people who fall for the claims. Okay, I'm all for ridiculing people who who push them knowingly for the wrong reasons. That's not what I'm talking about. But ridiculing people who are just subject to them, like all of us, that just makes people dig in even harder. And the way out is to really understand the mechanism so well that the claims of food villain, food villains just stop being interesting anymore. Like at this point, I and many of you who listen to this show, if you've listened to it long enough, you almost don't pay attention when someone says, Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. You're like, Yeah, probably not. Like, you could pretty much eat any food on the planet and be fine as long as it's meeting your goals as part of a flexible dietary pattern, something we've talked about before on this show. So let's go through the four top villains,

  Philip Pape: 08:01

  all right? The big villain number one is seed oils these days for whatever reason. It's super loud. People are calling it out online. Um, and that includes soybean oil, canola, corn oil, all of that. Supposedly it's driving the obesity epidemic. It causes inflammation because of the linoleic acid or because of the processing or rancidity or whatever, name whatever reason you want. But what the actual evidence says, okay, through meta-analysis of dozens of randomized controlled trials, which is the best quality type of study, thousands of people looking at what happens to inflammatory markers when you increase your linoleic acid intake, which is comes from seed oils, the result is no effect on inflammation, like CRP markers, IL6, interleukin 6, TNF alpha. Those are the three big inflammatory markers that we're all worried about. There's zero effect. And then on the other hand, to further compound the fact that seed oils aren't an issue, and in fact, might be better for you, there is just last year, 2025, JAMA Internal Medicine published a what's called a pooled cohort. 221,000 adults that were followed for up to 33 years. It doesn't get much better than that. And the main finding is that people who consume more plant oils had 16% lower total mortality. People who ate more butter had 15% higher mortality. If you could swap just 10 grams a day of butter for plant oils, there's a 17% lower mortality. So, and this is this is the finding I'm far more inclined to support because of the preponderance of the evidence for it. So, where does the seed oil panic come from? Well, two places that I could identify. The first is rodent studies, where the mice are fed soybean oil for like half their lives in environments that have nothing to do with how humans eat. And the second one is people conflating seed oils, linoleic acid with something called conjugated linoleic acid, which is like a structurally different compound sold as a weight loss supplement, which does increase inflammatory markers. And so the name sounds similar, the molecules are different. I don't know how many people are going with the first one or the second one, but there is no evidence to support that seed oils are the villain that everyone wants to make them out to be. And in fact, there's strong evidence that reducing your saturated fat and supplementing with these types of oils on a one-for-one basis is actually correlated with far-improved health outcomes and actually is in line with the American Heart Association recommendations. So the data doesn't match the narrative. That's the first

  Philip Pape: 10:36

  one. Villain number two is sugar. All right. You've heard for years and years and years, okay, sugar is the cause or the source of all our fat, especially corn syrup, that, you know, because it's processed, it just bypasses your appetite regulation. It spikes insulin, makes you store fat. So I'm gonna tell you about a guy named Mark Haub. Okay, Mark Haub is a nutrition professor at Kansas State. And back in 2010, he ran a 10-week experiment on himself. Okay, I love this guy for doing this. This time it's fun. I know it's like clickbaiting, it gets attention, but it's it's cool when people do this. So he ate Twinkies, little Debbie snacks, Doritos, Oreos, sugary cereals. Like 60% of his diet was just straight, let's call it junk food. Okay. He took a multivitamin and ate some vegetables on the side, but the bulk of what was going into his mouth was sugar and processed carbs. But the one thing he controlled was calories. He ate about 1,800 calories a day, down from his usual 2,600 calorie maintenance level. So that puts him in what? Do the math, 800 calorie deficit. Well, what happens when you're in a deficit? Well, you lose weight. He lost 27 pounds, but this is the cool thing. His LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. That's the bad cholesterol we call it. His HDL went up 20%, his triglycerides dropped 39%, his BMI went from 28.8 down to 24.9 while eating all of this junk. Now, is the conclusion go eat Twinkies as a diet? Of course not. He himself didn't recommend that. It was the principle of the thing that even on a diet that most would call the most awful diet ever, if you're in a calorie deficit, you can lose not only weight, but lose body fat and improve your health and blood markers because of the correlation between those. All that sugar didn't override physiology and thermodynamics. That's my point. Okay, not to eat Twinkies, but the fact that sugar is not the problem. There's also a 2020 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at isocaloric swaps, that means one-for-one swaps of sugar for starch. And they found very modest changes in LDL cholesterol and really no differences in body composition. Sugar's role in obesity in the real world, IRL, as they as the kids would say, where it shows up mostly in liquid form like soda, you know, sugary sodas. This is why I recommend diet soda, so you can lower the amount of calories and sugar you get just in general. But it's found in soda, juice, sweetened coffee drinks, you know, those big calorie bombs from Starbucks. The role of obesity there is absolutely real, but it's not because of the sugar. It's not because of the glucose. Okay, it's because of the calories. It's because you're consuming too many calories in too easy a way. And sugar does make it very easy to do that. So let's separate the fact from fiction

  Philip Pape: 13:28

  there. All right, villain number three is ultra-processed food. I know you're thinking, Philip, are you gonna actually defend ultra-processed food? No, remember, today's episode is about showing you that you cannot name a single type of food as a universal villain. There's a famous study that everybody cites to prove that ultra-processed foods make you fat. And it's the same study I cite all the time, not to prove that ultra-processed food makes you fat, but to prove that having a diet that includes primarily ultra-processed food leads to overconsumption. Those are two different things. So this is Kevin Hall's 2019 inpatient study at the National Institutes of Health. And Kevin Hall is a researcher I do respect a lot. He is a smart guy. He's careful with his data. He doesn't overclaim. And he took 20 people for two weeks on ultra-processed food, two weeks on minimally processed food. So it's a what they call a crossover design. It was matched for calories for macros, sugar, salt, fiber, but people could eat as much as they wanted. And the result was that people ate 500 extra calories per day on the ultra-processed diet, and they gained about two pounds in two weeks. So ultra-processed food makes you fat, right? Let's now let's add the nuance, okay? Which which Kevin Hall did. He looked at the why, he looked at the root cause. And the answer is how fast you eat and the energy density of the food. So on the ultra-processed diet, people were eating 48 calories a minute. On the minimally processed diet, 31 calories a minute. So the ultra-processed food was 50% faster to consume. Makes sense. It's processed, it's like denser, right? It's more calorie dense. And people still felt the same hunger and fullness on both diets. They just ate faster before their satiety signals could catch up. Now that's a behavioral mechanism. It's not a metabolic mechanism. And so the conclusion here is the food environment makes it easier to eat more calories. Okay, so that's different than saying ultra-processed food itself makes you fat. Then we have a 2025 follow-up in Nature Medicine by Dicken and colleagues. And it was the same kind of crossover design over eight weeks, but with a little bit of a twist to it. Both arms of the study had to follow national nutrition guidelines. So that means the ultra-processed side got fiber-rich, uh, high-protein ultra-processed foods, as opposed to what we normally think of, which are hyperpalatable snacks. And both groups lost weight. The minimally processed group lost 2% body weight, the ultra-processed group lost 1%. But but the researchers have predicted the ultra-processed food would gain weight. And they didn't. But they they lost weight just less than the other group. So ultra-processed food isn't something that just automatically causes cat fat gain. It's just a category of food that, in its hyper palatable form, makes it easy to overconsume. That's it. So if you structure your choices toward more fiber, more protein, even with ultra-processed food, it actually causes less of that. Now I'm not telling you go and eat just high protein, high fiber processed food. I'm just saying those are the things that matter, not the fact that they are ultra-processed. Okay.

  Philip Pape: 16:44

  The last villain is gluten, and I want to keep this short because the data is super clean here. Celiac disease affects 1% of the population. Those are people who absolutely cannot have gluten. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is that broader category that everyone seems to have these days, for some reason, everyone has a gluten intolerance, apparently. The latest 2025 meta-analysis puts that at 6% of adults. That's it. And then when researchers do what's called double blind challenges, where people get either gluten or placebo and they don't know what it is, only 24% of self-reported gluten-sensitive people actually have reproducible systems, symptoms. So that means 94% of adults have no clinical reason to avoid gluten. And of the ones who think they're sensitive, three-quarters are responding to something other than gluten. It's often FODMAPs. Sometimes the overall improvement they get will come from cutting something like refined wheat products because of the FODMAPs. There's a lot of reasons. This is why people go on carnival and they're like, yeah, I went on carnivore, it solved all my problems. Well, you know what? You just did an elimination diet. You eliminated something that was causing you issues, but it's not all plants. Okay. So, and I feel bad for you if you think it is, and then you live the rest of your life just cutting out so many amazing foods and not getting enough fiber, et cetera. So if you feel worse with gluten or with any other particular food like dairy, don't eat it. Like I'm not telling you to eat it. I'm just saying the universal claim of gluten is making us all fat, all inflamed, causing all sorts of other issues with our gut, whatever. It's not a real thing. There's a very small, small, small effect with people that may have an issue like celiac, but it's being scaled up to apply to everyone, and the evidence does not support it. Okay, I'm very passionate about this episode for some reason. So let me take a pause and let me just take a breather here because a lot of you are thinking, okay, what do I actually do with all this information? How do I structure my eating without falling into these food fear traps? Like, what do I eat? Tell me like what the alternative

  Philip Pape: 18:48

  is. Well, that's why we have what we have. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy. It's a program, it's a 26-week coaching program. It's mainly for women over 40 who have spent years cycling through all of these diets, all of these food rules, all of these villains. You know what I'm talking about. Cut this, add that. This is poison. That's a superfood. Rinse and repeat. Well, what if we replace all of that with a structured, flexible, much more liberating approach? You track your numbers for awareness and you learn to read your own data, but then you eat in a very, very flexible way, not only in terms of food, the food on your plate, but also how you go through phases of fat loss maintenance and muscle building so that it feels much more sustainable. It's easy to do. You're excited about it, you enjoy it. I want you to go to eatmore liftheavy.com to check it out. It's called Eat More Lift Heavy for a reason. It's a great thing to do. Go check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. And if you're tired of having to cut carbs or cut whatever else it is and feel like you're restricted, we've got the alternative. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All

  Philip Pape: 19:56

  right. So if no single food is making you fat, what is? The honest answer is energy balance. Okay, nothing new here, folks. But if you're new to the podcast or you wanted a refresher, let's just get into it. The amount of energy you take in from food relative to the amount your body burns and expense. So if you have a net surplus over time, you gain weight. If you have a net deficit over time, you lose weight. That's it. That's the governing law. Every diet that has ever worked has worked through this mechanism. Whether the people running the diet acknowledge it or not, okay, even the carnivore people, the keto people, anyone selling you the seed oil-free lifestyle. Heck, people that are selling you you don't have to count calories or you don't have to track or whatever, it still comes down to calories. Now, it's not all about calories. Energy balance and losing weight on a pure physics and math basis is about calories, but food quality does matter. Okay. So this is the straw man people use. They hear calories in, calories out, and they're like, okay, so that you're saying food quality doesn't matter. Nope, absolutely not. The actual position supported by what we have in the evidence is energy balance is the boss in terms of weight gained or weight loss. Food quality is helps you with your body composition, how you look, how you feel. See, so they each do a different job for you. So when we talk about food quality, what does it affect? Well, first, satiety, fullness per calorie. So if you're eating more whole foods, vegetables, lean protein, fruit, beans, whole grains, all of these give you more grams, more volume on your scale, right? More fiber per calorie. And by the way, fiber has fewer calories per gram than other carbs. And so they make controlling those calories easier. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Second, micronutrient density. A long term diet dominated by low nutrient processed foods are going to be worse for your health outcomes, even if your body composition stays the same or stays in a good range. You can still be lean and still be unhealthy, is my point. And then third is the rate of eating, which is the research we talked about earlier. Hyperpalatable processed foods make it easier to consume more calories before your brain registers the fullness. But again, food quality doesn't override thermodynamics. You can't eat enough quote unquote clean food, but be in a calorie surplus and stay lean. And you can't eat dirty food in a deficit and gain fat. You're actually going to lose fat. Isn't that interesting? Okay. All things equal, of course. We're not even talking about lifting weights and preserving muscle and all that fun stuff. I love a really good example here. It's sumo wrestlers. Okay, sumo wrestlers. So awesome. I haven't talked about them in a long time. So the staple meal of a sumo wrestler is called chanko nabe. It is chicken, fish, tofu, vegetables, and rice. What is that? Well, that's whole foods. It's some of the most nutrient-dense, traditional type of meals or cooking on the planet. And they eat five to eight thousand calories a day. They are among the heaviest athletes on the planet Earth. So they eat what we'd call clean food in a massive calorie surplus. So they have massive body weight. Just a very simple example. Now, what's interesting is we can go into the fact that they have healthier blood markers than you would expect for their weight because they have a massive amount of muscle. Totally different topic, but worth maybe worth doing an episode sometime, right? And I the the example of Mark Hobb with the Twinkie diet, that was kind of like the opposite of the exact same thing, right? He was eating a totally junk diet and then losing weight. Again, it came down to energy balance. And we're not saying that that's a good thing, depending on your lifestyle and the quality of the food, right? Just what we talked about. So at the end of the day, I would say the dose matters when it comes to these foods. There's a saying from a physician back way back in the 1500s, a guy named Paracelsus. I think it's Celsus or Paracelsus, I don't know. He said, the dose makes the poison. That's where we get that phrase from. Water can kill you if you drink too much of it. It's called hyponneutremia, and people died from that. If you have too much oxygen in too high of a concentration, it can damage your lungs. Right? So nothing is safe at every dose, and nothing is dangerous at every dose. The dose in the context of the system, that's what determines the outcome. So seed oils at say 7% of your calories in a diet rich in vegetables, lean protein, fiber, there is zero evidence of any harm, and there's possibly some benefit if they're replacing saturated fats. Whereas if you have seed oils at 35% of your calories in a diet full of full, you know, fried foods, low fiber calorie surplus, which guess what? That's like the standard American diet. And that's the problem, is we're we're comparing apples and oranges. Okay. Just because you eat a lot of seed oils and you're fat doesn't mean it was the seed oils. You're probably getting them from ultra-processed foods and you're drinking lots of soda and you're over consuming calories, et cetera, and you're not lifting weights. I could go on. Okay? It's not the seed oil that's the cause, it's the dose in the context of your overall diet and your dietary pattern. Same with sugar, same with ultra-processed food, same with everything. And that is, in my mind, very liberating. Like to me, that's the essence of flexible eating. So let's talk

  Philip Pape: 25:10

  about that. What is the framework that you can use that has worked with the hundreds of clients that I have coached? It's very simple. Roughly 80% of your calories from whole, minimally processed foods that you enjoy, about 20% from whatever you want. Now notice how I said that. The 80% are whole, minimally processed foods, but you're still gonna enjoy them. You're gonna pick the ones that you like. Okay, don't force force yourself to eat quote unquote healthy or clean foods that you don't like. There's plenty of foods that you should or or will like. And then 20% whatever you want with nothing off limits. There is no villain on your list. There's no moral hierarchy of foods. And the evidence supports this. There's a randomized controlled trial from 2021. Conlin and colleagues published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. They took resistance-trained adults, put them on a 20% calorie deficit for 10 weeks, and they randomized them to either flexible dieting or rigid dieting. So the same calories, the same protein. The only difference was the rules around which foods you were allowed to eat. During the diet phase, both groups lost similar amounts of body weight and fat. But then they did something smart in the study. They followed both groups for 10 more weeks of free eating. And that's where they saw differences. The flexible eating group gained 1.7 kilograms of lean mass back. The rigid group lost 0.7 kilograms of lean mass. So flexible dieting ended up with more muscle and better long-term outcomes. And the reason is because rigid dieting predicts binge cycles. Decades and decades of eating disorder research has shown this. When you label foods as bad or forbidden, those foods become psychologically supercharged in your mind. The all-or-nothing mindset kicks in. You're either perfect or you're a failure. And then eventually, guess what happens? You crack, you let go, you binge, you swear off the food again, you start over. It is a vicious loop or cycle. Flexible dieting prevents that loop because you're including the foods you enjoy at a small dose regularly. It is not a moral issue, and it loses its status as this forbidden thing. It becomes just food. That is it. So when I push back on food demonization on wits and weights, the what's underneath it is this idea of like orthorexia, this obsessive preoccupation with eating pure and clean foods, the binge eating cycles, the eating disorders, that's what I'm concerned about for folks. Okay, it increases food fear, it increases social anxiety around eating, it predicts these cycles. So the fix is to lower all of those moral stakes around food, knowing how the human brain works, and instead raise the stakes around the system itself, like energy balance, protein training, recovery, the big levers that you can work around that actually align with your goals. All right, before I wrap up, remember I'm gonna give you the food villain test. Three questions takes 30 seconds, coming right up. But if this episode made you realize, hey, the problem isn't a specific food. It's not carbs, it's not sugar, it's not seed oils, whatever. Maybe you're on carnivore right now and you're like, ah, I can't do this the rest of my life. The problem is really a lack of a structured system that does work for you. That is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. That is the 26-week coach program. You learn a skill one week at a time. And if you're done cycling through all this food nonsense, if you're done with worrying about what's poisoning you and your hormones and starting over constantly, this is going to fix that with you because it is super sustainable. It's skill building, it's positive. We empower you, we support you along the way. It's very flexible, and you're gonna come out the other side feeling so strong, empowered, able to do whatever you want to do for your physique and health for the rest of your life. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. That is the whole point. I want you to fire us when you're done. Okay, you don't need a coach forever. You need to build the skills and the structure so that food is not ruining or running your life anymore. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com and we'll see you there. All right,

  Philip Pape: 29:16

  here's that 30-second food villain test. It's three questions. Question one, at what dose? That's it. At what dose? If someone cannot tell you a dose where the food becomes harmful versus a dose that is fine in context, then they don't understand the food. Okay. If they say seed oils is harmful at any dose, sorry, that is not true. Question two, in what context? So if the claimer on the food doesn't account for the rest of the diet around it, calorie balance, training, the individual's health, that's the composition fallacy we started with in this episode. Okay. You're pointing at one thing and blaming it for the whole. And then question three, what human studies support this? Now, I'm not a big fan of like calling people out and saying, tell me the study, link the study. You know, it's more of hey, the preponderance of evidence should be there somewhere. And I'm fine if you, instead of asking the person, because you might be talking to a regular person as opposed to like a quote unquote expert, go ahead and look it up yourself. Like go to scholar.google.com and start looking up. Try to use AI and really do your searches. Try to avoid, you know, you want to avoid cherry picking here, but at least ask for the studies that support it so that you can look into those. If the studies are just like a mouse study over here, a testimonial over here, a case study over here, a documentary on Netflix, okay, that's not really the evidence we're looking for. So those three questions can really help you decide. Which at the end of the day, do you even need to ask these questions? I don't know. I would say probably not, because just about any claim about a single food being a villain is probably false, but it's worth going through the exercise. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember that no single food is making you fat, causing you inflammation, or anything else. The dose, the context, the system are where it's at. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.

Why "Muscle Confusion" Might Actually Work for Hypertrophy | Ep 470

Is "muscle confusion" just bro science, or does recent strength training research actually back it up? You migh be surprised...

We get into how muscles grow, why exercise selection changes which regions of a muscle develop, and the role of muscle length in hypertrophy.

This episode covers the last decade of research on exercise variation and hypertrophy. These include studies on leg press vs. leg extension and on triceps and hamstrings at different muscle lengths.

We distinguish the original P90X version of "muscle confusion" from the systematic variation (aka periodization and mesocycles) that you can intentionally plan into your strength training programming.

This framing matters most for adults over 40 who've been told to pick a few compound lifts and add weight to the bar forever (sound familiar?).

Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Muscle confusion and exercise variation
2:25 - Where "muscle confusion" came from
4:00 - Mechanical tension and progressive overload
5:52 - Muscles as regional structures
7:30 - Regional hypertrophy in the quads
10:24 - Muscle length and hypertrophy
14:30 - Strategic exercise selection
15:45 - Training programming for adults over 40
17:01 - 3 rules for planned variation
20:42 - Caveats on variation
23:35 - Bonus: lengthened-position swap per muscle group

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  If your training program looks basically the same as it did a year ago, because every coach tells you, just pick your lifts and add weight to the bar, but your muscle growth has stalled in spite of doing everything right. This episode is for you. We're gonna look at research from the last three years in the area of quote unquote muscle confusion, and some of it's gonna surprise you. I'm gonna show you what kind of exercise variation actually does grow more muscle, which ones waste your time, and a simple way to balance all of this along with your progressive overload. 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, Philip Pape, and we're gonna talk about the concept of muscle confusion. It probably sounds like something from the 90s, from P90X, from classic bodybuilding days, you know, random workout, shock the muscle, uh, progressive overload, what's that? Maybe not tracking, you know, none of the good stuff we often talk about these days. And a lot of coaches, you know, even evidence-based for the last decade or two have said, hey, that that that concept is nonsense. Let's focus on just muscular tension and growth and progressing our lifts. And I generally agree. I still generally agree. But honestly, there is there are aspects of bro science that do hold up in a way. And I like to address these because I think it's fun to tease apart reality from myth. And the phrase muscle confusion, I think, covers different things, two specific ideas, and we're gonna separate those. One of those ideas doesn't make any sense at all, complete nonsense. The other, the one that is a real driver of muscle growth, uh, especially the older you get and the more that you train, might give you this extra advantage once you understand it. And then stick around to the end of this episode because I'm gonna give you the single highest payoff exercise swap for each major muscle group. If you only change one thing in your training this week, this bonus at the end is the one that you can incorporate. All right, in this episode, I'm gonna cover why the original P90X version of muscle confusion was indeed broscience and what Tony Horton himself has admitted about it. The actual research from the last two to three years on regional muscle growth and muscle length training, and then a simple rule of thumb to set up your accessory work so you're getting the most out of every

  Philip Pape: 02:25

  session. All right, let's start with what muscle confusion originally meant, because I think a lot of people argue against it without realizing what they're arguing against. Okay, so the phrase actually predates P90X. We can go back to Joe Weeder. Joe Weeder was writing about something called the muscle confusion principle decades ago in the old bodybuilding magazines, and then it finally hit, I guess, what you'll call the mainstream, is in the infomercials about 20 years ago, the mid-2000s, let's say, Tony Horton. And the pitch was that your muscles get used to exercises and then they stop growing. So you need to constantly shock them with new movements to force adaptation. Monday is Plyo, Wednesday is Kenpo karate, Friday is yoga X with weighted curls. You know, you get the idea you've probably done something like this. Maybe you're laughing out loud right now. And if it kind of sounds like nonsense to you now, especially if you listen to Wits and Weights, you're definitely not alone because Tony Horton has admitted on multiple podcasts that it was a marketing term. Muscle confusion was a marketing term. The team made up the phrase as a label for what was just variety. That's it. And we call this something else generally. It's called periodization. So generally that, you know, labels are mean a lot, especially when we think about the fitness industry and marketing. There was another interview where he said muscle confusion and periodization are the same thing. So again, variety. That's really what we're talking about. And so that's the piece we're gonna say could work for certain reasons. We're gonna get into it. Now,

  Philip Pape: 04:00

  the bro science piece of this is the idea that muscles, you know, memorize your exercises or they get bored or whatever. Nonsense. Skeletal muscle responds to mechanical tension. That is the primary driver of hypertrophy. And you need sufficient volume with that mechanical tension to induce progressive overload, right? You have to have enough of the stimulus over time and the tension to grow. I mean, you don't want, you can't use mechanical tension today and then skip training for three weeks and hope for it to work because you're going to get detrained. So if you do the same lift week after week and you keep adding load or reps because you are pushing close to failure and inducing muscular tension, your body will adapt and you'll get stronger for next time. And that is the process. Very simple, full stop. You don't need muscle shock or any of this crazy nonsense. Randomly changing exercises, especially if you're doing it every session, that actually destroys the thing that drives long-term growth, which is your ability to track progressive overload and get enough frequency and stimulus on a specific movement pattern. Can you still grow in some ways? Yes, there are definitely programs where they rotate a lot and you still grow, but it's very hard to tell that you're getting stronger on your bench if every Wednesday is a completely different pressing variation drawn out of a hat. And again, it doesn't preclude growth if you're stimulating the same muscles. It just may not be very efficient. So when we push back on muscle confusion, there's a lot of validity to that. And the idea of picking a small set of exercises and just sticking with them is a great way to drive progress. And I would recommend that to all beginners and most intermediate lifters. And I've said that on this show many, many times. It's why I do like programs like starting strength. They're very basic compound lift style programs, especially when you're a beginner.

  Philip Pape: 05:52

  So we want to talk about some new evidence though in the last few years that addresses a narrower question. Does it matter which exercises you pick? And does loading those same muscle groups from multiple angles because of that variation produce different growth than loading it from just the one angle you get in a single movement pattern? And the answer, surprisingly, maybe, is yes. Yes, it does. And it does so in a way that has some practical implications for your accessory work. And that's where things get useful on this show. We want to tell you how to actually implement this in your real life. Okay, so to understand why exercise selection matters more than we used to think, I want to drop an assumption on you that a muscle is a single object. This is an assumption many of us have, right? That like there is a muscle. That is not true. A muscle is a structure and it has regions. For example, the biceps has a proximal portion near the shoulder and a distal portion near the elbow. So proximal is near, distal is far. The quadriceps, right? The quads of your leg have four separate heads, hence the word quad. Each head has a top, middle, and bottom. The triceps has a long head, a lateral head, and a medial head, right? Tri-three. And they all have different geometric relationships to the shoulder and to the elbow. So when you do an exercise, the load gets distributed unevenly across that muscle, that muscle belly. And it gets concentrated in regions where the geometry of the exercise puts the most tension. The more you understand that, the more you understand why different exercises produce different growth patterns, even when they technically target the same muscle group. So even when you're when you swear in the gym that I'm training my chest, you might be growing different parts of your chest. Case in point, flat bench versus incline. For anybody who knows anything about that at all, you know that they hit different parts of the chest. So I want to share some data because numbers are really helpful. I'm an engineer, I like data, and I always like to tie it back to metrics and numbers. Um, and this some of this stuff might surprise you. So it's interesting. There's a foundational study by Fonseca and colleagues in 2014. They took young men and split them into two groups. One group did only back squat for 12 weeks, another group rotated among squat, leg press, deadlift, and lunge across the same training week. So all back squats versus four different leg exercises each week. But the total weekly volume was matched. The total quad growth was the same between the groups or similar between the groups, but when the researchers looked head by head, so muscle, muscle head, the squat-only group had gaps in certain heads of the muscle, the rectus femoris and the vastus medialis. You don't have to know what these are, those are, you can look them up. The varied group, the group that had multiple exercises, grew all four heads of the quad more uniformly. And so that was kind of the first sign in the literature that exercise selection affects which regions of a muscle grow beyond just how much total growth happens. Now, again, we're talking hypertrophy, we're talking muscle growth. A lot of this growth, a lot of this isn't gonna translate one-on-one with strength if that's your goal, right? There's significant overlap for sure. But if you, for example, have already well-developed heads of the muscle, you may benefit more from the big movement patterns in a systemic way. So that's just a caveat. Anyway, fast forward to very recent research back in 2024, Burke and colleagues, they did an in-person or a within-person study. Uh, and this one's pretty compelling. They had each participant train one leg with leg press and the other leg with leg extension for eight weeks. So within your own body, you're training each leg different ways. Kind of interesting, right? So one leg gets a leg press, the other the leg extension, and then they measured the rectus femoris and the vasus lateralis using ultrasound. So again, two heads of the quad. And what they saw is the leg extension leg grew the rectus femoris more, and the leg press grew the vasus lateralis more. So same person, same effort, different exercise, different regions, different regions growing. And the statistical probability of this correlation was as high as 0.99, which is almost a perfect correlation. So that's kind of the regional heads finding. The second

  Philip Pape: 10:24

  piece of this mechanism is muscle length. And this one might be even more important because you've heard a lot of talk about the short and long positions of the muscle and lengthened partials, things like that. So now there's a series of studies showing that loading a muscle in a lengthened position produces more growth than loading it in a shortened position for the same number of sets and reps. And just quick caveat before you jump to ah, I see, see, I need to be training lengthened. We're gonna find that it's still beneficial to train the full range of motion for a variety of reasons. But let's just look at this. So Mayo and colleagues 2023, they had their subjects do triceps extensions overhead with one arm and triceps pushdowns at the side with the other arm. So again, this is a within person type of deal. And both arms got the same training volume. So after 12 weeks, the long head of the triceps had grown 29% on the overhead side and only 20% on the pushdown side, the whole triceps grew 20% versus 14%. Now, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? So in the overhead, now I've always thought or I learned a long time ago that overhead triceps work tends to be, tends to blow up your triceps more, and that it's because of the length and position, because of that extra range of motion. By the way, the overhead group used less weight than the pushdown group. Now, not that it translates directly, but that's just interesting, right? So the length and position was the the real key variable here, not the load. The overarm, the overhead arm grew more despite working with lower absolute weight on the bar. I think I said that right, right? Yeah, the overhead group used less weight but had more growth. So that's interesting. The same lab, they tested hamstrings the same way. So they did a seated leg curl where your hip is flexed, your hamstring is stretched over the hip joint, right? A seated leg curl versus a prone or lying leg curl where the hip is extended and the hamstring is shorter. After 12 weeks, the total hamstring volume grew 14% on the seated side and only 9.3% on the prone side. So it's 50% more growth from the same movement, but done in a different muscle length. So the seated seems better than the prone. And then in 2023, another group looked at the big calf muscle called the gastrosinemius. The group that trained mostly through the bottom stretched portion of the range, remember, this is calf raises. We talk about it all the time, how important it is to stretch at the bottom, have that height, and really have that ankle come down. So you stretch at the bottom, produced more than twice the muscle growth of the group that trained mostly through the top shortened position. Same load on the bar. The difference just where in the range of motion the muscle was working the hardest. So I think you get the picture from all of these studies. The same muscle can respond differently to different exercises and to different parts of the range of motion. And the mechanism here is straightforward. Mechanical tension drives growth, and different exercises apply that tension to different regions of the muscle at different points along the strength curve. So it's not muscle shock, muscle surprise, novelty effect. It's just physics and geometry. That is fascinating. As an engineer who loves to explain things with science, that is so cool. It still comes down to mechanical tension, right? But now you're talking about how you get to apply that tension in the proper way for what your goal is. And this is where the idea of imbalances actually carries some validity, right? Because if you're overdoing it in one region of the muscle, um, you could get an imbalance. Now, I'm gonna go way back to my starting strength days and say, you know, if you're if you're training the full movement patterns, by definition, you shouldn't be as imbalanced because everything's working together as it should. However, because of life, because of injury, because of improper movement, because of, because, because we do still see some level of imbalance. Plus, a lot of you want to do hypertrophy and grow your muscles and look better and all that. And so you might even create imbalances by training too much of the same thing, for example. And that's kind of what we're getting at when we talk about this concept. So that brings us to strategic exercise selection, where you cover different regions and different muscle lengths to drive more uniform growth across the whole muscle. And that is in concert with the major movement patterns, which also, in a sense, do a similar thing, but may hold you back if your bottleneck is a weak area of your muscle and the movement pattern doesn't stress that muscle group. Does that make sense? That's where I think variations can blow you up if you are in that situation. Whereas for others, they may not add anything and they may just add fatigue and volume that are unnecessary. So it's very interesting. All right, now if you're hearing this and thinking, all right, it all makes sense, but I don't want to spend a ton of time researching which exercises go with which heads of my quads. All right. And I get it. And you know, most lifters don't want to be their own programmer. They want to lift, they want to see the numbers go up, they want to know that someone else has thought about the program or the training. And that's why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. This is our program, Eat More Lift Heavy, where the programs are available already to cover a variety of goals, days per week, equipment, and skill level. And we assign it to you on day one based on what's going on with your intake, your life, your equipment, your experience, your goals. Right? We don't just give you a content library of a million templates or an app that has unlimited selection. We actually tell you here's what you can do to make the most out of where you are right now. And typically they're based on compound lifts with accessories rotating on a certain type of schedule. And the more advanced you are, the more of this kind of rotation and variation you might have. So this muscle length and regional growth stuff I'm talking about today is baked into how I like to structure our programs. And Coach Carol, who is also in Eat More Lift Heavy, she has written up some excellent training programs as well. Because many of you, you can't afford to spend hours and hours trying to research this stuff. So Eat More Lift Heavy, it's a 26-week coached program built around these ideas. Eat enough, lift heavy, progressive overload, know exactly what to do, focus on one thing a week. Don't get overwhelmed. You know what to do next. You focus on your biggest constraint, you make progress, you get accountability. It's as simple as that. There's a lot of extra bells and whistles, there's live coaching calls, there's a private community, there's lots of resources. That's all fine and good. But the main thing is that you actually implement the information to make progress. If you want to learn more, go to eatmore liftheavy.com, check it out, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. All right, I want to get practical

  Philip Pape: 17:01

  now. How do you use this stuff? Okay, assuming you're not, assuming you don't join our program and we just make it easy for you and you want to program your own stuff. How do you do it? I'm gonna give you three rules. If you apply these three rules, you'll get the most benefit from what the research tells us works. And again, it all comes down to mechanical tension, but it's more complicated as always. And you're gonna get the progressive overload that does build your muscle. All right, rule number one anchor your compound lifts. What I mean by that is the main lifts in your program shouldn't change much. Okay, until you get into advanced, like something like conjugate or powerlifting style thing, anchor your lifts, your squat or your hinge variant, your horizontal press, which is usually a bench press of some kind, vertical press, rowing, andor pull downs. Okay. I think I covered them all, or deadlift as well. I said hinge variant, but squat and deadlift. So even if it's a Romanian deadlift, even if it's a JM or an AD press, whatever, the variation is keep them stable for like eight weeks, maybe 12 weeks. Don't rotate them. All right, that way you build the neuromuscular adaptation. Your body learns the movement patterns. It's essentially a skill, and you'll be able to load it heavier from session to session. You're gonna be using your natural movement patterns. I think that's really, really important. All right, don't switch around from leg press to split squat to step-ups and just all over the place. Do not do that for your main lifts. Okay, so that's the first one. That's like your stable platform for the program. Rule number two is to choose complementary exercises, but rotate them on what's called a mesocycle. This is it's not too complicated. A mesocycle is just a long enough period of time, like four or six weeks, maybe eight weeks, where you swap out your accessories to start hitting different regions of the muscle groups. Okay. And you might already be using hitting different regions within your week, like if you do triceps on two days a week and you hit the long and short heads, you may, or the two, two, two of the two or the three of the heads, you might already have that built in, but then you're going to swap things out for slight variations after, say, six weeks, even if the compound lifts stay the same. And that gives you some variety as well, makes it fun. It's something to look forward to, but you need a long enough runway for your biceps, your triceps, your calves, your hamstrings, your delts, you know, direct chest, like pec work, that you actually make progress and then you rotate over these mesocycles, these blocks within the big block. And then rule number three is at least one exercise per muscle group should definitely load that muscle in a lengthened position. Now, if you're doing full range of motion, you are hitting the lengthened position generally, but certain exercises will hit it harder. Right? So if you're gonna pick two to three exercises per muscle group across the week or across your block, make sure one of them stretches the muscle really nicely under load. So for triceps, that means overhead. Like have an overhead thing in there. Oh, I'm always thinking triceps have something overhead. Don't just do press downs. For hamstrings, a movement where your hip is flexed. Okay, where your hip is flexed. For chest, a fly with a deep bottom stretch or press where the dumbbells go below the line of your chest. For biceps, an angle where the arm is behind the torso. So in this case, I love incline bicep curls. So I think you get the pattern, right? I think you get it. And I'm gonna give you a specific swap for each muscle group in the bonus at the end of today's episode. So hang tight for that. That's it. That is how you upgrade your programming to take advantage of this and get a really effective workout. You anchor the compound lifts, you rotate your accessories using a mesocycle, and you hit one lengthened position movement per muscle group. All right. Now I

  Philip Pape: 20:42

  want to address something that I know you're probably thinking, because I love nuance. We always lose nuance. That's why I like podcasts, long form. Okay. I am not saying that variation is more important than volume or progressive overload. Not even close. Okay, you have to go near failure on enough sets with enough frequency and progressively overload those lifts. You have to eat enough, you have to need enough protein, probably enough carbs. Are you sleeping? These matter way more than exercise selection. I'll tell you that right now. Okay. I'm also not saying that every study tells us this is exactly how it is. There are some studies that suggest maybe the benefit is really in the combination of all these things. And you're gonna get that just from a normal, well-structured program that we've talked about today. And I'm not also not saying you you make this a random variation where you're constantly switching around because that is not gonna help you out either. All right. I would call variation a refinement on top of the fundamentals. That's it. It's a refinement on top of the fundamentals. It's something to think about. One little thing I didn't mention, I'm just throwing it in there right now, is a finisher. This is just a bonus. You can add a finisher at just the lengthened position. Look it up, go to Google or YouTube, check it out, what I'm talking about. Just look up lengthened partials, and you can use that as a finisher, might. Be an extra fun thing to try. So that is where we land on this with the principles. Before we wrap up, I want to remind you that I promised I'm going to give you a single highest payoff swap for each major muscle group in just a second. But if any part of this episode connected with you, if you realize I haven't been running things quite the right way for my program and I'm not quite sure what to do, that is why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. It is going to level you up so much in your skills, which is my mission in life is to help you build these skills so you don't need to depend on another coach again. I'm sorry to all the other coaches listening where I'm ruining your long-term revenue per client or whatever. But I want people to fire me. I want people to learn and be excited. And you know what usually happens is you learn, you get excited, you grow, you build muscle, you lose fat, you look better. You're like, okay, what's next? I want to level up to the next skill. And that's how this thing should work. So eat more lift heavy, eatmore liftheavy.com, a 26-week coach program, primarily for adults over 40, to build the nutrition and strength training skills to build and preserve muscle, lose fat, manage your physique and sustain it and eat well and sustainably eat for the rest of your life. No diets, okay, no cutting carbs, none of that nonsense. You're gonna get a coach-assigned training program, monthly live coaching calls, a community where you can get accountability in addition to just the program itself, which is one skill per week that you focus on. It's very achievable. And it's an incredible program. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. I would love to see you there. You can learn everything about it on the page, eatmoreliftheavy.com. All right. If

  Philip Pape: 23:35

  you only change one thing in your training this week, swap one accessory per muscle group for its lengthened position version. So here we go. Triceps. Trade cable pushdowns for overhead rope or dumbbell extensions. Hamstrings, trade one set of prone leg curls, that's lion leg curls, for seated leg curls. Biceps, swap a preacher curl for an incline dumbbell curl. Okay, where your arms hang behind your torso. Your arms should be basically straight down when you're sitting. Chest, swap a flat dumbbell fly for an incline dumbbell fly with a deep stretch at the bottom. Alternatively, you can use a pec deck if you have one available. Calves, trade one set of standing calf raises for one where you let your heel drop as deep below the platform as you can. Now, this may be the same exercise, just positioning it differently, getting a higher box or platform or whatever. That's it. I think you can experience some more growth by just making these tweaks and have fun in the gym next time you go train. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, growing more muscle comes down to loading the same muscle well with mechanical tension from more than one angle. Nothing fancier than that. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.

The 20-Minute Fix for Menopause Belly Fat | Ep 469

Can you target menopause belly fat?

The surprising answer is... yes! It involves how metabolism shifts after 40, why visceral fat behaves differently than subcutaneous fat, and THIS time-efficient form of conditioning that outperforms steady-state cardio in the latest postmenopausal research.

This episode covers 2026 metabolic chamber research on how the menopause transition independently changes metabolism and substrate oxidation, the visceral fat redistribution that drives the menopause belly experience, and sprint interval research in postmenopausal women.

Plus how to fit short sprint sessions around lifting heavy, who should start this protocol, and the speed-drop test that tells you whether the protocol is working. Built for women in perimenopause, postmenopause, and adults over 40 working on fat loss, body recomp, and strength training over 40.

Get the free Sprinting for Fat Loss guide by joining my email list and replying to ask for it. The 6-page PDF includes the full protocol, equipment options, and how to fit short sprint sessions around your lifting schedule:
https://witsandweights.com/email

Timestamps:

0:00 - 20-minute fix for menopause belly fat
2:20 - Metabolism drop in menopause
7:06 - Substrate oxidation and fuel preference
9:58 - Sprint research in postmenopausal women
13:08 - Sprint adaptations and visceral fat
15:30 - Sprinting protocol
18:48 - Equipment hierarchy for sprint training
20:12 - Fitting sprints around lifting
24:48 - Bonus: speed drop test

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 00:00

  There is a specific fix for the kind of belly fat that shows up in the menopause transition, and it takes about 20 minutes per session, twice a week. In one of the best studies we have on this, that was enough to drop visceral fat 24% in just 16 weeks. You don't have to change your diet. You don't have to have any hours in the gym. Today I'm gonna walk you through what the research shows about menopause belly fat and this one form of conditioning that targets it specifically. If you're under 40 or you're a guy, this still applies. The mechanism is the same. I think you're gonna enjoy this one. Stay tuned. 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, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And today I want to talk about something that I'll say surprises almost every woman that I coach who is over 40, and that is that the belly fat you get during the menopause transition, it happens to everyone. Every woman knows what belly menopause belly is about. There is a fix for this that is actually meaningful, that actually moves the needle. And it's not walking more, it's not just losing body fat, it's not abloaded training, it's not the reducing alcohol or having more sleep. All of those things are good. All of those are goodness. It is not chronic cardio, it's not a new eating protocol. It's something that takes 20 minutes per session, twice a week, and it targets the specific kind of fat that gets redistributed during menopause. I'm gonna pull together two pieces of evidence today for you. The first is data from Dr. Bill Campbell. He's a researcher at the University of South Florida. He is awesome. He's been on the show several times before. He runs a monthly research review. It's one of the ones I pay for called Body by Science. We actually, or he actually featured me a while back, ironically, in an article or an issue related to abs and ab training. And his latest issue and a recent workshop he did looked at this finding from the research, which is that menopause independently lowers your metabolism in a way

  Philip Pape: 02:20

  that aging alone does not explain. It's menopause, it's not aging. It's very interesting because we always say, well, no, it's just the muscle mass, but there is some research suggesting there's something independent going on. The second piece of evidence is exercise research on what reduces visceral fat. That's the belly fat we're talking about when we say menobelly or menopause belly. And this is where a lot of women are headed off in the wrong direction because oftentimes the advice of you just gotta lose body fat, you just have to move more, you just have to lift weights, which again are all great things, it doesn't target this specific problem. So we're gonna talk about that today. And then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a single question test that tells you whether you're doing this protocol correctly. Okay, so we want to do this right once you know what it is. Here's what we're going to cover. I'm gonna walk you through why the metabolism drop in menopause is a real independent factor and what the best study ever done on this looked at. I'm gonna show you why visceral fat is specifically what is driving the my belly fat has gone up even though nothing changed experience. And then I'm gonna give you the 20-minute protocol that I use with my clients and with myself, along with who should start doing something else first before they do this. Okay, so let's talk about the experience of women that I hear. Obviously, I'm not a woman. There's a lot of things I don't experience, including what men experience. So I have to listen, I have to empathize, I have to hear your experiences. And our women over 40, which is roughly 70 to 80% of our clients and our members of Eat More Lift Heavy, are going along, eating about the same as you always have, training about the same. And suddenly there is belly fat that wasn't there before, right? Your clothes just fit differently. The scale might not even be that different. If you go listen to our last solo episode, all about three metrics before summer. If you're trying to lose fat, we talk about the scale weight there. Your scale weight may not be different, but your body distribution has changed. And it feels like everything that you've used in the past to help with this is are not working. Even dieting, even exercise, even moving. And so the intuitive response, though, is to try those things again. You're gonna eat a little less, move a little more, add some cardio. I appreciate the intuition, right? When something has worked in the past, we feel like it should work again. And energy balance still matters. It's physics at the most basic level. But what the research shows that's happening explains a bit why those don't always produce the same results in this window. Let's talk about that. Dr. Bill Campbell, love the guy. Okay, he's he's just such a great science communicator and educator. And in his March 2026 research review, and then he did a workshop for coaches, he looked at a study. The study he broke down followed 158 women for four years. All of them started pre-menopausal. All of them were at least 43 when they entered the study. And a subset of 34 women spent 24 hours inside a metabolic chamber at the beginning of the study and 24 hours inside the same one four years later. And that's kind of a gold standard for measuring metabolism, you know, as best we can, so we can measure the actual calories burned. Here's what they found. Pretty cool. The women who remained pre-menopausal over the four years, they lost about 150 calories a day of their metabolic rate. That's their metabolism went down by 150. And that's just aging, right? And happens all to all of us as we age a little, likely due to due to the loss of muscle mass. So that's kind of its own factor that affects everyone. The women who transitioned from pre- to post-menopausal over those same four years lost 200 calories a day. That's 50 calorie per day difference. And it was specifically attributable to menopause, not to aging, not to activity differences. They controlled for activity inside the chamber. Now, 50 calories doesn't sound like a lot, but think about what that adds up to. Just do basic math. 50 calories a day over four years equals five pounds of extra body fat from the metabolism drop alone, with no change in eating or moving. Right? So, this is that little tax on menopause that we're trying to understand as really good researchers actually study this population, which we haven't studied women in menopause, let alone women, let's be honest, in much of the research for all these years. The second piece of this data that again is not talked about too much, is what fuel your body is burning. Let me explain. They measured something called substrate

  Philip Pape: 07:06

  oxidation, which just means are you burning fat, carbs, or protein for energy? Well, the postmenopausal group was burning significantly less fat to fuel their daily life compared to the women who stayed pre-menopausal. And they were burning more protein, which basically means they were losing lean tissue. So your body has shifted its fuel preference away from fat and toward muscle. Less fat burn, more muscle burn, more fat stored. Again, burn is a very loose, unscientific term, but you get the idea. And then guess where you store that fat? In the belly. Belly fat, yes. So that is the setup to this story. You're dealing with a metabolism that's compensating downward, a body that shifted its preference towards storing fat in the belly, specifically. Your body is really good at compensation, and that's the whole problem here. You can you can add 30 minutes of, say, moderate movement and lose a chunk of that back in reduced movement throughout the rest of your day because your body compensates. Millions of years of evolution optimizing for keeping things in homeostasis. What your body doesn't compensate well against is what we're going to talk about today: a brief maximum intensity signal that could potentially do something about your belly fat. Oh, let's talk about it. Okay. The menopause transition, it doesn't just add body fat, right? We've been talking about the fact that it adds specific fat in your visceral, your abdominal area. There's two main places that your body stores fat. Subcutaneous fat is the fat right under the skin. That's the fat that you can pinch and see. It is, I'll say, metabolically calm or quiet. It doesn't do much besides just sit there. Visceral fat is different. That's the fat in your abdomen. It's wrapped around your organs. It is metabolically active. It pumps out inflammatory signals, which we can measure in the blood. It drives insulin resistance. It's the fat that correlates with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cognitive decline. So when we say menopause belly, we're not talking about subcutaneous fat. We're talking about a body-wide redistribution of fat toward the visceral compartment, driven largely by the drop in estrogen. And this is this is not arguable. Like this is not debatable. Menopause research studies have looked at this. We know this happens. Cross-sectional studies, longitudinal, metabolic chambers, they all say the same thing that during menopause, your visceral fat goes up and it goes up quite a bit. So the question is what targets visceral fat? Because if we're going to invest our time and recovery, which is limited, into something, we want it to work on the thing that all of you are frustrated about. So here's where it gets interesting. For about a decade, the research has been pointing to something that now we have pretty good confidence in.

  Philip Pape: 09:58

  There was a landmark study by a French researcher named Baylard in 2016. He took 17 postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes and he had them do two short cycling sessions per week for 16 weeks. So these are about 20-minute sessions. They didn't change anything else, not their diet, not anything. The result was that their abdominal fat dropped 8%. Visceral fat specifically dropped 24%. 24% in 16 weeks. That's crazy with two 20-minute sessions per week on a cycle. And for today's episode, the the key here is that those sessions were sprint intervals. They weren't steady state cardio. Because we know this, the moderate steady state group in the same study did not see significant visceral fat reduction. Isn't this incredible? And by the way, we're gonna we're gonna touch on this a few times, but you guys know I've been talking about sprinting for a long time. I just hadn't quite been able to connect it to this specific benefit yet. And now we can, and this is just just this is just incredible. A follow-up study from Dupuis in 2020, why'd I say it that way, 2020, extended this to non-diabetic postmenopausal women, and they found the same thing. Sprint intervals reduce their abdominal and visceral fat, whereas moderate cardio didn't change it in the same way. And then when they added resistance training on top of sprinting, guess what? They got fat loss and they got increased muscle mass. And of course, that's the only combination that did that, which makes sense. We've got to lift weights if we want to add muscle. Now, let's all we always have to be honest about research and how reliable it is. The the broader meta-analysis that compared sprint intervals to moderate cardio on total fat showed them as roughly equivalent when you match for total work. In other words, from the thermodynamics perspective, sprints aren't magic, which is consistent with everything I've been talking about, right? Like the type you do doesn't matter. But in this context, the the way they target physiologically the visceral fat is a difference that matters. And there's a practical aspect here, and that is the time efficiency. So let's start with that one real quick. Sprint intervals can produce the same or better results in about a third of the weekly time. When we talk about conditioning and cardio, okay, specifically. Aside from walking, like a lot of us love to walk, and I encourage walking, and honestly, you can walk a lot. And I don't necessarily like to compare walking to sprinting in terms of time efficiency. It's a different thing, right? So for women in menopause whose recovery capacity is getting more limited, this is a really big deal because your limited time, limited recovery, there's a stress component to this. And then if you have these long, frequent sessions of cardio, now you get compensation on top of an already stressed system. That's why we don't like that necessarily. Why I encourage a lot of women to do less, to be more efficient with their time in the gym and outside the gym. So sprint intervals are a really good tool in that perspective. The second one is more specific, and this is the one that's the most interesting about visceral fat, belly fat. Listen up.

  Philip Pape: 13:08

  In post-menopausal women, specifically, sprint intervals outperform steady-state cardio for reducing visceral fat. Like the Maylard and the Dupuis findings that I just talked about, which are not isolated. The, you know, there's this popular narrative that sprints burn belly fat through a calorie afterburn effect. No, that is not correct. And if I've ever said on this show, I would I retract it and say that I was wrong as well. We call that epoch exercise post-sector, or I never know, I never say this right, but it's like post-uh oxygen consumption. Exercise post-oxygen consumption. And that's burning calories after you do the exercise. It's very minimal. It's like 40 to 50 calories. The real benefit is the chronic adaptation. There is a catecholamine response that occurs over weeks and months. And what it does, this is technical stuff. I had to write it down. It increases the beta, the beta andranergic sensitivity of your visceral fat. All that is, in plain English, it's the receptors that let your body mobilize fat for fuel. That's what it is. So guess what? You're increasing the sensitivity of those. That is awesome. Your skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity goes up. That is awesome. Your mitochondrial function improves. This is energy. That is awesome. These are long-term changes that compound chronically in a good way, in the best of ways. So the summary of this piece is sprinting, it doesn't magically melt belly fat in one session. We don't care about post-exercise consumption or afterburn effect or any of that. You can't just sprint once and boom, there goes your belly fat. What they do is over time, if you do these two sessions, 20 minutes each, there's an adaptive pressure on visceral fat that keeps showing up when we do these studies. And we can't ignore that. That is amazing data. And it's time efficient, so it doesn't affect your recovery. It's actually anabolic when we talk about sprinting as well. It supports your lifting. You can continue lifting heavy in parallel. This is just an incredible combination of things that you can go after as you develop your training and movement routine. Just so good. So good.

  Philip Pape: 15:30

  Okay. Now, before I walk you through the exact protocol, I do have something that's going to make things a lot easier for you. I do have a written guide called Sprinting for Fat Loss that I try to keep updated with some of this research. In this case, it has the sprinting protocol that I recommend. It's about six pages long, and it has the protocol I'm going to describe now. It has the equipment options in terms of what you should start with, the warm-up, a little bit of a weekly template so you can fit it around your lifting, and even how to track progress. All in a PDF, all free. I've given it to you for free. The only thing I need you to do is join my email list so I can send it to you. So go to witsandweights.com slash email. That's witsandweights.com slash email. Then once you're on the list, just reply to the welcome email and ask for the sprinting guide. If you're already on my list, just reply to any email you get and ask for the sprinting guide. I'll send it right over. And that is it. Okay. Witsandwaits.com slash email. Join the list. Ask for the sprinting guide. Done. I don't have a special link. Sorry, you're gonna have to do it that way. Wits and weights.com slash email. So let's talk about that protocol. All right, the protocol I use with clients and myself, I pull it directly from Brad Kearns, who runs the B Rad podcast. He was on the show back, I think in episode 286. He introduced me to this structure. I've used it ever since. It is awesome. Okay, it's simple. Four to eight sets of all out sprints. Each sprint is 10 to 20 seconds. Never go past 20 seconds, never go past eight sets. Importantly, the rest time is six times the sprint time. So if you sprint 10 seconds, you rest 60 seconds. If you sprint 20 seconds, you're gonna rest two minutes. Make sense? And that's it. Now you can rest longer, but don't rest shorter. So one to two sessions per week, four to eight sets of all-out sprints for 10 to 20 seconds with six to one rest to sprint. If that's confusing, get get the guide. It's all written down for you. So if you do the two sessions, then one of them, in my recommendation, should be flat brown, only one of them should be flat ground sprinting with good minimalist footwear. The other one should be on a low impact machine, like a cycle, a rower, a stair climber. You can do them both on the machine, that's fine. But don't do both as flat ground sprinting until you get adapted to it and you feel like it's appropriate and you can handle that. The progression rule is the most important thing in this protocol, okay? Because just like progressive overload with your lifting, you want to progress with your sprinting. You do not do that by going past the 20 seconds or doing more sets. You do it by getting faster within the same constraints. Now, if your sprints are less than 20 seconds, well, then your goal is to get them up to 20 seconds. If the number of sets is less than eight, well, your goal is to eventually get them to eight. But eventually you're gonna cap out at eight sets, 20 second sprints. Now the goal is just to get faster, more power, more speed, and you'll you'll get adapted and you'll get better, and that's exactly what's gonna happen over time. And that's it. That's it. Now, a lot of people ask me, okay, what do I actually do for the sprinting?

  Philip Pape: 18:48

  Well, let me give you kind of a hierarchy. If you're brand new, start on a bike, an assault bike, stationary bike, spin bike, doesn't really matter. It's the easiest way to get to near maximum effort without any joint risk. You could just quickly get to those fast sprints. And it's also the type of modality they use in most of the sprint studies. So there's a nice correlation there. And then you can progress to something like an elliptical, a stair climber, or a rower, which are all low impact. They're still anaerobic. They're a little bit tougher. They have a little bit of skill involved. If you want to go to ground-based sprinting, like actual sprinting, you can work up to it using hill sprints or incline sprints, which you could do on a sp on a treadmill, but I really discourage a treadmill at all for sprinting just because of the safety factor and the inability to easily get to full speed as quickly. I would rather you just do it kind of on your own with one of these other machines or outside. The incline reduces your max speed, which preserves your hamstring. That's why it's a good way to build your tissue capacity before you go to flat ground. But again, do not use a treadmill. I know people do it. Again, safety and the ability to accelerate, decelerate is very difficult. And you're also not going to go all out on a treadmill. Some part of your brain knows that you can't bail on it. And so as a result, you clamp down on the effort, if that makes sense, as a safety mechanism. And then that's not sprinting, it's just jogging really hard.

  Philip Pape: 20:12

  So, how does this fit into your schedule? If you're lifting, all right. I would use a, for example, three, three-day full body lifting split as an example here. Let's say it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Sprinting could be Tuesday and Saturday. Not the morning of a lift day, not right before the lift. Ideally, 24 hours removed from a lower body session. If you're on a four-day upper lower, you can sprint on your upper days or your off days. If you're on a five day, like a bodybuilding, power building type split, you could sprint on your off days or a few hours after upper body training. Two quick rules. One, you have to feel fresh before the sprint session. If you're already fatigued, if you didn't sleep, if you're coming off a hard lifting day, push it to another day, right? Sprinting while fatigued, that is how you get injured and you're not gonna be at your best performance. The second rule is if your speed drops off during the session, like you get to set, I don't know, five, and your speed drops way off, you're done. Stop. Don't just rest longer and keep going. Stop. The session is over. That's the session is over. This is gonna tie to what I talk about at the end of the episode. So I'm gonna come back to it. Also, warming up. Warming up's important. If you're doing machine sprints, you could go say three to five minutes on the machine at a moderate speed. And then you could do some 10-second buildups if you'd like. If you're doing flat ground, you could do again three to five minutes of just light jogging or leg swings or high knees or butt kicks or any of that stuff. And then maybe two or three progressive accelerations and then get into it. Okay. If you're cold, you got to warm up. The more adapted you get to this, probably the less warm up you need. And then the whole session ends up being maybe 15 to 25 minutes, including the warm up, the sprint sets, the cooldown, all of that. Two of those a week, that's 30 to 50 minutes. Of sprinting, excuse me, per week. And that is a fantastic dose for being correlated with a massive drop in visceral fat. So everyone listening, especially ladies, especially in peri postmenopause who have the belly fat, who are writing in about this, who are curious about this, do this protocol and try it out and let me know how it goes. One more thing shout out to Dr. Bill Campbell again, because he said on a recent interview that for menopausal women specifically, he prefers short sprint sessions with fewer total sprints as opposed to a high rep hit because of the recovery burden of the hit. The goal is not to get your heart rate up. The goal is to get a brief maximum signal to trigger the adaptations that we're talking about today and then let your body recover and adapt. That's really, really important.

  Philip Pape: 22:49

  All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the beginning I was gonna give you one single question test that tells you whether you actually sprinted or if you just ran hard and you're not getting all the benefits. That's coming up in just a minute. But if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I get the sprinting, but I also know my lifting is inconsistent or my protein's probably too low. And nothing has worked for me in the last two or three years of trying to get leaner, especially if as I get older, maybe I'm over 40, 50, beyond. That's who we built Eat More Lift Heavy for. Eat More Lift Heavy is my 26-week coaching program along with Coach Carol. It replaces our old physique university. It is a huge upgrade. The core premise is that most women over 40 or adults over 40 who are stuck with their physique are under-eating and under-recovering. They're under-eating, under recovering. It's not on you. It's not a discipline problem or will problem. We've got to eat more, especially protein, sometimes carbs, sometimes calories in general. We have to lift heavy with progressive overload. Heavy doesn't mean too heavy or unsafely heavy. It means the right level of intensity to push the strength and muscle growth. So that is what it's about. Eat more, lift heavy. It's structured in three phases. Phase one helps you stop guessing. You set up your measurement system so you know what you're working with. Phase two is the eat more, lift heavy phase, where you execute the plan along with our support and live coaching. And phase three is to trust yourself. You graduate with the skills to manage your own physique with everything you've learned. There are monthly coaching calls, there are training programs. You get one assigned to you on day one. There's coaches who respond in the community within 24 hours. We have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. All of that go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. Let's get you out of this cycle for good. Get you on your way to a wonderful life, a wonderful physique, happiness with who you are in your body. EatmoreLiftheavy.com.

  Philip Pape: 24:48

  All right, here's a question that tells you did I actually sprint the way Phillips talked about on this show that reduces belly fat? Or am I pushing it hard but not quite getting there? The question is, did my speed drop more than 10% across my sets? And this is where data is helpful that you need to measure. If your first sprint was a 15-second effort, and by the fourth set, you're two or three seconds slower over the same distance, you're done. Do not rest longer, don't push through another set, stop the session. The reason that sprinting works is because of neural recruitment of your fastest fibers. Once those fibers are fatigued, any additional set is just practicing running slower. You're not getting the sprint adaptation anymore. You're actually piling up fatigue. It's kind of like junk volume of running for no benefit. So the test is simple here. You need to time your sets, track your sets. If your top speed is holding, keep going. If it drops more than 10%, the session is over. Go home. You're done for the day. You need to adapt to get a little faster and stronger so you can go further next time. That's cool. That tells you where you are. And that's the difference between training and working out, just like when you lift weights. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, Menopause belly does have a targeted fix, and it's more in your control than you think. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.