Wits & Weights Podcast
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Ep 5: How to Diet Without Being "On" a Diet
This is the DIET and NUTRITION episode, one of my favorite topics. Although this IS a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat—and more importantly, HOW MUCH you eat—plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat (while preserving muscle) or gain muscle (while limiting fat gain).
Today is the DIET and NUTRITION episode, one of my favorite topics. Although this IS a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat—and more importantly, HOW MUCH you eat—plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat (while preserving muscle) or gain muscle (while limiting fat gain).
You can’t have one without the other—and I’m going to assume you’re here because you want to get stronger AND leaner, and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels.
I’m very passionate about taking a SUSTAINABLE approach to diet because, like many of you, I’ve personally experienced yo-yo dieting, fad diets, and all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years. Only in the last two years or so did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought.
Today we’re going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life.
In today’s episode, we cover:
The spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don’t work over the long-term
A balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won’t drive you crazy
Focusing on what’s important and not sweating the rest
An overview of calories and macronutrients, and the phases of weight change
Determining your individual energy needs for your goal and then adjusting for success
The phases of weight change and how they align with your goals as a lifter
And finally, a brief foray regarding some specific foods and supplements
RELATED LINKS
MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:31] Hey guys, welcome to episode five of Wits & Weights. Today is the diet and nutrition episode. One of my favorite topics, although this is a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat and more importantly, how much you eat, plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat while preserving muscle or to gain muscle while limiting fat.
[00:00:59] You can't have one without the other. And I'm going to assume you're here because you want to get stronger and leaner and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels. I'm very passionate about taking a sustainable approach to diet because like many of you I've personally experienced yo-yo diets, fad diets, all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years, only in the last couple of years or so.
[00:01:31] Did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought today, we're going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life. In today's episode, we cover the spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don't work over the long-term a balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won't drive you crazy, focusing on what's important and not sweating the rest and overview of calories and macronutrients and the phases of weight change, determining your individual energy needs for your goal, and then adjusting for success.
[00:02:23] How to align the phases of weight change with your goals, especially as a lifter and finally a brief foray regarding some specific foods I like. And a couple of. Let's start by talking about the spectrum of dieting we have on one extreme are the diets that have specific names. You know what? They are, things like keto, paleo carnivore, Atkins zone.
[00:02:55] And one thing these diets have in common is they typically list good or bad foods or clean versus dirty foods. They tend to be somewhat complicated and somewhat restrictive. There are obviously differences from one to the next and each one has their advocates. But the main thing about them is they use.
[00:03:17] Prescribe how you should eat, eat this, donate that perhaps they give you what time you should eat this or that. And there are often what I will call unbalanced from a macronutrient perspective, meaning they might require very high, fat and very low carb or very high carb, very low fat. And the evidence shows that these are.
[00:03:38] Not sustainable diets in the longterm because they often lead to yo-yo dieting. You lose a lot of weight. Initially, the they're super successful because you might lose a lot of waterway, glycogen and actual fat loss because you've changed your eating patterns. For example, on keto, you try to go very low carb, very high fat, and as a rule, it starts to eliminate a ton of processed foods that might've been in your diet.
[00:04:08] Many of the highly palatable processed foods are a combination of carbs and fat. Well, if you're going to cut out carbs drastically, you're going to severely limit your food choices primarily to whole foods, animal-based products and things like that. And then that results in you significantly cutting your calories.
[00:04:29] If these diets work and they work for some people, it's because of calories in. So that's one extreme. And I put that on an extreme, because this podcast is all about sustainability. How can you eat in a way that will satisfy you? It won't drive you crazy and you could do so for years and decades for the rest of your life.
[00:04:53] If you could do that with say Quito or the zone diet good for you, if it meets your goals, go for it. But I think there's an easier way on the other extreme of this dieting spectrum is what's called intuitive eating. And that's just what it sounds it's eating. When you feel like it, based on the signals your body's giving you and not worrying about tracking or what you eat or really.
[00:05:23] And intuitive eating sounds great, but it's very hard to know how many calories you're eating or whether you need to eat more or less if you've never tracked your food. And if you have a difficult time telling the difference between one food and another, in terms of nutritional density, for example, take a tablespoon of peanut butter and put it next to a large bowl of salted popcorn.
[00:05:50] Chances are the popcorn has fewer calories. Furthermore, most of us who have had let's call them less than optimal eating habits over the years have trained our bodies in a way where we can not recognize those hunger signals as efficiently as somebody who maybe has been eating properly for years. And so if to eat intuitively means to continue eating as much pizza doughnuts and Coca-Cola, as you'd like, it's probably not going to help you meet your goals, but we're going to come back to this later because I believe intuitive eating can be a great approach for someone who has gone through a more balanced approach based on tracking, which is the focus of this podcast.
[00:06:35] Which will then teach you to understand what is in a certain type of food in a certain quantity of food, the nutritional density, and you could eyeball this stuff in the future. If you're not the type of person who likes to track. And that brings me to the middle part of the spectrum, the balanced, sustainable approach to eating that we'll talk about today, which is tracking calories and macronutrients, eating what you enjoy, making choices based on your goal, and eventually to learn enough about food portions and nutrient density to shift more toward intuitive eating.
[00:07:15] If preferred this approach is also called flexible dieting. If it fits your macros, I. Whatever you want to call it because we have, obviously I have a fondness for names when it comes to diets, this approach is significantly more sustainable than the highly restrictive named diets. And I'll give you just a few reasons why you might come up with more than these.
[00:07:40] The first reason is more sustainable is you don't have good or bad foods. You don't have clean or dirty foods. You can eat anything you prefer. As long as you meet your goal. The second reason it's more sustainable is there's no incentive to binge because you've avoided or deprived yourself of some particular food.
[00:08:04] We're not doing that. We're not restricting food groups or types or specific foods in any way with this approach. The next reason it's more sustainable is you're not going to be weird on this diet. What do I mean by that? Meaning your spouse cooks you food. You can enjoy it. You don't have to be picky or control exactly.
[00:08:25] What's in the food. You can go to restaurants, you can go to social events, you can go hang out with your friends and you don't have to be weird. You're not the person bringing your own Tupperware or your own shake bottle. You can just go out and pick from the options that are out there. And as long as it fits your plan, you are good.
[00:08:43] Another reason this is sustainable is it's flexible enough. You can continue to change your foods over time, or even on a. Isn't that great. So a few months from now, the seasons change you go from fall to winter to summer, you have different available options at the grocery store, different produce fresh products available.
[00:09:04] You might just have a new craving. You want to eat more fish now instead of beef, go for it. And finally, the reason the flexible dieting approach is sustainable is it is consistent with the laws of physics it's based on energy balance and nothing more. So it works in something that works and has all of these other benefits we just discussed sounds like a pretty sustainable approach to me.
[00:09:29] Have you ever heard of the parades principle? It basically states that in many cases, 80% of the outcome is from 20% of the causes. Some people call this the 80 20 rule. It just means that there are a few things that are very important and many things that are less. So, so why don't we focus our energy on the few things that impact 80% of the results or 80% of the outcome.
[00:09:59] And in our case, when it comes to diet, the most important aspect is calories or energy balance. And we talked about this and the first law of thermodynamics in episode four, if you want to go revisit that, we talked all about metabolism, the energy out side of the equation. And today we're going to focus on the energy in side of the equation.
[00:10:24] At the end of the day, would you gain or lose weight comes down to the energy coming into your body from food period. But then there is another priority just below calories that makes up the 80 20. And that is macronutrients. The stuff in your food that provides the calories. The proportion of these can be important depending on your goals and optimizing your outcomes.
[00:10:54] Everything else, other than calories and macronutrients is in the 20% things like supplements, micronutrients, meal, timing, food, quality. Yes, you heard it right. We are not going to focus on food quality when it comes to diet. Remember what I said before? You can eat whatever you like, as long as it fits within your calories and your macros, let's start then with calories.
[00:11:21] And we are going to go through a lot of detail on this podcast. Step-by-step lots of calculations. I encourage you to take notes or at the very least use the timestamps in the show notes to find your place later on and revisit some of these topics. The first thing we're going to do is calculate your maintenance calories.
[00:11:40] These are the calories that you need every day just to live and maintain your weight. And again, back in the previous episode, we talked about the breakdown, the various components of metabolism. We're not going to recover all that today. We're just going to talk about the numbers and how to set up. In that episode, we talked about estimating your calories, using a calculator.
[00:12:04] You can do that if you'd like, but the best way to estimate your calories is to track them over two weeks with your current diet, don't change anything. Don't change your lifestyle. Do it in a phase where you've been maintaining your weight. Not much is going to change over the next two weeks. Your activity level, isn't going to change much and you're able to track consistently be consistent and see how your weight changes.
[00:12:28] Ideally, the weight stays roughly the same in which case your daily calorie needs are the average daily calories. You can see. As simple as that. Now, if your weight went up slightly, then your daily calorie needs are a little bit less than what you consumed and vice versa, but it gives you a pretty good estimate.
[00:12:48] If I were to use a calculator today, it would probably say that my total daily energy expenditures, maybe around 25, 2600, but in reality, it's closer to 3000. I'm on, I've been bulking. I'm very active and I've been tracking and that is my current Mattel. Now I am going to mention this particular app several times in the podcast, it's called macro factor.
[00:13:13] It's by the guys at stronger by science. And I personally use this app. I think it is by far the best app on the market, not just for food logging, but for calculating your metabolism, adjusting your plan every week, and then presenting it to you in a way that is compliance neutral. It doesn't beat you over the head for missing your target.
[00:13:36] It simply gives you the data gives you the plan, what you need for the week. You either hit it. You don't no big deal. Here's where you are the next week. Do it again. So if you can get an app like that, it's going to make this entire process. We talk about today, much easier. You're still going to have to log your food.
[00:13:54] You're still going to have to weigh yourself, but all the numbers of calculating calories and macronutrients and metabolism are essentially done for you with some of these. So I'll include a link in the show notes for that there are other apps like my fitness pal chronometer or chronometer carbon and many others that do similar things.
[00:14:16] But again, my favorite is macro factor. So you start by determining your caloric maintenance, how many calories do you need every day to maintain your weight? And you're going to start tracking your food and tracking your weight every day. This is critical. This is integral to everything else we talk about.
[00:14:35] So if you're not willing to, or able to do that, it's going to be more difficult, not impossible, but much more difficult. And we're talking about changing our habits to change our lives for the long-term. And I know from personal experience tracking food and weight is cumbersome at first, but it quickly becomes quite easy, especially with these apps.
[00:14:58] Ma maintain your history. They make it easy to search, to use bar codes. It's really not that bad at all. And you'll be glad you did it because you'll have a much higher level of precision in terms of estimating the food that you're eating. Even if you decide to not track in the future. So how do you track your food?
[00:15:17] If you're eating packaged foods that have a barcode, the app that you use should have a barcode scanner, you scan it in assuming the data is accurate. It spits out the numbers. Boom. If you're eating whole foods like broccoli or meat or something that you can weigh, this is where a food scale comes in. I suggest going to Amazon or wherever you buy your inexpensive likely Chinese made electronics and get yourself a cheap food scale that measures in fractions of grams ideally would also measure in ounces and milliliters.
[00:15:50] So you've got all your liquids and solids. And between the food scale barcodes, the databases that are in the app. And then let's say you go to a restaurant, RET many restaurants, especially chain restaurants, have their nutrition facts posted online in the app that you use. Many of them also have branded food.
[00:16:10] So you want to track your food every day. That's everything you consume. Morning, noon, and night with the exception of small things that you consume every day in the same amount. For example, I take fish oil supplements. I take four capsules. It's probably 40 calories worth of fat. I don't track that because it's consistent every single day.
[00:16:33] So the relative change in metabolism and calories would be the same either way, whether I tracked it or not, because it's consistent. Perhaps you have a splash of half and half in your coffee every day. I wouldn't even track that. If it's an issue with convenience versus accuracy, you make the call, but those things don't necessarily need to be tracked, but all of your food and beverages should be tracked.
[00:16:56] And the other part of this is weighing yourself every day. You have to know how your weight is changing to adjust your calories. I recommend weighing yourself daily in the morning. Before you use the bathroom wearing very little clothing around the same time every day. I actually have a smart scale. I bought it a few months ago.
[00:17:15] I can include a link in the show notes. Connects to apple health on my iPhone and an apple health connects to macro factor. So all I have to do is open the app in the morning. Step on the scale. It beams my way, all the way through to the food log or app. I'm a big fan of automating and making things sustainable and making things much easier for yourself.
[00:17:38] Now that you've determined your maintenance calories, and you have a system in place to track your food and your weight, ask yourself, what is your goal? Are you trying to lose weight, gain, weight, or maintain? If your goal is to maintain your weight, it's pretty simple. You're going to eat as many calories as you burn so that your daily calories equals your estimated calories from the first step.
[00:18:06] That's it? It gets slightly more complicated. If you want to lose or gain weight, if you want to lose weight, the goal is to lose fat. I'm sure that that's your goal is to improve your body composition, which also means not losing too much muscle. And so we want to lose at a reasonable rate that is not overly aggressive, such that we would start to lose lean body mass, but just enough to burn fat at a good rate, to have a reasonable food or calorie plan where we're not starving ourselves.
[00:18:42] Now, if you're very overweight, you could push this a little bit further, be more aggressive. There are always special use cases, but for today, we're just going to talk more or less in the averages, and then we can go from there. So if you want to lose weight, the generally accepted range is going to be to set your.
[00:19:04] That is your caloric deficit, so that you lose between a quarter and 1% of your body weight per week. So what I suggest for your calories to establish a deficit of around 20 to 30% from your maintenance, and later on, you can adjust this based on your weight, that how your weight is changing versus your goal.
[00:19:27] But to start, we're going to say 20 to 30% of your maintenance. Let's go through an example. Let's say you're 200 pounds and you want to lose 20 pounds. And let's say your goal is on the higher end of 1% of your body weight per week or two pounds per week. That's going to take you roughly 10 weeks to lose the weight.
[00:19:48] If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and you're going to target 20 to 30%, let's go slightly on the higher end at 30. 30% of 2,500 is 750 calories per day deficit. If we subtract 750 from 2,500, that leaves you with 1,750 calories a day. So 1,750 calories a day would be your initial plan for your diet in hopes of losing two pounds per week.
[00:20:21] Okay. This is just the starting week. Every week. You're going to adjust this that's one example. Let's talk about gaining weight. Now, why would you want to gain weight? You would want to gain weight to build muscle or to improve performance, or if you're a powerlifter, there are a lot of reasons people can gain weight and we'll talk later on about some specific scenarios, but again, let's talk about the reasonable range for weight gain is probably between 0.1 and 0.25% of your body weight per week.
[00:20:51] Notice that's quite a bit less. Then the rate of weight loss. When you're losing weight, you can lose weight and lose fat quite quickly with not too much impact to muscle loss. But if you gain weight too quickly, it is inevitable that most of that weight will be fat. If you're too aggressive about it, you can only gain muscle at a certain rate.
[00:21:13] And it's not as fast as you might think. So what we want to avoid is what they call the dirty bulk. If you've never heard that term before, that just means eating as much and anything you find and see and want some people call it the seafood diet. You see it, you eat it. You're talking 4, 5, 6, 7,000 calories a day.
[00:21:32] Uninhibited. You are definitely going to gain muscle at a good clip that way, but you're going to gain a ton of fat and that fat later on is going to have to be cut down. So why don't we be smart about it? Why don't we gain in a reasonable fashion? 0.1 to 0.2, 5% of your body weight per week. And the initial target here would be half the target if you were losing weight.
[00:21:56] So if you want to gain weight, we're looking at a 10 to 15% surplus to start. Let's do another example. If you're 200 pounds and you want to gain 20 pounds and you want to go on the higher end of the gaining of quarter percent of your body weight, that's half a pound per week. So that's going to take you 40 weeks to get there, which is a nice drawn out period where you'll get to do a lot of lifting and training.
[00:22:23] You'll get to eat a nice, full, healthy satiating diet, but you're not going to get fat. If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and we go on the higher end of the target at 15%, in terms of our surplus, 15% of 2,500 is 375 calories. You add the two together. And you get 28 75, 2,875 calories a day. That would be your calorie target to gain the weight.
[00:22:50] So we've talked about establishing your maintenance calories, and we've talked about coming up with a goal and setting your either deficit to lose weight or your surplus to gain weight for that initial week. And we'll come back to these examples later, after we talk about the next most important priority, which is macro nutrients.
[00:23:13] If you just want to gain and lose weight, indiscriminately calories will get you there. But we want to be a little bit more discriminant about how we gained the weight, why we gained the weight, what goal we trying to achieve. So now we're going to talk about the three big macronutrients that we care about protein, fat, and carbs.
[00:23:36] We're going to. Explain the purpose of each one in our energy systems. And then more importantly, talk about the target amounts and some eating strategies around those that might help you meet those targets. I like to start with protein because that is, I'll say the most important macronutrient when it comes to muscle building and lifters.
[00:24:01] It's the one that has a solid target that you want to hit every time. Or get close to it. And in the fat and the carbs have a lot more flexibility. Protein is critical to your health. It facilitates muscle protein, synthesis, muscle building. It makes you full. It helps you recover. And it's found in a lot of really delicious foods.
[00:24:27] In my opinion, proteins are comprised of amino acids. There are essential amino acids and non essential. There are 20. And I'm not going to get into the science of that today. What I really want to focus on is the importance of protein for kick-starting what's called muscle protein synthesis. But the idea here is to feed your body with enough protein, that you are engaged in more protein synthesis than protein breakdown, so that the net effect is you gain muscle.
[00:25:01] Furthermore, the evidence seems to support the idea that you need to consume protein. Reasonable amounts, you know, certain minimum amounts multiple times throughout the day to maximize or optimize muscle protein synthesis. So we did talk about how meal timing isn't nearly as important as of course, calories and macronutrients, but there are some timing strategies with protein that will optimize how you use that protein that should fit just fine into your normal eating plan without doing anything crazy.
[00:25:36] So we'll get to that in a bit. Another aspect of protein that I think as well established is the importance of leucine, which is one of the amino acids, as well as the essential amino acids. So getting enough of both is easier when you're eating high quality proteins, such as those from animal sources, whey protein, egg meat, fish, chicken, other forms of poultry and so on.
[00:26:01] So if you are a vegetarian, for example, or a vegan, it's going to be harder to include the. Set of amino acids and loosening in your diet without being very deliberate and careful about your food choices. At the end of the day, you need sufficient protein. You need to eat it enough times per day. And the types that give you the protein that you need for muscle building, the next macronutrient is fat despite its bad reputation over the years, which fortunately, I think we've moved beyond that.
[00:26:34] Fat is particularly important for hormone production. It also, for many people has a positive impact on society. It makes you full it's what you hear often with people who eat the keto diet. For example, although I think people can go too far the other direction. And the third macronutrient of course is carbs.
[00:26:54] And back in the day when I tried Atkins and later on paleo primal and keto carbs were my enemy. And a lot of people have this mindset when it comes to some of the more modern diets. When it comes to people who train people who lift folks like you and me, people listening to this podcast, those of you who are getting into training carbs are your friend.
[00:27:18] When it comes to glucose glycogen, they fuel your training. They help recovery because of glycogen stores. It's actually very hard to be low carb and train, to build muscle when you're losing weight. It's definitely possible to get those carbs down as you're losing weight, because you're simply trying to hold on to muscle.
[00:27:38] You're not trying to train as hard, but when you're building muscle and you're in a bulk carbs, are your friend, at least in my opinion. And you'll find from the strategy we set up here for your macronutrient targets, that carbs are a robust aspect of the eating strategy. Before we talk about amounts and eating strategies, we need to understand what is the energy contained in these macronutrients.
[00:28:04] And it's as simple as. Protein has four calories per gram. Fat has nine calories per gram and carbs have four calories per gram. So both protein and carbs have approximately four calories per gram. Whereas fat has more than twice as much in nine calories per gram. So if we're trying to convert between calories and grams, that's how we would do it.
[00:28:33] If we know our protein target every day is 200 grams. Then, you know, since there are four calories per gram, that's 800 calories and you could do the inverse. If you need to convert from calories two grams, and we'll be doing that in some of the examples later on. Now let's talk about the amounts that we want to target for each macronutrient and some eating strategies, some ideas around these, so that you can determine exactly how many grams or calories of each you want to target based on your goals.
[00:29:08] If you use a food logging app, something like macro factor, many of these apps will calculate this for you, or at least allow you to select some sort of goal. And it will suggest reasonable targets, but we're going to do it by hand on this podcast, giving you the tools to do it yourself in whatever way you wish, whether it's on a notebook or in a spreadsheet or using an app.
[00:29:32] So let's start with protein. The evidence suggests that a reasonable target, especially if you're lifting a reasonable target is 0.82. Gram per pound of body, weight of protein. And you can push that all the way up to 1.2, 1.3 grams per pound, which you might consider, for example, during a cut, when you're losing weight in order to preserve muscle mass.
[00:29:57] And it helps us to tidy as well. You can push that up a bit, but the key is that you must be lifting. If you're sedentary, if you're not lifting the targets go way down. And we're not concerned with that population, we are concerned with folks like you and me who want to get stronger. And it's really as simple as that, where it gets a little more tricky is the evidence that shows when and how much protein to optimize.
[00:30:24] Muscle protein synthesis. And from what I've gathered, the consensus is shoot for 25 to 50 grams of protein in a meal. It's going to depend on your weight and age. For example, the older you are, the more protein you want to try to get at each meal or even overall, but this is a range 25 to 50 grams per meal, roughly four to six hours apart.
[00:30:50] Now I'm not going to tell you that if it's three in the afternoon and you've got to have a snack to avoid having protein in your snack, because it's only 15 or 20 grams, if it gets you to your target. Go for it. We're talking about sustainability and flexibility, but if you want to optimize it and you're okay having say four meals during the day three or four meals, each meal, you shoot to get 25 to 50 grams, some of your bigger meals, your lunch or dinner, where you have a little extra pork or steak or whatever your protein is of choice.
[00:31:23] You might get into the 60, 70 gram range and it all evens out and gets you to your target for a 200 pound person shooting for 200 grams of protein you would need on average four meals containing 50 grams per meal. Now, one of those might just be a to scoop protein shake before or after or during your workout.
[00:31:45] And remember what we talked about before the importance of leucine and good high quality sources of protein to get you to that target most effectively would be things like whey casein eggs. And fish. So good rule of thumb that I live by is one gram per pound. It's easy to remember. It's a nice round number that brings us to fat.
[00:32:06] The amount of fat in your diet can range considerably primarily based on your preferences and goals, such as how much room you want to leave for carbs or what kind of foods you enjoy eating. It really is as simple as that. And the range is anywhere from 0.2 on the low end to maybe 0.6 on the upper end grams per pound, or another way to look at it is 20 to 30% of your calories.
[00:32:33] So, if you're going to pick a nice round number to forget all those ranges, you could say 25% of your calories start there and then adjust up or down based on your other goals. Now I've read over the years and I've heard and seen it supported with the. That it's possibly a good idea to limit how many fats you have in your Perry workout, nutrition, peri, meaning during or in the vicinity just before, during or after your workout in that window to limit your fats and prefer instead carbs and protein, and to distribute your fats throughout your other meals.
[00:33:10] During the day. Now we talked about the fact that there are no good or bad foods, no clean or dirty foods. The one exception to all of that, that I would ever make is trans fats, artificial, trans fats. I don't think anybody agrees. They're a good thing to include in any substantive amount in your diet. So you probably want to limit artificial trans fats.
[00:33:30] That's the only thing in this entire discussion, I would say, try to limit. There's still lots of debate about saturated fats. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a pretty balanced diet, pretty good foods, it's going to balance out between saturated, Moto and saturated polyunsaturated. And that's a good point.
[00:33:49] And we're not trying to artificially bias toward one or the other with some radical food choices, just eat what you enjoy, have a good balanced diet. And it's going to work out. That brings us to carbs. Carbs would make up the remainder of your calories. If protein is one gram per pound and fat is roughly 25% of the cow.
[00:34:11] Then based on your calorie allotment for the day, which we talked about earlier, are you in a surplus? Are you in a deficit or are you maintaining relative to your maintenance calories? Whatever those calories are, the remaining calories or carbs. Now, when you eat carbs, pretty much anytime you want, but there are some benefits eating them at specific times.
[00:34:34] Pre-workout especially if it's your first meal of the day. Like it is for me. I have at the very minimum, I'll have a banana about a half hour to an hour before I work out. So that's a good time. Post-workout seems to be an excellent time to eat carbs, to replenish your glycogen stores. If you've ever heard of the anabolic window, it's actually much larger than people claim or used to think it was probably four to six hours after your workout.
[00:35:04] And that's a good time to replenish and eat your carbs. Some studies even suggest. Roughly 60% of your carbs for the day, peri workout in the vicinity of training. So it's something to consider. If you're eating 300 grams of carbs a day, then perhaps 180 of those are smushed closer to your workout, depending on when that is during the day.
[00:35:27] But again, don't radically alter things just to meet these timing suggestions I would eat when it makes sense to eat, eat normal way. Don't be weird. And it generally is going to work out. These are just extra tips to optimize when and how you. Another thing, more intense workouts require more carbs, and this could be a high volume lifting session, or it could be endurance related exercise if you're using high weight on the bar, but you're working in a very low rep range with lots of rest periods.
[00:36:02] It may not rise to the level of the endurance that requires extra carbs. So again, don't go out of your way, but if, if it's a high volume session or endurance, something like that, then it could be a good idea to bias your carbs close to or in the vicinity of that workout. Now, what about keto? We're talking about carbs and if you're on keto or a low carb, very low carb diet, you're trying to avoid carbs.
[00:36:26] You're trying to stay a hundred under a hundred grams. Maybe even less than that. Maybe under 50 for the day. Keto can work for you if you're losing or maintaining weight. But I think it's going to severely hinder muscle building and performance in the gym. If you're trying to gain. So just keep that in mind, it works for some people, it may work for you.
[00:36:48] I'm not saying this is a hard and fast rule, but given that carbs are the source of glycogen and that's an important input to your performance. When you train the logic goes that it's better to have more carbs than. The last thing about carbs is fiber, which is a type of carbohydrate. You want to get enough fiber, and if you're eating pretty well, if you're eating fruits, vegetables, grains, you're going to get it.
[00:37:14] You could of course seek it out. Quest bars have a lot of fiber. For example, there's obviously fiber supplements, but you want to get your fiber. And the general recommendation is something like 14 grams per thousand calories. So if you, if you have a 2,500 calorie diet, you're up in the thirties terms of grams of fiber.
[00:37:34] Now the only other macronutrient we haven't talked about, or the only big one that people are familiar with is alcohol. What about alcohol? I love a glass of wine or a, a nice stout or, you know, a mixed drink every now and then a couple of times a week. In fact, now that I'm on a bulk, I can drink a little bit more than when I was cutting.
[00:37:54] And it's an integral part of many people's social lives. Some people suggest take. The calories and alcohol and treating it as a carbohydrate, which means you would take the calories and you, and multiply it by four. For example, I had, I think it was founder's breakfast stout the other day, which is 270 calories.
[00:38:16] So divide that by four. I could track that as 68 grams of carbs. Now let's start to put all of this together. We've established our maintenance calories. We've talked about macro nutrients and a way to target each one. How much protein, how much fat, how much carbs. Now let's talk about the different phases of weight change and how to adjust your diet to fit each.
[00:38:45] So these are phases of weight change in how they align with their goals. We're starting with weight loss. Typically, this is associated with a goal to lose weight, reduce your body fat and improve your body composition. And the idea here is not just to reduce the number on the scale, but to reduce fat while limiting muscle loss.
[00:39:12] If you are not trained at all and you're overweight. Or even skinny fat as, as it's called, you may decide that you'd like to lose some of that fat before he then bulk up and gain muscle. Now, I would caution you if you are not severely overweight, a more effective approach may be to just eat at maintenance or even in a surplus and start training.
[00:39:36] If you've never trained before this could result in somewhat of a body composition where you actually burn fat while gaining muscle, but let's for the sake of this example, assume you want to lose weight. You're either overweight, you're skinny fat, and you want to lose that fat before he gained weight, or you have been training.
[00:39:56] And now you're just ready for a weight loss phase to lean out before he bulk up. Again, our example will be a 200 pound person who needs to lose 20 pounds with a total daily energy expense. Of 2,500 calories. We previously calculated a starting deficit of 750 calories, which leaves us with 1,750 calories or less per day as our target.
[00:40:26] So to lose weight because our maintenance calories are 2,500. We're going to eat 1,750 calories a day to try to lose weight. And here's how we're going to break up our macronutrients. We're going to start with protein. One gram per pound for a 200 pound person. That's easy, 200 grams of protein. You multiply that by four and you get 800 calories now because we're talking about weight loss.
[00:40:53] Some of the literature supports going even higher for your protein target as you're losing weight to preserve muscle mass. So you might even target 1.2 grams per pound, which would get you up to two 20 grams, which is a lot of protein. I understand if you're not used to eating that, but it's a worthwhile target based on what the evidence supports.
[00:41:13] Then we go to fat again, rule of thumb before I said, just start with 25%. You can adjust up or down to based on your needs, but let's just start with 25% of 7,050 calories is 438 calories. You divide that by nine and remember fat has nine calories per gram, and that gives you, and we're rounding here 50.
[00:41:34] So you got 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat. Then we get to carbs. Carbs are simply the remainder of your calories. So you start with 1,750 calories subtract the 800 calories of protein subtract the 438 calories of fat. And you're left with 512 calories divided by four. That gives you around 130 grams.
[00:41:57] Now 130 grams of carbs, depending on how you've been eating for the past few years might seem fairly low for a lot of people who are used to eating three, 400 grams of carbs every day. And if that's you and you want to eat more carbs, just reduce the fat to say 20% instead of 25%. And that'll free up some room for more carbs or vice versa.
[00:42:21] If you want to be in a very low carb diet like keto, and you want the fat to dominate and have very few carbs. But for this example, which is a little more balanced approach in summary, it's 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat, 130 grams of carbs. That's your goal. You get in the ballpark of that every day plus or minus 20%, you're going to be pretty good.
[00:42:46] And then later on you can start seeing the results and adjusting accordingly. And we'll talk about that. That was weight loss. Now what about weight gain? Typically you want to gain weight for one reason and one reason alone, and that is to build muscle, but you want to do it while limiting fat gain. So if you're a newbie, you'll probably see some pretty good results, whatever you do.
[00:43:11] And if you are lean but trained, this is where it is even more important to gain weight at a reasonable pace. So you don't gain too much fat because the more experienced you are under the. The slower, the rate of muscle gain, because you've already gained a lot of your muscle. Let's go to the same example, 200 pounds.
[00:43:31] In this case, you want to gain 20 pounds and your maintenance calories are 2,500 calories. So earlier on we talked about the surplus. We calculated a surplus of 375 calories giving you a calorie target of 28 75 now because you're gaining weight. I see that as a floor, meaning you're trying to hit at least that many calories a day.
[00:43:55] It's kind of a nice position to be in, to want to eat a minimum. And you'll get there. If you start lifting, if you lean out and then you're ready to bulk, you'll be in that position. So let's calculate the macronutrients again, protein, same thing. One gram per pound, 200 grams or 800 calories, easy fat.
[00:44:16] We're going to stick with 25%, but now it's 25% of a higher calorie target 28 75. So that's going to result in 719 calories of fat divided by nine gives you 80 grams and then carbs are the remainder. So the carbs are going to be higher as well. Again, cause we're working with more calories and we haven't changed the protein.
[00:44:39] So we take 28, 75 minus 800 calories of protein minus 719 calories of fat leaving us with 1,356 calories of carbs divided by four gives you 340 grams. So in summary, that's 200 grams of protein, 80 grams of fat. So 80, instead of the 50 grams, when you were losing weight, you get to eat 80 grams, all gaining weight.
[00:45:05] So a nice little bump there and then 340 grams of carbs. So that's well more than double. In fact, it's almost triple the amount of carbs you would have been equally while losing weight. And this is what we want to see. If we're training to build muscle. This big bump in carbs is. But you can always swap some fat for carbs and vice versa, depending on your preferences, angles and how you feel.
[00:45:31] All these keeping in mind that fat is nine calories per gram and carbs is four calories per gram. All right, in the last type of weight goal would be maintenance. Your goal is simply to maintain the weight where you are. Now, if you are a newbie, if you're just starting lifting, this could be a good place to start for you where you just try to keep your weight, where it is.
[00:45:55] You start lifting heavy. And what will start to happen is you'll burn fat while gaining muscle in weight really won't change, but your body composition will improve. Another reason we maintain weight is when you're transitioning from a cut to a bulk, for some people they want to break, but they don't want to start gaining heavy right away.
[00:46:16] So they go into a maintenance phase for a few weeks. Or even a month or two before bulking. And finally, if you are trained and you're just trying to maintain your muscle and you're not looking to bulk at this time, maintenance is a good strategy going with our same example, our 200 pound person who wants to maintain and has maintenance calories of 2,500, then you're going to eat 2,500 calories a day.
[00:46:41] And the breakdown is as follows protein 200 grams, same thing, right? One gram per pound. So 200 grams or 800 pounds. Fat 25% of 2,500 is 625 calories divided by nine that's, 70 grams. So it's, in-between the weight loss and the weight gain amount of fat. And then finally carbs is the remainder 2,500 minus 800 calories of protein, minus 625 calories of fat leaving you with 1,075 calories of carbs divided by four that's 270 grams, which is lower than the weight gain, but quite a bit higher, right?
[00:47:24] More than double of the weight loss, which is a nicely balanced, sustainable diet for the longterm. It's you could find a good balance of delicious foods. You can fit in dessert. You can fit in alcohol. Even at that maintenance level in summary, 200 grams of protein, 70 grams of fat and 270 grams of carbs.
[00:47:45] We've just talked about. The calories and the macronutrients, but this really is just for week one. And you might be thinking, oh man, now I have to do this every single week. So hear me out. What are you going to do is weigh yourself every day. And at the end of the first week, I want you to take the seven day average of your weight.
[00:48:09] I don't want you to worry about individual fluctuations. Just take the seven day average. That's the first week compare that seven day average to your starting weight. If the change is in the vicinity of what you're targeting. So let's say you're trying to lose two pounds in a week. If it's in the vicinity of that, I would continue with the exact same calories and macronutrients if however, it's quite a bit off.
[00:48:38] So if you're trying to lose two pounds and you only lost half a pound. Just adjust in the opposite direction conservatively. And I don't want to give you a specific number, a specific target. You can. It really doesn't matter because you're going to converge over time. Let's put it that way. It's not going to be perfect first month or so it'll converge over time.
[00:49:01] So if you intended to lose two pounds and you lost only half a pound, then you were eating too many calories. The data is telling you that either your metabolism is lower than you thought or decreased. Or you ate more calories than you thought you did. Now, I'm making the assumption that you properly tracked all your food, because if you're missing meals in your food logger, that's going to make a big difference on how many calories you think you ate.
[00:49:31] So assuming that you've been tracking it properly and by properly, I mean, within 20%, it really doesn't have to be super precise. Then chances are, it's really your metabolism that is lower than you thought at least for that week. So what do you do? You simply reduce your caloric requirement for the next week and recalculate your macros?
[00:49:54] Just like we did before. So if you're in a weight loss, And your calories were 1,750 and you realize that you're not losing as quickly as you'd like, then reduce it by say a hundred calories, reduce it to 1,650 and recalculate your protein, fat and carbs. Your protein is going to be the same. So it's really your fat and carbs that are going to come down and guess what you do the same thing the following week, the next week you keep taking the moving average.
[00:50:22] You can continue using a seven day average, or if you're a math geek, you can use a, a longer average or another special algorithm. It's really up to you to play around. But you'll keep assessing it this way. If the following week, now that you've cut your calories by a hundred calories a day. If the following week you lost say 1.8 pounds, that's pretty darn close to the two pounds you were shooting for.
[00:50:44] I would keep it the same. Or if you lost 2.2, if it's in the vicinity, keep it the same, make it easy on yourself. You don't have to do all the math again until you see that the change is drifting farther away from what you want. It's that simple. And it goes both directions. Weight gain is the same thing.
[00:51:01] Now I know that was a lot of numbers and each of these sections will be timestamped in the show notes so you can review them again. And again, I'll reiterate that using an app like macro factor makes this much easier, but of course you can also use a spreadsheet or a notebook, and it's just fine, depending on convenience versus results.
[00:51:23] Some important things to keep in mind. The first is that your daily expenditure, your metabolism can fluctuate. All the time and it can do so quite dramatically, based on your weight, your activity level, stress, sleep, your overall lifestyle, your job. So you have to track continuously just to stay on top of how your metabolism is fluctuating.
[00:51:50] The second thing is using an app like macro factor will make this much easier, and I encourage you to use technology. If that's your thing, I'm a big fan of putting things on autopilot. Putting habits in place, tools, technologies, things in place where you don't have to think about things, you just do them or they happen for you.
[00:52:09] I suggest adjusting weekly at first. Meaning at the end of every week, as we talked about earlier, you're going to assess your average weight for the seven. Versus your weight change goal. And if it has drifted from your goal, you're going to adjust your calories for the next week, accordingly at a reasonable level, that doesn't create some big overshoot.
[00:52:35] Eventually you should be able to shift toward an intuitive eating approach if you want, because you'll have the experience to know the calorie content and the macronutrients, the density of the foods you're eating based on having gone through this process, you've developed a skill and a knowledge base that will be with you for the rest of your life.
[00:52:57] I personally continue to track every day because I have very specific goals. It does keep me honest to an extent it's, it's a built-in habit that I've just been doing. And I don't really have to think about it. And I enjoy the science and the numbers behind this whole process. That's just me. I'm a geek.
[00:53:15] What can I. Notice that we have not talked once about specific foods that you can and cannot eat. I've mentioned some examples of foods that will give you higher quality protein, but it's totally up to you. If you want to eat those, there's nothing that you can or cannot eat. However, there are foods that can make the process a little bit easier, depending on which phase you're in.
[00:53:38] And I'd like to share just some of those foods, just to give you some ideas, if you're wondering, Hmm. What, what do I want to pick up at the grocery store or try in some new recipes, starting with weight loss. When you're, when you're losing weight, things become a little bit more restrictive, just because you only have so many calories to play with your fat and carbs have been lowered your protein still up.
[00:54:03] But it, it limits your choices a little bit if you want to avoid being super hungry, for example. So when it comes to protein sources, pretty much any protein source is, is still going to be great, even when you're losing weight. But if you compare to say 80, 20 ground beef to chicken or fish or even pork, there's obviously a difference in content and calories, right?
[00:54:25] The beef is going to have a higher content of fat. So you'd have to eat more of it to get the similar amount of protein. But now you're eating into your fat target. Doesn't mean I haven't done it. I love beef. I love a simple dish of ground beef and rice with some taco seasoning as a, as a nice pre-made lunch for the week.
[00:54:44] But generally the lower fat leaner meats might make it a little easier to get the protein you need while avoiding hitting those targets. And I think, you know what? Those are things like chicken and. I'm I love chicken thighs. So I'm not a big chicken breasts advocate necessarily, but of course chicken breast is going to be leaner, but eat what you enjoy and then make it work.
[00:55:09] So chicken fish even lean cuts of beef steak. And so on. Certain dairy products are excellent sources of protein like cottage cheese. That's a really nicely balanced snack, cottage, cheese, and Greek yogurt. Eggs are great. But again, if you're on a cut, you've got the protein in there along with the fat, if you're eating whole eggs.
[00:55:31] And frankly, I don't like to eat my eggs any other way than hole, so I make it work, but you could just eat egg whites and you'll get a lot of protein. You're not going to get the fat that way. The standard grains like wheat, right? Barley oats. I love oatmeal, oatmeal. It's got protein and it gives me my carbs and it's got fiber kind of has everything in it.
[00:55:51] And it mixes well with things like peanut butter fruit. You can use almond milk, you can use whole milk again, depending on what you're gaining or losing weight. You can adjust some of these ingredients and the amount to hit. Vegetables are always great. Vegetables are effectively free when we're talking about things like green vegetables, broccoli, and green beans, I consider them almost free.
[00:56:13] So when you're trying to lose weight, those are excellent fillers to cram into your diet and to every meal, eat big salads and whatnot because they'll fill you up and they'll keep the calories where you need them. And then as far as carbs go tos, there's always the potato variants, sweet potatoes, white potato.
[00:56:29] In addition to the grains we talked about. So you notice, I'm not telling you anything surprising any super foods, any special foods you have to get in some organic local food source or anything like that. However you notice, I didn't mention say sour patch, kids or Hershey. Chocolate bars, even though I love all those things.
[00:56:53] I have a sweet tooth, chocolate brownies, muffins, all this delicious stuff. If those are parts of your diet, you can still eat them. You just have to track your macros and calories and make it work. But the idea is I was sharing with you where those that will maximize your ability to get your protein, keep the fats and carbs and moderate range and still enjoy it.
[00:57:13] All right now, foods for bulking. Okay. We talked about a dirty bulk, which is the idea of just eating whatever you want. We're not going to do that. There are so many delicious foods in existence on this planet for your protein, carbs, and fat. When it comes to bulking, when your calorie limit is higher, everything is higher and you could really enjoy yourself.
[00:57:34] Let's take proteins. For example, all the meats are on the table. Lean fatty from beef to chicken, to seafood eggs, the dairy sources, as we talked about cottage, cheese, Greek yogurt, but even milk, even whole milk. I love whole milk. They're all on the table. And they're excellent. Sources of protein. Think about the grains, think about potatoes, rice keenwah.
[00:57:59] And then as far as fats go, here's where you've got a little more licensed to use some more butter, olive oil, eggs, eat some nuts, things like that. And I'm not saying any of these things won't work while losing weight. It just comes back to your calories and your macros. All right. The last thing I want to talk about is supplements and it really isn't going to take very long.
[00:58:21] I plan to do a future episode exclusively about the whole variety of supplements out there, things that work things that don't things, where the science is out. But today I want to talk about just two of them, whey protein. And Creotine whey protein really isn't even a supplement. In my opinion, it's just a food that's been processed.
[00:58:42] It comes from milk. We're talking about whey protein, isolate in particular. There's also casein protein, which has slower digesting, but let's just focus on way. I have way every day that I work out and usually on days that I don't. And the only reason I have it is because it's a quickly digestible, convenient, ready source of lots of protein and not much else.
[00:59:06] So the way I consume protein is before and after my workouts, I might have 30 grams before and 50 grams after, along with carbs, that's my preference. And that's it. And then the rest of the day, I get my protein from whole food sources, from meat, from dairy eggs, fish. So whey protein, there's nothing wrong with it.
[00:59:26] Yes, it's processed, but so is just about everything else in our diet. And it's an excellent source of all the complete proteins we talked about, including leucine. It's probably the ideal source of leucine from a convenience perspective and one scoop of a minimally flavored high quality whey protein will give you something like 25 grams of protein.
[00:59:49] Okay. So that's enough said about that. Now let's talk about creatine. Creatine is the one supplement that has been validated to actually be effective in a way that's meaningful in a way that most would suggest that you should take it, especially if you're lifting, but now we're coming to find. Various populations would probably benefit from creatine, the elderly, the sedentary kids.
[01:00:12] And I'm not going to go there and I'm not going to bring up the studies. You can look those up. I'm just focusing on us as lifters. The recommendation is three to five grams of creatine every day. Creatine monohydrate it's dirt cheap. It's easy to just throw in your post-workout shake or a glass of water.
[01:00:30] It doesn't taste like anything goes down easy, and there is plenty of evidence through hundreds of studies that it helps you build muscle and gain strength more quickly. If you're taking creatine than if you're not, it helps with your endurance specifically anaerobic endurance and between sessions that helps with recovery.
[01:00:51] It's perfectly safe. It's totally natural. You get creatine from food. You just don't get as much as you should from an optimal perspective. If you want to take it as a supplement for training, if you're going to take creatine, you might hear about a loading phase where you take 20 grams a day for the first week or so, but there's research that shows you probably don't need to do this.
[01:01:14] Just take three to five grams a day. It'll be saturated in your body soon enough. And then you just keep taking it and you could just take it for the rest of your life. It has no side effects whatsoever. It's good stuff. Enough said, let's recap. Everything we've talked about today. Cause I know this was a long episode.
[01:01:33] But I hope it was extremely useful to setting up and adjusting your diet to meet your goals. We talked about how to estimate your maintenance calories and the best way to do that is to track for two weeks, track your calories that you eat and track your weight. We talked about identifying your goal.
[01:01:53] Are you trying to lose weight because you want to burn fat? Are you trying to gain weight so you can build muscle or maintain your weight and how aggressive do you want to be? We talked about establishing your calories for the deficit or surplus consistent with that. Then we talked about macro nutrients, what they are protein, fat, and carbs, and how to set up your targets, proteins easy.
[01:02:19] One, one gram per pound fat. We talked about 20 to 30% in carbs, the remainder, but fat and carbs can be adjusted based on your preferences and training needs. We talked about logging your food every day, preferably using an app. So it's easier weigh in yourself every day and you can use something like a smart scale to make it easier, and then measuring your weight change each week and adjusting the calories up or down by tweaking the fat and carbs accordingly.
[01:02:50] If you have questions about any of the specifics in this episode, or want to share with me your personal experience and your individual goals, I'd be happy to get back to you by email@phillipatwhitsonwaits.com or you can DM me on Instagram at Whitson weights. I'd be happy to go over those details with you.
[01:03:10] That should cover it regarding the basic plan of attack for fat loss and muscle building. When it comes to calories, macronutrients, and even supplements. Stay tuned for episode six, where we introduce systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot. If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear on future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook.
[01:03:34] All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.
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Ep 4: The Truth about Metabolism, Cardio, and Fat Loss
What if there is one attribute above all others that permeates all attributes of fitness—that if you just focus on this attribute for a while as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all others? Today’s episode is all about the “S” word—STRENGTH. What is it, why is it important, and how to get it.
Today we’re focusing on the “calories out” side of energy balance with a discussion of metabolism, as well as whether and how we can manipulate this “calories out” side of the equation.
We will not discuss diet or nutrition, which is the “calories in” side of the equation. Stay tuned for the next episode. In the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet later on.
In today’s episode, we cover:
What is metabolism in the context of your total daily energy expenditure?
How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management
Whether it’s possible change your baseline metabolism, both short- and long-term
The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss
A more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat
RELATED LINKS
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy by Herman Pontzer, PhD
MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:29] Welcome to episode four of Wits & Weights. As pedestrian as it sounds, your ability to manage weight comes down, not to food, quality, carbs versus fat meal timing or any other new and improved fat loss secret. But rather to the age old first law of thermodynamics energy can neither be created nor destroyed, or in our context, calories in calories out, we refer to this as energy.
[00:01:01] Today, we're focusing on the calories out side of energy balance with the discussion of metabolism, as well as weather and how we can manipulate this calories outside of the equation. I don't plan on discussing diet or nutrition. Which is the calories in side of the equation. You can stay tuned for the next episode for that, but in the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure, sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet.
[00:01:34] Later on in today's episode, we cover what metabolism is in the context of your total daily energy expense. How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management, whether it's possible to change your baseline metabolism, both in the short and long-term. The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss and a more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat.
[00:02:05] Let's start by defining metabolism. Metabolism is basically all the chemical reactions going on inside your body that keep you alive. If you look up the definition on Wikipedia or anywhere else, You'll see three purposes for your metabolism. The first is to convert energy from the food you eat to run cellular processes.
[00:02:30] The second is to convert the stuff that comes from food, into building blocks, for things like proteins to build your muscle. And the third is to eliminate metabolic waste. So this would be through excretion urination, CO2. And the inner workings of this can get very complicated and it could be worth exploring in a future episode.
[00:02:54] But today I really want to keep it at a higher level and talk about the constituents of your metabolism and the various models that are, that exist to define how you might manipulate metabolism. We'll talk about how to track it, how to calculate it. Can you change it? And all of those sorts of things.
[00:03:13] Now, if we want to get objective and start tracking what we mean by metabolism. Total daily energy expenditure or T D E E. And I found a pretty good breakdown of this that you, you can consider an average for most people who are generally active or just mildly active, uh, some of these components change based on your activity level, but generally they hold for the average person, your TD E again, your total daily energy expense.
[00:03:43] Can be broken down into four components. The largest component is your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. And this could comprise roughly two thirds to maybe 70, even 75% of your expenditure. This is just the energy you need to stay alive. This is the energy you would burn. If you were sleeping. The next component of metabolism is the thermic effect of feeding.
[00:04:12] And this is the energy you burn to eat, to digest metabolize and store your food. And that makes up roughly 10%. And some people argue, you can increase that by eating more protein. And, you know, these things are probably true, but. Amount by which you can manipulate. It may not be significant. The next component is neat.
[00:04:33] Non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. That's all the energy you expend throughout the day, doing stuff, not necessarily intentionally like standing, walking yard work, doing your job, fidgeting, typing on the computer. So that's your non-exercise activity thermogenesis that represents roughly 15%. This is the, the one that I think possibly fluctuates most from person to person and even within a single individual, depending on.
[00:05:06] Your circumstances, right? How much sleep you're getting, how much activity you're doing, whether what your job is also, whether you're on a diet or gaining weight. And then the last component, which happens to be the smallest is exercise activity, thermogenesis. And this could be as little as 5% of your metabolism, which you might be thinking, well, that's not very high.
[00:05:27] Is it? Isn't the point of exercise and activity to burn calories? Well, not. And we'll get back to that. That actually brings me to the next topic, which is energy expenditure models. Now just to keep it simple, I'm going to compare what I'll call the traditional model, which is called the additive expenditure model and something proposed by Herman.
[00:05:55] Ponsor called the constrained energy model. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong. They're evidence, there's evidence to support both. And even if the constraint model is. Quote unquote accurate. It has to be interpreted properly. I think people take some of these to the extreme, to make a wild claims and recommendations.
[00:06:16] So if we look at the additive model, this is what I'll call the traditional model. The idea is simply. The more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn and it's linear and it goes up forever. So if you're running two hours a day or you're preparing for the tour de France or Olympic swimming, you're just going to burn tons and tons and tons more calories a day than somebody who's less active or sedentary.
[00:06:44] That's the traditional model. What Herman ponsor. His colleagues have found, and other researchers who have analyzed precisely calories in calories out in many different populations is that perhaps there's a, an adaptation that occurs with higher activity levels. When you go from sedentary to lightly active, to active, the more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn, but then your body starts to adapt your BMS.
[00:07:14] Declines and thus the total calories burns starts to level off. It starts to plateau rather than continuing to increase. If we're to accept this, then the extreme conclusion some people have made is, Ugh, well then I don't even need to exercise because if I exercise more, my body adapts by burning fewer calories and my net calories are the same.
[00:07:38] I just should just sit around all day because it doesn't make it. Well, the problem with that taken to the extreme is it's just that it's the extreme. When you look at the graph, when you look at the model, there's an entire first segment that shows your activity level does correlate with an increase in calories.
[00:07:57] It's just that perhaps doing lots of activity in the form of cardio could be counterproductive because of this adaptation. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that because that conclusion is supported by what we've discovered when it comes to cardio versus strength training, for example.
[00:08:16] So the constraint model is not a license, not to exercise. Now that we've established the objective definition of metabolism that is total daily energy expenditure, which is comprised of several constituents BMI. Thermic effect of feeding non-exercise and exercise activity, thermogenesis, and that perhaps the curve does not increase forever with activity.
[00:08:44] The next thing we want to understand is, well, how do we measure this? How do we calculate our TDE and then continue to measure it so that we know what to do about it in terms of diet, exercise, or any other levers that we can. And the thing about tracking your TDE, your daily expenditure was just simply how many calories you burn every day.
[00:09:07] Is there tends to be an inverse relationship between the convenience of doing so and the accuracy. That is the easier it is. The more convenient it is, the less accurate it is, but the more complicated and advanced the more algorithms and calculations you do, that's great, but that takes a lot of work and it may not be sustained.
[00:09:29] So we're going to talk about three ways to estimate your daily expenditure from the quick and easy, quick and dirty method that is not very accurate to an intermediate way to do it. That's somewhat accurate to vote way that's most accurate, but not necessarily convenient. And then I'm going to talk about an app that I use that takes the high accuracy.
[00:09:52] But also makes it convenient. So you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. We'll talk about that at the end. So starting with a quick and easy approach, the quickest way to estimate your potential calories burned is purely based on body, weight and calories per pound. So let's say you are. 200 pounds.
[00:10:15] The general number range you see is around 15 or 16 calories per pound. This is your total daily expenditure on average for your weight. So if you're 200 pounds and you assume 15 calories per pound, simple math, 3000 calories, or for example, I'm closer to 180. So 180 pounds, times 15. 2,700 calories. Now in reality, my.
[00:10:44] Daily expenditure at the moment is close to 3000 and the day I'm recording this podcast, I weigh only 1 71, cause I just finished a cut. I just started a bulk. So the 15 calories would be way off. And that's because I'm quite a bit more active. I have a higher metabolism. I have more muscle tissue, all these things that take me away from.
[00:11:09] The center portion of the normal curve in the population. So that's why the accuracy could be way off with this approach. But it's, if, if you have never thought about this before, and you're wondering, Hmm, how many calories do I burn every day? Add maintenance. Take your weight, multiply it by 15. Okay. The next.
[00:11:29] Where you get to a more accurate estimate for most people, but it takes a little more work is to use one of the validated formulas based on research. And most of these formulas are named after the researchers who were involved. And I, there are three formulas that I see used most often. Now the nice thing about these is because they're so.
[00:11:50] You can find calculators online, where you just enter the input data, and then it does the calculation for you. So I'm not saying you have to set up a spreadsheet or, or use Mathematica or something to calculate these, but there are three formulas that I wanted to mention. One is the revised Harris Benedict.
[00:12:09] This uses your gender height, weight, age, and activity level to determine your. TD E and I want to take a quick tangent and talk about this activity level. The big challenge with activity level. They don't decouple deliberate bouts of activity, like going to the gym and lifting heavy five days a week from all the other activity people perform.
[00:12:37] So for example, if you lift heavy and then you sit on your ass all day at a desk job, the rest of the time, another person never goes to the gym, but they're a construction worker who does lots of yard work and chops, whatever. Who has a higher activity level. That's the challenge. So if you're going to use one of these calculators, Look at how they define activity and probably be a little bit conservative just to make sure that you underestimate your expenditure.
[00:13:05] And then there are a couple others. There's the Mifflin St. Jor I think is how you pronounce it, which I think is more accurate than the Harris Bennett Benedict. And you don't have to know your body fat percentage. If you do know your body fat percentage, I would recommend the catch McArdle formula. I will mention these in the show notes.
[00:13:27] But you can go online and Google calculate TDE, and you'll find all these calculators. And most of these websites will say what's recommended. Also be aware to take any recommendations as to what calories and macronutrients you should use to gain or lose weight from those calculators, because they may have very different philosophies than what we're trying to achieve here on this podcast.
[00:13:52] Then we get to the most accurate approach. To collect real data on yourself. And there's two types of data we need, we need our food coming in and we need our wait. The best way to do this as it was some sort of food logger, usually an app where you can log your food every day and figure out how many calories you're eating.
[00:14:14] And then you use a scale every day, weigh yourself in the morning after you've gone to the bathroom with minimal clothing, and then you use a smooth version of your weight, something like a seven day. After about, I would say 14 days, you will have determined how your weight is changing relative to the calories you're eating.
[00:14:38] And that'll tell you how close you are to maintenance. So if you're somebody who has been roughly the same weight for months and months and more. And you're eating fairly consistently. You start measuring that food and you continue weighing yourself and you confirm, yeah, I'm not changing my weight, but I'm eating 2,400 calories a day and I weigh 180 pounds.
[00:15:00] Well, there, you know, you have a data point that tells you that your metabolism is somewhat lower than what these calculators might produce. Conversely, it might be much higher, but the point is it's individually. Now you might say, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. Well, we're going to talk in the next episode about diet and in the following episode about systems to track things on autopilot.
[00:15:23] I am going to be recommending that you log food and weigh yourself daily, at least for a period, if nothing else, then to learn about yourself and to learn about the calorie content and density of foods. But this brings me to what I mentioned earlier, that there are food bloggers that do some of these for.
[00:15:44] But there's only one that I found it's called macro factor and it's by the guys at stronger by science. I have no affiliation with them. They don't even do affiliate links. There's no program or sponsorship with them. I just love the app. I use it every day. And the best thing about it is that it's an adherence.
[00:16:05] It doesn't penalize you for going over or under your calories and macros like many other tools do, but the best part about it is it can calculate your TD E based on some sophisticated algorithms that they've worked out that account for many of these factors and more things like body fat things like are you lifting and doing cardio and can tell you within a few short weeks, roughly what your expenditure is, and then adjust your food plan.
[00:16:32] Going forward week after week to hit your target. And we're not talking about diet today, but I wanted to mention the app because of its ability to calculate for you, your individual TDE based on your food. And. Without you having to do any calculations. All right. We've covered what metabolism is the different models of metabolism and how to calculate it.
[00:16:59] So the next question you might be thinking is, okay, great. That that'll come in handy for diet, but can I actually change my metabolism? Can I change the energy outside meaningfully? I'd like you to ponder something. Think about the calculators we talked about and how most of those calculators. Ask for things like age, gender, height, and weight.
[00:17:19] And the reason they do that is because those factors tend to be correlated with body fat percentage. And it turns out that fat free mass is the strongest explanatory predictor of metabolism. Now, what is fat free? Mass fat free mass is just everything that's not fat in your body, which will be things like Oregon's.
[00:17:41] But more importantly, it includes your muscle tissue. And your bones. Ah, we're going to start to connect the dots here. How can we increase muscle tissue and bone? Resistance training. And we're going to hammer home this message time and again, on this podcast by resistance training, especially with a focus on strength so that you can increase muscle mass and bone density.
[00:18:07] You thus increase your fat free mass and that results in a higher metallic. If you were to take two people that weighed the same, let's say two men that weighed 285 pounds, both six foot eight, but one had significantly lower body fat. Let's say the first person is in the 30% range of body fat and has maybe 20% muscle.
[00:18:34] The second person is down near 10% with 60 something percent. The second person is going to have a higher metabolism by virtue of the extra muscle mass. And you've probably heard muscle is more expensive than fat muscle tissue requires more calories and fat tissue, and it goes beyond just the tissue itself.
[00:18:54] Some people. We'll say, oh, but I've heard it's very few calories per day, extra from muscle versus a pound of fat. And that might be true, but there are other systemic effects of having the extra muscle tissue that also lead to additional calories burned. And we can get into details behind the science, perhaps in another episode, some really cool stuff.
[00:19:15] That's been discovered even in just the last year or so, but suffice it to say it's well understood that a higher fat free mass, which occurs because you have more muscle higher bone density from resistance training will give you a higher metallic. So the best way to do that is through strength, training, the focus, the very focus of this podcast.
[00:19:37] Now, what are some other things you could do to increase your metabolism on a day-to-day level? Because I look at strength and resistance training as the long-term way to increase your overall metabolism, but in the short term, there's some other things you can do. Generally, you're going to burn more calories with more activity.
[00:19:54] Now, many of us can't really help what we're doing for our jobs. You know, if we're working a desk job, If we're sitting behind a desk all day, but we can walk more. We can take a few more walks, take, take a walk after lunch, take a walk after dinner for half an hour, get a couple miles in maybe five, 6,000 more steps for the day than you normally do.
[00:20:13] That's going to burn some more calories. And if you develop a habit of doing that, you might find you enjoy it, and it helps take the edge off of your need to cut your calories on the diets. Also your weight affects your metabolism. When you, if you've lost weight, you're probably going to have a slightly lower metabolism.
[00:20:31] Also things like eating more meals. When you're gaining, when you're bulking, you might end up eating an extra meal or two every day. You're, you're eating more. You're digesting more, you're eating more protein, you're eating more frequently. All of those things can affect your thermic effect of feeding your neat, those.
[00:20:49] The challenge is that metabolism fluctuates constantly. I've seen in my own tracking, my metabolism fluctuate between 2300 and almost 3000 calories just in the last three months or so. And I can't always necessarily explain why, well, what about cardio? I go to the gym and I hit the treadmill. I jog for half an hour, 45 minutes.
[00:21:16] I do the elliptical machine. I swim. What's the problem with lots of medium intensity cardio. Doesn't that burn a lot of calories? Well, here's the problem with too much cardio. And when I say too much, there's a F there's a balance. I'm not one of those hardliners that says you can't do any cardio at all, because it completely interferes with your strength training.
[00:21:36] No, I think there's a balance. I think it is okay to do some cardio. And I think you have to be smart about it, both in terms. What and when, but too much cardio, we're talking 3, 4, 5 days a week, half an hour to an hour or more of medium intensity cardio, where you are doing as much cardio as you are lifting, or perhaps even more, it sends a signal to the body to do two things.
[00:22:04] First, it tells your body to become more efficient, to conserve energy. And it does that by reducing your metabolism. And this is actually. The part that is supported by Herman pantsers constraint, energy model that shows as you, as your activity level goes quite a bit higher, your body starts to adapt and down-regulate parts of your metabolism and thus your overall calorie burn, doesn't go up very high.
[00:22:29] And this is why you see folks. Only do cardio as a form of exercise, often get into a hamster wheel of having to do more and more, eat less and less, not really lose weight, or even if you lose weight, you don't have much muscle and you become. What they call skinny fat, which is the second part of this in that doing too much cardio actually inhibits muscle growth, or even reduces or cannibalizes muscle tissue in the quest to become efficient because of a signal you're sending your body.
[00:23:03] Now it does interfere to some extent with lifting and that's a more nuanced topic for another time, but the take home message here is that some cardio is okay. And you have to be smart about it. For example, when I lift the forms of cardio, I like to use are walking. I think walking is awesome because it doesn't affect your joints.
[00:23:23] It doesn't interfere with recovery, between lifting sessions. You can enjoy nature if you're walking outside and it still burns a bunch of calories and it takes the edge off of your dieting. But other forms of cardio, I like occasionally would be some forms of high intensity interval. Like Tabata sprints are running shuttle runs and sled pushes sled poles, sled, drags, but re you want to limit the total amount of cardio time-wise to something like a quarter to half of your lifting time.
[00:23:53] Not really including things like walking again, walking or very easygoing biking, you could probably do. A lot of it, and it wouldn't interfere with your, if we piece all of this together, we get a good picture of maybe a more optimal way to burn fat. The most immediate route to fat loss is through your diet.
[00:24:13] We're talking about reducing fat, but as we know, reducing fat will take some muscle with it. So there's a smart approach to doing that. And we'll be talking about that in the next episode. The longterm sustainable route to fat loss is like we mentioned before, add muscle. And to do that, you have to do resistance training the way I've heard it said, which I really like is cardio burns, fat while exercising muscle burns fat while you're not exercising more lean tissue equals a higher metabolism, which makes it easier to lose weight later on.
[00:24:51] Or avoid getting fat while still eating more calories. And that is why I love strength training. That is why we're going to hammer that message home time. And again, the importance of adding lean mass to your body, because it helps your metabolism helps you control your diet, helps with fat loss. It's a more sustainable approach.
[00:25:10] And it's a lot of fun. All right, last but not least, I'm introducing a new segment today called the internet. Gets it wrong again. Where I look at the kind of information you get from a Google search when you're just trying to get a simple question answered and Google spits out tons of information that you have to sift through.
[00:25:28] Some of which is right, but most of which is not so right. For example, if you search for ways to increase my metabolism, you'll find several claims that just are not supported by the evidence or if they are they're so insignificant, they're not worth your. Now, the first claim is that metabolism just goes down when you get old and there's not much you can do about it.
[00:25:53] And that is just not true. The reason metabolism decreases as you age comes back to fat, free mass. As you age, you lose muscle mass and bone density. Therefore the lower fat free mass results in a lower metabolism. It's not just because of age. If you can counteract or increase your muscle tissue or bone density.
[00:26:14] As we've discussed multiple times through resistance training, then you can offset this idea that your metabolism declines with age. The second claim is about all these magic foods that can speed up your metabolism. I've seen green tea, chili peppers, even just eating more. We'll increase my metabolism.
[00:26:35] Now, now there might be a little kernel of truth to those in that they affect your digestion and they might burn a few extra calories here or there, but it really is insignificant and it's not worth deliberately going out of your way to try to eat more chili peppers, just to increase your. Just eat a good diet and you'll be fine.
[00:26:55] And the third claim is about using meal. Timing, eating early, eating late skipping meals to jumpstart, weight loss. At the end of the day, the calendar. Inside of the equation comes down to just that calories. And any attempt to manipulate that at the end of the day is measured in terms of calories. So stop trying to use quirky, weird ways to manipulate how and when to eat just in the interest of jump-starting your weight.
[00:27:25] I hope you enjoyed this examination of metabolism and its relationship with cardio fat loss and resistance training. And you're excited to use this information as we delve into diet in episode five, then in episode six, we'll talk about the systems and habits you can put in place to put your fitness and diet on auto.
[00:27:48] If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear in future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook. All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.
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Ep 3: Why is Strength so Important?
What if there is one attribute above all others that permeates all attributes of fitness—that if you just focus on this attribute for a while as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all others? Today’s episode is all about the “S” word—STRENGTH. What is it, why is it important, and how to get it.
Today’s episode is all about the “S” word—STRENGTH. What is it, why is it important, and how to get it.
If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s a safe bet that you have some sort of fitness related goal. You want to improve yourself physically in some way: build muscle, burn fat, get lean, get strong, improve athletic performance, look good in a bathing suit, or even improve mobility, flexibility, or balance.
What if there is one attribute above all others that permeates each of these attributes of fitness—that if you just focus on this attribute for a while as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all those other attributes?
Well you’re in luck, and if I haven’t made it painfully obvious by the title and intro of this episode, that one fitness attribute is…strength!
In today’s episode, we cover:
What do we mean by strength?
Why is strength the most important fitness attribute?
Assuming strength is so important, how do you get it?
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:31] Welcome to episode three of Wits & Weights. Today's episode is all about the S word strength. What is it? Why is it important and how to get it? If you're listening to this podcast, it's a safe bet that you have some sort of fitness related goal that is you want to improve yourself physically in some way, build muscle burn fat, get lean, get strong, improve athletic performance.
[00:00:59] Look good in a bathing suit. Or even improve mobility, flexibility, or. What if I told you there is one attribute above all others that permeates each of these fitness attributes, that if you just focus on this attribute for awhile as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all the others while you're in luck.
[00:01:22] And if I haven't made it painfully obvious by the title and intro of this episode, that one fitness attribute is strength. In today's episode, we cover, what do we mean by. Why is strength the most important fitness attribute and assuming it's so important, how do you get it? Let's start by defining strength.
[00:01:44] Although 10 people might give 10 different answers. The definition we're concerned with is the production of force against. We're not concerned with power speed, your ability to do something without getting tired or your ability to do something quickly. Only your ability to overcome a force or load measured by absolute physical.
[00:02:08] Absolute strength is measured simply by the amount of force you can produce. As indicated by the weight you can lift. This could be measured by your one repetition, maximum, or one RM on a barbell movement. Like the squat bench press or deadlift, or it could be measured on other movements like the overhead press, the barbell row, or any number of exercises across multiple numbers of repetitions weather, three, five.
[00:02:37] If you're following a program where you perform three sets of five, you can measure strength by your maximum three by five weight. Once more strength is simply your ability to exert force on an object. And we'll measure that by the weight. Having to find strength. The next question is why is strength relevant in starting strength?
[00:03:00] Mark Rippetoe writes quote, physical strength is the most important thing in life. Our strength, more than any other thing, we possess still determines the quality and quantity of our time. Here in these bodies, a weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong and. Andy baker wrote that quote strength is foundational to a better life.
[00:03:24] There is no instance in life or sport where stronger isn't better and quote, these may sound like exaggerations, but my personal experience has shown me time. And again, that strength is so much more important than people think. Once you have it, you realize the physical and mental doors and opens, let alone vastly improving your health, fitness, and lunch.
[00:03:47] Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called fitness programs from CrossFit to bootcamps, to orange theory, to P90X, and many others attempt to generalize across multiple fitness attributes without focusing on any one. In particular, for example, CrossFit claims to improve 10 attributes, cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, stamina strength, flexible.
[00:04:15] Power speed coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Yet the physical reality is that all of these attributes have a common baseline in stress. Although many of these programs recognize this fact in their descriptions and guides, they don't prioritize strength above all else. I personally was stuck in this hamster wheel with a generalized fitness approach for many years when I finally prioritized strength, that is my ability to handle greater and greater loads on the bar.
[00:04:47] Everything else related to fitness became easier and progressed more. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the benefits of strength training? For many, it's getting big or jacked, but building mass, like that takes hard work and dedication over a very extended period. In fact, strength has a cornucopia of benefits that almost make it seem like a magical elixir.
[00:05:13] And for many who have worked to gain strength, that's not too far from the. In the barbell prescription strength training for life after 40 Jonathan Sullivan wrote that quote, strength training can slow arrest or even reverse many of the degenerative effects of aging, loss of muscle and strength, brittle bones, floppy ligaments, dysfunctional joints, and the decline of mobility and balance and quote.
[00:05:40] Now that sounds like the fountain of youth. According to the fitness Wiki, here are 10 more benefits of building. Improved ability to manipulate or move objects in day-to-day life, including yourself increased bone density, reduced risk of osteoporosis, improve balance, and reduce risk of falls. Reduce symptoms of arthritis, back pain, obesity, heart disease, depression, and diabetes.
[00:06:08] It can improve cognitive ability in older adults. It can improve blood pressure triglycerides. HDL cholesterol can reduce the risk of cancer. Broadly reduces the risk of injury can help maintain joint flexibility and improved ability to control weight gain through increased calorie. For athletes, strength can correct.
[00:06:31] Muscular imbalances, prevent injury, increase power or explosiveness and increase muscular endurance. Whoa, what a list I'm assuming you're now completely convinced that getting stronger is probably a wonderful idea, which brings us to the final question. How do we build strength? It really comes down to lift weights.
[00:06:56] Eat. Lift weights, eat and sleep. Repeat that's it. But I would be doing you a disservice if I left it at that, because as we know, a lot of things can be simple, but they're not necessarily easy. There are many roads that lead to the same destination, some more serpentine than others. And we are going to pay for ourselves the most efficient road we can to get to that destination based on.
[00:07:23] The decades of experience, personal anecdotes, research, knowledge and outcomes. We've seen whether it's among powerlifters, bodybuilders, or everyday folks like you and me who have been successful doing this at a high level, becoming stronger requires a few key elements, heavy resistance training with sufficient frequency and recovery.
[00:07:49] That includes. Eating enough food to create what we call an anabolic environment and eating enough protein to provide sufficient material to build muscle. Let's cover each of these in detail, we'll start with resistance training. There are many strength building programs out there. Some are much more optimal than others.
[00:08:14] And generally, if you pick one of them, you work hard, you stick to it. You'll make much more progress than someone who jumps around from program to program or even worse. Does. In episode two, we talked about how to choose a strength training program. So if you didn't listen to that episode, go back, revisit it, choose a program and start training.
[00:08:39] We established that the optimal approach is one that uses barbells and compound lifts. Namely the squat, deadlift and bench press with the addition of the overhead press and even power clean or barbell rows in some. The conclusion is that you must train heavy with sufficient frequency to build strength by heavy.
[00:09:04] I mean, the load on the bar is high enough to drive the appropriate stress on your body to put it objectively when you're a rank novice following a linear progression, that would be heavier than last time by some meaningful amount, whether that's two and a half, five or 10 more. This is why we use barbells and compound lifts.
[00:09:27] Let's reiterate that barbells allow you to train your entire physical system in a full range of motion with multiple joints recruiting, significant muscle mass. It aligns with the neuromuscular functional reality of our human anatomy, both skeletal and. Barbells let you control the weight over time.
[00:09:50] Whereas machines are the ones controlling you barbells also allow you to scale from very light, to very heavy in an efficient, consistent way. Therefore you can train heavy and progress. Also by heavy, I mean, not so heavy that you can't use proper form and control the movement as Greg knuckles puts it, quote, you should use something between the heaviest weight that you feel very comfortable and confident with and about 15% less than that.
[00:10:21] And if you choose a program like starting strength or the big three routine, you'll see that sets of five are a cornerstone of effective beginner strength. The strength spectrum is generally considered between one and eight reps, where five is the sweet spot for new lifters. And here's why let's say you did only singles the, so those are sets of just one rep you would be required to recruit the maximum force possible for the movement, fully engaging your neuromuscular system, which would provide an excellent stimulus for strength.
[00:10:58] But the volume perhaps is too low. On the other hand. Sets of say eight and above require much more muscular endurance because of the duration and cardiovascular requirements sets of five are a good compromise for novice. To stimulate an increase in strength while maintaining good form consistency, muscular coordination, and still benefit from multiple hard reps from an endurance perspective.
[00:11:26] If you followed my advice in episode two and started. You'll find soon enough, if you haven't already that sets a five can be very hard, especially the last few reps of the last few sets, but that's a good sign that you're applying a stimulus that your body has never experienced before. It teaches you how to do hard things.
[00:11:49] One of the realities you'll come to value over the years. And I say this from experience. Now when you're training this hard, you need time to recover before hitting those same muscles. Again, newer lifters can train more often because they recover quickly as quickly as 48 hours, even for the leg muscles.
[00:12:11] Workout sessions are shorter because rest periods are shorter when you were a newer lifter, as you get stronger, or as they say closer to your genetic potential over months and years, you'll place more stress on the body in each session requiring longer recipes. Thus longer workout sessions and more recovery between sessions.
[00:12:33] At that point, you transitioned from a beginner three days per week, full body style program to either a modified intensity program with longer sessions or something like a four or five day body parts split. Now, one of the keys to recovery, when you are resistance training is to avoid over. And that is when your performance can't recover sufficiently to enable the appropriate adaptation.
[00:13:02] And this leads to much harder and ineffective workouts, which then just sabotages your ability to recover and adapt. Lastly, you have to get sufficient and high quality. And for many, that means not being on a screen till right before bed and getting at least seven or eight hours of sleep per night, which may sound like an insane requirement for busy working professionals based on your habits, but is something that will pay off big time when it comes to recovery between lifting stuff.
[00:13:34] So that's resistance training. That is how we build strength in the gym. And we'll be talking about many more details behind lifting, training, rest periods, and so on in future episodes. But the next thing I want to talk about is getting enough food and getting enough protein. Now, maybe you didn't think we would talk about diet today and it's true.
[00:13:56] Today's episode, isn't the diet episode, but it's a fact that. Your body's a system and building strength requires lifting combined with the right kind of environment from a food perspective so that you're lifting actually pays off. So you have to eat enough food. It's a fact of biology that to build muscle, you must be in a caloric surplus, even if you're a brand new lifter, who's able to build muscle while losing.
[00:14:27] A caloric surplus is simply taking in more energy through your diet than your body burns each day. The easiest way to tell if you're doing this is by the weight on the scale. If you're gaining weight each week, you're headed in the right direction for packing on muscle and taking advantage of that new training program of yours that you're working so hard at.
[00:14:49] Let me go on a little. If you think you can't eat enough or gain weight, I want you to get out of your head. All the silly nonsense about being a quote, hard gainer or having any quote, fast metabolism. These aren't real, they're just excuses to avoid eating enough. If you are a human being. Your energy system is ruled by the law of energy balance.
[00:15:13] We'll get into much more detail on this in the next episode, which will be an exciting one full of useful information and plenty of myth-busting. But for now, just accept the fact that if you start training hard to build strength, you must eat enough to be in a caloric surplus. No excuses. Part of eating enough is also making sure you get enough protein.
[00:15:35] Even if you're eating enough calories, you'll need a sufficient amount of protein within those calories, they can't be all fat or carbs. Protein is required for muscle protein synthesis or put simply gaining muscle mass. Now how much protein is enough? This has always been the. And the subject has been exhaustively researched in recent years.
[00:15:56] The consensus seems to be that around 0.8 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight is a good target with no need to go much higher than 1.3 grams per pound. Despite all the bro science out there suggesting that you need hundreds of grams of protein per day. I personally shoot for one gram per pound each day.
[00:16:20] It's a nice round number. And if you fall short, you're still well in the ballpark. What does this look like for a 200 pound man? That's 200 grams of protein per day for a 150 pound woman. That's 150 grams. Now this might sound like a lot. This might be hard if you are not using. So stay tuned for our upcoming episode on diet and nutrition, where I break down a plan of action and some ideas for getting sufficient protein.
[00:16:48] But for now, look for ways to get closer to this target of 0.8 to one gram per pound, starting with things like. Eggs and dairy. All of this leads me to a concept called the stress recovery adaptation model, stress recovery adaptation, which neatly captures much of what we just talked about. First, you apply a new stress to your body with very heavy weight.
[00:17:17] At moderately low reps, we're talking the F one to eight rep range, but primarily around five for most of the effective beginner programs. Second, you give yourself enough time to recover. By resting, sleeping enough, eating enough and getting enough protein. Finally, your body then adapts as a protective survival mechanism to handle a slightly higher level of stress.
[00:17:42] Next time, next time you go to the gym, you have a new baseline and you should be able to lift a little more weight, and it does this by increasing your neuromuscular strength and muscle size, but only if you gave it enough fuel rest and sleep to. Stress recovery adaptation, the magical formula to building strength.
[00:18:05] All it requires of you is hard work, dedication, and consistency. Now here's a bonus tip. Even if your goal is just to have a better physique, just to look. You must have a baseline of strength to grow big dense muscles and support your ability to handle heavy enough high rep exercises. If, and when you Wade into the bodybuilding and hypertrophy world, you can't just jump in and start doing hypertrophy in the eight to 12 rep range and hope to gain much muscle mass.
[00:18:40] You have to lift heavy and gain strength. Let's recap, today's episode, we covered a lot of material, but I think it's important to understand deeply that which might become the foundation of your health and fitness for the rest of your life. My goal in this podcast is to help you become a highly educated, informed consumer and practitioner, an independent thinker and beholden to so-called fitness experts.
[00:19:09] Today, we talked about what we mean by strict. From a fitness perspective, why it's critical to the very essence of your health and all fitness attributes and how you can achieve greater strength through resistance training, eating enough food, getting enough protein and sufficient recovery to exploit the stress recovery adaptation model inherent in our biology.
[00:19:35] In our next episode, we'll talk about cardio fat loss and Metabo. Then episode five, we'll discuss how to approach your diet without going on a diet. We'll dive into a lot of the things we discussed here regarding calories and protein at a much deeper level and how you can put it into practice. And in episode six, we talk about developing systems and habits to put your fitness on auto-pay.
[00:20:01] If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear on future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook. All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.
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Ep 2: How to Choose a Strength Training Program
This is the episode where we lay out our fitness philosophy and give you steps to take action right away. We cover basic terms, requirements for an effective strength training program, proper form and technique, and choosing the right program.
This is the episode where we lay out our fitness philosophy and give you steps to take action right away.
Strength training is by far the most effective way to increase muscle mass, boost your metabolism, and improve your health in more ways than you can imagine, from mobility, balance, and flexibility to reduced risk of metabolic disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and injury. It also tests you physically and mentally because it’s hard—one of the best reasons for doing it!
Today is about getting you moving on a training program right away.
We will definitely cover some basic principles of strength training and muscle building, but we’ll save a deep dive into all things strength-related for the next episode, where we’ll examine in great detail WHY strength and resistance training are so important.
But today is all about ACTION. Getting you moving and lifting right away. No excuses.
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape, and in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:31] Welcome to episode two of Wits & Weights. This is the episode where we lay out our fitness philosophy and give you steps to take action right away. Strength training is by far the most effective way to increase muscle mass boost your metabolism and improve your health in more ways than you can imagine.
[00:00:50] From mobility, balance and flexibility to reduce risk of metabolic disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It also tests you physically and mentally, because it's hard and that's one of the best reasons for doing it. Today's about getting you moving on a training program right away. We'll definitely cover some basic principles of strength, training, and muscle building, but we're going to save a deep dive into all things, strength related for the next episode, where we'll examine in great detail, why strength and resistance training are so.
[00:01:28] But today is all about action. Getting you moving and lifting right away. No excuses. In today's episode, we cover strength, training lingo. We'll define key terms. So you can speak the language, the importance of training with a program instead of just exercising the requirements to train effectively for strength, the one category of lifting that meets all of those requirements and overview of the movements.
[00:01:55] You'll be. Choosing a program and measuring progress. And finally what to do next to get started this week. First, let's take a moment to define some terms. I'm not going to do this every episode, of course, but I think it's important to get familiar with what people mean when they say certain things in this universe, which can be kind of strange if you've never been in it before.
[00:02:23] So the first thing we're going to define is. Strength is simply the ability to exert force on an object. And for our purposes, strength can be measured by how much weight. That's it. If you're doing a squat, how much weight is on the barbell that measures your strength? The next term is hypertrophy. And I'm defining this early because I know you're going to want to hear about it.
[00:02:50] Uh, and most people getting into strain, training programs, you know, they just want to get big and muscular or they want to increase their muscle mass and hypertrophy is the increase in muscle mass due to. Muscle cell size or quantity increase, but here's a thing. Hypertrophy comes with strength. You don't need to separate the two until you're an immediate, intermediate or advanced lifter.
[00:03:16] And all you need to focus on now is to get stronger. You need to get bigger, but to get bigger, you need to get stronger. Thus, we focus on. Don't worry about hypertrophy. Worrying about hypertrophy takes you down a dark path of tons of exercise, variety, and all sorts of movements that you really don't need early on when you're just trying to build strength.
[00:03:43] The next definition is intensity intensity for our purposes is the weight or load. That's it, it's not how hard you're working or the reps you have left in the tank, or whether you're getting in a good sweat or how sore you are. It's just the weight on the bar. Let's talk about reps and sets and you're probably familiar with these concepts.
[00:04:09] Most people are, but let's just define them. A rep is a repetition or the number of times doing a complete movement. So, if you're doing deadlifts, how many times do you lift the bar off the ground and set it back down? That's a rep. Sets are the number of consecutive reps before taking a rest period. So if we go with that deadlift, if you do one deadlift, you set the bar down, you take a breath, you do another set the bar down, take a breath, and you do this five times and then you stop.
[00:04:46] That's a set of five. However, if you do a deadlift, set it down and you take 15 breaths and then do it again. I would consider those two separate sets of one rep. Now there's nomenclature. When it comes to sets and reps, that gets a little bit confusing for the most part, we're going to use the scheme of sets times reps.
[00:05:12] So if you do three sets of five reps, each we're going to say three by five and that's three X five. If you write it out. So three by five, if you see three by five, three sets of five, the next thing I wanted to find is a rest or rest period. And this is simply the time spent resting between sets. So that you can recover for the next set.
[00:05:39] So when, back to my deadlift example, if you did a set of five and you put the bar down and then you rested for one minute or three minutes or 10 minutes, that's your rest period. The next term, within the last two terms, I want to define our exercise and. Exercise can be one of two things. It can either be the movement itself.
[00:06:07] The back squat is an exercise or physical activity done for its own sake. So by just playing football, you're exercising or running, you're exercising or doing back squats, your exercise. Training on the other hand is physical activity or exercise to achieve a goal. And his goal could be strength. As in the weight on the bar keeps going up.
[00:06:35] It could be physique or aesthetics for some people, it could be performance. If you're. Regardless, you have a goal and then you have to have a plan to get there. And that's the way we are going to operate on this podcast and how I'd like you to operate in your life when you try to build muscle and get stronger and fitter as we move forward.
[00:06:56] Now, the question is, why should you follow a program or training versus random exercise? It really comes down to long-term sustainability and motivation, which is the number one reason people stick to or abandon a particular type of training or diet. If you have a structured plan to follow with specific days of the week, exercises , sets, reps and intensity, it's a lot easier to get motivated to go in the next day and execute you, preplan your workouts, you track your progress. You align all of these with your training goal, which in our case early on will simply be linear progression of weight on the bar and all of these things. They save you a ton of time and they eliminate excuses versus just randomly going to the gym.
[00:07:56] If we want to train for strength, we have to establish the requirements for our training program. What exactly are our parameters? What are our constraints? Because if we don't have those, then we're open to a whole world of possible selection. Do we use dumbbells? Do we use Bosu balls? Do we use yoga? Do we use high intensity interval training?
[00:08:24] What, what do we do exactly? So let's establish five requirements for an effective strength training program. The first is going to be intensity, as we said before, intensity is weighton the bar. So an effective training program will allow us to lift as much weight as possible. The second is efficiency.
[00:08:48] We're busy. We don't have time to go to the gym twice a day, six times a week, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding encyclopedia, or like somebody competing for a powerlifting competition. We want to maximize our time in the. Train the most amount of muscle using the fewest number of lifts. The third requirement for an effective strength training program is progression.
[00:09:16] We need to be able to measure strength and progress objectively, session to session week to week, but also continue to increase over time. There are many exercises and movements that do not allow you to increase the weight beyond a few sessions they stall out, or it just doesn't make sense based on the movement and the muscles being recruited.
[00:09:42] So it has to be scaled. You have to be able to go from extremely light for somebody who may not be very strong or an older person, somebody who's physically limited all the way to very, very heavy using the same movement without changing the movement. The fourth criteria is safety. We want to avoid extreme high impact high stress type.
[00:10:09] And we'd like to take advantage of the range of motion that is natural to our anatomy, the longest range of motion that our body permits. This is a safe way to exercise and build strength. And finally, The last criteria is recovery. We need a program that allows us to recover so that we can continue to progress.
[00:10:34] And recovery means eating enough, sleeping enough and minimizing stress, which brings us back to what is the most appropriate type of exercise type of equipment that satisfies all of these requirements. And the answer is compound. Put simply a compound lift is a lift that involves more than one joint as opposed to a single joint movement.
[00:11:02] For example, when you do a barbell curl, you're only bending at your elbow. It's a single joint movement. In contrast, when you're doing a back squat, you're bending at the knees and the hips you're bending at the ankles. So it involves multiple genes. Compound lifts like these with barbells satisfy all five criteria.
[00:11:24] We mentioned earlier, let's go through them one by one intensity barbells by far, allow you to lift the heaviest. What about efficiency compound lifts because they involve multiple joints. They recruit many different muscles. Therefore you can minimize the number of exercises, reduce the exercise, variety, keep things simple and thus get through your workout much more quickly, fewer times per week and satisfy the efficiency.
[00:11:59] Next we have progression with barbells and compound lifts. We can continue to add weight for a very long time. We're going to use something called linear progress. We're the only thing you change from session to session is the weight on the bar and barbells are highly scalable. You can go from a, an empty barbell or even an empty lighter version of a barbell all the way up till you start adding weight.
[00:12:29] And then you can continue to add weight with the simple use of plates. The fourth criteria is safety and barbells. Really stand out here because with barbells, you can move in a full range of motion when you're doing a compound lift without undue stress on your joints. If you're doing it properly and with equipment like bar collars pins in the rack spot or on.
[00:12:55] You can have additional safety in the event of a failed rep, such as on a bench press. And of course, failed reps is something we want to avoid, but if, and when they happen, you want it to be safe and finally recovery, heavy lifting. Means that you only need to work out two or three days per week as a new lifter.
[00:13:17] And it gives you plenty of time between sessions to eat and sleep enough as opposed to doing five or six days a week of lots and lots of accessory or isolation exercises. It doesn't add undue stress like running or other quote unquote intense exercise. The next thing you might be asking is what if I don't have access to barbells and power racks, you're telling me I needed to do barbell lifts, but my gym only has machines and cardio equipment.
[00:13:47] My answer would simply be, get access right away. However you can, and you have a few options for this. So this, this should not be an excuse because barbell lifts are the way to go for maximum strength, gains and efficiency and all the other criteria we talked about. Your first option is to find the closest gym that does have barbells and power racks.
[00:14:11] And we'll let you deadlift, even if it's just a commercial gym, find one. The next option is to find a more specialized gym like power powerlifting, bodybuilding style, starting strength, gym that is geared toward clients like yourself who want that equipment. The third option, and this I highly recommend.
[00:14:34] Is to just buy a power rack, barbell and plates. However you can hustle. Look for sale. Go to the Facebook marketplace or Craigslist. That's how I got my first barbell in 40 fives is from a kid who graduated college. He no longer needed his equipment. Bought it from him, met him in a parking lot. It was cheap.
[00:14:55] Good deal. Good equipment. Talk to your friends, look for gyms going out of business, man. There's CrossFit gyms going out of business left and right, unfortunately, but during COVID, that's obviously an opportunity for you to find equipment. And then the other option is to mooch off of a friend who has their own home gym and buy them a bottle of whiskey.
[00:15:16] You've got to have that basic equipment to get started, what we will not be doing. And you do not have to worry about on any of these programs. Things like kettlebells medicine or Bosu balls, fixed plane, weight machines, you know, the kind in the gym where you sit down high intensity interval training, medium intensity, cardio, like running, or really any other cardio initially, other than brisk walking, if you love to do any of these things.
[00:15:47] Sorry, you want to not do them during the novice phase here and focus just on lifting. You can incorporate them later for fun, or if you have specific goals, but any cardio you do now will likely interfere with your ability to recover. And we want to focus on one goal at a time. And then later on, we can pull in sled pushes or things like that, that you might just enjoy sports and such.
[00:16:13] Now that we've established that. The big compound lifts with barbells are the most effective way to go for a strength training program. What do we do with those? What kind of movements are we talking about? And what we're going to examine now is what we call the big four. The big four movements are the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, and the press, which some people call the overhead press or the shoulder press.
[00:16:45] And we will just call the. Now you'll find a lot of programs, leave out the press and focus only on what they call the big three squat deadlift bench press, which are found in powerlifting competitions, but the overhead press, the press is in my opinion, an elegant, beautiful, technical exercise. You can tell I'm passionate about it, and it's superb for developing upper body strength.
[00:17:14] As well as things like balance and awareness, it's not just a shoulder exercise. Like people think it recruits lots of muscle mass from head to toe, but it can be a fickle themed to progress. So it teaches you resilience, precision timing, how to tackle hard things. If you can build to a one times body weight press, you're pretty darn strong.
[00:17:43] Programs like starting strength also incorporate a fifth big lift, the power clean. This is an Olympic lift, which is an explosive dynamic pulling movement that you can alternate with deadlifts to keep progressing. And you'll learn about these lifts in greater detail. Once you dive into the program you choose to go with.
[00:18:05] Now, we have to use correct form to avoid injury and optimize. Your results and your progress. There's so much misinformation out there about whether weightlifting or lifting is safe or not. And it usually comes down to people just not using correct form. And in my opinion, you want to treat this like a skill every time you do the movement, every warmup.
[00:18:30] Treat it like a skill that you're constantly refining and getting better at. There are many ways to improve your form. And I want to focus on this just for a minute before we talk about choosing a program, because I think it's that. The first thing you can do is start to read definitive guides on each of the movements.
[00:18:49] I would recommend something like starting strength by mark Rippetoe, which in my opinion has the most exhaustive, detailed explanation of each of the lifts. The explanation of the low bar back squat itself is probably 30 or 40 pages long. And for that very reason, you should seek it out. There are other guides online.
[00:19:11] Andy Morgan's ripped body website, I think has some good definitive guides on the big three. You can watch form videos. Go to YouTube places like barbell logic. Another way to improve form as you start training is to video all of your lifts and then watch them back yourself and compare them to high quality examples, whether they're online or in a book or even a written description, and just continue to find and be your own worst critic, find where you can.
[00:19:42] You can also post your videos online and get what's called a form. Check my warning. There is just to be very careful where you post them. For example, Reddit, although an awesome place for most communities and discussions, isn't often the best source of quality feedback on a form check. So look for groups that make sense.
[00:20:02] For example, I'll mention starting strength. Again, they have an open Facebook group you can join and people get some really good form checks. The next two tips I have in terms of form and technique has to do with hiring a coach. I strongly believe hiring a coach, even for one or two sessions will help greatly accelerate your ability to do the form correctly because you'll get that second pair of eyes who can tell you immediately the 10 things you're doing wrong.
[00:20:31] Can work on, and I've done this several times where I'll just hire a coach for one session and say, I want to work on my squat today. And out of it, I learned so much way more than I would have learned from these other methods. You could also find a good power lifting type. Make friends with the other lifters, with the coaches and get feedback that way or hire an online coach, especially with the pandemic and people working remotely, everyone starting to build their own home gyms.
[00:21:00] This is an excellent option for getting feedback and working on your skill. The way it works is typically you take a video, you send it to your coach and they get back to you. I have heard of coaching where they'll do it live over. The next step is choosing a program. I suggest selecting a program that lots of people have used successfully rather than trying to write your own program, especially if you're just getting started.
[00:21:26] There's no need to do that. We're going to talk about four. Programs, you could consider, there are many, many more out there, but these are four that I would recommend you look into and choose what works best for you. And the first program we'll talk about, which is the program that really helped me make significant progress is starting strength.
[00:21:48] This is a book written by mark. Rippetoe the thing that I really like about it and why I recommend it highly is it is extremely. It focuses on just the big lifts and you will make significant progress. And that's all we're looking for. The starting training program focuses exclusively on sets of five important.
[00:22:11] Not, not for the reason. A lot of people think a lot of people say, well, the strength rep range is one to five and then the hypertrophy rep ranges, maybe six to 12. So it's more on the strength side, although it is a balance between those and maybe it's that kind of sweets. The most important thing is that it keeps you focused on going heavy.
[00:22:36] If you're doing sets of eight or 12, it disincentivizes really pushing the intensity up. Also doing sets of five keeps things simple from a numbers perspective, from an exercise and movement perspective. You're not going to do leg presses or bicep curls. If you're trying to do heavy sets of five.
[00:22:57] Starting strength also provides, I mentioned this earlier, but a definitive explanation, a guide to form and technique on the big lifts on the squat, the deadlift, the bench press the press and the power clean. And the book does go into other accessory movements. It talks about chin ups and even things like barbell.
[00:23:23] Practically speaking, what does it look like? It's extremely simple. When you are brand new, when you're a novice, there are two workouts and you alternate these two workouts over three days a week. So we'll call them workout a and work out. So week one, you'll do a, B a, then we too. It's B a B, and you continue in that fashion until you get to the next phase.
[00:23:53] Workout a is three by five squats, three by five, press one by five deadlifts, deadlifts are considered highly stressful and they don't recommend doing more than one. So it's squats, press deadlift. Workout. B is three by five squats. So notice you're doing squats again, three by five bench and one by five deadlift.
[00:24:22] So you're squatting and deadlifting every other day during the week, then you take the weekend off and you do it again. And then you're alternating the press and the bench. Again, work out a is three by five squats, three by five, press one, buy five deadlift workout. B is three by five squat, three by five bench, press one by five deadlift.
[00:24:44] So the only difference being the press and the bench press, and you want to pick the days that are convenient for you generally, this is going to be Monday, Wednesday. But you could do Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And if you are extremely pressed for time, you could reduce the frequency to two days a week.
[00:25:04] You just won't make progress as quickly. It is critical that you have at least one day off between any two training days. This is key to recovery. And as the saying goes, you don't get strong under the bar. You get strong. Between workouts, you don't get strong while you're working out. You get strong while you sleep.
[00:25:25] Now, the one thing I didn't mention it is probably the most important aspect of this program that you need to add weight to the bar. Every time you do a movement, the next day you do that movement. So you're squatting every single cell. You should be adding five pounds or initially it could be as high as 10 pounds.
[00:25:43] If you're brand new and not very strong at all, it might be 10 pounds than it'll be five and it could even drop to two and a half pounds on something like the press or the bench press deadlifts might go up by 10 pounds for quite a while, till you scale them back to going up by five pounds. Now, eventually the deadlift is going to get quite hard.
[00:26:06] It's generally going to be. Far ahead of the squat. And this is pretty quickly like within a month, potentially of starting, in which case you then move to the next phase and you're going to replace the deadlift with a power clean, every other workout. And the power clean is a whole different movement that requires a special skill, and you really have to pay attention to the explanation of the.
[00:26:31] Watch videos get a coach, if you can. It's a lot of fun if you're older, like, and when I say older, I mean maybe in your sixties or higher, or for whatever reason, can't do a power clean, not everybody has to power clean. There are alternatives like doing other pole movements. Pull-ups chin-ups even barbell rows, but this is the program.
[00:26:56] Then when, after a few more weeks and you get the power of. Inc. You moved to the next phase of the novice linear progression. And in this case, you're actually going to add in chin. To get some more upper body volume. And for the guys out there who want big guns, big biceps, chin-ups, we'll do wonders for your biceps.
[00:27:16] You don't even need girls. This phase can actually go on for quite a while and you're going to start feeling it get harder and harder, especially as you push up for guys. For example, once you get into the two hundreds on the squat for the first time ever. You might start to feel it now everybody's different.
[00:27:35] Some guys are very strong naturally. So they're going to push up toward maybe the three hundreds and their novice progression, but most sits somewhere between. I want to say 2 25 and 2 75, by the time they get toward the end of their linear progression and you get to the final phase and you're backing off on frequency of the deadlifts and the power cleans because the deadlifts are just getting so heavy in terms of progression.
[00:28:04] The suggestion is that you start with an empty bar. Now, if you've been lifting for a long. You may be able to start with more weight than that. If you know, for a fact on a back squat, you could easily start at 95 pounds or 135 pounds, you know, your body, you know what you can do, do what makes sense. But the recommendation is to start with an empty bar and then start adding weight because you're doing the lifts so frequently.
[00:28:28] It won't take long to increase to a reasonable level of intense. Now the thing is here. You, you want to be proactive in terms of when you think you're starting to get to your limit, do you think you're actually going to potentially fail one of your sets in the next workout? If you go up by five pounds again, could you then instead go up by two and a half to avoid failing.
[00:28:50] We want to avoid failing the reps for as long as we can, but if you do you try it the next time you try the same weight next. Eventually you will start to plateau. And this is when you're heading towards your intermediate phase. And if you're listening to this and just getting started on this, you haven't even started training.
[00:29:09] So we're talking several months out from now, but it will happen. And at that point we have to discuss things like backing off resetting deloads moving to four day or five days, splits, changing frequency, changing to periodization, all of those kinds of advanced concepts. When you're done with linear progression, but for now, the key is to add weight to the bar, every session and get big and strong.
[00:29:37] That's all I'm going to say on that program. I could get into things like warmups and diet and so on, but go ahead and look it up. Read the book. Go to the website, startingstrength.com. I have no affiliation. I just love the program. It worked wonders for me, and I think it's great for a lot of folks that try it because it's simple and it works and you progress pretty quickly and get bigger and stronger.
[00:30:01] Let's move on to the second program you might want to check out, which is by Greg knuckles. Greg knuckles is the head of content at stronger by site. And I absolutely love their podcasts that are one of the podcasts that I've inspired me over the years. And I listened to it every time it comes out. He also is behind the new nutrition app.
[00:30:23] This is the app that I've been using since it came out not very long ago, it's called macro factor. And I will be talking more about that app in the upcoming episode about diet. But in the meantime, I think if you subscribe to the stronger by science newsletter, I'll include a link in the show notes.
[00:30:42] You'll get 28 free. Programs that he's put together. And they're very simple. What I like about his free programs is he simply splits the programs up by Lyft, the big three. In his case, he lets you choose a frequency and how to put them together. And then he gives you various combinations of how you can do this.
[00:31:03] So if you're looking for kind of a mix and match with the big three and keeping it super simple, check out Greg knuckles, 28 free program. The next program I want to mention is called the big three routine by Andy Morgan at rippedbody.com. And again, I'm not affiliated with any of these. I just think they're good programs, but again, I'll have a link in the notes.
[00:31:26] This again is focused on the big three. Five by five and it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and he has them split up in a certain way. That's explained on the website, he's got some very definitive guides, tutorials and videos that I think would be extremely helpful, even if you don't use one of his programs.
[00:31:47] And then the last resource I'll mention. The fitness.wiki, which is associated with the fitness subreddit. And I recommend checking out this site because it has a bunch of guides on muscle building, strength, training programs, and so on. And they actually have something called a beginner routine. They suggest running it for no more than three months after which you're ready to move on to intermediate.
[00:32:16] It is actually quite similar to starting strength in some ways, because it's three by fives. It's a workout, a and a workout B and three days a week. Alternating workout a is three by five barbell rows three by five bench, three by five squat. So the squat comes last and then workout B is three by five.
[00:32:38] Chin-ups, three by five press and three by five debts. And then they suggest a specific progression two and a half pounds for the upper body lifts, five pounds to the lower body lifts. And then some rules based on how many reps you get, or if you fail and so on, it's has a little more complexity. It also incorporates some specific conditioning requirements, but I think it's still a good program to check out.
[00:33:05] And that brings us to the first action for you in this podcast. And that is to choose one of these programs. Do this today, pick a program, review some of these by the books, or get the eBooks or borrow it, go to the library, whatever it takes, learn about them. There's plenty of information online and then figure out how you're going to track your.
[00:33:31] The simplest way is just use a notebook. I do love technology. So there are apps out there like strong or stacked or train heroic. If you're working with a coach to track. Now that you've chosen a program and have a way to track it. I'd like you to consider measuring progress, taking a baseline, and then measuring yourself going forward.
[00:33:54] Since you're just getting started, it'll be an excellent resource to look back on in the. And to do this first, I would suggest taking some before photos, then take some before measurements. Now I think these are a bit more important for tracking progress, and these would include your weight, your waist, your chest, your biceps, and your thoughts.
[00:34:19] You can use something like the Mio tape and I'll include a link in the show notes. And this allows you to measure yourself without the help of someone else. And I suggest taking measurements now and then every week and write them down or use a spreadsheet. Now I want to give you a couple of bonus tips that are important before we recap the episode and talk about your plan.
[00:34:43] When building muscle, you must eat enough to gain weight. If you do not eat enough, everything else we talked about will be somewhat of a waste of time. You're just not going to make gains. Yes. If you're totally new to this, you will gain initial strength through what's called neuromuscular Adams. And you'll even gain muscle and lose fat because you've never lifted heavy things before, but that will plateau quickly enough without enough food.
[00:35:15] We'll be talking about diet in episode five, but at a minimum to start, just make sure your weight every week is going up. Not down second. You must get enough sleep to recover. And don't do silly things like long distance running or other physical activities that will exhaust you and prevent you from coming into the gym.
[00:35:37] The next session, adding weight to the bar and hitting all your reps. This will only slow you way down. Let's recap. And talk about your plan of action. We talked about the requirements for an effective strength training program. Why compound lifts are the most efficient way to do. And they satisfy all of those criteria and the best programs for getting started.
[00:36:04] Here's what you'll do next first, choose a program. Second, get access to a barbell third, get a notebook or download a workout app to track. Fourth, take initial body measurements and repeat every week, fifth start training right away. Get under a barbell in our next episode, we'll talk about why we care so much about strength in episode four, we'll cover cardio fat loss and metabolism.
[00:36:36] Episode five. We'll discuss how to approach your diet without going on a. And in episode six, we talk about developing systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot.
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Ep 1: Let's Get Strong Together
Welcome to the very first episode of Wits and Weights: Strength Training for Skeptics. On this very first episode, learn about my background, the importance of strength, and what you can expect in future episodes.
Welcome to the very first episode of Wits and Weights: Strength Training for Skeptics.
If you’re a skeptical, critically-minded person like me, you’ve probably gotten tired of what the modern-day so-called fitness industry has to offer, and you just want to know what actually works.
Not only that, you’re probably a busy, working professional with a full-time job or perhaps you own your own business or run several side hustles, so time is at a premium. Can you actually build a stronger, healthier body and maintain a sustainable, active lifestyle?
The answer is an emphatic YES.
Plenty of everyday folks have figured out what works in terms of exercise, nutrition, habits, mindset, and lifestyle, but there is so much information out there—even from highly respectable sources—that it can be overwhelming to distill it down to a single, focused plan that works for you.
That’s why I created this podcast.
On this very first episode, learn about my background, the importance of strength, and what you can expect in future episodes.
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape, and in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right..
[00:00:32] Hey guys, welcome to the very first episode of Wits and Weights: strength training for skeptics. I'm extremely excited to let you know what I'm all about and give you a sneak preview of what you can expect on this podcast. If you're a skeptical, critically minded person like me, you've probably gotten tired of what the modern day so-called fitness industry has to offer.
[00:00:54] And you just want to know what actually works. Not only that you're probably a busy working professional with a full-time job, maybe two or three, or perhaps you own your own business or run several side hustles. So time is at a premium, let's say you can only get to the gym two days a week. Can you actually build a stronger, healthier body and maintain a sustainable active lifestyle?
[00:01:18] This way? The answer is an emphatic. Yes. Plenty of everyday folks have figured out what works in terms of exercise, nutrition, habits, mindset, and lifestyle. But there is just so much information out there even from highly respectable sources that it can be overwhelming to distill it down to a single focused plan that works for.
[00:01:43] That's why I created this podcast. Like you, I'm busy with a career and family, and I didn't truly understand the importance of strength as a foundation of fitness until my late thirties, just a few short years ago, just to get it out there. I turned 41 right before this podcast went live on this episode.
[00:02:03] First, I'd like to tell you my story and why the heck you'd even want to listen. Then we'll talk about why strength is so important. Perhaps the most important aspect of fitness and health. Finally, we'll preview some of the really cool topics we'll examine in upcoming episodes related to resistance training, especially with barbells fat loss and body recomposition exercise, selection, form technique, programming, recovery, and adaptation, and many other topics from foundational to.
[00:02:38] All right, please indulge me while I share a bit about my background. So you'll understand why this podcast and becoming strong and healthy are so important to me. For most of my life. I was not at all. Athletic, never participated in organized sports and lived the sedentary life of a desk jockey with a job that has me sitting in front of a computer.
[00:03:01] All. During my twenties and thirties, I very inconsistently went to commercial gyms and very inconsistently, tried to quote unquote exercise. Usually this involved, the clumsy sweat inducing use of a treadmill or elliptical machine, and maybe 10 minutes playing around with strength machines. You know, the ones where you get to sit down, there's a label that tells you how to use it.
[00:03:26] And you whip out a few sets of lots of lightweight. Needless to say this, didn't put a single pound of lean muscle on my frame, which vacillated between skinny, fat and fluffy. Over the years in my thirties, I found CrossFit. I had decided that with my wife pregnant with our first daughter and me about to become a father, I needed to step it up and get in shape.
[00:03:52] Although it's far from the most effective way to gain strength and I don't do it anymore. CrossFit introduced me to three new concepts that changed my life: barbells, coaching, and physical transformation. First barbells, many people correctly, in my opinion, credit CrossFit with reintroducing barbells to the general population, not to mention the squat, deadlift and Olympic.
[00:04:19] I had never touched a barbell in my entire life. So the first time I realized an empty bar, weighed a whopping 45 pounds, surprised me, but I also learned that a barbell holds great power due to its uncanny ability to allow a human being, to move very heavy loads, using safe, natural, full range of motion, multi jointed.
[00:04:44] After all squatting picking things up, pushing and pulling our primal to our anatomy.
[00:04:50] Second is coaching other than low paid unskilled, personal trainers and commercial gyms. I had never worked with a coach who would watch me lift and then give me immediate cues and feedback to. Say what you will about certifications and experience the value of having a training partner, coach, or even someone online to look at a video of you lifting cannot be understated if you want to make meaningful progress and improve your form and technique.
[00:05:21] Third CrossFit introduced me to the idea that I could physically manipulate and transform my body through sheer effort. And. Mind you CrossFit doesn't use the principles of linear progression, periodization and objective tracking that we'll talk about in later episodes when it comes to having an effective strength training program.
[00:05:45] But given that I was previously sedentary, the sudden use of barbells and conditioning workouts showed me that. Yes, despite what I thought was my so-called bad genetics. I can indeed improve my fitness and body. By the way the CrossFit gym I attended later evolved into a strength focused facility called Romeo athletics in Enfield, Connecticut of which I'm still a proud member.
[00:06:11] It's owned by Andrew Romeo and you'll hear clips of an interview I did on his podcast. Finding your strength radio in a future episode. It wasn't until two years ago, when I realized progress had stalled years earlier, that I changed my mindset on this whole fitness thing from an inconsistent hobby to a dedicated, focused educational and training pursuit.
[00:06:35] I discovered I needed to take my research and learning to a completely new level. And I began to voraciously consume books, videos, interviews, and podcasts on the subject while gaining direct expertise and experience through heavy barbell training. I also engaged various mentors and coaches posted form checks became active in online communities and started tracking everything with the most contemplative, serious ethos I could.
[00:07:04] That led me to the epiphany. That strength appears to be the pillar of all other aspects of health. And. Want to lose fat, add muscle Want to throw your grandkids in the air. When you're 70, get stronger. Want to avoid injury, metabolic diseases of aging, sarcopenia osteopenia, you need more muscle. Want to increase your metabolism, increase your athletic power or survive a harrowing physical ordeal.
[00:07:31] The answer is strength. And for those fathers out there who want to be an intimidating presence to your daughter's future suitors get big and strong. Having realized this universal truth. I got honest about my training. I buckled down, selected the appropriate program, dialed in my nutrition, which often means eating more, not less and proceeded to gradually get stronger and pack on muscle.
[00:07:56] I'm excited to share the details of my personal habits, training, eating, and progress in future episodes. Strength training is setting a goal, developing a plan, executing that plan and objectively measuring your progress toward that goal until it's achieved. And that is what we're going to do together on this.
[00:08:18] With wits and weights. My goal is to help busy professionals get strong and lean through lifting and eating like a normal human being so they can achieve physical self-mastery to do that. I'm going to draw on personal experience, well vetted sources of information, such as people who have been successful in their fitness.
[00:08:40] The latest evidence-based, but practical findings from the research and comments, reviews, and Q&A from you the listener, I may also experiment with different formats. Initially this'll be a solo podcast, but I may also do interviews live Q&A or even live mentor, coaching and future. Most importantly, I plan to lay out specific actions.
[00:09:04] In each episode you can use and apply right away. Here's a sneak preview of what you can expect in the next few episodes. The next episode is already available for download and future episodes will come out every two weeks. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out. In episode two, which as I said, should already be in your download queue.
[00:09:25] If you subscribe to the podcast, I cover how to choose a training program. I think this will get you started in thinking about and taking action on learning to lift properly and developing your initial foundation of strength. We keep things simple and discuss the various programs out there. Programs I have used and how to choose the right one.
[00:09:47] Episodes three through six cover foundational topics to give you a well-rounded base of information to help you separate what's important from what's not as important, including why do we care so much about. The truth about cardio fat loss and metabolism, how to approach diet without being on a diet and developing systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot.
[00:10:14] After episode six, we will start to dig deeper into all of these topics and more such as dissecting form and technique on the big barbell lifts , rest periods, warmups, how to calculate metabolism and body fat. The truth about supplements, why walking is awesome, how to build a sweet home gym and many more.
[00:10:37] Finally, each episode will have one or more unique segments, such as listener Q&A. Just send me an email, DM me on Instagram @witsandweights or post in our WitsAndWeights subreddit. And we'll feature those on future episodes. I personally love listening to Q&A episodes on other podcasts. So I think it could be awesome to take those topics that you really care about and talk about them here.
[00:11:02] In other segments, I might break down a research paper or critically examine what the internet has to say about a particular fitness. That's just a sampling of what's to come. And I, for one, am extremely excited to start this adventure with you, the listener in a way I'm envious of those who are in an early phase of their strength training journey, because that's when all the wonderful discoveries and progress.
[00:11:28] But I'm equally excited for our more advanced listeners and lifters who might learn something new or contribute to the podcast through our listener community.
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Wits & Weights podcast trailer
In this trailer episode, Philip introduces the new podcast Wits & Weights: Strength Training for Skeptics. Wits & Weights is a bi-weekly podcast that helps you become stronger, leaner, and just an overall healthier human being with straightforward, no-nonsense education and strategies.
In this trailer episode, Philip introduces the new podcast Wits & Weights: Strength Training for Skeptics.
Wits & Weights is a bi-weekly podcast that helps you become stronger, leaner, and just an overall healthier human being with straightforward, no-nonsense education and strategies.
We’ll talk about lifting, eating right, how to train with barbells, programming, dieting without being on a diet, and answer listener Q&A to dig into YOUR favorite topics.
If this sounds awesome to you, you can help support us by subscribing to the show.
If you enjoy the show, let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts!
Subscribe for FREE in your favorite podcast app:
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Have you subscribed to the podcast?
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