Barbell Shrugged - [Metabolism] Nutrition, Exercise, and Lifting Weight to Improve Your Metabolism   w/ Dr. Eric Trexler, Anders Varner and Doug Larson #719

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Eric started lifting at the age of 12, and has been hooked ever since. Eric has a background in powerlifting and strength coaching, and has been competing in natural bodybuilding since 2011. Now he’s a pro natural bodybuilder with a PhD in Human Movement Science, and serves as the Director of Education for Stronger By Science. As a scientist, Eric has published over thirty peer-reviewed papers on a variety of exercise and nutrition topics related to performance and body composition. Some of his studies have evaluated the effects of dietary supplements, including creatine, caffeine, beta-alanine, and nitric oxide boosters. He has also done research evaluating body composition changes that collegiate and professional athletes experience across a single season, and even across an entire collegiate career. These studies have observed changes in a wide range of sports and competitive levels, including college and NFL football players. Eric was also able to blend his research with his biggest passion, completing multiple studies investigating how to effectively prepare for bodybuilding and physique competitions.   Eric has been involved in strength and fitness coaching for around a decade. Eric spent about four years working with high school wrestling and football teams, and has spent the last six working with a Special Olympics powerlifting team. At Stronger By Science, Eric now coaches online clients with a wide range of goals, and provides leadership and educational support for the entire team of online coaches. Connect with Dr. Eric Trexler Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Eric Trexler is coming into the pod. We're going to be talking about metabolisms. If there is a single subject that is, I don't know if it's confusing, but we like to confuse it as human beings. We like to think everything we are doing with the body, everything that burns the calories that we're putting in our mouths. How do we cheat the system so we can eat so much more, build all the muscle, and of course not put on body fat. So Dr. Trexler is here to discuss all things metabolism, resting metabolic rate, and how you can improve metabolic function. Very cool show. And he's very

local to me over here at Duke, which is cool, which means I need to go to his lab and do cool stuff. As always, friends, make sure you get into rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing free lab and lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson.

Coach Travis Mash. Eric Trexler. Welcome to the show, my man.. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Mash. Eric Trexler. Welcome to the show, my man. You're at Duke University right now. That means you as well hanging out in the middle of North Carolina with me, which is pretty cool, I guess. Absolutely. We don't have many of these Raleigh people on. We're going to talk about metabolism today. And just to, at the highest level, I would love if you could dive into just what our metabolism is before we break into all of the, uh, little pieces, um, that we're

going to be breaking, uh, working through over the next hour here. Yeah. So metabolism kind of the, the most simple way that people often talk about it is, um, with relation, with relation to energy expenditure yeah so when people talk about their metabolism broadly they're often just talking about their total calories that they burn throughout the day and then sometimes people talk about their resting metabolic rate or resting metabolism and that's exactly what it sounds like it's the calories that your body's kind of burning on autopilot when you're resting, you know, and then you can kind of add in your

physical activity on top of that. So that's just like the very, very basic. Yeah. Of course, everybody that is trying to lose weight thinks theirs is broken. But I'd love to really dig into kind of how lifting weights specifically really improves people's metabolism. Yeah. I mean, you want me to dive in and answer that? Yeah, I would love to. Sure. Yeah. So metabolism is interesting because it responds to just about everything. But usually when we talk about trying to influence metabolism, we're talking about just how are we going to move the needle in terms of total daily energy expenditure. So one way you can do that is by exercising, any kind of exercise, right?

And so resistance training is no different. When you're in the gym, you're doing stuff. You're breaking a sweat, right? You're, you know, your heart rate goes up, your breathing rate goes up. You can tell you're doing things. It takes energy to do mechanical work so when we do resistance training we are burning calories in the gym right and so there's a bunch of a bunch of papers lately that have tried to kind of quantify how much energy we burn during resistance training and it's actually

uh if you kind of nerd out about uh uh, measuring metabolism, it's actually kind of tricky because, you know, the, the typical approach of just kind of measuring the expired gases and looking at carbon dioxide production, it actually kind of doesn't work that well, like on a breath by breath basis during resistance training, you really need to capture the energy that's being spent, uh, kind of during rest periods. And then even for a length of time after the training session, because you're building up a large oxygen debt because you're doing a lot of anaerobic metabolism.

You need to actually capture that process of paying for that oxygen debt. But broadly speaking, you know, I think one of the estimates I saw recently was about six calories or kilocalories per minute of resistance training. I think it was something like that. I'll have to go and check that number again. But anyway, yeah, so we're burning calories while we are doing resistance training, no question. Like I said, we are kind of building up in oxygen debt and usually no matter what kind of exercise we're doing, we're going to see an elevation of energy expenditure. Um, you know, for some period of time after exercise, you know, exercise is, you know, it induces so many physiological responses, right?

And then there's kind of a period of time where after a workout, we're not back to a true resting state. We're still kind of on the way down from that kind of high rate of energy expenditure. So we're going to be burning calories during the workout. We're going to be burning calories after the workout. And then I'm of two minds about this. Sometimes I don't like bringing it up just because the magnitude is so overstated but you know if you build a bunch of muscle muscle burns more uh more calories at rest than nothing right so someone with you know much more muscle is going to have a higher

resting metabolic rate generally speaking the reason that i don't like to emphasize that much is we like to think of muscle as having a really high metabolic rate or, you know, high rate of expenditure per kilogram or gram of tissue. And that's true if we frame it relative to fat mass, but it's also not true if we frame it relative to like your kidneys or your brain or your heart um and you know the reality is um i'm going off the top of my head i think i've seen the estimate that like gaining i don't i don't want to mess up the number but the the short version i usually see like 30. it's like 30 30 calories per pound but that's overstated as you just said is that correct well you know i've crunched the numbers i i can i can kind of fact check them on the fly. If I open up a browser window, I know I've written about it before, but

basically if you talk about adding a realistic amount of muscle mass, like over the course of an entire career, you're still really barely moving. It's not like you're going to be doubling your caloric intake because you've gained all this muscle. Now, I know a lot of folks will say, well, that can't be true. I've bulked and I know how much it took in terms of eating to kind of continue gaining muscle beyond, you know, I built a bunch of muscle and it got harder and harder and harder to gain weight after that. And there's multiple factors contributing to that. I mean, like I said said sure um when you build

muscle your energy expenditure will go up a little it's just not a ton it's not like a night and day difference um but people that are in that specific scenario the people who hear that building muscle isn't going to totally change your metabolic rate and they are skeptical of that perspective what they're forgetting is the other factors in that specific scenario, right? So you're probably like force feeding yourself if you are allegedly struggling to gain weight. And when we, you know, there's some really cool research when you bring people into a laboratory and you have them do intentional overfeeding, like what we would call bulking, a lot of folks will have a massive increase in

their energy expenditure, almost as if their body is kind of resisting that weight gain. So they try to keep ramping their energy intake up and up and up, and their resting energy expenditure and their non-exercise activity thermogenesis is ramping up to kind of offset that, which is a really fascinating observation. And what's interesting about it is that there seems to be a great deal of variability. So one of us may be able to bulk very, very easily. When we increase food intake, we gain weight. Someone else in this call might have a completely different experience where they say, man,

when I'm bulking up, it's so hard for me to eat enough to gain weight. And so there are many factors going into that. And then of course, when you're trying to build a bunch of muscle, you're hopefully training pretty damn hard, right? And so you're going to be burning more calories in the gym as well. So I know a lot of folks say, well, trust all these people that I trained to build muscle and get huge. They're maintaining on way higher calories. So what are you talking about? Muscle doesn't make that big of a difference. Well, it's the muscle plus the fact that they're training like crazy, plus the fact that they're eating a whole bunch of calories. It's kind of the cumulative impact, which is why someone who trains like crazy and is really jacked can probably maintain on a much

higher caloric intake than someone who is considerably less jacked, but also probably not overfeeding as much and probably not hitting it quite as hard in the gym. And plus a lot of people think they're force feeding themselves. Like when you really look at it, like, are they really, you know, like every time someone tells me that they're feeding themselves ice cream, three pounds a they have one big meal and they they associated their one big meal with doing it every day i'm like when you look at it over time no you're not eating like a bird man there's so many that's the strongest man in the world was i've heard the argument on the other side of it many times. Like if you,

if you eat in a caloric deficit, then you're just tired all the time. And so you just don't expend as much energy. And so you can't lose weight, quote unquote, because now you're just more likely to be sitting more of the day or, or, you know,

resting more of the day. Cause you're just tired all the time, but I never really made the intuitive leap to think that if you're overeating, then you would just be more active just throughout the entire day and thus burning more calories. And so now you can't gain weight. Shark family. I want to take a quick break. you're overeating, then you would just be more active just throughout the entire day and thus burning more calories. And so now you can't gain weight. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.

When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns.

And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the

video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. Like bodybuilders oftentimes, well, they'll like force themselves to sit on the couch just to not burn any unnecessary calories when bulking. And I suppose other people would need to adopt a similar approach if you're force feeding yourself and you can't put on muscle mass, assuming you have good training and good sleep and all the other things. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really interesting because, you know, other things it's the chance yeah yeah it's really

interesting because you know part of it is resting part of it is kind of those non-exercise activities that we don't think much about so when someone is dieting super hard you know when they're in that deficit yes their resting metabolic rate will go down but they'll also fidget less and they'll maintain uh more passive posture when they're standing, when they're sitting. Uh, if they walk past the mailbox and remember, Oh, I forgot to check the mail. They're not walking back. You know, they're just going to keep on going where they're going. So we, we see that some of it is, uh, volitional decisions, like not getting the mail. Some of it is non-volitional activity like fidgeting and postural control. And then some of it is just pure resting metabolic rate,

basal stuff that is completely out of control. And that called neat, right? And is it the, the non expenditure or whatever, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. Like I've always wondered my mom is always been super thin, but she can out eat me and like i mean she can crush me eating and she's 125 pounds older woman who eats like a horse and like but she never sits down she just moves all day long for five hours and i don't do

that so yeah and i'm sitting here behind a microphone because like right now at duke i'm in the uh i'm not in like the exercise science department or the nutrition department which is where i've spent all my career up to this point i'm actually in the department of evolutionary anthropology um and so what's really fascinating is we like to look at energy expenditure through the perspective of evolutionary constraints and so uh you, with that in mind, there's this idea of what they call a dual intervention point model, which is that, you know, when you're trying to get really, really lean at a certain point, it's no longer

helpful as a human being who wants to survive and be healthy to get any leaner. And that would be kind of your lower intervention point, which if you've ever tried to get really shredded, we've all run into that point where we say, listen, this diet's been hard, but something's different now, right? And so that we can think of that as being kind of the lower intervention point and the constraint there is obvious, right? Like you're starving, you know, and for an organism that wishes to survive and procreate and thrive as a population, not ideal to be on the brink of starvation. And the interesting thing is that there may be an upper intervention point as well, which comes into play when you're bulking, when you're like, I am really like, yeah,

I started out going smoothly. Then it got a little bit harder, but I feel like I'm at like a brick wall with this bulk. And so the upper intervention point is interesting because clearly it's not as strong, right? Well, it's not, I don't want to say as strong, but when we look at instances of folks who can get really, really heavy, far beyond what we would expect to be kind of a biologically preferable or, you know, a level that would be like advantageous for survival, you know, potentially from like a evolutionary perspective. Clearly, you know, there are folks who that upper intervention point doesn't seem to operate particularly strongly to kind of keep them within a tight range of adiposity or body fat level. But in many cases, there does seem to be an upper intervention point.

And the thought process from the evolutionary perspective is that it goes back to not wanting to be prey, right? So the idea, whether you're being hunted, which is not ideal, you know, you have to be able to get away. You have to be kind of quick on your feet and have endurance. And I would argue the same is probably true for, for hunting or for, um, even for just kind of foraging, if, if resources are scarce, you know, to have that endurance, to be able to go really long distances in a hunt or in a forging

scenario, uh, you could understand why, why there is kind of both intervention points, uh, at least at, at kind of a broad level what is uh go ahead doug i was gonna see you've already mentioned a handful of these things but uh to to state them directly like in what ways do we actually have control over manipulating our our metabolism our resting metabolic rate our non-activity thermogenesis etc like how much control do we really have there? Are you destined to have a slow or fast metabolism? And kind of what's the spectrum there? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the thing that's tricky about metabolism is that it's very adaptable, but those adaptations

are so context specific. So for example, if you wanted to just increase your total daily energy expenditure, you think, okay, I'll do a lot of physical activity, right? Like easy enough that burns calories, get the number up. But, you know, I work in Herman Ponser's lab who wrote the book Burn, and our lab has done a lot of research in hunter-gatherer communities where you don't go to the supermarket to get your food right you hunt or you gather right and it's not unusual in certain hunter-gatherer populations uh and societies to see daily step counts for individuals being you know well over 25 30 000 steps a day on a regular basis um i mean and in

america it's like if you go over seven you know you're like all right i did it you get a you get a reward in your email if you hit 10 000 that's right i got a badge they will send you a trophy a digital trophy right and so so you think well man they're you know folks in that scenario, they're walking around all day. Their energy expenditure must be through the roof. It's not. It's really not that different from a fairly sedentary person in America. And what's really fascinating is that if you are doing a ton of physical activity, but you're not consuming a lot of calories, you're still creating this large potential for an energy

deficit. And it looks like there's some adaptive mechanisms where your body can say like, hey, we really need to perhaps reduce resting metabolic rate to make up for all of this activity in the context of low energy intake. So you start talking about, you know, can we change our metabolism? To what extent is it malleable or adaptable it's tremendously adaptable um but it almost always seems to be in the opposite uh direction of what we want from a fitness perspective right so one of one of the like adaptive things like i said is if you try to overfeed a lot of times your energy expenditure will go up well if you're over feeding you're probably trying to gain weight right So it's kind of opposing what you want to do. And then, you know, when we do a

lot of dietary restriction plus exercise, trying to get shredded, a lot of times you're resting and non-exercise activity, you know, those things will go down. And again, it's opposing what we're trying to do. So in terms of, you know, someone asking, you know, can I change my resting metabolic or my energy expenditure metabolism? You can influence it. You know, especially when it comes to just how much activity you're doing, generally speaking, you'll move the needle some, but in a lot of cases there, I don't think it makes sense to focus on that as a target. Like don't say I'm going to try to do this because it impacts my resting metabolic rate. Rather, I would say, okay, I've got some kind of physical goal.

I'm going to train for that. I'm training for a particular stimulus. And I will try to generally be active because that's broadly good for health and well-being. And, you know, even if you don't uh need to have high cardio respiratory fitness for your sport of choice you still want to be able to like get up a flight of stairs and not you know feel like you're breathing super heavy like there's quality of life associated with that um so train for what you're training for uh be active enough to support your just general health and well-being and then modify your

energy intake in accordance with whatever your body composition goal is at that time. I wouldn't really focus on changing my metabolic rate as an outcome because one of the things that's, that's, there's been great research the last couple of years indicating people who like, like in the context of metabolic adaptation that that describes basically your energy expenditure kind of slowing down when you're trying to lose weight on purpose so you're constricting energy intake and you're constraining energy intake and you are potentially exercising so people who experience more metabolic adaptation they have greater metabolic slowing during a weight loss phase. They might lose weight more slowly. If you look at a 12-week window, they might lose less weight during that time,

but it's actually not by much. Like we're talking about if you had these people diet until they reached a particular endpoint, you know, the folks with more metabolic adaptation, it might take them an extra couple weeks to get there. You know, they might get there in 14 weeks instead of 12. If you say, hey, we're all going to diet for 12 weeks, exactly one group loses, you know, six kilograms, the other group loses five, right? The people with more metabolic adaptation. So it exists, these changes, differences, fluctuations in metabolism. It exists. Sometimes it's not fun. It's not an ideal reality when you know that you kind of drew the stick that you didn't

want to draw in terms of how your metabolism responds to things. But ultimately, this is not something that's like an insurmountable barrier. When you look at the actual quantifiable data, you say, okay, there's a little bit of friction in the process, but it can easily be overcome by just spending a little bit more time on the diet. It gives a lot of hope. Many months or just maybe a few years ago, I saw, you know, I never actually read the paper itself, but there was some seem to be landmark paper on metabolism that came out where there was some type of a scatter plot that basically showed that your metabolism doesn't decrease as you age. I think it was assuming you didn't lose muscle

mass or some other XYZ reason. I'm assuming you're familiar with that paper. Can you can you explain what was happening there? Yeah, the lead author of that paper is Herman Ponser. That's the lab that I work at. That's your lab? Actually, yeah. Alright, we're spot on here. Yeah, I think... You researched that before. That wasn't just happenstance.

I'm going to act like this is all coincidence. It actually totally is, though. This is fantastic. I want to hear about it. Yeah, so I wasn't involved with that paper. That was before my time here at Duke. But yeah, I certainly read the paper. I came to Duke because I thought that line of research was just fascinating. But that particular paper, a few things that jumped out to me when I read it. Number one, as we would expect, fat-free mass is a good predictor of, you know, what your energy expenditure will be. However, well, I shouldn't say it's a good

predictor. I should say it's kind of the best one we got. So when you look at different equations to predict someone's basal energy expenditure or, you know, total daily energy expenditure. Usually fat-free mass or lean mass is going to be a huge component of that. Like I said, that makes sense. Bigger folks do burn more calories. It's not going to be something that, you know, you're not going to build enough muscle. We're talking about the difference between someone who weighs you know 65 kilograms and 110 kilograms not you know the fact that you're going to build you know six pounds of muscle or whatever but you know fat-free mass is a predictor but when even when you look at folks who have the

same amount of fat-free mass um you know there's a tremendous amount of variance there's a lot of variability where we can say you know the best, the best piece of information we could get to guess your metabolic rate is going to be fat-free mass, but it's still going to put us in this huge range. There's a lot of fluctuation and variation from person to person. And, you know, some of that is just genetic. Some of that has to do with physical activity level. But yeah, another, the kind of main finding that people took away from that paper was it's always, I mean, it's so cliche. People will say, you know, yeah, I was lean when I was in college, just like you, but wait, you know, wait till your metabolism slows down. And then like, you know, they'll put a number on it. If someone has always got a

different number, everyone would say, wait, they gave up. Yeah. It's like, wait, wait till you hit 36 or wait till you hit 45 or wait till you hit, you know, whatever. Um, so that number is always there and,

and it always changes, but that, that's so cliche. It's set, it's set all the time. And, uh, you know, this paper basically said,

you know, from a pure physiology perspective, it doesn't really look like that's the case. But more likely what happens is, you know, as someone gets older, you know, up until, you know, we're talking into your maybe 50s or 60s, going off memory, things stay pretty stable there. But, you know, of course, what happens in many cases is that people, they get busy, man. Life gets real when you're past the age of 22 and you got kids and you got responsibilities

in the house, you got responsibilities at work. And so a lot of times people, their physical activity level goes down a lot and their eating habits change a lot, A lot more eating based on convenience. So those two factors together lead to some pretty noteworthy challenges in 30s, 40s, 50s, et cetera, when it comes to maintaining a relatively lean physique. What's really interesting about it is like there's a paper, you know we we eat about a million calories a year right and so a lot of people are like man i'm gaining weight as i get older and like there's some mismatch where my body's just not regulating intake and expenditure it's not coupling those together the way it used to like why is my appetite forcing me to overeat so much that i'm

gaining this substantial weight and uh you, I've seen some like really brilliant papers that have done just extremely basic modeling and projection and saying, well, like, listen, you eat a million calories a year, you know, if you're over by 1%, but you do that every year, it kind of tracks out this trajectory of weight gain. And it ends up looking like the person who at 47 is like man what happened when i was 22 i was you know i was super lean and so one of the things that i think is fascinating is like you could explain a lot of you know the the current uh obesity rates in the population with just a just a very tiny uh you know, percentage of overeating on an annual basis, but then just extrapolating that

out over several decades of life. But anyway, what this paper found, getting back to it, is basically, you know, the idea that metabolic rate is meaningfully slowing down a lot, like just basal resting metabolic rate in the 30s, 40s, 50s, probably not the case. There is, you know, in once you get it in the, I think, above like 70s, 80s and beyond, I think it does dip a little bit. But there's, there's a lot of physiological change that happens in that, you know, eighth decade of life and beyond. So it's not particularly surprising to see that that would drop a little bit with the, you know, that's where we start to run into a lot of the changes that we associate with sarcopenia and things like

that. So physiology does get pretty different as we get into like the eighth, ninth decade of life. But in terms of energy expenditure, yeah, it stays pretty smooth up through like the fifties, maybe the sixties or up to about 60, I think. Yeah. I'd love to dig into kind of specifically on resting metabolic rate. When is that measured? Is it possible for Joe Schmo at home to, to understand what that number is? I feel like that anytime I hear the resting metabolic rate, it's like somebody, it's like a thing that everybody wants to increase, but we don't really have any information or, or path forward to understand it, measure it until we, not everybody can go to a lab and actually understand that. So why is it so important? Well, uh, so resting metabolic rates, um,

I would actually say, I don't think I would ever really encourage someone to measure it unless I was just trying to prove a point. Um, you know, when it dunking on people's cool, well, not dunking on people, but kind of to provide like a little reality check, you know? So like, yeah, so if you were going to measure resting metabolic rate, as a consumer, there's really, you know, you could try to go into a place that has decent equipment that would capture the air that you're breathing out. Like I said previously, we can look at, you know, carbon dioxide production, oxygen consumption, compare it to ambient room gas concentrations and say, okay, we can figure out how many calories you're burning at rest. If you were going to do that,

you'd want to do it early in the morning, totally fasted, and you'd want to have a good period of rest before that measurement began. So the best case scenario is what we call basal metabolic rate and that is literally like you you wake up and we're already there right and we say okay we're going to put the mask on so you are fully rested you didn't get in your car drive across town walk up the stairs get into the lab once you do all that stuff we're talking about resting metabolic rate but basil is like don't even roll out of bed we want to get you in your just most rested uh state possible so but but yeah if you're gonna do resting metabolic rate and you have to go out to a place to do it uh definitely want to be fasted you don't want to

do any exercise uh preceding that ideally if you could schedule it you know after a day off even that'd be great um because there is there can be a residual effect of, you know, sometimes up to 24 hours in terms of energy expenditure from a really hard workout. Not a huge effect at that point, but still detectable. So those are the things you'd want to do. And you want to avoid caffeine as well, because caffeine can increase metabolic rate a bit. But the only time I'd really recommend doing that is if I had a client who was like, I know that I'm like an anomaly physiologic, like this diet's going really poorly.

And I know it's because my resting metabolic rate's low. And, you know, what you could do is say, well, okay, like, let's go ahead and get it measured if we feel like we have high enough quality instruments to do it, high quality, uh, equipment, um, cause there are some kind of crappy instruments that are, you know, cheap little things that are supposed to measure your metabolic rate that, you know, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even talking about this or listening to this podcast might make you targeted on Instagram or those products. Uh, Maybe. I don't think I would want to go in. They would lose for sure. Yeah. Try, I guess. The good thing is I don't know what any of them are called, so I can't get in trouble for calling out specifics. Right. But yeah, so if you were

going to do that, I think the most valuable thing that you could get from it is just reassurance. It's like, no, my number is within a pretty typical range that we can totally explain based on the circumstances that i'm in and sometimes that's a good reality check for people who feel like they're resting metabolic rates holding them back for example um i do know that there's one company that actually does doubly labeled water um and i would imagine it's pro it's probably not cheap just because doubly labeled water is not cheap but basically with doubly labeled water you can drink um you know like you remember in high school chemistry class you had the the periodic table of elements and each element had its little atomic mass and you could figure out how many

protons and neutrons it had so there's a heavier version of hydrogen uh there's multiple but there's one that has uh two neutrons it has an extra neutron in there and then there's a version of oxygen that has two extra neutrons so instead of oxygen 16 it's oxygen 18. and so basically you can give a form of water that is labeled with a heavier version of hydrogen and a heavier version of oxygen. Person drinks that, collects several urine samples throughout the week. You can actually use that to figure out their carbon dioxide production over the week. And that's not resting. That's resting plus neat, plus physical activity, plus thermic effective feeding.

It is everything wrapped up in there. Um, and, and so you're just looking at their total daily energy expenditure. So that is probably the best you can do is to, to do that because it's not just looking at resting metabolic rate, but it's factoring in your actual lifestyle and your habits, right? Because even if someone gave me their resting metabolic rate and said how many calories should i eat i said i have no idea what do you do from nine to five what do you do after that you know what's your training like you know there's so much more that you need to know beyond resting i mean resting is a fair i mean i wouldn't say negligible but what percentage

of your day are you spending laying down, not doing anything? There's so much more that needs to be looked at. So yeah, if one was to look into their metabolic rate, I would actually say doing that type of thing with doubly labeled water, at least you can, you know, get a really practical outcome from it. But even then a limitation is the fact that, like I said, metabolic rates adaptable, um, which means if you're doing that because you want to know where to start your diet, because you're going to lose some weight, that's great. But you have to understand that 12 weeks later, you're going to be in a different position, whether you're trying to lose weight or gain weight. Beautiful. Yeah. When we start to understand kind of the like increasing that number, how much of lifting weights really has to do with like the recovery side and actually just building the tissue back after tearing it down when you're training?

Oh, so how much of the increase in energy expenditure is from rebuilding those tissues? Yeah, it's kind of like a like, yes yes we're in the gym moving around lifting weights um that's that's kind of like the the obvious one um and maybe this plays into kind of like what that resting rate is um but the recovery at peace i feel like is the is the real benefit on recovery of now once we've gone and lifted the weights now we got to go build muscle and recover and then maintain it um yeah is that something that really is um like if you look at the total calories of what like a maintenance would be for everyone on here it's a significantly higher the number i would imagine than anybody could non meathead people would understand like how do you eat 3 000 calories and not gain a pound um but if you're really really sore is your metabolism higher than if you're not sore well soreness is tricky there's there's a lot that goes into soreness you know like so for example

there a lot of what we experience with soreness pertains to novelty of the stimulus you know so um presumably your body's working hard to fix the damaged tissue and to regrow new tissue above and beyond where you were before. And that takes, all that takes energy, right? Yeah, it would take energy. Yeah. I think, I think the challenging thing is if I don't have a number to it and we're trying to say, is it a significant elevation? I think that's kind of in the eye of the beholder if we can't put a number to it, right? And I'm not sure if I've seen research that specifically would allow one to kind of triangulate the energy cost of building new tissue, you know, like I'm sure you could find something to get kind of an indirect glimpse at it.

But I think it goes along with the general point, right? That like, if you're a person who's a lifter, you probably will notice that your maintenance calorie intake is higher. And there's going to be a number of factors that contribute to that. When you try to divvy up that pie chart and figure, okay, how much is that calories burned in the gym? How much is the post-exercise oxygen consumption that we see with all sorts of exercise, aerobic interval training, lifting, you know, we see it for all of them. So how much is that? How much is repairing, you know, damaged muscle? How much is actually adding new muscle proteins, which is, you know, a distinct process from repairing

damaged muscle. There's the repair processes and then the actual kind of, you know, process of building new tissue, you know, so you could get into that. And then on top of that, what is the cost of maintaining this new muscle tissue once it's built, right? So we know the kind of typical energy expenditure of muscle tissue at rest. So that's a factor. But then, hey, here's another factor while we're at it. So once you've built these bigger muscles, when you're doing exercise with those muscles, you're probably, you know,

I mean, you're activating more metabolically active tissue. So the absolute energy cost of that exercise is probably going up because there's more, you know, more contraction occurring because you have more contractile proteins. And then onto that, we can also add when you're walking around throughout the day, you used to carry around, you know, 180 pounds of mass, but you can't gain 10 pounds of muscle. Now you're carrying around 190 pounds of mass. So every step is a little bit more expensive, right? So, um, I can't give you an exact number, but I can get on board with the general premise that yes, uh, muscle repair in terms of muscle damage is costly. Uh, building

new muscle is costly. Um, and so there's a lot of different ways where the general, um, uh, collection of factors that goes along with being someone who lifts, you know, there are many different contributing factors that would indicate that yes, your total daily energy expenditure is going to be higher than if you were not lifting, you know, if, if we control everything else in the situation. Yeah. So, so that is, that goes into that point that I've, like I said, I'm of two minds about it because a lot of folks kind of

give the, the very straightforward thing. If you lift weights, you're going to build muscle and maintaining that muscle specifically is something that is going to have you eating way more than you could ever imagine. So we kind of have to reject that premise when we start doing the calculations and we say, what's the resting metabolic rate of muscle tissue per kilogram? How much muscle tissue could you realistically build? So if we, if we only focus on that piece of the pie, that's where I say, well, that's, that's not really going to move the needle too much. But, uh, there is kind of a kernel of truth to that because when you factor in all those other things, right, which is, which is that, that yeah you're maintaining more muscle tissue which is not zero but it's not a ton but on top of that

you know the energy cost of everything that you're doing is going up uh you're training day in and day out to maintain that so there's all these other factors where i would say of course yeah if you're a lifter um the recommendation still holds right right? Which is you should lift for a variety of reasons. And one fringe benefit is you're probably going to have higher expenditure throughout the day. Yeah. Expanding on those examples, I suppose, like if you are doing three sets of eight with 275 and then now you're doing three sets of eight with 315, it's still three sets of eight, but you're still doing way more. Even if like the volume looks to be the same on a, if you're just comparing sets and reps without realizing that you're,

you're lifting that much more weight. Yeah. Total work goes way up. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's physics, right? You're doing more mechanical work. And if you're fueling that mechanical work, you're going to need to do, you're going to need chemical energy. Right. And so, yeah, the yeah the the the cost of that will go up so i wonder does it you know do you i'm sure you do but like you know when you have a taller athlete who naturally whatever you do they do more work you know because work is force

times distance so like you know do you guys being taller when they squat are they burning more calories i mean i think i know the answer but they're running a longer race so to speak with every rep yeah yes every time you know they do a rep sure it's like me bench pressing like this yeah and like me pushing that thing three feet right and i'm pushing it three inches yeah yeah you know i i wonder because there would be the um there's kind of that uh trade-off right where it's like because they're at such a mechanical disadvantage the most likely thing is that they're going to be using a smaller absolute load right and so then then you have like another variable in the mix if you're going to calculate that out like if you were shorter but then you might be using a greater load on the bar because you'd be in a more

mechanically advantageous position most likely yeah because you know as you get taller it's not just sizing up or scaling up a short person your leverage is changed right because the tibia the not everything is going to grow in the same proportion but um you know i i would say that you know it's hard right like you know there's there's a lot of taller folks who uh you know um like i've talked with basketball players who you know their energy expenditures just through the roof and they're like man i cannot gain weight and it is this kind of combination of factors where it's like you've got know, a big body that you're moving around, right? Even if you're not really, you know, muscular, you're, you know, tall people weigh a lot, you know, it's just how it works,

right? You've got a big skeleton. And they're playing basketball, which is a very energy intensive sport. I mean, up and down the court non-stop um and yeah whenever they're lifting you know it's it's a tremendous amount of effort um likely you know as you were saying that they are kind of overcoming in many cases a lot of mechanical um mechanically disadvantageous leverages um you know there's this whole kind of uh combination of factors that can make weight gain super hard for for taller people and rather than pinpoint one specific instance of like, ah, here is where your energy cost, you know, really got got out of got out of whack. I think, you know, at the end of the day, from a coaching perspective, you have to

say, OK, this is kind of a cluster of attributes or characteristics that I can easily recognize. I mean, like being a good coach, a lot of it is pattern recognition, right? When you get someone, a brand new client and you say, okay, I know every person's individual and I need to coach the individual accordingly, but I've seen this kind of thing, right? I've seen this kind of combination of characteristics. And now, now I have a blueprint, at least for the starting point. And I think a lot of, a lot of times when you're dealing, when you're working with folks who say like, man, I really just cannot gain weight, you kind of have this picture in your head and it's like, okay, you're a little taller than

average. I like already know, you know, so much about this particular scenario. And it can be kind of helpful to think in those patterns and say okay we might have an uphill battle we might have to really be eating you know like you probably have low appetite relatively high energy expenditure so how are we going to get around that and it's usually you know like i said the modifications that you make are almost never how are we going to change your metabolic rate it's always how are we going to find strategies for you to eat that are acceptable right like how are we going to overcome the fact that you're burning all these calories per day if you're coming to me because you're a basketball player and you want to build muscle to get bigger and

reduce injury risk um i'm not going to tell you to stop playing basketball so that you stop burning so many damn calories right oh you'll be fired yeah yeah yeah it's it's literally the worst thing i could tell you to do um in most cases And so then you have to start thinking, okay, how are we going to get creative about getting more calories in you in a way that is going to be tolerable and maybe even enjoyable. And it's, we've, I'm sure we've all been there, but I used to teach a weight training class and I get these college kids in and they'd be like, man, I just can't gain weight. It's crazy. I've tried everything. I'm like, well, what does your diet look like? And they're like,

I'm trying to eat, you know, 4,000 calories a day and I can't get there. And I'm like, 4,000 calories of what? It's like chicken and broccoli. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's terrible. I wouldn't wish that upon anybody, 4,000 calories of that, right? Same kids into BDSM for sure. And you actually can't because if you eat all the chicken breasts, only the chicken breasts, you can't get fat on protein. Yeah, protein makes you not hungry. Yeah, so I'll tell them like, hey, you trust me, right?

Like I'm a sports nutritionist. I'm a scientist. You trust me. I've done all this research on dietary supplements i'm going to give you an incredible supplement that is going to absolutely change your your circumstances and i tell them to supplement with like a snickers bar right like if i love you then yeah if i told you this was some kind of fancy uh sports supplement with you know some lab and a chart on the on the marketing marketing copy, you'd say, Oh, this is great. Yeah. I believe in this. But in reality, it's like, dude, eat ice cream, eat a Snickers, because I already know that you're going to have

plenty of vegetables throughout the day. You're going to have plenty of protein throughout the day. We need to find a way for you to get calories that isn't going to make you like feel terrible. And yeah, if, and you trying to eat chicken and broccoli means you're probably eating like 90 grams of fiber per day. And you're probably eating like 350 grams of protein. You probably feel sick. Yeah, you're sure your stomach is hurting. Yeah. So it's like, you know, sometimes it's all about the eating strategies.

And there's so much cool research lately in appetite regulation. I love the appetite research lately. It's so cool. But like little changes in food texture can go such a long way. Like I saw, you know, a paper comparing hard food textures to soft food textures. If you can find a way to eat similar things, but in softer textures, it's much easier. It's so much easier. And you can pack so many more calories in. And like the stuff that qualifies as like a harder food

in some of these studies is not hard. I mean, we're talking like in one case, it was like dried mango, which like we're not talking about like crunching on, you know, almonds all day. So like, yeah, I mean, just going from an apple to apple sauce, like little, little changes

like that can go a long way. And the more palatable you can make a diet, the better, you know? So if you can find snacks that, that you just love to eat, I mean, you will consume more calories, no question. And then, you know, to bring it back, like I mentioned, like I never really tell people what we need to do is reduce your metabolism or increase your metabolism. What we need to do is find the dietary strategies that are going to get us where we need to go based on your metabolism. And so all those tricks that I just

mentioned for folks who struggle to gain weight, you just run them completely in reverse and they work so well for weight loss so getting someone to eat harder food textures like even if it's the same general number of calories like in that meal we'll probably eat fewer calories at the next meal if we're able to to just broadly say we need to be chewing a lot we need to be eating slowly we need to be eating hard food textures you know ideally we're going to cut down on the energy density of food which is just calories per unit mass or unit volume um the technical definition is per unit mass but it goes both ways um but yeah it's it's just finding these little eating and this is stuff you know

science you know we're able to kind of quantify things better now and there's cool research in this area but this is generally stuff people have been doing for decades, right? People in the trenches basically saying, you know, Hey, we need to get you something that's full of calories. It tastes good. And Hey, if it's soft, you know, it'll probably go down a little easier. You can basically drink. I tell all my athletes the same, especially around competition time, when you're getting a little nervous there's anxiety it's better to have something that's easy that's soft that you can just like swallow like almost drinking it so on a similar note though like and this is certainly not my area but if you watch competitive eaters

if they're eating ice cream they'll alternate they'll get sick of eating the ice cream then they'll eat like crunchy salty french fries and then they'll go back to the sweet soft ice cream and having the ability to alternate well they'll be they'll be much more likely to be able to put down way more ice cream even though they're eating the french fries on top of the ice cream because they alternate the textures and they alternate the salty and the sweet and that allows them to kind of re-enter you know if they're if they're starting on ice cream get the french fries and allows them to kind of reenter the ice cream world by having that alternating pattern. It's the hot dog eaters that are amazing. And the little skinny girls that win.

And they dunk it to make it softer, if you've ever watched that. I mean, so they dunk the bread so they can – makes it easier to go down. You know, I would really love to do research on competitive eaters. I think it would be so fascinating to see like how much their energy expenditure goes up from the thermic effect of feeding and, and their non-exercise activity. I actually had a buddy who was doing a study and it was on body composition and somebody came in for post-testing and I think they were using bod pod for it and their fat free mass was was just astronomically higher than than pre-testing and it was supposed

to be like pretty similar you know i mean there's not a lot of interventions we can do uh you know ethically where we're going to see massive changes in fat-free mass in short periods of time. And so he pulls the study participant aside and he goes, hey, dude, what's going on? Like what happened here? And it turns out that the person did a competitive eating competition the night before post-testing and just had like literally kilograms of food in their digestive system. It's so gross. It's absolutely revolting. But the bod pod doesn't know. It's just like, yeah, I mean, I'm going off of density here, right?

It's not fat. Yeah, so the bod pod counted all of their like whatever competition it was still with them at the time. And it counted it all as fat-free mass. And the guy was like dude what am i supposed to do with this data give me a day give me a day man yeah yeah yeah so awesome man tell uh tell the people where they can find you yeah so the best places to find me um i'm most active on instagram my handle's at trexlerfitness. I have a website that I update

kind of sporadically called trexlerfitness.com, but a really good place to keep up with what I'm doing is massresearchreview.com. We review research every single month pertaining to exercise, nutrition, fitness, and health. And, you know, what's really cool about it is that's where all the numbers go right so uh i know i can think of the exact articles where i where i tell people how many you know calories per hour muscle tissue builds and that's where we kind of come from these come to these conclusions that like yeah you could add a whole career's worth of muscle as a lifter and it's probably not that factor alone is probably not making the big difference but um

i did fact check myself while we were talking it is six calories per hour for lifting so at least i got at least i got that number right but um yeah so we we like to make those uh those articles as practical as we can we try to make it you know not just what does the science say for its own sake but how do we actually use it you, that's ultimately what every article is about. Love it, man. Coach Travis Bash. Yes, I'm one of your customers. It's like the very beginning. So like I can attest that they make it very palatable.

If you're in a hurry, like, you know, you don't need to be an exercise scientist to be able to read their, their articles. So they make, you know, for coaches out there who are busy, they do a really good job. So shout out, you know, for coaches out there who are busy, they do a really good job. So shout out to you guys, uh, Instagram at Ashley performance,

Twitter at mash elite. Um, or you can read all my articles on gym wear. Now I feel like I do so much writing for them. It's hard to do any of my own. So there you go. Doug Larson. Right on.

I'm on Instagram. Douglas E. Larson, uh, Eric, appreciate you being on the show. I've been aware of you for quite some time and I have wanted you to be on the show for probably a couple of years now at least. So I appreciate you being here, man. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it. Awesome, man. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrug to barbell

underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab, lifestyle, and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.