Barbell Shrugged - Muscle, Protein, and Aging with Dr. Stuart Phillips, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #734

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Professor Phillips is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Skeletal Muscle Health in Aging. He is a Professor in Kinesiology, and Graduate Faculty in the School of Medicine at McMaster University. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS) and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). His research is focused on the impact of nutrition and exercise on the mechanisms of human skeletal muscle protein turnover. He is also keenly interested in diet- and exercise-induced changes in body composition particularly in older persons. His research is funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the US NIH, the USDA, and several industry partners. Dr. Stu Phillips on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged family this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Stuart Phillips, all the way from north of the border in Canada. He's coming to hang out with us. We're talking about all things protein, muscle, resistance training, aging, anti-aging, so you can stay young forever. But he's also got this like really cool thing. We kind of opened the show. He has opened a gym up and brought in a bunch of elderly people to get them doing resistance training. And he's got like 500 people in there doing it, which is like one of the coolest things for somebody that's a meathead as you start to get more experience in this world. We'll just call that the nice way to say as we get a little bit older and our vision of how we can make impact changes and we

mature and kind of see where we're going and the people that we would like to help. When you see 500 people in their 60s, 70s lifted weights and how it impacts their life, it's a very, very cool thing. And we dig into it a little bit to start the show today. But that was something that very much caught me by surprise. And it was like a super inspiring thing really to want to impact that community. As always friends, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin

are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that free report and analysis over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner.

Doug Larson. Dr. Stuart Phillips. All the way from Canada today. You just told us one of the coolest stories. I feel like the longevity conversation has just exploded. And building muscle has to be one of the most important things when it comes to living a long and prosperous life, a healthy life. And you have what you said, 500 people all the way up to into their seventies, lifting weights with you five days a week right now. How did this come about? I think, yeah, so the Community Access Center,

I run downstairs. So repping the brand today, PACE. There you go. Physical Activity Center. You're allowed to sell out if you got 70-year-olds getting jacked. Yeah, you gotta live within the Hamilton vicinity. Otherwise it makes no sense.

But yeah, it's a facility that caters to seniors. We have cardiac rehab patients. We have cancer patients coming in here. And it's basically a research center, but it's also a community facility. So, yeah, I'm the guy who taps them on the shoulder and says, hey, great work on the bike, the treadmill, the stair climber. But, you know, weights are over there. They're really important too. So we have lots of reminders around the gym and, uh, tell people about, uh, how good it is for, as you said, it's longevity. Awesome. But, uh, really health span and, and, and, you know,

being able to do what you want to do and to, and into your later years. Yeah. I'm convinced that's a strength and power, uh, issue, not issue, not an aerobic issue as much. Yeah. I hope one day we have lots of 70-year-olds listening to the show, because that means Doug and I are 70 and somehow we grew very old together. But in kind of that, call it healthspan, lifespan conversation, the balance between cardiovascular fitness and strength training. Where do you see kind of like that, the optimal balance there over time? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think, you know, I've walked back to history on this a little bit. And, you know, you go back 50, 60 years ago, and Ken Cooper comes out with the term aerobics

and the book follows the Cooper longitudinal study. We find out a lot about aerobic exercise and it just sort of gets amplified in terms of, you know, the health benefits that it, and Jim Fix starts the jogging craze. In the parallel, in the muscle side, you know, you had Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not saying he was the first, but as an icon. And, you know, who want to look like that? Like that was meatheads were in the circus. I know.

Yeah. So Sandoval was like a circus freak. So so you didn't really have a comparator over this side. But, you know, fast forward 40, 50 years, and we're now beginning to peel back the layers on some of the health benefits and in populations that, you know, even probably would have been told in their lifetime, cardiac rehab patients, as an example, don't lift weights, like it'll literally blow your heart up. So I think there's a balance to be struck, you know, peak VO2, which is a huge, you which is a really great predictor of health span, lifespan, etc.

You're going to get that from doing aerobic work or HIIT work. Strength and power, they're the exclusive domains. But health-wise, they share a lot more in common than they do different. I think the balance is really dependent on your goals and your preference. And so I don't necessarily say that, you know, 150 minutes, but that's a guideline and two days a week for resistance. But if you want to take two of those days and turn it into three and forego an aerobic workout, I'm okay with that. You know, I think we've got the data now to show that that's okay. Similarly, if you want to run or you want to bike or you want to swim and you don't want to lift,

like the biggest thing is, is doing it because a lot of people don't impact. Most people don't. So, uh, I I'm, I'm cool with the arguments about how we should do it, but I'm like, just do it, right? Like get out there and do it. It's so good for you. Yeah. I feel like the younger generation at this point, it's, it's intuitive that you should be lifting weights. Like it's almost generally accepted, especially amongst our audience that during your twenties, lifting weights just makes sense. It's very, it's like entered the mainstream pop culture world at this point. Um, but for the older audience, like I have a close family member who's about to have open heart surgery and she's trying to like stay, stay strong, get as in shape

as possible leading up to it. And then of course there's going to be some out of rehab and whatnot, uh, after the surgery, but like convincing this person to lift weights is, is a rough go. She's, you know, she's, she's older. She just didn't grow up doing it. Never been a part of her life. I feel like the older generation needs more, um, they need to need their their doctor to tell them or they need some type of scientific studies to convince them to lift weights versus the younger generation it's just generally accepted that yeah you're supposed

to lift weights you want to be strong fast and healthy yeah i i'd agree with that i think you're right i think that uh you know lifting weights has become more mainstream it's it particularly with women who it's you know it's the constant i don't want to get bulky and like you said in 30 years trained a lot of women and i said look you tell me if you're getting bulky okay and we'll do something different and i've been trying to get bulky for a while yeah i was gonna say like it's it's not happened to me yet so uh you know yeah no i i hear you and and and to your point, I think that if you haven't done it, particularly if it's a late life switch, it's harder to pick up and you need to,

you probably need some guidance, how to do it safely, how to do it right. And just how to do it. You know, what do I lift first? What do I do second? How much should I do? Those are, you know, those are tougher things to dial in than saying, you know, I need you to go for a walk. You know, I'll open my door and I go. Right. But yeah, weights is a tougher proposition. But I agree. The younger folks now, it's much more mainstream for sure. Yeah, there's certainly much more of a learning curve for lifting weights than just go walk, go for a jog. You just you just go that way until you get tired and then you go back to your house and you did it check you check the box you have to learn all the different techniques and exercises and orders and volume and all that um but i'm curious like what does

the actual data show could you like cite any studies and like how kind of how they're structured there's a control group and the group that lifts weights and like what are the outcomes like what are the specifics people talk about research all the, but we rarely get like the specifics of how these studies are run and what the outcomes look like. Yeah. You know, I think in general terms, if we talk about health, there's very few studies where we've actually trained one group and haven't trained another group and looked at a specific health outcome, mainly because the health outcomes take a long time to emerge. So we're usually using in those cases, observational research. So we're taking a cross section of people, we're saying,

you lift, yeah, I lift, I lift, I lift, I do, I do aerobic work, I do nothing, I do nothing. And then looking at curves of what diseases people get, how long they live, etc, etc. And that research is the one, the stuff that I'm citing,'s I think pretty convincing, although it's association. For the causality, you really need the two groups. And I think those are restricted to relatively short studies that are done. And it's usually an outcome of either strength or muscle growth. And you can say then with a degree of, you know, one group did this, one group did this, and there was another group did nothing. And this group got stronger than this group and will gain more muscle and those sorts of things. So two classes of research, one observational science, what we call epidemiology that, you know, a lot of people

say, well, you know, that's just correlation and that's not causation. And I'm like, well, that's the exact data on which the aerobic guidelines are based. So, you know, let's be clear about what we're talking about here. And the other one is it tends to be shorter studies. And if I were really honest, I'd say, you know, somewhere between 12 and 16 weeks, which happens to coincide with about the length of a university semester. So, uh, you know, you, you figure it out. I mean, that's, that's where a lot of it comes from. Um, I've always kind of wondered what, what happens to, I've been lifting for 27 years. So we'll call that three decades, almost, um, my muscle mass likely isn't going away quickly, but I always wonder what would

happen if I just stopped lifting for five years? Like, is there, um, does the muscle just waste away? Is there still the neurological components to being strong? Um, nobody, I feel like we spend so much time telling people, you need to go lift weights, you need to go lift weights, but I've never heard what would happen to my body if I just started training for marathons. Would I still be carrying a decent amount of muscle mass around? Would I still be able to squat, say, 70% of my best numbers? what happens to the muscles if we, if we aren't challenging it on a week to week basis? Shrug 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

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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. It's a great question.

I don't know about a five-year, you know, nobody, I've never seen anybody quit. It's too long of a study, I get it. We got to shorten it to six months, but. Yeah, yeah. I think that there's an acute event that probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with. And, you know, if you put a cast on somebody's arm

or somebody's leg, or you've had one on and you take the cast off and you're like, like, where did my muscle go? So it wastes away very quickly. And we've got lots of clinical data from, you know, putting people on bedrest, like they might be sick or they might not. Sometimes they try to recapitulate what it's like to be in space by just getting people on a slight six degree head down tilt, let them lay in bed. And it's, I mean, there's always gravity working against them, but it does do some aspects of what astronauts experience and you lose muscle mass. Is it quickly? Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say, is it quick?

Does it happen quickly or is it something that, oh, gotcha, awesome. Like super fast. Yeah, I mean, all the action kind of happens in the first two or three months. Like it's gone that quick. We did a bizarre study, and I won't try and tell you why we did it this way, but we were interested in responses to resistance training, which we had one leg of these guys do. And then on the other leg, we put their leg in a knee brace, the same type of knee brace you might wear after an

ACL reconstruction. And it took 10 weeks to gain what it took two weeks to lose. So you went up by about 8% in the in the training leg, and you went down by about eight percent in the in the training leg and you went down by about eight percent but the training leg it took 10 weeks to gain that and it went down in two so it's it's about a five to one ratio so forget about five years you you'd be wasting away you'd be right back to you well you'd just be a mere mortal again you you wouldn't you wouldn't be you know you wouldn't be the super guy you are super strong or anything i think there is this concept of muscle memory and you can debate what that really means but uh you know like if you were once there you can get back there quicker i don't know if

that's true the longer you take off i do think that you know we see it with athletes in the off season they do go down if they don't sort of stay up with their training, but they seem to be able, particularly when they're younger, to bounce back. I think when you're older, it's much more of a deal. Like if you're young, you just do this, you just come back. When you're older, you do this and then, man, you know, that curve up, it's hard. Or in lots of clinical scenarios, you go down and you're sick and you just plateau out at a new, you shifted down. And I think for older people, that disuse event, that sickness,

that illness, it's a real precipitating event for some pretty bad stuff to happen. So work real hard on the backside of that type of event to come back. Yeah. I never really thought about the bedrest side and that you could kind of go run that experiment on yourself. If something bad were to happen that you just kind of lay there and you don't use it, you wither away pretty quick. Yeah, man. Use it or lose it. Make sure I don't have that happen, Doug. Make sure. Yeah. Use it or lose it is a trite phrase, but it's spot on. Like if you don't have that happen doug make sure yeah use it or lose it is a trite phrase but it's it's

spot on like if you don't use it man you lose it and quickly and i think that's what most people don't appreciate is it it really like we can run these studies and we put people's leg in a brace or like a cast we do it for two weeks and these people say why don't you do it longer i'm like kind of all the actions over in about two or three weeks that's it these are all the things i'm terrified of it's like the what was the uh the fit that fat uh fit guy um i i once got a call from that audition and they were like would you be willing to put on like 50 pounds for this experiment i was like how famous how big is this tv show like what, what do I need to do? I've already got an eating disorder.

This is, I'm terrified of this. Like, I'm so scared. No, that goes, we're talking values now. Like I, ah, that's another experiment I don't want to do. I don't want to be in the brace and see my leg just wither away. I would go crazy. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's why would go crazy yeah it's uh you know it's it's

why it's so great to have you know 30 000 college students walking around there's enough of them out there that are uh someone to stay is interested in science enough to do it or or as foolish or as as hard up for the money that we give them which isn't much so yeah you know most people i hang out with just in general kind of think more muscle mass is better and less body fat is generally better. I'd rather be like muscular and lean compared to compared to other ways of being. And if you've ever been around anyone who's kind of toward the end of life and they start to look very thin and very frail, that kind of shows like what the tipping point is for like once your once your muscle percent, your your body muscle percentage is below a certain amount, then you're you're heading very quickly toward somewhere you don't want to be, we'll say. Yeah, I mean, there are those types of standards. I don't know how hard these, you know, whatever you want to call them, cut points are. In other words, you sort of hit this and you kind of drop off the edge. But, you know, to your point, Doug, I think we've all seen, you know, our grandparents or people that we've known that get older and then everything as it ages does less. It doesn't matter if you're,

you know, a squirrel or they all do less dogs cats everything so it's a natural part of aging to do less the the main point is that whether that's contributing to that downward sort of slide in muscle mass and everything or that's aging per se which is you know it's happening all the time um and we and we have yet to find a way to wind it back yeah unfortunately um so it's i i think it's about trying to push back as hard as you can and instead of having the slope down be like a hard slope be sort of a more gentle decline uh but to your point there probably are some harder cut points you can say if you don't get if you get below this amount and it's usually measured as as hand grip strength and i know like it's not the greatest but it's one of the easiest tools to use

which is why it's so ubiquitous like it's easy to get in a doctor's it's easy to put in a clinic and we have so much data on it and and you know if that's a proxy for strength then yeah there are some points below which i don't know if I throw out values, because I'm not overly keen on that the number is the number. But it's certainly a point. And I think one of the things I make pretty clear to older people is to say, if you were to divide 100 older people at age 80, into quartiles, in terms of their strength, their walking speed, all kinds of things, activities of daily living, the quartile you don't want to be in is the lowest quartile. You can be in the third quartile and you actually do quite a bit better than the fourth. You be in

the second and you do marginally better than the third. If you're in the top quartile, you're doing well, but you're only a little bit above the second quartile in terms of all of your abilities to do stuff. But that fourth quartile, they take a dive real quick. So, you know, by age 85, they are overtly frail. Yeah. A personal concern of mine, similar to that is obviously wanting to maintain as much muscle mass as possible for as long as possible. I'm only 40 right now but you know having had an entire lifetime of many sports and yeah and a lot of joint pain to go along with it you know i'm only 40 but i have a fair amount of joint pain already and i can only imagine that's going to potentially get worse as i get older like old people hurt you know so for you know for uh yes they do as somebody

who's 40 is well in my rear view mirror the voice of experience yeah so you understand my point here like if i want to keep as much muscle mass as possible i'm in my 70s and it hurts to hurts to walk into the kitchen how do i how do i lift weights and and or what else can I do that doesn't involve, um, you know, stressing my joints to maintain as much muscle mass as possible, whether that's extra protein or just sleep quality or all the, all the other things you possibly could do. How do you maintain muscle mass, uh, without aggressively strength training if you're in pain? Yeah. Well, so, so, so number one is, uh, I don't lift as much as many days. So it used to be like I could, you know, my earlier days and I spent way too much time just hanging around the gym just because I like to hang around the gym.

And I would say that is time well spent. Yeah. Well, you know, I call it my misspent youth, but there's some good that came out of it. Yeah. And then you opened one and you live there, you sleep there. Yeah, yeah. You knew everybody on the desk. Hey, what's going on?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, basically I'm under the bar, quote unquote, three days a week most now. I try not to do things that I don't I call it extrinsically driven. So if I'm at the gym and there's a younger guy and, you know, he's racking on the weight, I wait till he's done and then take all the weight off because I have no he's like, you can work in. And I'm like, no, man, it's too much work to take off. Like, I just don't lift this heavy.

And and the event horizon is a longer horizon. Like it's, you know, people say, what are you training for? I'm like, you know, I'm like, I'm training until I can't train. I don't have an event to be ready for. I've got three sons. They're all almost out of the house. But, you know, when they were young, it was so I could play hockey with them and hang out. And, you know, but now they're a little bigger and stronger.

I think I might have the edge on one out of three, but that's about it. But you just modify your goals, I think. I use a lot of bands when I train now. And the pandemic forced me into that. Not that I don't like, you know, getting under the bar and, you know, throwing the iron around, but some days where I'm like, I don't know if I got it. I train with a lot of bands and I find I can maintain my strength. I can keep everything up. And, you know, all of the things that I could do in the gym, they're going down slowly,

but they're going down slowly. And I think that that's the point. Yeah. I'd love to transition. I talked a little bit about, or asked about a pre-show this new wave of kind of semi-glutide ozempic, but go V I have heard so many different things about it. And one of the things that comes up is like pretty consistently is I thought that this was like a drug that's introduced as like a diabetes drug for people that are overweight, dealing with glucose issues. And then that what its purpose is to kind of inhibit the cravings. And kind of the more I hear about it, it's not just about kind of the fat loss side, but it's also, it comes in and really attacks the muscle mass that people have. And that's a big portion of the weight loss side, which, you know, if you're obese, losing weight in general is just going to make everything easier and healthier. So that's not a negative.

But losing muscle mass seems to be very counterintuitive to the actual goals that people, they don't, it's like a very negative side effect that they're not taking into consideration when they go to take those medications. Do you have any insights into kind of like what those drugs are doing, how they're affecting muscle mass? Just what are the mechanisms there that are either positive or negative? Yeah. You know, like first, I mean, this is generation one of these drugs. And if you go back and you look at the first generation of drugs that we had to lower blood pressure, they had all kinds of side effects. They were pretty good, but some people couldn't take them. And then there was the next generation. Then there was the next generation.

And it just got better and better and better and better. So I think in 10 years, you're going to see none of these drugs will be injectables anymore. They'll all be oral pills and much more prevalent than they are now. So to your point, what they do is essentially they act centrally to basically, yeah, remove the craving, that central signal in your brain that's saying you're hungry, you're craving food. And it's blocking that effectively. That's always been the Achilles heel of people who reduce their energy intake because the craving takes over and it's just hard to adhere. Remove that signal and these drugs are ridiculously effective. One of the side effects of as soon as you reduce energy intake is you you know if you

if you tip the scale towards negative energy balance we we've known for years decades that you don't just lose fat you you lose muscle as well traditionally it's it's you know when you look at all of the studies that are out there, about a quarter of the weight that you lose on most diets is, is what we call lean tissue, some of which is going to be muscle. Two things you can do to mitigate that. And by mitigated, I mean, actually, pretty much shut it off. The first is lift weights. It's the most potent anti,muscle loss stimulus that we have to the point around, you know, how do you counter bed rest? Well, you know, first you get out of bed and that's, you know, if you're laying in bed, getting out of bed is loading the muscle. If you're loading the muscle by walking, well now load it more with a weight. And so it it intrinsically makes sense the other is to increase your protein

intake and i mean this is how you know bodybuilders have they've learned the secret of this for they know it you know time immemorial um if you've got a lot of body fat to lose the good news is is you can actually you can you can do the recomp right So the fat goes down, you lift enough weights and eat enough protein, you can get lean tissue to go up. That's, you know, everybody's, whoa, I got to get me some of that. The problem is, is your body fat comes down and down and down, that that goes away. And, you know, we've, we've tracked a few bodybuilders leading into competitions. And I think once you get below sort of about 10% body fat for every pound you lose, about a third of it is lean tissue. We don't know that it's muscle per se, but some of it is for sure. So I think there's a point below which it gets really hard to hang on to lean no matter

how much protein you're eating or how much weight you're lifting um but these folks are you know they're starting out 35 40 50 body fat so they've got a lot to lose but they do lose muscle as well and you know without somebody telling them yeah you probably don't want that particularly the older you get uh i think you're going to see some of these people because particularly when you take them off the drug they rebound weight gain just like that's a whole on backside of a diet, right? So a lot of the talk now is that people will get on these drugs and they'll stay on them. It's sort of the same, you know, when we treat a type two diabetic and we give them that form and it normalizes their blood glucose, but you don't come off the drug. Like you're on the drug until you do something differently. So, you know, this is

the beginning. We've just scratched the first layer back and it's going to fundamentally change the landscape. But your point around lean loss is well made and and it's needs to be i think increasingly talked about yeah it it seems like it solves one problem but the longer term problems um and and there's many things that are happening kind of like while people are on this stuff but the the long game of not having the habit change or the lifestyle changes um and then the decrease in muscle mass seems that, that really seems like the, the massive one in this, where it's like, you're, you're eliminating one of the most important things for living a productive, healthy life. Yeah. Well, you appreciate the converted. When you say that to me, I think a lot of other people just, I mean, if it's weight on a scale

and it's just weight on a scale, then, you know, a lot of endocrinologists and physicians would probably say, who cares what you lose? But I think you're going to, you're going to realize the problem with that on the weight regain side, because nobody regains muscle. You just, you just regain fat. The other tissue, of course, what muscle is pulling on a tendon and yanking on is bone. And you give up bone mass as well on those drugs if the weight loss is substantial enough. And again, what do you do to counter that?

Well, lifting weights is a pretty good one, increasing calcium, vitamin D, that sort of thing. But yeah, you can't substitute for the physical activity. It's such a powerful stimulus that it should be a durable part of everything that anybody who goes on those drugs does, in my opinion. But I'm probably a minority voice, I'll be honest. What about your thoughts on kind of the more, the rise in popularity of TRT that obviously increases muscle mass and what have you? What are your thoughts on the short-term versus the long-term with TRT specifically? You know, short-term, I mean, there's no doubt, right? I

mean, I'm not going to be one of these TRT deniers. I think that there's, I don't like to mess around with biology that's, you know, that's not broken. And, and my point I think would be is that, you know, if you're, if you're hypo gonadal for sure, if you're below the cutoff, get yourself into the eugonadal category. If you're in the middle, I don't know why anybody would really mess around with trying to get, you know, high, higher. The only thing we do know for sure is that reproductive tissue cancers in men are driven by testosterone, and that's prostate cancer for the most part. The long-term data on all the clinicals, and we only have, again, observational data,

probably pretty safe, to be honest with you. But I'll take my chances with just lifting weights and living with my testosterone is apparently sort of right in the middles. So I'm good to go. You know, it's much more prevalent in the United States than it is actually just about anywhere else in the world. So it's, it's difficult to get TRT here in Canada,

unless you're bona fide, you're below the cutoff. Yeah. I know a guy who is almost 80. He's about to turn 80 and his testosterone is like 750. His total. I was like, high five, dude. He was showing me his labs. And I was like, I was like, you're not on anything. This is your real labs. He was almost 80 years old and he still lifts weights all the time. And he feels good and has energy. Good for him yeah i mean there's a lot of other things that go along with testosterone libido and you know cognitive issues and everything that i i've seen we've done some i've been around people who have done the

experiments where they've given and it's a placebo controlled um but the truth is as soon as you get a guy particularly if they're hypogonadal on testosterone, it's a market change. And the cognitive benefits, a lot like we talk about estrogen for women post-menopausally, which it's kind of been wrecked by the Women's Health Initiative, but there is still a rogue group of OBGYNs who are like, you know, that should probably be in a lot of regimes for women postmenopausally as well. I know you're a prominent researcher in the world of protein. That's correct, right? Something like that.

Something like that. What's the latest in that world as far as like new research on protein or any new categories that people are starting to explore right now? Yeah, you know, a good friend of mine, his name's Luke Van Loon. He's a guy, he's from the Netherlands. A student of his, Jorn Tromlin, did a really interesting study recently where, you know, for years I would talk about you needed to get your meals in discrete 30 gram doses or 40 gram doses of protein. And I was like, you know, and everybody said, cause you can't digest more. I'm like, no, no, no, you can digest tons of protein. No, no problem there. The difference is it's how much your body can use at any one time. Uh, and they did a kind of a cool study where instead of having those type

of doses, they had a group that just had one meal a day. So that like the OMAD, you know, if it's time restricted feeding or intermittent fasting. And for years, I would say, I don't think that's a good way to try and manage your muscle mass, you kind of need to divide it up. That's what muscle likes. And they did a study where they compare these these meals. And actually, the one big meal did just as well, if not even maybe a little bit better than, uh, my, uh, three or four meal approach. Um, and you know, that's, that's science, right? So people go, oh, you were wrong. I was like, yeah, I was wrong. You know, I like, we don't get it right all the time. I'm like, that's science is a, it's not a

static thing. It's like, you have one theory, it seems to be right, but then someone proves it wrong. And you're like, look at that. And so, you know, hats off to them for, for that one. And I think a lot of people actually thought, you know what, that that's kind of a relief, like, because I worried so much about timing and everything. And I'm like, actually, I don't think it matters as much as i once told people and and you know in general people sort of thought so that's one of the the kind of big knowledge bombs lately for sure didn't come from my lab but the other the other one i think uh i'll just mention this is that you know plant-based proteins are big right now and 20 years ago if you'd ask me i've been all right animal-based proteins vastly

superior to plants yeah no not you're not a question 10 years ago being like i don't know like they're the differences aren't that big and now everything that we've done particularly when you take the protein out of the plant and you isolate it um the difference has become really small like it's so if you're going whey protein, which I love, don't get me wrong. I still think it's the best protein, best tasting and all that sort of stuff. But if you want to eat pea protein,

I'm like, I don't see much of a difference between the two to be fair. Yeah, the biggest difference that I've noticed in the two is when you say whey protein, I get excited to drink it. And then I get this like weird spasm in my face where I just go, oh, my God, you just ground up a bunch of peas. I don't even like a whole pea. Much less ground up dry pea.

Yeah, there's an aspect of taste. Let's just say I'm not a food scientist. So we get, we can get people in the lab to drink it. And we do the experiments. When you, if you ask them to say, what would you prefer to drink? If you were stuck in a desert island, they're like, oh, I picked this one. And then I'm like, no. Yeah.

It's usually not the pee. Yeah, for sure. I didn't know I had that reaction, but luckily we're doing this on Zoom. So I just saw my face. We were like, i was like oh yeah i had a woman send me a sample of uh it was insect protein it was crickets crickets yeah it was cricket and she said you know try it and uh it came from mexico so it had this it had a kind of a deep chocolate flavor and a bit of cinnamon so it smelled great and i i did it like you know tape myself and you can see me doing it and i'm like there's sort of a moment where i'm like okay yeah yeah like it's like i can do that

now i don't know if i want to do that, but yeah, you know, man, like whatever, you know, pushes your buttons and you're like, I want to do this because of this reason. Then all of a sudden, maybe taste becomes a less of an issue, but hands down, I'll just say, yeah, you can make whey protein tastes good a lot of different ways. He cricket, you got to work on it. So it seems like as long as you're hitting the, you're getting the requisite amount of amino acids, the source doesn't really matter. The timing doesn't really matter so much. As long as you're getting enough protein throughout the day, that's really the big, big, big picture. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. Yeah. And it's definitely more than the RDA, probably about twice the RDA. So 1.6 grams per kilo, about 0.7 grams per pound, you're sort of hitting. And a lot of people go, oh, I'm just going to eat one gram per pound just to be sure. I'm like, no, I got no issues with that.

None at all. I just, I'm not convinced that going above about 0.7 gets you any further. But, you know, if you're going to put something in the machine, protein is not a bad choice because it's really hard to turn into fat. Almost impossible. It doesn't mess around with your blood sugar too much. And it's still building and it's good for all of the protein requiring processes we need. I think it was Bill Campbell we We were talking to Anders that, that told us that if you overeat on protein,

it doesn't go toward body fat or something along those lines. You remember that Anders? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to disagree with Bill on that. I think it's, it's hard to do that experiment because it's hard to, but,

but let's just say is that, you know, we've got some studies where people intervene and got people to eat enormous amounts of protein and and they didn't gain body fat. Let's put it that way. So, yeah, it's it's almost impossible to to gain fat. In fact, maybe even the opposite, because protein makes you feel full. And so you actually a lot of a lot of people find they eat less. Um, as far as the, the total amount, um, say roughly I'm 200 pounds and my like minimum is one 50. And if I was really trying to get huge, I'd eat like two 20 to 30, somewhere in that range. Um, is there really, uh, I guess kind of like, what is the difference between 150 a day and 220

besides the 70? Or is these kind of like the whey protein versus the vegan protein where the differences are very minimal, as long as you're kind of hitting the minimum number, and then everything else is just like a surplus that allows for zero air when it comes to building muscle and recovery like we've just got excess in our body yeah well i mean you know i know i piss people off when i say this so i'll just pre-apologize for anybody who tells you there's a difference between like 150 160 and 220 and you can notice it, detect it or anything like that, the answer is not true. We can't tell the difference. And so, you know, if we're talking about a curve and we're coming up, we're on the part of the curve that's starting to level off.

And it's sort of that last marginal piece. And we just don't have the the technology to detect these differences but you know to you to you know bill's point if you're like well i don't want to put i don't want to gain weight but i'm still want to maximize what my muscle can do and i'm trying to do all of this and you know i i feel better when i eat more protein i find i recover better then the answer is eat more protein um from my standpoint when we talk about what we can measure in the physiology, the analogy I always give is you dip a cloth in water and the first little part of it, you're squeezing and a lot of water comes out. Now you're getting close to about 150, 160, 170. Now you're having to work real hard to get more water out of the cloth. So

that's the analogy to say, I think you're, you're, you're at the top part of the curve and you've kind of, you know, it's super hard to get more. And that's because the effect is so small up in that range. Doug, you know how many arguments I would have lost to my 40 year old self when I was in my twenties? All of them, all of them. In every category. We're in the same group. i would yeah man i'd have been destroyed

by my yeah i just i'd have destroyed my 20 year old self the thing about wisdom right you just yeah yeah you gotta get through the part where you don't know anything just to find out that you didn't know anything to actually have some information that works. Yeah, absolutely. Um, kind of going back to the testosterone thing, the, the over the counter, uh, kind of like testosterone boosters of TRT is like really the highest level. Is there anything that people can, um, and I guess this could even be kind of the, is it Punggut Ali? Um, I think it's kind of like the, the one that really comes out at the top of the over-the-counter supplementation. Is there any validity to those? Not as far as I'm concerned. We've done a lot of

work measuring testosterone for lots of reasons, you know, as a positive factor for hypertrophy. When we find is when you're in the normal range and you try and relate muscle gain, as long as you're normal, like if you're hyper, because you're on anabolic steroids or you're just happen to live at that end of the curve, or if you're hypo,

then there's definitely disadvantages and quote unquote advantages. But in that normal range, very difficult to find any true benefit um all of those supplements you know when when we've had our hands on them and when i've looked at anybody else's data you just don't see the changes that that they claim that you can see um i gotta you know there's there's a few people out there that have been, I'll just call them prominent supporters vocally. And they'd say, Oh, I had this, I did this. And I'm like, show me some numbers.

And when you ask, it's sort of like watch so-and-so's video. And I'm like, those aren't numbers. It's not data. Well, I felt better. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, so you placebo controlled the trial and you know, I'm there. So then I get called an egghead usually. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, all I'm asking for is for you to show me a number. And when you do that, it, it, it fades away pretty quickly. Yeah. I'd love to hear kind of just the, your overall thoughts. Like I've always had kind of like two two pieces of it of this

nihilistic nothing matters as long as you check the box just you're doing the right thing like nothing matters just weights somehow and eat protein somehow and you'll be fine in the long run if you play the game long enough you'll build muscle and feel good. Or we need the most hyper precise, like exact numbers of protein. And I also think there's a lot of validity to that. If you are chasing a very specific goal over a shorter timeline, do you have any, and a couple of questions that you've answered have kind of fallen more on the like, make sure we check the box because the gap between those two is actually significantly smaller than we would all like to believe. Yeah, you know, some of this comes with the, you know, the gracious gift of hindsight, right? And worrying about a lot of things. Some of it comes from, you know, part of my, my other life of, you know, training young guys and kids and that sort

of thing. And thinking that the only thing that really mattered was that they, they got to the gym and when they got to the gym that they, you know, they gave some good effort and man, a lot of things happen when you do that consistently. And to your point, eat pretty well, get the protein you need, come consistently, good effort when you're there. Probably then the next box that a lot of young kids and the young men could figure out, I think would really have an effect is get adequate sleep um so much falls into place when you when you get those things right and and you know then as you

climb higher up the ladder and you begin to work with quote-unquote you know higher value clients and and people that are that are just you know they pick their mom and dad wisely so you know the connor mcdavid's the uh whoever you know name wisely so you know the connor mcdavid's the whoever you know name your favorite athlete or dropping connor mcdavid in here yeah yeah you know i mean he's not a particularly impressive specimen from a physical standpoint he's not he's not tiny uh he's not wayne gretzky gretzky never lifted a weight right but mcdavid does he keeps himself in shape he's he's a physical player um he's an extraordinarily talented player uh but i mean you know for those folks maybe that last little

you know that for for mere mortals like like me and and completely mediocre physiology like i had when i was that age yeah um you it just disappeared into the into the noise. And a lot of people on a lot of prominent social media platforms make a lot of water over that last little bit and the nth degree, as you point out, of what I can do to fine tune the system. And I'm like... I think you brought up a point that I think is, is possibly the most important part, which is just the effort that is applied to whatever you're focusing on. Like you can,

you can overcome a lot of the precision with effort and just getting to near failure on a daily basis at the right stage of life. And, and then having a really good head around, just like, I'm going to do this forever. Like this, I'm just going to have to go lift this weight no matter, no matter how heavy it is every single day. Don't you remember like the good old days and I, you know, since you've, you've given me your ages, but for year, you know,

me that's like 40 plus years ago when, when you were young and man, you just went in the gym and you could crush it like every day. I squatted every day. I felt a little bit sore. Yeah. Every day of my life, I squatted somehow. Yeah. It was the greatest. If I did that now, like I'd be a wreck. I don't squat really. It's like once a week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I'm happy with. I have a good squat session next day. I'm like, man, I feel that. Like there, and there's no such thing when you get older is the delay

in the onset of muscle soreness. It's a, it's immediate onset muscle soreness. So yeah, I think a little bit of joint pain too, Doug. So just, uh, I think it was already there. No immediate onset. It's just always there. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah yeah persistent muscle soreness yeah yeah um deadlifting is like the thing that i i actually notice so much of just the mindset like some days 225 sounds great yeah some days 315 sounds great yeah um much more than that it's gonna have to there's gonna have to be an old friend of mine in town that has just been talking crap to me over text message for a long time that we're going to have to go see who can go play the game but being able to go if i can just do this for the next 40 years i'm probably going to win the race sounds awesome you know yeah and like i

say it's it like not that it's don't you know get out of that fourth quartile, that lowest quartile. If you want to be in the first, absolutely, man, like go for it, but, but you don't have to be there. Like, you know, if you want to or whatever, or the effort to be in the first and be in the low end of the first and the top end of the, that's a, that's a lot of effort. And, uh, you know, there are times in your life when it's the right time to do that. And I get it. I'm not, didn't ever get into this to tell people not to apply the effort and to try. But measured, measured effort, judicious effort. To come full circle, I'd love to hear kind of the results that you see when you have

people coming to you in your community. They're in their seventies, they may be just getting introduced into weightlifting. I would, I think if you were to ask a lot of people, whether it's because of testosterone, general age, kind of like the frailty that comes around with getting older, like can you be 70 completely unresistant, no resistance training background and still build muscle at that late in life uh yes but not much yes question uh yeah like you you get much stronger um the the constant line and and lots of people use it but but but people here talk about it they say you know first

they go well i never knew i could do this is usually one of the first things and now like i started out and i lifted 10 pounds and like that just felt so heavy now 10 pounds is like it's like nothing like the the world feels lighter things getting in and out of cars going up and and downstairs. My confidence, I feel confident. And I don't know what that is or what it means, but the outward manifestation is just people feel better in their skin. They feel like they can handle more of the things that they experience in daily life. It might not be, you know, you're not going to win any medals or anything, but people feel better.

And I think they surprise themselves muscle wise. It's a small tweak. I don't know that you can get much out at age 70. But it's an interesting observation that we do a lot of work in, in, in older people. So we're recruiting now constantly about four trials going on in people over the age of 65. It is rare to have someone who's like, let's say 70 or 75 come into us. And we say, what medications are you taking? And they say nothing. It's like almost zero.

It's a, it's, it's a unicorn. And if they do say nothing, or they say, usually they go, I take like a baby aspirin. I'm like, that doesn't count. That's just preventative. It's all good. I'm like, what do you do? They're like, oh, you know, I got five dogs. I walk this. I do this.

You know, I still go to CrossFit a couple of times. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, so we've got a prescription. I don't have to dig too much deeper. But yeah, they're like, yeah, I've been, I just, it's just something I do been doing it my whole life, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I was asked by a very good friend of mine, uh, like what I thought the plan was for being strong late into life. And I, my, my, the first answer that popped into my brain was just becoming obsessed with physical labor. You have something to do. You have to show up. You have to go dig the hole. You got to go chop the tree down. It doesn't matter. Like that's just your day is now

you don't sit behind the computer. You have to go do physical labor and that will force your body to stay dialed in. Yeah. And it probably doesn't have to be a lot, but I think that the intensity, if you don't do much, then I think the intensity part matters. So you got to drive yourself into that zone. If you do a lot, then yeah,

I think you can dial down the intensity. But as you say, you know, it's all the trite phrases, right? Hard work never killed anybody. Yeah, you're right.

In fact, lack of hard work kills a lot of people. So exactly what you know we're all sitting here doing this or whatever i think i think doug might be standing up but uh overachiever but yeah a lot of sitting around and doing this this describes what what most people do and most of them and i'm a guy talking about exercise and i'm doing it sit in front of computer. All right. Dr. Phillips, it's been fantastic. We've been trying to get you on the show here and talking about having you for

a long time. So thank you for coming on and hanging out with us. Where can people find you? I am, I am, I'm, I'm on X probably less, mainly because I find I get attacked more than I do on any other platform. So I'm on X less, but I'm MackinProf, M-A-C-K-I-N-P-R-O-F on X, Instagram. I got on TikTok mainly to get my youngest son's goat because he told me old people ruin TikTok. So I'm ruining it. Evan. One old guy at a time. Yeah. I hope you,

I hope there's this like 500,000 followers on Tik TOK. Yeah, no, there's not. Yeah. I'm terrible on Tik TOK. I don't know how it works. I I'm just there to really actually really great. My, my youngest son. So it's all good. It's hard to dance and talk about protein at the same time yeah when you yeah you can i can't do that yeah doug larson that'd be a wild situation if my dad had more tiktok followers than i did i don't know how i'd feel i have more followers and likes than my son but he like if i if i get it like my stature grows at all he's

gonna be so upset it's's going to be unbelievable. Doug, doesn't your dad have more TikTok followers than you because he's posting fishing pictures? Yeah, my dad sent me a TikTok the other day. Somebody else made it, but he was in this cool hunting duck hunting montage that was pretty rad, but

I did not expect to receive a TikTok from my dad. That was a wild text. I thought it was fake. You're never too old to learn new tricks, right? Yeah. I will pair it with what Anders just said. Yo,

we've been wanting to have you on the show for quite some time now. So I really enjoyed it and appreciate you being here. This was fantastic. I appreciate you guys taking the time. It was great to chat. You bet. I am on Instagram, Douglas E.

Larson. And I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That's 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 over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.