Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 547 - Menno Henselmans

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Menno Henselmans is a board member of the Institute of Nutrition and Fitness, and advisory board member of Legion Athletics, USA. He is also the founder of the Henselmans Personal Training Certification Program and has published his knowledge of training in Men’s Health, IronMind, T-Nation, and several others. He is an experienced strength and physique coach, helping many athletes achieve pro status in bodybuilding and top rankings in powerlifting. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off the Power Project Panel! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use code "POWERPROJECT25" for 25% off your first order, then code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off every order after! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Settleage, aka SettleGate, here to introduce you to our next guest, Menno Henselmans. Menno Henselmans is a board member of the Institute of Nutrition and Fitness and is also an advisory board member of Legion Athletics USA. He is also the founding member

of Henselmans Personal Training Certification Program and has published his knowledge of strength training in Men's Health, Iron Mind, Teen Nation, and several other publications. He's an experienced strength and physique coach, helping many athletes achieve pro status in bodybuilding and top rankings in powerlifting. He is the creator of the number one fitness website, according to the Huffington Post, his site, mentalhensomans.comcom and although he has established himself as a top professional in the career of health and fitness he actually began his career in a different industry prior

to being a health and fitness professional he was a data analyst and business consultant and while he was fully invested in what he calls a traditional occupation he was sickened by the bro science fads and misinformation plaguing the fitness industry. He eventually decided to change career paths to help destroy the disinformation surrounding health, fitness, and strength training. On a side note, Menno's secondary passion is traveling the world in search of the world's greatest roll of sushi. But that is a different story for a different time. Please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Menno Henselmans. It's kind of different than the other form of social media, too. You don't

feel like a dirty slut on that one. Because it just comes and goes real fast. I don't do shit on Twitter. You should. I tell you all the time. I don't get notifications. Because I don't post anything on Twitter ever. And I keep all notifications

off. Are you guys ready? Yeah. You should. I know I should. You should follow Jordan's site and copy what he does. Because he does like, he takes like, he starts out with micro information and then turns it into macro information. And he shares a lot of it on Twitter.

So he just does the opposite of what Gary Vee taught him, which is macro information turned into micro information. But you already are doing all the information. So just fucking post it. I'll do it. I'll check it out. I'll open it. I haven't opened Twitter in literally months.

So I should, I should, I'll do it. Fuck it. You won't do it. You won't. I don't want, I'll do it.

Twitter. Do you guys think today's guests will know anything about cow will we's i hope so are we starting yeah we started yeah we're here now oh fuck you um we started from the bottom no we're here yes how about my brother-in-law when he saw you in the uh in the suit in the um when we were uh what the fuck kind of scuba suit i guess i don't know what's that called what is that yeah scuba suit in the wet suit i like how we all went blank you can figure out what the fuck is i know right his uh greeting to you was fuck you that was great i love andy he's the best i wasn't very i mean it wasn't very nice

yeah but he meant it in love but then you were like why he's like just fuck you and we all knew what it meant it was great yeah i love that guy yeah now talking to him is like one of the coolest things ever because he knows everything well just because he knows a lot he knows a lot but He knows a lot, but yeah, yeah, no, we were talking about like, you know,

raising kids and stuff and how I was like worried I wasn't going to get it. And, you know, because I was the youngest of my family, he's like, Oh, it was like, I had the exact same fears as you.

And I'm like, Whoa. And then we just get to chat and it's like, next thing I know, I'm just, he's hosting a seminar for a couple of us. He's like, this is fucking great. Yeah. He, uh, he went to Jes next thing I know, I'm just, he's hosting a seminar for a couple of us. This is like, this is fucking great.

Yeah. He, uh, he went to Jesuit, you know, there's a big difference, you know, there's a huge difference between a private school and public education. And, uh, we got talking about that too. Like just as a family, we were all kind of talking about education and a couple of them were mentioning, like, as soon as they got to high school, it was really, really clear on like some of the kids would transfer cause they just didn't want to be in all boys school and all that kind of shit kids would transfer into uh like davis high school from some of these

private schools and they were just like blazing through these classes just fucking smoking them and i was like damn that's really interesting i never even i just never thought about it that way but makes a lot of sense you got to pay a lot of money to be in a private school. Yeah. Yeah. So I got to tell you guys about dinner last night. We still have tons of family from Texas in the area right now. They're actually all kind of, they're probably on a plane right now.

But we went and hung out and said our goodbyes to everybody but that meant um dinner was not ready and it was already about to be like eight o'clock and i'm like dude what the heck are we gonna do uh so eat right foods to the rescue uh stephanie had the uh the bulk shrimp i had the bulk chicken and bulk salmon along with some rice a little bit of g hughes on top of that but dude within i don't know like probably 10-15 minutes i had a full dinner ready to go and you know during this time stephanie's just trying to like feed the baby put him down and i'm just like running around all over the place and i get food done and i'm just like dad harder than me motherfucker it was so dope to have everything

ready to go yeah in that amount of time that it wasn't like hey let's go through the drive-through or like ah shit on the way home we should do this or we should do that it's like no like let's just go home like i know we have something ready to go and it was it was awesome it was a really good feeling because the food was great tasted amazing and it And like I said, we didn't take any steps backwards last night. Better options and more convenience. I mean, these are huge things when you're trying a diet. And if you have a better option that can be cooked up in just a couple of minutes, then you're on your way. You're probably going to choose, probably make better choices that way almost all the time.

You know, you could be a superhero dad or you could just freaking be a single guy who has you chose to just eat two yesterday more for me right or single woman um but yeah i feel i feel it's kind of nice when all that's just ready and i'm just like fuck it i'm gonna eat it one day when i'm like you yeah great but for now i'm good yeah no absolutely which ones did you eat last night i ate the chicken which is good i do like chicken but i also had the steak which i i like i love yeah i love the steak yeah i can't can't argue with that yeah uh we're huge fans of it they are helping us out in more ways than just simple meal prep like i just mentioned. I saved dinner last night. You guys got to head over to eatrightfoods.com. That's

eatrightfoods.com at checkout. Actually, load up about a week or so worth of meals. On your first order, use promo code POWERPROJECT25 and that's going to get you 25% off that first order. After that, use

promo code POWERPROJECT for 10% off that first order. After that, use promo code PowerProject for 10% off every order. Shrimp is amazing. The turkey, oh my gosh, I think I'm going to have that today, is my favorite, and the shrimp is incredible, but really, I haven't met a bad Eat Right Foods meal yet. So again, eatrightfoods.com,

head over there ASAP. I can't stop looking at that watch, man. Fucking snazzy. It's nice, isn't it? It's fancy. You know, I think when it comes to, like, the meal prep situation, you know, one way to help solve your meal prep situation is to not prep meals. You know, like, have someone else do it for you.

Like, you know, just what's the thing that for you. Like, you know, just what's, what's the thing that blocks you the most, you know, what is the, for some people they need a coach or some people they need a trainer, you know, um, I don't know what to do in the gym. All right. Well, you don't need to know, like go and hire somebody that, that can assist you, that can help you when it comes to meal prep, you're confused. You don't, not sure what to do. Um, check out eat right foods there. You know, it's just, you're not sure what to do, check out Eat Right Foods. It's these little things that seem so obvious to us that other people don't even know about yet. And I noticed a trend in the grocery stores, and this was brought to my attention by our buddy Todd Abrams a few years ago. He said all of the major chain grocery stores are going to have meal prep in them. It's coming. And he said this a few years ago, he said all of the major chain grocery stores are going to have meal prep in them. Like it's, it's coming. And, you know, he said this a few years ago, I haven't really seen

it around. And then I was at whole foods a couple of days ago and I saw prepped meals and I was like, Oh, now they're not like, you know, they could be healthier. You know, they're not, not, not the same quality you're going to get from something like eat right foods, but it's heading in that direction where you're seeing like salmon and some rice and chicken and some mashed potatoes and things like that. And I even noticed that at nugget and I'm starting to see it more and more where there's like these prep meals and I'm like, oh man, this would be a great step. If more people got involved in, in having prepped meals, things that are convenient and easy that are better options than what they normally would eat is a great step in

the right direction to help people get healthier. Yeah. You know, we were talking about this yesterday about, you know, how to start the conversation with friends and family member about, you know, a better diet or better nutrition. Being less fat. Being less fat. Being less fat. And it's funny, we've heard it several times where it's like, oh, can you just cook meals for me? It's just that way I don't mess up.

Because people actually, yeah, they don't know, like, oh, is this a carb? It's funny to us to hear questions like that, but it's true. And what you said is spot know it's spot on like just have somebody else take care of it for you and yeah if we can't get some of the bigger stores to just that way there is another option for people that would be sick it's gonna be great to ask our guests today about uh like metabolism type stuff as you were mentioning off air i'm actually really curious on uh his thoughts and perspective on people like kind of wrecking their metabolism. We hear that a lot.

And I don't know how exaggerated it is. I don't know how real it is. I oftentimes think sometimes, too, that somebody comes from a specific coach and they say, oh, I got, you know, I got all screwed up from this coach. But I don't think that's fair, a fair assessment a lot of times, because who knows what the coach recommended and who knows what the athlete actually did. You know, sometimes the athletes not following the protocol really well. But I, I kind of wonder, you know, you hear people talking about like overtraining and overdoing your cardio and under eating. It would be great to know from like our guest today kind of what his what his expert opinion is on that. Like, how real is that?

And then how would somebody potentially reverse their way out of it? Kind of like a reverse diet or something. But, yeah, no, you hear about a lot of people talking about, oh, yeah, my metabolism is wrecked and this and that. I think more people like more often than not, people's metabolism, it's not wrecked. It's if you go on a deficit for a long time, like when I went on that prep,

that bodybuilding prep for 40 weeks or whatever in 2015, and it took me five or six months to get back to normal, I was in a deficit, a hard deficit for a really long time with a really low fat. So it does take time to get back to normal. But in a deficit a hard deficit for a really long time with really low fat so it does take time to get back to normal but for for normal individuals um it'll be interesting to see especially in terms of his opinion on how how often that is actually the case because a lot of people just spit out having a wrecked metabolism even though i don't think it's probably right right hey guys yo great having on the show today appreciate your time

all right let's uh let's kick this show off uh and sema and i we were just talking about um metabolism and people potentially like you know quote unquote wrecking their metabolism how we hear some athletes saying that um when they come off of like a show prep or we hear people saying that they think they just have a shitty metabolism. This is why they're heavier. But I want to know, I guess, from you what your opinion is on, you know, can someone really wreck their metabolism? Can somebody really, quote unquote, slow down their ability to burn calories? And if so, what are some ways that we could potentially avoid this? Yeah, that's a good question.

I actually did a research paper on this together with Anastasia Asinchenko. And it basically revolves around the idea of metabolic damage, whether that's a real thing. And we have to distinguish this from adaptive thermogenesis, which definitely is a real thing. And we have to distinguish this from adaptive thermogenesis, which definitely is a real thing. So when you're dieting, your metabolism banks, or at least your metabolic rate decreases to some extent. That's basically inevitable because it's going to happen due to a few factors. One, your body weight is going to decrease, and the less body weight you have, the less energy

you'll expend. Two, the thermic effect of food will decrease because if you eat less food, then there's also less thermic effect of food. And then assuming no change in activity level, there will still be, or at least in conscious activity level, there will still be a decrease in your subconscious activity level, which is

movement I'm making right now, for example. And if you're bobbing your head to music and just how energetic you walk, those kinds of things are generally called spa or NEAT, like non-exercise activity from a genesis or spontaneous physical activity. And those decrease as you get leaner. They're like a function of your body fat level. The leaner you get, the more conservative your body or nervous system in particular becomes with energy. the more conservative your body or nervous system in particular becomes with energy.

But the thing is, what we found in our review of the literature is that this adaptive thermogenesis, it's permanent if you maintain the lower body fat level, but it's completely reversed if you regain the fat. So there is no such thing as metabolic damage in that sense. There is only metabolic adaptation. And in that sense, also, I think that the idea of reverse dieting in the extreme sense to sort of fix your metabolism is not necessary. You can just go straight back into your desired energy surplus. But you do have to take into account that your metabolism will now be slower than before you started your weight loss journey or your content spread so you do have to take into account well your your body weight's a lot lower and on top of that even there's still a bit of a difference can you explain that a little bit more uh adaptive pharmacogenesis adaptive pharmacogenesis right it's like an adaptation

your body's heat production so you're in energy expenditure basically you're what people say they refer to your metabolism they're basically referring to energy expenditure of various forms and most of that essentially comes down to heat production in the body thermogenesis so adaptive thermogenesis basically means a reduction in energy expenditure beyond what you would predict anyway from other factors like your weight loss. I'm curious about this because a lot of people, when they do a certain diet for how many weeks, let's say it's 12, 16, 20 weeks, and let's say they get to not a contest lean, but let's say maybe 10, 11% body fat, but they're not eating in terms of the amount of food they're eating.

They're still feeling hungry, et cetera, even when they're using tactics and they would like to, a lot of people do have the goal of, I want to see if I can slowly increase my food while maintaining my body composition. What are the strategies for people to go about doing that if they can actually do that? So let's say they want to go from eating 1800,800 calories at 12%, 10% body fat, but they want to maybe get up to 2,600 calories and maintain that look and that body fat percentage. How does one have to think about going about that process?

Right. What you basically have to do is you have to estimate what current energy balance you're in. And then you have to estimate what energy balance can i realistically um bulk on like lean bulk on so add on some weights preferably mostly muscle mass but not get fat so you can extrapolate that a bit from the literature for example if you're currently losing um a good 0.5 0.7 body weight like say 0.7 body weight on average that that corresponds to about a 20 energy deficit you probably also have some idea of what your

maintenance is and what energy deficit you originally set so based on those factors you have an idea let's say i'm at 20 deficit right now well then you know at least i can go up to i can go up 20 in energy intake and then i'll, at least I can go up to, I can go up 20% in energy intake, and then I'll be at roughly maintenance. But I want to be in surplus, so we can go up 25%. And you can do that straight away. Like you don't have to do any baby steps. You can just go, those 25%, those are pretty much guaranteed. You know, you can get to that point. Now, I think it is very important to note that you have a certain metabolic rate and there is a big genetic factor here so i don't think it's wise to think of i want to be on

3 000 calories you know you can say i want to lean bulk or i want to stay lean those things are great but this idea of you know some this um a lot of women have that these days with uh the the all-in kind of mentality where they think like i i deserve to be on 3 000 calories or i should be on 3 000 calories you know and it doesn't work that way you know maybe your metabolism is that fast but maybe it's not and whether you want it or not it's not going to change it did you use those words the all-in mentality for a specific reason because when you said that i thought of a specific individual but i'm just curious did you use those words, the all-in mentality for a specific reason? Because when you said that, I thought of a specific individual, but I'm just curious. Did you use that for that reason?

No, I'm not referring to a one individual here, but it's becoming a thing, I'd say. Okay. What have you noticed with cardiovascular activity? We hear people, sometimes people are recommending it for weight loss. Sometimes people are against it. Um, again, sometimes people say, Hey, like the more cardio that you do, uh, you're actually going to be maybe expending a little less energy, you know, as you do it more, like, I don't know, we hear some of these things and I'm kind of thinking like that, that kind of sounds like bullshit. It sounds like a moderate amount of cardio could be super effective,

but what are some of your thoughts on that? Yeah, cardio can definitely be effective. I'm not a fan of it, though. It's effective for energy, for burning energy, for increasing your energy expenditure. It also has a few downsides. Some people say that a big downside is that you get accustomed to it and you don't

burn as much energy anymore. That's theoretically true, but it's a few percent. And it's mostly offset, in fact, by the fact that when you do cardio, you become better at cardio, so your workout put increases. So you can run a longer distance or you can run faster on the treadmill for the same amount of time. And often, actually, when you compare untrained versus trained individuals doing a certain amount of cardio, trained individuals actually burn more calories than untrained individuals.

So this idea of, yeah, it's not worth it because your body will adapt, that's not quite the case. But it is the case that cardio alone does not make you lose body fat. You have to be an energy deficit. So cardio quickly becomes a crutch for many people that I think, you know,

I'm getting, I want to get lean. So I do a lot of cardio and then it becomes very difficult to maintain that low body fat level. Because if you need, you know, two hours of cardio a day to get lean, then if you're not planning on sustaining that activity level indefinitely,

you're going to have problems keeping that weight off. Is this why we see a big rebound from a lot of folks after they do a show? Or even your average person that's just looking to lose weight, they get all excited and they do an hour of cardio every day. They lose 40 pounds, all excited and they do an hour of cardio every day, they lose 40 pounds, but then maybe they just lose their habit of doing this amount of cardio and they gain the weight back and then some. Is that kind of what's going on?

Part of it. It's due to both. I think it's mostly a mindset issue. You can address this in terms of energy balance. There's an increase in energy intake. There's a decrease in energy expenditure. But I think it's mostly a mindset issue. You can address this in terms of energy balance. There's an increase in energy intake. There's a decrease in energy expenditure. But I think it's mostly the mindset, this idea that you go on a diet.

This whole idea, this word itself is now sort of poisoned. Diet, the word, comes from diata, from Greek. And it meant way of life. It did not mean an unsustainable period of suffering to get a six-pack for summer, after which I go right back to the shitty lifestyle that got me fat in the first place.

Let's talk about sustainability because you were talking about deficits as far as percentage is concerned. A lot of people that listen to this show, some of them do track, some of them don't track their calories. You obviously need to know your maintenance to go into a 20-25% deficit, but how much is too much for a caloric deficit when you're trying to cut?

Because a lot of people, you know, they'll, they'll go into a very hard deficit and they'll drop a good amount of weight and then they'll stall for a bit and then they won't know what to do next. Some people are like, okay, I just decreased my calories more or I just increased my cardio more.

But what is the way that people can go about structuring this so that instead of, you know doing uh going on a harsh deficit for eight weeks and they stall themselves out they can then diet for a good period of time and get to their end goal without doing it in an unsustainable fashion yeah generally a moderate approach pays off for most people. There is an optimal amount of energy deficit. And this depends mostly on your current body fat level. So if you're currently obese, then your primary goal is to get lean.

And it doesn't really matter so much if you get lean slowly or fast or, you know, in terms of your body's retention of muscle muscle mass at least like it's not going to burn off muscle mass if you're 50 body fat as a guy you can basically crash diet your way at least to 30 or so and you're good your priority also health-wise you know you want to get lean yesterday so it all of those things like the optimal deficit they don't really matter that much and actually i like very aggressive deficits for people that are very motivated and have a lot of body fat to lose. And there's also research showing that if you start off aggressively,

it helps with motivation in the long run because it shows them from the start like this shit's working. If I follow the program, I can get lean. And that's a big problem for many people that have been overweight for a long time. They don't have faith anymore. They've given up on the process. And then they try for a week or so. They don't see results. It doesn't work. How is that study conducted? That's really fascinating. You're saying that people that start out a little bit more

aggressively end up being maybe dedicated to it in a longer term, maybe? Yeah, there's a meta-analysis that confirms this, basically aggregates results from different studies, and then looks in the long run at, A, how fast or how aggressive did they start the diet? And then how long could they actually sustain it? Like what's their attrition rate?

How long were they compliant with the diet? And you see that it actually helps a bit to start aggressively. When having higher body fat levels. Exactly, yeah. Exactly, when having higher body fat levels. Because we have a couple more studies showing that as you get leaner, it pays off a lot to be more conservative. When you're no longer overweight, 20 percent is is aggressive as um as i generally

like to go and often erring on the side of lower than that there's even a study by garth at all finding that um between i think 30 and 20 percent deficit and in this particular study the group had 30 percent deficits and they were pretty lean they were athletes like serious competitive athletes the 30 percent deficit group actually got less fat because they were pretty lean. They were athletes, like serious competitive athletes. The 30% deficit group actually got less fat because they were losing muscle mass whereas the 20% group was recomping. They're gaining muscle while losing fat. Even while keeping protein

levels like the same in both, like let's say, yeah? Yep. Protein levels, same training, pretty well controlled study. That's an extreme example. This kind of stuff is so fascinating. These guys got their body fat tested recently.

I'm going to go in pretty soon and get my body fat levels tested. What have you personally seen like the most effective way for someone just to flat out get jacked? Because it seems like it's not easy to keep the muscle mass on while burning body fat. And then even for a lot of folks that listen to this show that are natural, that don't, don't use any performance enhancing drugs. It is very,

very difficult. Even when on stuff is difficult, it's very difficult to, to gain muscle mass. So what, what have you noticed are some of the kind of key points in somebody recomping their body? Yeah,

it takes a long time. That's, uh, that's for sure. And, uh, I think my approach generally is to cut you into a level where, you know,

you're, you're pretty happy with your body fat level and then lean bulk. And it's good to realize that this cut that I'm sort of known for recomp programs, but I call it cutting. The goal is recomping. I think the goal should always be recomping, but recomping is not

something that you set up the program for. It's you're cutting. You're setting an energy deficit. You're going to do a 20% energy deficit, for example. You could call it. And then you could call it a cut or you could call it a recomp program. But whether that happens is more how effective the program is rather than

your intention. You always want to retain muscle mass, at least for physique athletes, and ideally build it. But whether that happens depends on your genetics, whether you're on gear, your training program, a lot of other factors. So if everything goes well,

you can recomp. And if things don't go quite as well, or if you're already a super advanced athlete, like you're pushing the limits of your genetic potential, then you're probably going to have a hard time maintaining muscle mass while dieting. So it's not a program design feature,

you know, recomping. It's more a goal design feature, you know, recomping. It's more a goal. It's always the goal. But in the end, I'm still pretty traditional, actually, in terms of cutting and bulking. On that note of being traditional in terms of cutting and bulking, this makes me very curious. Because when a lot of guys have the goal of gaining muscle, especially when they start off as a new athlete. We know about newbie gains. We know that you could be at maintenance. And once you get some gym stimulus, you're going to gain some muscle, right?

But for the individual that's been lifting for a while, they don't want to necessarily go on your classical bulk where you're seeing the scale go up a while. Like you're in quite a bit of caloric surplus. You're gaining some muscle. But over time, you might be slowly also gaining some body fat. Let's say that this individual wants to do a classic recomp, which we know takes time. Say it's a 180 pound male, right? Do you think there is still merit in going for the classic bulk where they'll maybe slowly bulk themselves up to 195, 200 pounds where they've gained some muscle, but they've also gained some obvious body fat or should they try to slowly do a recomp where they are gaining new muscle but they're also not gaining too much fat at the same time maybe they're slowly losing body fat what do you think

is better for that athlete both okay basically you want to do both at the the optimal energy deficit and the optimal energy surplus and i think that is actually one of the most important things of nutrition like the the two sort of big variables i think in your training and nutrition are your energy intake and your training volume many other things they matter only because they influence those two things your energy intake and training volume and stepping your energy intake and your training volume correctly are therefore one of the most important things you do in a training program so in terms of bulking i often distinguish between lean bulking and dreamer bulking yeah like you have this idea of I think it's actually a misconception

when they look at professional bodybuilders, especially from more 90s, I'd say, 90s, 2000s era, and they're like, whoa, they got fat in the off-season. They're not fat. They're bloated because they're on aromatizing gear.

It's very hard to see the difference, especially through the untrained eye. Even with a lot of experience, it's very difficult to see the difference between bloating and fat. Also, by the way, between lactose intolerance and fat gain, which I think is another misconception. But they don't actually get that fat,

and they put on a lot of muscle mass. So I think overall, they do pretty well. But even that aside, you can have much higher energy surplus as an enhanced athlete than as a natural trainee. There's just a certain amount of muscle you can build. And as a natural trainee, especially if you're an advanced natural trainee, it's a slow process. Most research finds, again, Garfa's team has done some studies on this. I've done a few studies looking at the energy surplus.

You can think of it basically as there's a certain amount of muscle you can build over maintenance. And if you spill over that, it's mostly going to be a fat gain. It's a ratio thing, but it's mostly, it's a very small amount of energy. Realistically, one kilo of muscle in a month is great. That's not a lot of energy. Not metabolizable energy density of lean body mass. It's mostly muscle. You're talking 2,500 calories max and that's including most of the energy it takes for storage.

Divide that over a month, you can do the math. It's a tiny energy surplus. It's a bit bigger because there's also energy inefficiency in the body but it's a few percent energy surplus that realistically is going to be pure muscle. And if you go over that, then

it's quickly going to lead to mostly extra fat gain and not a whole lot of extra muscle. But it changes a bit when you're on gear, when you can have potentially higher surplus. I think actually gear is much more effective for bulking than for cutting. I think for cutting it doesn't really, in my experience, at least with with clients it doesn't even do that much at all but it helps with

maintenance of course retention but unlike it's a recombining miracle um any case so for cutting it's the same approach like this is optimal deficit where if you try to be more aggressive you're going to lose muscle and if you're muscle. But the difference is you can do it slow. So if you want to cut slowly, that's fine. It's just going to be slower and it's going to be more of a recomp approach. And if you want to push it, like retention of muscles is fine. I just want maximum fat loss. That's also fine.

Probably in the end, you're going to actually get to a similar endpoint, as long as you're not too aggressive either way. Don't greener bulk. Don't crash diet unless you're going to actually get to a similar end point, as long as you're not too aggressive either way. Don't green or bulk, don't crash diet, unless you're obese. Do you personally count calories? Yeah, most of the time. Actually, I'm also a fan of ad libitum dieting for contests, for sure, or for photo shoots, and when bulking also.

But when cutting, I'm pretty used to very very stable food choices and as long as i measure my caliper readings my weight i can actually sort of get into the right energy intake pretty much by just eating certain foods and i know well this is going to be about 2500 calories and and it doesn't really matter that much if one day it's 2800 someone is 2200 you mentioned earlier very briefly the thermic effect of food. Does the thermic effect of protein, does this factor in much at all or is this something that just doesn't matter that much? Yeah, it matters but not much. So there have been a few studies suggesting that if you sort of eat more protein

at a certain point the excess protein cannot be used for body fat storage and that's a bit of a misconception because well usually your body does not store protein as fat it stores the fat you eat as fat it doesn't even store the carbs you eat as fat it stores the fat you eat but the thing is if you eat more carbs then the freeze-off energy uses that to produce energy to store the fat. So in the end, it comes down to energy balance. And it's impossible to have three calories, like basically. So this thing of negative calories, like you eat more and it in no way contributes to energy balance, that doesn't exist. So for protein, the idea is, well, if you have 100 calories extra of protein, maybe that's only 90% efficient compared to 95% efficient for fats or carbs.

But it's a pretty small difference. There have been a few questionable studies and a few very well, tightly controlled studies, at least in untrained individuals, by Breital. We have people in the metabolic ward, everything controlled. They know their exact energy expenditure. They know everything that goes into the mouth of the participants, and they find that diets with various protein levels, from wildly excessive to insufficient, don't have

much of an effect when you're overfeeding on the amount of fat you gain. So, yeah, it may be, it's one of those things where if you like protein a lot, it fits your diet, I say great, you know, nothing wrong with eating excess protein, also health-wise, kidneys and stuff, it's all diet, I say, great. Nothing wrong with eating excess protein. Also health-wise, kidneys and stuff, that's all been debunked.

But I'm also not one of the proponents of really forcing the protein because it's expensive. It's not that satiating compared to vegetables and stuff. And also not that nutritious. So I'm relatively moderate protein. Most of my clients are probably at 1.8 grams per kilogram per day. Okay. Real quick, I'm curious about the satiating effects of protein that you're talking about. So you're mentioning, so as far as fiber from vegetables or that group, not that you believe, but it is more satiating than getting in a good amount of protein. Obviously, calorically wise the protein

would be heavier but as far as the satiating effect it's been proven that vegetables or fibrous vegetables are more satiating than protein generally yes at least when you're talking about excess protein we've done a study on this randomized control trial in trained lifters where we have them consume 1.8 or 2.7 gram per kilogram per day of protein. And the lower protein group ate mostly more veggies, boiled potatoes, pretty satiating foods. And in that case, there was basically no difference. And a few other studies, they find that things like mushrooms are both per calorie and even per volume sometimes, more satiating than meat, for example.

And I mean, if you run the numbers, you can quickly see that, for example, chicken breast, which depending on if you make it with a nice tasty sauce, then it's very easy to eat a lot of chicken breast. The volume shrinks down a lot when you grill it. And then 100 grams of chicken is nothing. And for that, you can have about 600 grams of zucchini, which is a serious amount of zucchini, and it's more than a pound of food. So when you have 100 calories that you have to

fill in, you're hungry, I say generally, you know, the 600 grams of zucchini is going to be the way to go, compared to 100 ultra grams of extra chicken breast in these studies are you aware if they used like meat or if they used like protein powder protein shakes yeah it's a big confounding factor a lot of studies they in general a lot of people think in terms of macronutrient only and the same macronutrients can have very different society

profiles depending on which foods you eat you know like a whey shake is not the same macronutrients can have very different society profiles depending on which foods you eat you know like a way shake is not the same as uh chicken breast that's very ill-prepared so it's like rubber that's actually very satiating you know like you just can't eat much of that so it's um but it's both most of the studies i on whey, but there's also whole food-based diets where they just have different protein intakes from food. They don't supplement, and you find similar effects. How do you help control for hunger and cravings? There are a lot of things.

I think satiety management is the most important thing. You want a high-protein diet, but not necessarily excessively high. High fiber intake, that's a big one. Food volume is another very big one. Especially if you want to get big, you also need to get rid of your idea of normal portion sizes. You have to eat big,

not necessarily in calories, but you need large portions of food. If you go to a normal restaurant and you want to get big, if you order the regular courses, you're not going to be satiated or you have a low appetite. If you go to a normal clothing store, the clothes

are not going to fit. Those are things you have to deal with. If you want to look abnormal in a positive way, you cannot behave normally. If you do the same things everyone does in our society, you're going to look like everyone else. that's two-thirds overweight one-third obese so that's not what most people listening here probably want i want to ask you this and i i hate to

rewind a little bit but i want to go back to the the recomping that we were talking about and since you work with so many athletes that you do re-comps with um the the one of the biggest the things is the training volume and the training that they're doing, but then also the amount of food that they intake, whether it's slight surplus or whether it's at maintenance, but how do you help athletes get to the mind of being patient with their re-comp because a re-comp isn't something where you're visually seeing changes all the time, or you're even seeing changes on the scale all the time. Um, for myself, I've been around the same weight range for three years now. And, but, and I'm also curious about your ideas on DEXA scans, because I've heard you talk about DEXA scans before,

but I've been able to make like training gains through the years. And I've been able to gain a small amount of muscle, get leaner, but gain a little bit of muscle these past three years. And it's been a very slow process. How do you get athletes to focus on their gym performance rather than focusing on how their body looks every single month? Yeah, that's a good point. You already basically touched on the most important thing, that is not to go just by the mirror and definitely not go just by your body weight. a mirror and definitely not go just by your body weight is a big mistake i very often see on successful programs when people especially if they they're not used to optimizing all their nutrition and their training and everything they start with me and then they freak out they're not

losing weight and then i say well look at your waist measurements look at your caliper measurements look at your gym performance you know you getting stronger. Your caliper readings are going down. Your waist is getting slimmer. This is exactly what we want. I can get you lean at 200 pounds or I can get you lean at 140 pounds. I think you want 200, right? Lack of weight loss.

If you see good fat loss on objective measurements, and I think calipers and waist circumference are the most practical for most people then that's good that's what you want like if you want to recomp then you don't want to lose weight so that's basically an ideal scenario if you're not losing weight now for many people there will be changes and they may be gradual and slow but still you want to to measure this so you need objective markers that you're tracking.

Your gym performance is a big one. And I think waist, caliper readings, and weights. Those are the things I track with almost all clients. If you have access to DEXA scans, that's great. But ideally, you then need them every week. So that's going to be expensive for most people. And then actually radiation is probably not a concern, but it might be over a very long run.

So for most people, I think DAXA is more of a nice thing to know or a verification of your long-term progression rather than something that you really use as your benchmark of whether to adjust your calories. Because you don't want to wait a month every time, or a month is a good scenario for most people, right? So you don't want to wait a month before you adjust your calories because you don't want to wait a month every time where a month is a good scenario for most people right so you don't want to wait a month before you adjust your calories if you you find that you're truly not losing fat anymore then you want to go down with the calories right now otherwise you're spending a lot of effort just to get maintenance so i i actually track

my calories marking and sema they don't um they don't have to anymore. But sometimes I'll lean on some of the, like if it fits your macros videos on YouTube and stuff. And majority of them focus just on the macros. Nobody really talks about micros, but if you're completely ignoring that side of things, what's some of the, I guess, what's the detriment that it can have on you if you're, you know, eating protein powder all day long to hit your protein goal? What could some of the drawbacks be from not really considering some of the micronutrients? Yeah, that's hard to say at this point, but I think they will be significant. And I think if I look at my clients where I clean up their diet, I do see benefits.

And they're not major in terms of energy intake. For example, you may see, well, maybe they can consume 100, 200 extra calories. There is one study that actually measured the firmic effect of food and found that it was twice as large when they were eating. Funny enough, they called them whole foods, but it was bread and cheese. So like, guys, you know, you know that that doesn't walk around, right? Bread and cheese in the wild. But so it was whole grain bread and less processed cheese compared to sort of the American cheddar like cheese and white bread. And even that already made like a 10 percent difference. So that over the course of a whole day would be a 10% difference in energy intake.

Now, of course, nobody eats only processed food, especially not fit people. But it will make a few percent difference in energy intake. And if you look at studies on muscle growth and performance, we have pretty good data on vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, iron, calcium, and some more tentative data on B vitamins, that they actually can improve performance and sometimes muscle growth. And at the very least, deficiency is a real problem. You're deficient in all of those things I just mentioned. You're going to have low testosterone levels. Your recovery is going to be terrible.

You're going to feel terrible. You're going to be really tired all the time. You're going to be anemic. So rest and revolve between sets, those things, they will definitely suffer. But the thing is, those things take a lot of time. You won't see much difference week to week or something. Even vitamin D, if you're correcting a massive vitamin D deficiency, I've found that some people can sort of feel that,

but it's still a process of a few weeks. And then they're like, hey, I feel better. And I think something's changed. It's like, yeah, you're not deficient in vitamin D anymore. You were mentioning earlier about cravings. I asked the question and you kind of started talking about something slightly different. So what are some of the strategies that you utilize with cravings and hunger? What are some of the strategies that you utilize with cravings and hunger? I think the most important thing with cravings is to realize that, A, it's predicted very well by hunger. So managing cravings is very much the same as managing hunger. You're not hungry, you're not going to get a craving. So a craving is basically hunger that's given shape in your head to a certain food

and in research probably one of the biggest myths here is this idea that you satisfy a craving and it's gone and it's kind of like alcohol where the day afterwards you're hungover you're like i'm never gonna drink again and then next week you're drinking so with mcdonald's or something, you get the same effect. Now, I always say that if Saturday is your pancake day, then Sunday to Friday are your thinking about pancake day days. Because, you know, you're glorifying the cheat food. Whereas if you if you want to eat pancakes, I say fine, fit it into your macros. And that's where if it fits your macros, work very well. It gives you a lenient way to say, well, if you really want this, you can fit it into your macros. Just make sure your overall diet is still good.

And be prepared to probably be hungry, but you'll find that out for yourself. And then you can decide which foods are worth it and which foods are not worth it. And that's what most research finds, that if you don't eat something that's actually the best way to stop the cravings i never have mcdonald's cravings in fact if i went past the mcdonald's there's i don't really realize there's no decision in my mind like shall i go there you know it's it's not something that crosses my mind and i think for a lot of people they actually find that when they become they start eating healthier better food choices, they have a very stable diet

then you can actually see also based on research in their brain that their reward pathways activate more when they eat healthy and less when they eat unhealthy. So you really get accustomed to it. It's a long term process. Again it's a lifestyle. And then you can be craving free whereas

if you keep indulging in the cravings, that's actually often the worst way. As long as you don't have a restrictive mindset. You have to think, I can eat these foods, but you have to learn to decide which foods are worth it and which are not worth it for you. Got it. I'm really curious about this, and I think you'll have a lot of good insights since apparently there's been some research on this recently. Keto's been really popular in these past few years. Same with high-fat diets, low-carbohydrate diets. But there's still been something within the bodybuilding community where people are very wary of trying to gain muscle while not eating excessive amounts of carbohydrates

because throughout bodybuilding, everyone's always been like, you know, well, you know, eat an adequate amount of protein. Okay, eat enough fats and bump up the carbs, right? But apparently there's been some new things that have come out that have shown that individuals that do eat high carbohydrate, yeah, gain muscle, but also individuals that are low carb, high fat also can gain the same amount of muscle in the same fashion. Is that shown to be true at this point or is there still something to think about there? I would say so.

I think the only indications that low carb diets are inferior for muscle growth are confounded by energy intake. So very often what you see is you put someone on a low carb diet their energy intake goes down you put them on a high carb diet the energy intake either stays the same or it's likely to maybe go up depending on the choice of carbs especially when they think carbs and they think you know grains and everything especially more processed foods then that racks up a lot of calories so So in most of those studies where you see, well, lean body mass gains,

they're not as good in the low-carb group, they're not eating as much, and they lose more fat. So this idea, there comes, we get this idea where keto is great for fat loss, but not great for muscle growth. And that may be sort of practically true in that, you know, for some people, it's hard to eat enough in keto.

If you're trying to bulk, if you need to bulk on 5,000 calories, that's going to be tricky in ketosis. You know, then you're going to be drinking a lot of olive oil or something. In general, I would say as soon as your fat intake has to go over your protein intake, you're going to get tricky situations with your diet because you need to consume foods that have no protein and no carbs, which means basically oil or butter. So that's sort of the threshold where I think it becomes very impractical to bulk on keto. But other than the practicality, as long as you control it for energy intake, I don't think there's a difference in strength development or muscle growth between higher and lower carb diets and just so people are clear like you don't have to do a ketogenic diet like you could be lower carbohydrate because a lot of it like a lot of

people that are trying to gain muscle like i need to eat 300 grams of carbs 400 grams of carbohydrates you could be lower carbohydrate moderate high fat still meet the entry requirements and still manage to gain enough muscle correct while still obviously in taking enough protein am i correct in that assumption yes definitely it's funny enough the most research is on ketogenic diets but recently we had another study on just low carb but not ketogenic versus higher carb and it also found no difference basically it's good to know we've've been talking a lot about training and training volume. What is kind of a

minimal training volume that people need to be able to recomp? To be able to recomp, that's very different from sort of retaining that maintenance or something, because maintaining is super, super easy. Most research finds just two workouts, two serious full body workouts per week you're probably good

like for free for sure so that that's easy but the minimum needed to recomp that can be much higher because especially if you're an advanced trainee then any recomposition at all is very good that's pretty much optimal results but then it's actually a pretty high volume. And I think it's pretty high training volumes are, can be very effective. Most research finds that you add volume and you can recover from it. You get better gains. So the,

in that case, the minimum and the optimum are sort of the same. And then you may be talking 20, maybe even 30 sets per week per muscle group. Well, some people are scared hearing that actually because most people are trying to show them the 12 to 20 right they they see those requirements and that's where they stay but you're talking about 20 or 30 sets and you talk about mainly advanced trainees or is this also like immediate level athletes and on that note how does an athlete know where they are just because a lot of athletes for example have been training for two there's this thing going around with a lot

of athletes are training seriously for two to three years and they're like well this is the most amount of muscle i'm going to be able to gain like now it's just everything's going to be everything does slow down but i'm not going to be able to gain much more here how can an athlete navigate where they are on that spectrum? Yeah, that's tricky. I'll start with the last question and then go to volume. Because for volume, yeah, training, advancement and the like, they matter a lot.

Like the optimum training volume is very different for different individuals. The first, how do you know if you're an advanced individual? Well, you can't just go by your training experience that's sort of the common approach right well how many years have you been training but it doesn't mean anything because you can spend 10 years dicking around and not achieve anything and you're still a novice like your body only cares about uh like muscles respond to tension and they they change in structure and that changes what kind of stimulus they need to change further if they're not structure, and that changes what kind of stimulus they need to change further.

If they're not changing structure, then nothing changes. You can spend 10 years in a gym. As long as the muscle's not changing, the optimal volume is not changing. When the muscle gets bigger, generally research finds more advanced trainees can benefit from higher training volumes. So what you want to know is basically percentage-wisewise where you are in terms of where you could be. That's sort of your training advancement level. And 100% would be your genetic maximum potential if there is such a thing.

Because that's actually not 100% clear scientifically. Actually, I have a calculator on my website where, based on the available data, I give a rough indication of what 100% is and then what percentage you are for various body parts. It's rough. We don't know. The calculator looks at your frame size, which is a significant difference.

If you have big wrists, big ankles, then you can probably put on more muscle mass. So it's like the FFMI? Yeah, the FFMI. If you're starting, FFMI is large already because you have

a big frame. You also see this with most very high-level powerlifters. For example, they have big frames. You never see a scrawny but very muscular high-level powerlifter. They're always like, they have big hands, they're just big guys or women. That's a very good indication, but then still

you don't know what's happened genetically and everything. We have a lot of research now on that, but it's still scratching the surface of even a full genetic test. We still don't really know how muscular someone can get. There are so many genes and interactions.

You can get a rough indication. Strength level is probably for most people almost as good. You just measure what your current strength level is. Mark Rippert has actually published some strength standards that I think are very reasonable. They're good guidelines. They say if your overhead press is this,

this level is intermediate, this level is advanced, depending on your body weight. I think that's also a good classification. Because over the long run, strength and size correlate pretty well. And it's very practical. You know, it's like a strength test, a one-around test. You can't fake. It's easy. It's practical. So if you do those two measures,

like a rough indication of your path-free mass index and your rank level, you can get a pretty good idea of how advanced you are. You mentioned that. You can set your training volume. So if you're more advanced, you can have higher training volumes. Like I said, 20 to 30, that's probably for more advanced trainees,

especially in energy surplus. In energy deficit, those 12 to 20 ranges, for many people, probably pretty reasonable. And then you still have to factor in individual genetics. You can look at someone's work capacity. Just someone's training progress is also important. We have studies showing that.

In the same individual training different legs with different volumes, for example, you see that some people just do better on low volume. Some people do better on higher volumes. And it's just an individual thing. And it's like sets per week we're talking about not just in a necessarily given workout yes sets per week for muscle group is generally the best metric to measure active training volume you don't count warm-up sets and repetitions and stuff they don't matter that much. Because if you do high rep work, high rep and low rep work are, roughly speaking, equally effective for muscle growth in the short term, as long as you go post-failure. So the total number of hard sets, or work sets, as I call them,

is probably the best measure we have of effective training volume. And it is for muscle growth. Because generally, your biceps are like Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens to your b group because generally your biceps is like vegas what happens in in vegas stays in vegas what happens to your biceps stays in your biceps doesn't care about if you're training your quad or not there is some very tentative research showing that if you're training lower body your upper body can grow more but by and large what you do to one muscle that determines how it grows not what you do to another muscle so like like three to four sets, three to four exercises, and you might shift the weight around here and there in accordance to what

your goal is. You might lift a little heavier for certain periods of time, but that seemed like it would kind of do the trick, right? Right. That's a good starting point. And then you monitor and you adjust over time. I'm,

I'm very curious because I know there's I don't know actually there's been research done into this but I'm curious about what you've seen anecdotally from people from the amount of clients you've worked with from the amount of physique coaches you've talked to from the amount of athletes you've talked to

the people have the goal of having this ideal physique that then they can maintain without really trying to maintain year-round. It might be 8%, 9%, whatever. They have this ideal physique in their mind that they want to get to and maintain. Many people, when they get very lean, single-digit body fats, they notice, oh, my performance is in the shitter. I feel bad.

My hormones are all weren't weren't. So I need to put some body fat back on and chill there. Right. So I want to ask you this. Is there what I found for myself personally is that the times in the past when I got down to the body fat level where I am currently, I felt really crappy. So I kind of had to dip in, dip out, dip in, dip out, dip in, perform there for a bit, come out of it. And it's been in the past year and a half where I've been able to be at that body fat percentage. And over time it's gotten easier and easier.

And now it's very easy. Like, I don't feel like I'm dieting. My performance is great in the gym. It's great when I do martial arts or whatever, I can maintain this. But I feel like because of what I've seen from my experience, I feel like it's because I've given myself the experience of training at this body fat level and maintaining it for periods of time while focusing on performance. A lot of people think, oh, it's not possible to be lean year round, but I think that it is if you give yourself the time to get used to being at that body fat level and performing

and kind of shifting in and out of it for a period of time what have you seen when it comes to that as a possibility definitely i definitely agree with that at least up to a point like you're never going to feel great at five percent body fat oh fuck but yeah at ten percent body fat you know or if you're it's the first time you reach ten 10 body fat then it's probably going to be very effortful but you can actually for at least for a lot of guys for when add about 10 to these figures there's a rough guideline but for most guys you can be 10 body fat year round but it's hard you have to learn to cope you have to have a good diet like satiety management is

very important you cannot crash diet because if you crash diet at 20 body fat not so bad if you do that at 10 yeah things go down a little fast so you need to have your nutrition in check you need to have your training in check because if you over train or you get injured at 10 body fat and we're at energy deficit in general it may be more severe compared to a higher body fat level so it's mostly coping and learning how to diet and how to train i think and that makes it much easier like i've i've actually been um experimenting with going up to higher body fat levels uh for the past year or two but before then i was But before then, I was a little too bodishly lean.

Like 10% was high-ish for me for probably five years. And I can get down to that level without tracking calories. Actually, I'm cutting out lipidism right now. And I'll probably get to 10%, 9% or so, and then I'll continue lean bulking. But that level for me is not ever full anymore. And I remember for most people, actually, it really happens that every time you cut, you get to sort of a lower level and it doesn't

feel like the cut was more difficult than the last one. You just get better at it. And then over time, you learn to cope. That's sort of the goal, I think, for most people, is to be a body prep percentage you still feel good at, as low as possible, and that you think you look great great at and it doesn't feel effortful and you don't have to track your macros that's probably sort of a golden goal that's practical for for most people

to aim for in the long run because you uh aren't a huge fan of cardio when you're prepping somebody for a show uh do you have them focus more on their lifting and uh what does that look like because i know some coaches will even like back the lifting down because the person's doing 90 minutes of cardio a day and they're not eating much food and so how do you uh manage some of that yeah so i keep the lifting end and i i try not to reduce volume like you cannot sustain the same volume when cutting as when bulking. But you do want to keep as much of it in basically as you can tolerate. And you can tolerate more if you're not doing a lot of cardio.

But that is a downside of cardio that it eats up recovery capacity. And it causes an interference effect on top of that. So it interferes with your strength training. And if you're not doing it, you can have more strength training still in there. And then mostly it's a matter of measuring very well. Make sure you're losing fat, not being too aggressive with the deficit, but ensuring there's a constant energy deficit. And very importantly, taking your time.

Actually, if you want to get to pro-level condition, these days there's still this idea of 12 weeks to contest, like 12-week contest prep. It doesn't exist anymore. Not if you want to place and not get left off stage. You know, it's more like six months. Like even 10% body fat as a starting point, good chance, yeah, it's going to take six months

before you get pro-level conditioning. So you need to take your time. And especially if you also want to experiment with the peak week, etc. You may actually need a few extra weeks to do those things. Take your time. Can you expand upon that? Because with the listeners on the show, there are two sectors. There are people that use PEDs as far as prepping for shows. And then there are people that don't. And there is two sectors there are people that use peds as far as um as far as prepping for shows

and then there are people that don't and there is a difference there because like like you'll notice a lot of guys that do use peds when they cut for shows they're doing 12 like eight week 12 week cuts and getting shredded but that isn't possible it maybe it's possible but, but you don't see that as much on the individuals that don't. Yeah, I think it's twofold. For one, you can be more aggressive if you rely on PADs, but it's still better to take it slowly, generally. So if you just use more drugs, that compensates for a lot of things. more drugs, that compensates for a lot of things. But it's not the best

approach, and for most people that rely on a ton of drugs to get to a certain physique, you find that it's not sustainable. So, taking it slow is better, and I think people overestimate how bad people were

that were on PEDs, especially in the off-season, and they're like yeah you know you had no ad definition at all because they were bloated you know and then they switch to non-aromatizing gear and they switch to trend and stop rather than just a lot of the stop drone and you're gonna have very very big changes and also when diuretics and everything the water comes off even with very relatively little fat loss you can have major changes and then the vascularity and everything is sicker so um for a given amount of fat loss you also get greater changes in drug since we're kind of talking about the idea of testosterone i'm always getting this question

from people what are like what are good ways that you can get your testosterone levels to maybe the levels that they should be? And I think there are probably a lot of lifestyle factors in there that maybe you could talk about. But along with the lifestyle factors that you may mention, are there any supplements that you think are actually beneficial for an individual's testosterone levels? Theoretically, not so much practically yes so there are a lot of things that are bad when you're deficient in them but it's actually really easy these days to be deficient in magnesium or vitamin d and if you're not consuming dairy and calcium for example so

there are a lot of things zinc is also like an optimal intake of zinc it's not that easy especially without red meat or shellfish in your diet but there are a lot of those things that are theoretically not needed like if you're doing everything well your diet's great you don't need those things but in practice a lot of people do benefit from them because it's so hard to get the optimal amounts of everything especially if you're on a concept prep diet with very limited calories so there are quite some supplements that are just practical to have in terms of actual test boosters most of them have pretty much failed and most of them work if you're deficient and that's mostly due to either age or genetic conditions rather than dietary factors but they don't do anything anymore when you're deficient. And that's mostly due to either age or genetic conditions rather than dietary factors.

But they don't do anything anymore when you're already healthy. I think when you're healthy, the biggest factors are basically things you should be doing anyway. So it's funny, those things like test booster programs, they work, but they work

because they make you do things that you should be doing for other reasons anyway, like more sleep stress management you know not dieting too aggressively good food choices more zinc magnesium etc and if you do all those things yeah you're gonna have a better diet you know better recovery capacity so you're gonna make better progress and it may not even be related to your testosterone level there's something i wanted to ask you on that and this kind of goes back to you mentioning how ad libitum you can get yourself down to very lean levels of body fat um now back in 2015 i was on a contest prep diet and my fat was at like 35 to 40 grams for the last 12 to 16 weeks of that diet i had no libido and i didn't even get a testosterone test

but i know that my shit was in the kick. Like my shit was bad just because it took me literally four to five months to feel normal post show diet. And I dieted for 40 weeks. But now I am on a very high fat diet, low carbohydrate diet. I am, I'd say maybe 10 weeks to being back to that kind of stage lean. And I feel amazing. My idea is not just as I have, I gotten used to it,

but I'm also eating high amounts of fat. But what, what kind of a, what can you help people understand as far as getting lean? Cause a lot of people want to just cut their fats out, but then they feel like crap. Yeah, I do think this matters more than most people give it credence.

In the evidence-based community, it's well known that higher fat intakes increase testosterone levels. But then the idea is, well, maybe those changes within the physiological range, you know, 20% difference. One recent study, though, found almost 40%. Maybe that's still not relevant. And there's this idea that within the physiological range, your testosterone doesn't matter. It don't start mattering when it's low or when it's super physiological, like higher than normally for a natural trainee. I don't think that's true.

I think if you look at the studies within individuals, you clearly see a dose response. There's no magical cutoff. rarely see a dose response. There's no magical cutoff. And if you look at people on TRT, it's a thought from replacement therapy, you definitely see a difference between keeping on the low end what maybe the doctor wants versus high normal. They feel better.

You're talking at least a good couple pounds of muscle. Sometimes even without training, actually, in research that they add. So, I think it definitely matters and especially over the long run and more in contest prep because yeah otherwise your levels are going to get really low so my experience is actually the same in people that are used to especially the zero fat diets

when you put them on higher fat intake during contest prep they feel a lot better and also takes longer before they start feeling uh poorly Women also retain their menstrual cycle for longer in my experience, which is generally a very good time. I'm definitely a proponent of, I'm definitely not an advocate of the zero-fat approach. It's something only in the last

weeks, maybe, if you have no other strategies for appetite management. The only advantage is you can crank up your food volume a ton, but afterwards, most people actually find that even for satiety, things go downhill fast. I also actually did this after

my last prep, and it also took me a couple months before my appetite levels normalized. My appetite was already very high normally, but then it went off the charge high, and it actually took a long time before it normalized with higher fat index do you do anything specifically with lifting to recomp we talked a lot about volume and kind of how much you need um you know sometimes people talk about like

working out like a bodybuilder or i've seen more recently people talking about doing these workouts that might burn eight or nine hundred calories like Do you find any difference or merit in, I don't know, supersetting an upper body movement with a lower body movement? Have you seen anything like that really help somebody improve their physique quite a bit? In general, energy expenditure, not so much. But I am actually a big fan of circuit-like training, supersets or what I call combo sets, which is basically a circuit or supersets

but with rest in between. So actually let me think of the workouts I'm going to do later today. That's squat, lacquer roll, and then conversion machine chest press and a diagonal high row. i do all of those i

do one set of lacquer one set of squat one set of uh chest press one set of high row and i repeat but i rest still at least i catch my breath rest for one minute or so in between sets that's a very time efficient way to get your workouts in. I do full body workouts usually in 45 minutes. Of course, gym logistics have to allow it. You can't be that guy that hogs four pieces of equipment in a busy gym. Actually, as a tip, what I recommend is you just don't hog the equipment.

You can do this. This is also what I do. I go through the circuits, but if someone takes one of the machines I'm using, it's like, too bad. I can't occupy all that. Then I'll just continue and do the other things. You still save a ton of time. When you do this,

I'm imagining that you go through it four or five times after you've gotten yourself warmed up and prepped for it. Yeah. I train every single day. Quite often my volume is actually just um now i'm actually down it because i'm cutting pretty aggressively i'm only doing two sets per muscle group per day and when bulking it's usually three four sometimes pushing up to five um i've experimented with crazy volumes and i found that after six i think we go downhill fast so and that you know that's more

than 40 sets per week for muscle group and uh you're talking about like two three hour workouts per day so yeah that's not not so surprising that it doesn't work but still is that uh like a specific way that you like to train because it sounds like there's some pushing and pulling going on in there we've got to squat the leg curl and a bench press and a pull. Is that kind of the way that you structure it? Maybe on another day, uh, you know,

maybe you're doing, um, biceps and triceps paired up or something like that. Yeah. Uh, for one, I'm a fan of high frequency training, which allows itself very well to do those kinds of circuits and like combo

sets because you're have different muscle groups and it also allows for antagonist supersets those are the exercises that i actually try to superset because research finds that if you're doing for example chest press followed by a row you're stronger on the rows at least for if you do them within about a minute and there are certain muscle groups that are antagonist to each other, so they have opposing functions. And if you train one of them and you immediately do the other one afterwards, your performance can actually increase rather than decrease due to fatigue.

There's no research showing yet that this actually translates into greater gains, but typically more volume does. So I think it's both time efficient and possibly also beneficial for better gains. In your combo set, you have compound movements and some isolated movements. Have you found them both to be as equally beneficial?

Yep. Most research finds there have been numerous studies on this over the past couple of years. You find that compound isolation, it matters a lot practically. And of course, there are different kinds of exercises. But my friend Berger Fagerlin from Norway likes to say,

muscle is just a dumb piece of meat. It doesn't know if you're lifting a kettlebell, a dumbbell, or whatever it is you're holding. It doesn't know if you're doing a bodyweight exercise. Which, what is that anyway? Why is a squat not a body weight exercise? You're lifting

almost all of your body weight. The muscle just registers tension and it's going to adapt to that tension and it doesn't care if you're whatever it is you're holding in your hand or if you're not holding anything in your hand. Do you want to go somewhere

with this? No, go ahead. I know where you want to go with it. You know where I want to go with this. I'm very curious. Now, I love this guy. We had him on our show. His name is Doug Brignoli. He's a big advocate of mechanics as far as lifting. Making sure that whatever movement you choose on the specific muscle group, you get the utmost amount of mechanical attachment on that muscle group.

So there's ideal movements he has for certain body parts. And for example, he would say that if you're trying to grow your legs, you shouldn't, you probably shouldn't be squatting with a barbell. You should probably be doing the, the sissy squat or other movements that will give you maximum tension on your quadriceps. Correct? Well, I'm just curious what your thoughts are on going in that direction uh as far as only working certain move only like using certain movements that'll give you peak

tension on that muscle group how effective do you think that is in the long run curious i mean overall um i agree with the idea of maximizing uh on your muscle fibers. That's a very good idea. We know that mechanical tension is the primary stimulus for muscle growth. And exercises that stimulate high muscle tension, both active and passive, are generally more effective than others. But it doesn't necessarily matter if you're doing a squat or a 360 squat. I can see the argument that it's better for the quads. It's probably not as good for other muscle groups. I can see the argument that it's better for the quads.

It's probably not as good for other muscle groups. So it's not so much an equipment consideration as just you want to do a certain movement pattern, and then you choose whatever equipment allows you to perform that movement pattern well and fit your structure with specific quads. My general take is great quad exercise, also a great knee killer. So it's nice if you're Tom Plotz and you can do hack squats and all those things year-round, no problems. But if you're like me and you have the wrists and knees of a six-year-old girl, then it's problematic. I can tell you. It's hard to take information like that sometimes and just try to apply it to everything.

Because his main point was that a squat, you're only using like 30% of the muscle fibers in your quads. But you also might be using 400 or 500 pounds, which is a huge difference than what you'd be using if you were doing a sissy squat. Yeah. I mean, for a squat, we have good research on electromyography, for example, showing that the quads reach pretty much 100% of maximum voluntary activation during squats. Squats are objectively

a good squat exercise. Maybe their SISI squat is slightly better, but squats are good. There's basically no contrasting that yeah i think he would say um like even if you can't do either of them it would be just a squat with the elevated heels like on a slant board i think he says it's like kind of the best of all worlds um but another thing that i was curious about that i've seen you use is blood flow restriction. I don't know anything about it,

but it seems to be working very well for you. Can you educate us on the benefits of blood flow restriction training? Wow, that's a mouthful. Yeah, blood flow restriction training, also called Katsu from the Japanese. Yeah, nice history lesson. The guy that came up with it

I'm pretty sure he's Japanese and he was sitting in I think Buddhist prayer position anyways he was sitting on his knees and then he noticed that the sensation in his quads that he got from that was a lot like during

training in the gym and that gave him the idea that occluding the Venus output so basically a lot like during training in a gym. And that gave him the idea that occluding the venous output, so basically it's a bit of a misnomer because the idea is you sort of restrict the blood flow, but you're only restricting the venous output. You're restricting the blood from coming back up to your heart, but the arteries, which are deeper down, they can still pump the blood in. Just not having any blood would be very, very bad.

So basically it allows the blood to pull up and accumulate higher metabolic stress, which is also what happens during training. The more metabolic byproducts, more lactate, more pump, more burn, and you basically enhance that by letting the blood pull up. And the benefit of that is that it allows you to train with very light weights, 30% of 1RM, and still very effectively gain muscle. And it's very, very joint friendly. And it also induces a slightly different stimulus to the muscle. So it's more in the type one fibers, for example, rather than normal training, which is

more in the type two fibers. So it may be good to combine them, although research generally finds that it's a small difference. But over the long run, it's at least a very good injury mitigation method. And maybe there's also something to be said for incorporating some Katsu training in your programs to get slightly different growth stimulus. Also, it would be great for somebody who is actually, let's say that they have a nagging elbow issue that's stopping them from doing heavy bicep curls or heavy tricep pushdowns. Definitely. So they can use some BFR, work with really low volumes, less stress on the joints,

and still either maintain all the muscle they have while they were dealing with their injury? Yeah, absolutely. I use it a lot for my elbows, my knees. And I was training with Eric Helms in New Zealand when I was there. And then he was actually doing a powerlifting program, and he did the normal powerlifting program, but then he did basically all the accessory work,

sort of more bodybuilding work, basically all with Katsu, because the idea is that, well, powerlifting is really hard on your joints. Yeah. But you still want to get that extra volume in, and then he's like, well, if I just do that all with Katsu, that's a great way to sort of get i can do both without getting injured i like that a lot because um like a lot of people there's this there's still a lot of people who are like oh how can you get strong with power lifting but also

maybe try to gain muscle while doing bodybuilding work and my suggestion is usually just like do your power lifting compounds and get your bodybuilder accessory work in. But what Eric's doing, that's really cool in terms of just using BFR, using light volumes, easing up in your joints, but you can still make maybe a slow amount of progress that way rather than cutting out all your accessory

volume. Yeah, I actually think this powerbuilding is 100% valid. You can maximize strength development and muscle growth at the same time, but it's practically difficult. And the biggest thing I think for most people is, for one, just the total amount of volume that you need to do, because if you're spending, you know, 50 minutes on just your squats

and then you still need to do the rest of the workout, yeah, you're talking about a two-hour workout basically minimum to begin with. So that's one thing. And then then two can your joints handle it because that i think for most people is one of the biggest factors and a really underrated aspect of whether you can get really strong and whether you can tolerate high volume training especially for people that aren't so genetically gifted like they don't have the super big burly frame, then injury rates, they happen. And a lot of people conclude, I can't tolerate high frequency training or I can't tolerate

high training volumes because every time they do, they get injured. But it's not necessarily the case with high volumes. You can also get those volumes in a less injurious way with, for example, catheter training. What are some misconceptions in fitness that really bug you or in nutrition? We've heard people talk quite a bit about insulin and insulin resistance

and how carbohydrates make you fat and just things like that. What are some things where you're just like, man, I just can't even handle to see this one more time? Well, there's a lot, but I'm a patient man. So, well, one thing that to say on sort of on the topics we've been is that recomping is impossible.

That's just a really, really silly idea. Like from every angle, like physiologically, it makes no sense because there's no way. There are different compartments. Like the body is always... If you're saying recombining is impossible, you're effectively saying that if you're in the hospital and you have a heart injury, then your heart will never heal unless you're in energy surplus.

Right? Because it would be impossible to build lean muscle in energy deficit. But clearly that can happen. And it's the same with other muscle. You just have to give it the right stimulus. And it can be breaking down fat and at the same time building muscle.

They're different bodily compartments. There's no reason. Also, in terms of research, there are tons of studies that show body recomposition is possible. And they go back a long time. So this is one of those things where if you say it, you don't understand the physiology. You clearly also don't have the anecdotal experience because if you've seen a lot of people train you've seen them get leaner and bigger at the same time and you also don't understand the physiology and you've never read the textbook or um seen any actual research on

this so it makes no sense from any angle i think a lot of times in um, you know, what we're seeing now is like, you know, it's a huge surge of like young people getting involved in training, which is amazing. Um, but as, you know, as I remember, you know, being an athlete when I was young, uh, there was such a wide variety of how, of the kind of effort that people put into their sport. You know, there was some kids on the football team, and then there was, like, football players. There was people that took it more seriously. They trained more often.

Not only did they train, they started, like, take their nutrition seriously. So I think a lot of young folks that are getting into this, I still think they're rolling through McDonald's. And it's just very, very difficult for them to understand, like, this is totally possible. You can gain muscle mass you can you can be lean you can be strong you can uh lose body fat gain muscle simultaneously these things might take a longer period of time um it might take a little while to see some of the

some of the results but you're not going to be able to do it it actually probably is impossible doing it off of uh a, really poor diet and staying on your phone all night and not sleeping. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I heard you mention something towards the beginning of the podcast where like, I don't, well, I know you probably program cardio, but you said you don't think cardio is necessary obviously for fat loss or it's not necessary in a fat loss phase which which I get but I'm curious what are your thoughts on having good cardiovascular capacity to have the ability to recover from training session

to training session as far as lifting is concerned do you think that there is a benefit to building that skill or do you think that there are and if there is a benefit to building that school skill if there is a benefit what are good ways where people can build that skill while also not sacrificing muscle? Yeah, I do think that helps, especially for people that are more out of shape, where you really notice the difference in work capacity. But training also does that. And you can also get a very good effect by just decreasing your rest intervals, for example, by accustoming yourself not to rest five minutes between every

set. And research found, there's a nice study by D'Souza et al, finding that you gradually cut down on your rest periods over time, over the course of, say, two months. You can, at some point, get the same volume in while resting like half the time. And then you achieve the same thing, but without the cost of cardio in terms of interference effect and eating up your recovery capacity. Because the thing with cardio is it's a long-term investment in your work capacity, basically, but it's also an acute detriment to your recovery capacity. So I wouldn't necessarily rely on cardio for that.

And generally, when I program cardio, it's mostly for female competitors when I'm at the point where I think I really don't want them to get lower in calories than this. The rough rule of thumb, that's a number that's sometimes thrown around at 1,200. That's probably as good as any. Below 1,200 is probably not something most

women should do on training days got it and then also a question that i seem to get quite a bit i'm curious on your take on it a lot of people are curious like oh my left arm is substantially bigger than my right bicep or my left lat is way bigger than my right lat what is the suggestions for people to deal with that? So maybe one doesn't keep getting larger and the other one lags. How can people figure out how to do that? How to get things to catch up to the other side? Yeah, that's a good question that I get a lot.

The first thing you need to do is find out if it's actually true. Because I know a lot of guys that are like, you know, my arms are undeveloped. I need to bring on my arms. Like, no, your arms are already overdeveloped. You just have a very skewed perception of what balanced development is. So actually, the genetic test I mentioned,

you can use that also to see the relative development of your different muscles. So that's a good indication of, you know of if your arms are really overdeveloped. And then between sides, you want to measure. Measure your flexed biceps on two sides. Because sometimes the arms are a bit different, the insertion points, the tendons, they're just not quite the same. Most people have pecs and abs that are not 100% symmetrical.

So then it's something you have to deal with. And if the strength is the same and the size is the same, well, if they don't look the same, well, then you probably just have to deal with it. If there is a difference, you need to figure out, is it in strength, size, or both? If it's both, you just need to train that muscle maximally and probably put the other one on maintenance,

just lower the volume. If one muscle is stronger, but not bigger, then you need to train that with higher reps compared to the other muscle group, because then that muscle gains less strength. For example, your right bicep is very strong compared to your left, but the size is about the same. What you can do then is to train the right arm with higher reps than the left arm, and they will gain the same amount of size, so you keep the size symmetry,

but the left arm will get stronger. Typically, heavier training is better for strength. You can use that using different intensities to basically cancel out those differences. For most people, I think if you have some unilateral exercises like one-legged or one-armed exercises in your program, you're equating volume between sides. If you start with the weaker arm or leg and you do the same amount of reps with the other, then it usually cancels out.

arm or leg and you do the same amount of reps with the other, then it usually cancels out. I think, especially for natural trainees, symmetry is a little bit of an overblown issue because in the end, if you get to your 90 max, then everything's going to be symmetrical or as symmetrical as it can get anyway. But it's a huge issue for people on gear because

then you do a cycle and you're training one arm a lot more intensely for some reason than the other, you can actually create a big size asymmetry, and it's not going to naturally cancel out over time. What are two or three things that you learned in the last maybe two years that you didn't think, that you thought maybe were bullshit a couple years ago, but now you're like, maybe that is pretty effective.

Maybe that does work well. Mostly the other way around, probably. Usually I like to implement things early and then it turns out, oh, maybe it's actually not that effective. Which was, for example, the case with high-frequency training, which I'm still a proponent of, but it's not nearly as effective as the original research suggested. Or training to your muscles fiber type. I originally was a big fan of

and I still use it, but I think the effect is tiny. It has no downside, so why not? Try to take advantage of it. The typical things I didn't know were effective? High reps. I think almost no one would have

predicted, say, 10 years ago, that you could do sets of 30 and gain the same amount of muscle as with sets of eight. There's always someone, when you post this on social media, there's always this guy that's like, well, John Doe and Doe said this in 1950. Nothing's new in the world. It doesn't matter what you post. There's always going to be some person that says something like that. But I think for almost everyone, that was a completely novel thing. your post there's always going to be some person that says something like that you know but um i think for almost everyone that was a completely novel thing i think actually the researchers because i talked to stewart phillips and brad schoenfeld uh they were one of the early researchers

that investigated this and both of them did not believe their own findings initially and the reason brad schoenfeld actually did his first study was because he looked at the findings of i think sort of phillips and he was like way. I want to replicate this in my own lab. Did anything surprise you with fasting or carnivore-style diet or things like that? Mainly that it became much more popular. But it's not a super appealing type of diet. With veganism, you can really flaunt with it. But carnivore diet

not so much so um other than that probably not so much i'm not i'm not a fan of either like health or performance wise i think a balanced diet is generally the safest way to optimize things but if anything i'd say that research has been kinder on keto and low-carb diets. At least most people would have believed. I've always been a believer, sort of. But research has really validated lower-carb diets in a lot of ways over the past years. What is your take on intermittent fasting? It's a tool.

It can be used for some people. It's mainly just a way to decrease energy intake and there's some research showing that it's better for some people, it's probably worse if you have a very high activity level, especially during the fast, because then it may hamper your activity level

there's some indication women don't tolerate fasting as well as men and there's also some indication that impulsive eaters tolerate it less well and depressive eaters do better on intermittent fasting diets. I think for muscle growth, you don't want to make the fast too long and you don't want your training to be in the fast. You don't want to train fasted.

You don't want, for example, a workout, maybe one meal, and then a super long fast afterwards. You don't want to fuel your workout with the anabolic window, basically, which is, by the way, not just a one-hour people around the workout, but actually sort of the whole process of muscle growth that comes afterwards. And then generally, research finds that fasting or not fasting, if you implement it well, it's equally effective for fat loss and muscle growth, given the same energy intake, protein intake.

Preston Pyshko What does your diet right now look like? Because you said you were in a pretty aggressive deficit. I'm curious to hear what that's like. Dr. Jan Bogaerts Yeah, about 2400 calories coming just off a lean bulk where I was about 4500. That's a big drop. And my metabolism is quite adaptive. That's a big drop. And my metabolism is quite adaptive. So I also

need big changes. In fact, to reach counter shape, I need to go below 2,000. I need a photoshoot condition. I need to go below 2,000. And I can bulk pretty much always on 4,000 plus. But like crazy changes I need to change my weight a lot.

But I'm at 2,400 I wait a lot. Um, but I'm at 2,400 calories, pretty steady, stable, kind of free staple or free big meals. Um, two post-workout, one pre-workout most days.

And the post-workout ones are bigger than the pre-workout one. Um, not too, too exciting, relatively low carb, moderate protein. Oh, I am curious now that you uh you mentioned the adaptive metabolisms because i think people heard that you were bulking on 4500 calories and there are a lot of guys are like i won't do that right like just find an excuse to eat right but number one how does one know when they have an adaptive

metabolism because actually i've dealt with a few people like that through the years. There's this one guy, John. His calories went up to like 5,000, and he was not gaining that. He was not really gaining. And to cut, we had to make big changes, just like what you're doing right now. How does one know that they have an adaptive metabolism? And how does one navigate that when they're trying to bulk, when they're trying to cut? that they haven't adapted metabolism then how does one navigate that when they're trying to bulk when they're trying to cut yeah you can actually sort of define it as the gap between cutting and bulking

calories it's sort of the gap you need to change your body weight in either direction for some people there's one client that seems to not this metabolism does not seem to adapt so it's bulking and cutting calories range from like 2300300 to 2,800 or something. And we need to beat everything. He's like a super hard gainer for everything. Tiny deficit, tiny surplus. His calories are like very, very similar all year. For me, I need huge changes.

And we also see this in research. Some people, their metabolism adapts a lot more. Like if they increase calories, they burn off a lot of those extra calories. And maintenance is almost more of a zone where almost nothing happens if you go up, say, even 500 calories. And you just need a big change to make a difference. And as soon as you gain a little bit of fat,

but you also see in someone with adaptive metabolism, their energy expenditure increases a lot further. So it quickly normalizes to your new energy intake. And you are at great risk of plateauing, so you need more frequent adjustments. You may also need to be more aggressive with the adjustments to your diet. And it's just something you can learn basically by trial and error. You have to monitor your progression over time and see what happens for a given change in energy intake. You get an idea of, okay, how adaptive is your metabolism? And if it is adaptive, you need to know that your maintenance

is not set. It's not static at all. It's very adaptive. And things are very easy if you have a non-adaptive metabolism. But on the other hand, you also can bogus heart and you need to be more strategic with small changes. So for those people, maybe even just 50 calories a day extra or less is actually an optimal adjustment. Whereas for someone with an adaptive metabolism, it's like, why even bother? Let's at least start with 100 plus. For those individuals, I'm just curious, as far as like the energy equation is concerned, what is the biggest metric that has that change for them?

It's like their NEAT just goes up and they're moving around a lot more naturally without them even realizing. What are the biggest things that have that adjustment for them to just get used to 4,000 calories? Yeah, it's mostly NEAT. NEAT is by far the most adaptive component of our metabolism, of our energy expenditure. Neat is by far the most adaptive component of our metabolism, of our energy expenditure. So there's a big difference for those individuals where the nervous system basically says, we have lots of energy, YOLO, let's expand it on everything. And when they're cutting, it's like, okay, times are harsh, family's incoming, we're not going to expend any energy on trivial movements. Whereas for other people, it's more static.

And I'm also just curious about this, this is the last question on this topic for me at least um do you know if there's any type of correlation between people that have maybe gone through their lives with a lot of physical activity because one thing that i noticed just or is it genetic because anecdotally what i've noticed is that the people that i've worked with that have had this, and I know they have adaptive metabolisms, they were all athletes growing up. They played sports. They did things. So that was just something that literally every single one of them, I just saw that. Or is it just literally it's a genetic thing?

I think it's genetic. But it may be possible that people with an adaptive metabolism self-select more towards sports for example but i don't think it's sports or something that makes their metabolism adaptive i mean maybe during like childhood or something those things might still differ but once you're an adult i don't think it's going to change much gotcha thank you so much for your time they really uh really appreciate. Where can people find out more about you? My pleasure, man. Um,

metalhandphones.com has everything. I'm on Instagram and Facebook, but, my site is probably best for those that don't know me yet. I have a free email course. If you go on my website, I spam it in your face right away. And,

um, then you get sort of a tour of my most popular contents and articles, things that people like the most. So that's probably a good way to start. I think you need a book, my most popular contents and articles, things that people like the most. So that's probably a good way to start. I think you need a book, my man. Actually, I have one finished and it's going to be out about next month. Oh, wow.

Wasn't planning on announcing it, but it's not on like training or not much on training and fitness. It's about the science of self-control. Tell us a little bit more about it if you can. That sounds awesome. Yeah.

So I'm going into my chapter, explain what self-control is, and I go into productivity management, like how to generally just be a more productive person. The biggest part of the book is probably diet adherence, like self-control during dieting. There's a chapter on how to make your workouts easier um and i go into motivation theory and how to motivate yourself more be more motivated for general things which because if you're motivated you don't need as

much self-control and wrap it up with some general more lifestyle uh perspective so it's more of a grand uh overarching theme book i actually studied behavioral psychology or technically behavioral economics. And I've always been passionate about either or both lifestyle and fitness. And in this book, I sort of converge it and integrate all the psychology stuff that I've never really written that much about, but actually do a lot of research on as well. written that much about, but actually do a lot of research on as well. You mentioned earlier the reward system in the brain and some of the chemicals and some of the hormones and stuff like that that are going on is higher in somebody when they're following their diet as opposed to when they go off of it. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? I found

that to be really fascinating. I'm sure that this is probably more stuff that you talk about in the book. Yeah. So if you put someone in, for example, an fMRI scanner or some of the cognitive neuroscientists appliances that measure brain activity, you can sort of see a picture of the brain and see which areas light up. And then the places that we know are sort of your reward centers. You can measure basically how much it would light up when something happens or when you eat a certain food. And you see that people that are used to eating vegetables, they have more activation in those reward pathways when they eat vegetables.

You also see that when they start going on a healthier diet, the rewards that they get from eating junk food decreases. But there's actually quite some research that also shows that liking and reward activation and all those things, those increase for things that you're used to.

I think that's one of the big themes of the book is also that there's, evolutionarily speaking, the body is very well suited to consistency and habits and routines. And many people have this idea that I have this craving because my body needs it.

And I go into a lot of research on that also and practice cultural differences that is mostly not true. And in fact, the body is really not very good at saying like, oh, you need more zinc. The body is very good at saying, well, this is what we have available right now. We better get used to it. You can take that to your advantage by learning to deal with things that we better get used to it. You can take that pure advantage by learning to deal with things that we know are good for us.

You can actually learn to like an healthy diet more. We actually find that you can be satisfied. Also, for example, on people that go high fat, if they do it for a long time, they actually have a better mood, they feel better.

When they go low fat, the switch itself is what makes it deteriorates their mood and their well-being and in this case we actually don't know if it's the switch because we don't have the opposite way so it may be either a benefit of higher fat diets or consistency but at least we have very strong support for the for the consistency argument so great thanks again for your time it's, really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. See you guys.

We learned a lot of great stuff on that one, huh? Yeah. Andrew. What's up? Yeah, I'm going all keto. That's what he said, right? Shut up, man.

I'm joking. To drink oil. To drink oil. We got to pour coconut oil in his cereal. Yeah. I got to figure out a way to sneak fats into Andrew's mouth. Hey, like I said, I had the eat right salmon last night. I had the Piedmontese hop-doddy patties over the weekend.

Sneak something fat into his mouth. Just got to figure out what you're talking about. I thought we were talking about food. We're off air, right? We are talking about food. Well, we're off. Some people see it as food. You will see it as food.

Nervously excited. Excited and nervous at the same time. You should be. Wait until we get off this podcast i'm gonna feed you some fat okay now i'm comfortable getting a little wet man meno i'm so happy we had him that was great yeah man it was fantastic i think it's really cool though because like i've seen this comment quite a bit since you know we're low carbcarb, right?

And we also had just John Anderson here recently who's like, carbs for the week, right? And I saw this comment of like, well, these physiques were built on carbs and now they're going low-carb and there's no way you can build a good physique while eating low carbohydrates, right? eating low carbohydrates, right? And it's cool to see that, like, honestly, it really, you can build a great physique while not intaking an insane amount of carbohydrates. You don't have to, like, I think it's, again, I think it's just an excuse for people to eat a lot of carbs, a lot of those processed carbohydrates that they love to eat.

It gives them an excuse because I want to get big and strong. Most of my building was on lower carbs. The power lifting stuff I did later on, that was just like, I just kind of ate whatever. You know, I ate a lot. But even before that time, you guys seen pictures when I was young, before I ever got anything, that was from a keto diet. I started a ketogenic style diet when I was about 17 years old. Whoa. Shit.

So I, you know, and that's where I made most of my gains. I was already lifting for a while. So, you know, I that's where I made most of my gains I was already lifting for a while so you know I already looked looked like I lifted a little bit but from the time I was about 17 to about 25 is when I made the most progress and I was on a ketogenic diet every once in a while I'd carb up a little bit here and there get a little extra fuel but yeah primarily primarily low carb I actually kind of wish that i you know knew a little bit more back then because i back then i ate like a lot of fat i ate a crazy amount of fat it was probably just overkill um if i shoot myself in the foot here and there but

i just didn't know you know i would like you know cook up these real real fatty burgers which are great uh but i was probably also occasionally just over consuming calories. But that was that was some great information that he shared there. And I really like that thing about the reward system in the brain. I'm not a huge fan of studies and stuff like that all the time, but they can sometimes give us some insight. And that's really interesting. I think we all know that already. Like we know that when you set out to do a plan and you follow it,

you fucking feel better about it. And when you get sidetracked, yeah, there's that side of you that's like, ah, good for you, bro. Like you took a fucking break,

but there's the other side of you saying like, there shouldn't be any breaks, man. Like you don't deserve it. You know, you need to keep, need to keep pushing forward forward like you're not where you want to be. And so trying to balance those things out can be very difficult. But knowing that, you know, success breeds success and that momentum is going to continue to move you towards your goal.

That's awesome because it might be that one thing that deters you from going off your plan. Absolutely. I'm really psyched about the conversation that we had about body recomposition just because a lot of people seem to be on either side. It's either you're bulking and you're gaining muscle and you're gaining a lot of weight at the same time or you're cutting and you're losing body fat. Body recomposition is very possible. You just have to pay attention to the right metrics. You need to have a high level of patience. You mentioned taking measurements.

Taking measurements in areas is super effective, especially like Stan Efferding kind of also talks about the same thing. Owning your weight is what Stan calls it. If you're 15% body fat at 185 pounds, right? Stay there for a while. I'm focused on increasing your gym performance, increasing your training volume in the gym, doing more and more work month to month to month and just holding there because you'll notice that after six months, you'll be a little bit leaner and a little bit bigger. You know, your, your waist will be a little bit smaller, but it just takes mental time.

Um, and it's hard because you're not just seeing the scale go up to 190 and 195 and 200 and 210. Be really helpful if there was easier ways to get your body fat checked. You know, I know that there's like some of these electronic impedance and stuff like that, but I don't know how effective they're supposedly not. They can just be manipulated really easy even the you know when we went to the uh dexafit and midtown sack um you know i just i kind of i asked him like how easily can you manipulate one of these and i think it just all comes down to your water intake like you could either be super dehydrated and it will read one way or the other and then you can drink a lot of water and it can um i think uh when you're when you're hydrated it's accurate like when you drink a lot of water

it's more is that what it is yeah and when you when you are dehydrated it's less accurate because muscle volume decreases drastically yeah so yeah it's uh it's interesting but i think that would be another marker that could help people but all all we have for the moment that's inexpensive is your scale, the mirror and a measuring tape. And I think that's some good insight. I think sometimes we don't want to like check stuff that we're not sure if we're improving upon. It's kind of like when you have people that you help and you text them and you check in with them and you haven't heard from them in a while. Like you haven't heard from them in a while because they're not killing it anymore. If they were killing it, they'd be like, dude, you won't believe what happened. Like I lost another 10

pounds or I fit in the suit that I wanted to fit into for my wedding or whatever, whatever the situation is. Usually, you know, no news. Sometimes it's not, it's not great news, right? Yeah, normally they'll reach out to you first. Right. Yeah, yeah. They'll take the initiative on that. But yeah, great information from him.

One area that I did disagree with him on, and this is, I think we have a tendency to all be guilty of this at times. You know, things that you haven't tried or things that you haven't really done or examined and really tried yourself. I don't think you really have much, uh, you don't have as much ground to stand on. You know, he was talking about fasting and how he just thought like you shouldn't, you know, train fasted. And I do understand the idea of like finding what's optimal. And I do understand that, uh, you know, while I enjoy fasting and I usually train fasted and things like that, um, that someone can make an argument that, Hey, it would be more optimal, you know, if you did it this way. So I do understand that side of it, but, um, I have just learned for myself, I'll just leave it at that. I've learned from myself that it doesn't seem to really matter whether I eat three meals a day,

four meals a day, six meals a day, or one meal a day. I agree, and this is why I love talking to a lot of different people, because like Menno, I'm doing the contrast, like I'm doing a lot of my workouts as far as jujitsu, and my lifting workouts are fasted these days. There are a lot of days where as far as jujitsu and my lifting workouts are fasted these days. There are a lot of days where I eat one meal a day. Right.

But I eat a lot of calories in that meal. Right. And it's a direct contrast to what he's seen and what he's seen through the research. But I like that. And the reason why I like that is because I've done what he like. I've done what he's doing before. I've done that and I've done this. And for what I do currently, this is just so much better right so i i better for you for now better for me for now and that's the thing and that's why i think everyone needs to take that and you need to

understand there is no real right way like just because i'm fasting i'm i'm killing it i'm feeling great doesn't and just because he says it's like you shouldn't do that or it's not a good idea and he doesn't do that. You need to try things. Because, again, a few years ago, I've been paying attention to his stuff for years. A few years ago, if I would have heard that, I'd be like, yeah, no fucking way. I'm going to try that fasting shit. But I did. And there have been a lot of habitual benefits in terms of my hunger levels, my hunger control control my how i feel day to day when it comes to like dealing with cravings and that like all of that

is so much easier these days it it feels i don't ever feel like i'm trying to diet or trying to stay lean and it wouldn't have happened if i didn't pick up that habit and try it out so that's the big thing you hear these things if something piques your interest try it out. So that's the big thing. You hear these things. If something piques your interest, try it. And give yourself time. And give it a go. See what it'll do for you. Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you about, Mark, and it's mainly just because I don't want a listener to hear what he said versus what we say all the time, which is about protein being extremely satiating.

Yeah. protein being extremely satiating yeah and what he said about like well you know i don't know if it was a study or whatever it was but had shown like if you eat just the same amount in um like vegetables it's gonna leave you more satiated and that's only because you know like uh whatever i'm just gonna make shit up but 100 calories of steak is this much and 100 calories of vegetables. It's this much. You know, it's a big old bowl full. One will definitely fill up more in your stomach. But, you know, so again, listeners heard that, but they hear you say that, you know, protein is actually more satiating.

So load up on that. I just wanted you to kind of give me your thoughts on that. All calories aren't accounted for. You know, we talked about bumping someone's calories up and you're like, oh shit, the guy's not gaining weight. I don't think all those calories can be attributed to just neat. I don't think, I don't think that makes any sense at all. I don't know exactly what's happening, but I know that everyone's like matter can either be created or destroyed. But I think the unit of measure at which we have for calories at the moment is probably fairly, fairly accurate when it's outside of your body. But once it goes inside your body, I think all bets are off.

I don't think we really, truly know exactly what that's going to turn into or how it's going to work. It seems like with protein, I think they talk about how it takes half of the amount of energy just to even process and or assimilate the protein in the first place. And so that would mean that protein maybe has a lower caloric value than it currently does, which it might be more like two calories per. I don't think that calorie counting and I don't think any of this is an exact science. It takes a lot of tweaking. I mean, you heard him say, like, if I had it my way, people would do a DEXA scan every week and then you would recalibrate the calories based off of that. And even if you were to do even if you were to go that far, it's still not an exact science.

It still take a lot of tweaking. So I think a lot of times the calories that we consume, they're not always accounted for. We can't always make sense of it. Who knows how your body's reacting to the stresses in your life and the different things going on. What I do know is this, is that if you eat a fuck ton of protein and you primarily eat a fuck ton of protein, you will get lean. You will get in better shape. If you simply just change the percentage of every American, the average American eats about 13% protein. If that percentage

increased to 23%, everyone would eventually start to lose some weight. And I'm not talking about just increasing the amount of protein. I'm talking about increasing the percentage. That would mean the percentage of other stuff would go down. So if someone could say, well, that's because you're changing the amount of calories that they're maybe possibly getting extra calories from fat or something like that, which I understand that. But just in general, I think if people were to bump up their protein, even if everyone bumped their protein up by just having a meal of eight ounces of steak every day, I think

that a lot of people would lose weight. I think that it is satiating. I think it does help fill you up. And that's been, you know, mainly my own experience and just in communicating with some other people. The other thing is, too, is when it comes to his thing about the vegetables, you know, yeah, he was talking a lot about the amount of vegetables,

right? My issue with vegetables is usually vegetables are like accompanied by something else. And protein oftentimes is too. So we're talking about protein. If we're talking about a ribeye, that's quite a bit different than a New York strip or top sirloin or something like that. So

you can get like way into the weeds on a lot of this stuff. But in general, I think protein, if you are to overeat on anything or if there is to be a concentration on anything in your nutrition, I would say be protein minded first, go after protein first and other things will kind of fall in line from there, in my opinion. I agree with that. And I also think that if there's anything that we can also get from that statement that he mentioned, it's that when you were saying vegetables are typically accompanied by like, yeah, they're usually accompanied by a lot of sauce or a lot of fat or whatever that people choose to whatever. It's a vehicle for something else. Utilize it and don't utilize it as a vehicle.

Maybe utilize some mushrooms cooking in a sick way where it tastes great. Maybe you can cook it with your steak or something like that. But use that because that might be something that fills you up even more from your meal. If we get anything from that, it's that, wow, well, we can use vegetables as another way to help us fill up even more when we're having a meal. Yeah, that's why I like, so throw all like the uh my vegetables in the ninja foodie grill and then i'll throw a steak on top of that and cook it all in one and i don't need to put anything i mean i put salt on everything but like that's all i do like i don't

put any sauces or anything and i'm eating i mean close to 400 grams and in weight in vegetables where i normally would never even touch that stuff but it it's, I don't know. It's amazing. It tastes great. Yeah. Um, but in regards to like the changing the protein and just adding more, would you say it's the same benefits for somebody who's kind of already, I guess made,

you know, has come to this side and they're on the fit. Like I'll just say it's for like me, you know, like I'm a 15% body fat training on a regular basis. My diet is as in check as it's ever been. If I just kind of add more protein, I'm still going to see the same benefits as somebody who has a lot of weight to lose. I think most people would benefit from adding more protein.

I think in your case, if it made you more committed to your diet to where you were just really on point more often, then I think it would assist. I think it would help. I think that's, you know, when I'm talking about protein, I'm talking about it replacing other things. Right. And something that I mentioned here and there is what I kind of refer to as like protein displacement. Like when you eat something else, like pretty much everything else, let's just be totally honest, pretty much everything else tastes better than protein.

Like meat is really fucking good. A steak is really good. Like the taste of the steak is really, really, really, really amazing. Right. But like a cereal, you know, like these processed carbohydrates and stuff, they're all really delicious. And how many times have we looked in our fridge before and seen, you know,

a, a piece of steak that we cooked up maybe the night before, or even just a steak that's available to be cooked in just a few minutes. And you chose something else in the fridge. Cause you're like, I don't fucking feel like, I don't feel like eating that protein. I think when people switch their mind over to understanding,

like I'm going to make myself a little bit, I'm going to make myself feel like eating that protein because I need the protein. It's going to be a double positive for me. It's going to prevent me from eating the food that's not necessarily on my plan. And it's also going to assist with gaining muscle mass. Whereas the double negative is you just consume something that you probably shouldn't have that takes up space in your stomach for protein, which would have helped you towards your goal more. So that's where I think protein plays a huge role in being able to assist just about anybody in making some changes.

And the way I approached it a couple of nights ago was I was looking in the fridge like, man, I kind of want something. And I was like, I'll just have a protein shake a protein shake like do i don't really want it so i did have a protein shake and i made it pretty big not my like ice cream shakes or anything like that but just a regular like almond milk protein shake it up and i i couldn't really finish it but then i no longer wanted anything else it didn't matter what it was. So, yeah, it's not as fun. And it's, you know, obviously a bowl of cereal would have, I mean, I would have ate the whole box. But, you know, again, it wasn't that double negative. It was a net positive because I didn't over consume.

I just had more protein. And I found out in the process that, like, you're being an asshole. Like, you weren't actually hungry. You just had more protein and I found out in the process that like you're being an asshole, like you weren't actually hungry. You just wanted something. And I feel that, that, um, you know, whatever that craving with just a regular protein shake. If I had four things that I could just share with people, it would be intermittent fasting, eat protein, walk and lift. And it's like, man, if you can get some of that shit done every day, you're going to be on the right track. Absolutely. One thing I really

do like before we finish up is what he mentioned was like people can teach themselves to learn to like things. Right? A lot of times people start eating a lot of whole foods. They start a new diet or whatever. I don't like it. It tastes good. No, no, no, no, no. Like a kid, right?

Do it long enough. You're going to learn to like it. Yeah, you can learn to love it. Yeah. Take us on out of here, Andrew. I will. So a super easy way to get whole foods in your diet. I didn't even know what couscous was until I had it through Eat Right Foods.

It was delicious. Honestly, I didn't know it was a real thing. But apparently. I didn't know you could have that when you're married. Exactly. Me neither. But I had it through Eat Right Foods. It was freaking incredible.

I'm a couscous fan. The food's so nice, they had to name it twice. Thank you, Eat Right Foods, for sponsoring today's episode. Again, eatrightfoods.com. Check for links down below in the YouTube description as well as the podcast show notes. Promo code PowerProject25 for 25% off your first order and promo code PowerProject for 10% off every order after that. Please follow the podcast at MarkBell's PowerProject on Instagram, at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ and Seema, where you at?

Don't forget, if you listen to us on Apple or anywhere, go leave us a review. We know you're digging this shit, so let the people know. Give us five stars and leave a review. At NCMA India on Instagram and YouTube. At NCMA Yin Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Mark. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weak. This week, this is never strength.

Catch you guys later. Bye!