Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1302: How to Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss ins and outs of maintaining muscle while losing body fat. Mind Pump Shout Outs. (3:17) Understanding the difference between weight loss and fat loss. (6:03) Why do we lose muscle when we lose weight? (13:40) How to lose weight and NOT lose muscle. (19:08) How to send the RIGHT signals to maintain muscle while losing body fat. (22:50) Through proper Resistance Training. (23:00) Become more efficient with your Calories. (31:45) How to send the WRONG signals with macronutrients. (38:40) How your lifestyle can affect your metabolism. (43:52) Related Links/Products Mentioned May Promotion: MAPS Starter ½ off! **Promo code “STARTER50” at checkout** Special Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “WHITE50” at checkout** Visit Felix Gray for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! We Burn as Many Calories as Hunter-Gatherers, So What Makes Us Fat? FitnessWave - Leader in Hydrostatic Body Fat Testing Resistance Training in the Treatment of the Metabolic Syndrome The Best Form of Exercise How to Undulate Your Calories for Faster Weight Loss & an Improved Metabolism – Mind Pump TV Mind Pump #1072: What You Need To Know About Protein For Muscle Building & Fat Loss Study: Stress may cause excess abdominal fat in otherwise slender women Three Things You Can Add Into Your Daily Routine To Help With Weight Loss Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pumped the World's Top Fitness, Health and Entertainment podcast, we tackle a subject that is very, very important for most people who work out. Now, the number one goal for people, when they start exercising or changing the nutrition, is they want to lose weight.

Everybody wants to lose weight. Obviously, we have an obesity epidemic. It's much more common that somebody has excess weight on their body than being underweight. Now, here's the problem. It's not really weight you want to lose. It's fat. And you probably or definitely want to keep muscle.

Keeping muscle keeps your metabolism fast, keeps your body firm and sculpted, and it looks a lot better. So in this episode we talk all about how to do that, because believe it or not, when you're eating in a way and exercising in a way to lose weight, oftentimes you're simultaneously sending a signal to your body that says, hey, not only do we want to lose weight, but we need to burn less calories

So get rid of some muscle studies actually support this most weight loss protocols cause cause as much muscle to be lost as Body fat, but we know how to stop that in fact, we know how to make the reverse happen So that's what we're talking about in this episode We talk about the right signals. How do you send the right signals with exercise, calories, your macronutrients, which are proteins, fats, and carbs, and your lifestyle. By the way, when we talk about lifestyle, we do talk about wearing blue blocker glasses before you go to bed because that does increase the recovery ability of sleep, gives you better sleep, helps you fall asleep faster.

This episode is sponsored by Felix Gray and they make the best blue blockers on the market. The classes themselves don't change the color of the room, so they're not orange or red, they're clear, they look good, but they still block a significant amount of blue light so that you can get better sleep at night or just avoid eye strain from when you're working on your computer. If you want to get the Mind Pump hookup, go to FelixGreatGlasses.com that's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y

glasses.com forward slash Mind Pump. Also we have a program called Map Starter. It's a great at-home workout program. All you need are dumbbells and a physio ball. It's excellent for people who want to start with resistance training, who may not have tons of experience. Want to reap the metabolism boosting muscle building effects of resistance training.

This program, MAP Starter, is 50% off. Right now, there's only four days left for this promotion, but going on all month. So again, four days left. Here's how you get the half off discount. Go to mapsstarter.com, that's MAPS, S-T-A-R-T-E-R.com, and use the code starter50, that's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0, no space for the discount. And one last thing, all of our apparel is on sale, right now, massive sale.

You can get stuff first, cheap as I think five bucks. Everything's on sale. This promotion's going on to the 29th Friday. You can go check that stuff out on our website minepumpmedia.com. Do you guys go on the forum and see what Kristen Hammond wrote? Oh yeah, what an incredible post. Insane, I'm gonna read a little bit of this

for this particular episode, because I think it's perfect, but she starts out by saying that my pump changed her life. She started listening when we were talking a lot about reverse dieting. So at the time, 60 plus minutes of cardio every single day, plus lifting,

plus working at a physically demanding job, and only eating 800 calories a day. She was on a very, very low, low calorie diet. One of those people whose metabolism's, I think, had been slowed down as a result of all this. Did she list her weight? You can tell that she had a significant amount of weight. I mean, the before and after picture is just insane.

It's dramatic. Anyway, she says that she listened to what we said, bumped her calories up, cried, because that's a tough thing, because you gotta trust it. You're afraid, right? You gotta trust the process. The last thing you wanna do, and you're trying to lose weight, is to up your calories.

Yeah, she said she said she would eat like a quarter cup of rice, and then it would make her cry, because she'd be stressed out, is it what's gonna happen? Anyway, she's now deadlifting 300 pounds, squatting almost 200 pounds, benching 145, eating, she says 4,000 calories a day.

So she's eating a lot, lot, lot more than she was before, but the before and after is just insane. Yeah. It's absolutely insane. Well, and I know there's going to be a lot of people that hang on the 4,000 calories, even if she is overestimating by a thousand. That's still unbelievable. So substantial.

Well, just to 800 to almost 4,000 just to even if you just double even if you just doubled your caloric intake, but now have eliminated all that insane amount of activity. You're now in a more sustainable place. That's that that's the key here. It's not it's much more sustainable because you know for the average person is 60 minutes plus of cardio every day plus all working out, plus demanding job, plus eating 800 calories a day, even if that worked for you,

which it probably wouldn't, but even if it did, how sustainable is that? No, I got somebody right. You guys have seen, I don't know if you recall her post, she's tagged, I know you guys, and I think I've shared already her story a few times, Diane Semonik, who I've known for over 15 years matter when she was like 20 years old and she was like cardio bunny like hardcore and even all the

years of knowing me and training like she still didn't break that she recently she's had had two kids and she's now following she just went through maps of anabolic and aesthetic and is like blown away. But like her body posts two kids in her 30s, looks better than it's ever looked, zero cardio, and just sticking away. She's constantly DMing me like, I can't thank you enough. I'm so frustrated though for so many years I didn't listen. It's important that we really differentiate the difference between weight loss and fat loss. And I know some people think, well, that's silly. It's actually not.

I've worked with a lot of clients who just tell me, I just want to lose weight and I don't care. So I have to kind of break down why it's not just weight you want to lose. It's body fat. It's body fat that you want to lose. It's not about weight. Wait, so it was an argument I had with one client that actually, we had to part ways. And that was the only reason it was,

because it was just so embedded in her brain that by all means necessary, it should just lose weight on the scale. And it didn't matter to her the way that we did win about that. Whether we were just running through these circuits and just keep cutting calories. And we can't do this, not sustainable. And it was a really difficult thing that later on

I figured out a better way to present it to clients so that way they could digest it. But it's a very hard mental thing to really wrap your brain around. Well, that's why this conversation I think is so important because I remember actually most of my clients that were, especially if they were 40, 50 plus pounds overweight, I mean, somebody who has put on that much weight over years has been staring at the scale

forever. And, you know, what ends up happening is they become attached to the number on the scale. And when they finally break down and come to you as a coach or a trainer, they're like, at all costs, just get me back down to, you know, whatever the number is. And it's hard to convince that person that we don't just want to drop the scale as much as you, and I remember I used to use this analogy, like listen, if all you care about is 40 pounds on the scale, then, okay, well, then what I want you to do is stop eating food and come on the treadmill every day for an

hour. Now, that's obvious, unhealthy piece of advice, and I would be sarcastic when I said that to them. But the point of it was to get my analogy across to them that, listen, if you just grossly reduce calories and increase movement, sure, you'll lose weight on the scale, but you just grossly reduce calories and increase movement, sure you'll lose weight on the scale, but you don't realize how much you're shooting yourself in the foot. And one of the hardest things to do is to take someone like that and convince them that listen, we want to do this really slow.

And we want to hang on to as much muscle as possible while we lose body fat. Yes. Muscle looks good lose body fat. Yes, muscle looks good. Body fat, once you're past a certain point of healthy body fat percentage, doesn't look good. So if somebody wants to lose weight to change their appearance for the better, muscle good body fat bad. That's generally the, you know, how you want to think about it.

One of the most effective things I did as a manager of a gym, and I started doing this probably five years into my career, was I had female trainers that worked for me that understood this. They had lots of muscle, lower body fat, they looked phenomenal, of course they were natural, so they weren't like, roided out bodybuilders. They looked excellent, like very sculpted bodies. And what I would do when I would talk to a potential member when I was trying to get this message across and would say, look, weight isn't as important as body composition. I would page one of my trainers over the intercom, attention staff,

Lisa come to Sal's office, then up comes my trainer, my female trainer, who looks phenomenal. I'd have them stand there and I would ask my potential member, I'd say, okay, now, how much do you think she weighs? And there were always 20 to 30 pounds off. At least 20 to 30 pounds off. Oh, she weighs like 110 pounds. I'd be like, actually follow us to the scale.

We'd walk over the scale, 140 pounds. And you see their faces, they couldn't believe it. And I'd say, well, it's because she has a lot of muscle. Now, why is that a good thing? Besides looking good, you're stronger, you're more functional. But the most important thing is your body burns more calories. This is why it's so important. Now, why is that important?

Well, if we were living in pre, if this was 10,000 years ago, that might not necessarily be a good thing. You don't wanna have a body that burns tons of calories because food is hard to come by. Is food hard to come by today? Food is so easy to come by today and it's so tasty. It's designed to be tasty.

I can right now walk outside the studio and have Mexican, a tie-in or Chinese food all within three minutes of walking distance, right? Food is so plentiful that we die from having too much of it. We throw away more food than we probably ate 10,000 years ago. That's the food that we waste, right? So it makes sense to have a body that burns a lot of calories because you're gonna live in the modern world.

So imagine trying to, even if you were healthy and fit, imagine trying to subsist on 800 calories a day when you're surrounded by all this food, you're surrounded by all these events and birthdays and celebrations, all that stuff. Now, how difficult would that be? Now, imagine if you could do that on 2500 calories a day, much, much different.

So it's about that, how long can I maintain this? Is this something that's realistic? And again, most of us, we want the scale to change, but in reality, nobody gives a shit what your weight is on the scale. It's really about how you feel feeling, how you're looking. He just reminded me of this. I haven't thought about this in a really long time.

So I trained an NFL lineman, like maybe, I don't know, 15 years ago when I was training him. He was a lineman for the Niners. Big Simone guy, like 350 pounds. And I trained his wife. And I'll never forget the first time I did an assessment with his wife. Now, I don't know about you guys,

but I'm pretty good. I could look at somebody's body and see their height and everything, and I could probably guess their weight within three to five pounds, maybe 10 off. I mean, I don't think I'd ever been more than 10 off until this situation happened. So she's a Samoan lady and I could tell she's solid. So I know she's probably a little heavier

than what I'm gonna guesstimate, but still at a respect, you always as a trainer, you kind of like start the scale. A little bit lower than what you probably think inside your head, because the last thing you wanna do is a coach, right, her trick. Right, there's nothing worse than like overestimating

somebody's weight like sliding you. Oh shit, sorry, just kidding. What, I looked that heavier one, right? So I remember, I'll never forget getting her on the scale. And I remember in my head looking at her, okay, I know she's solid, she looks very solid. She's not a little woman by any means. She's probably like 160, maybe 170 or so.

So I'm gonna start at like 155 and like get her on there. I get her on there and that thing's fucking pinned. Doesn't even move it. I'm like, okay, slide to 160, still pinned. 170, still pinned. 180, still pinned. One, I get to, this girl weighs 201, okay. Now here's the trip though.

I lift her shirt up to do like her stomach to do her body fat caliper test. Flat stomach. Well, I never, it's just an example of like how solid and heavy and dense muscle muscle is. She looked great. She maybe wanted to lose maybe 10 pounds on the scale, quote unquote, but she did not have all this crazy body fat. And you can tell that, you know, weight does not matter. You can have so many different body types weigh the same amount of weight. And so I'll never forget doing that with this person

and being so far off, even as a trainer who looks at bodies all the way. Right, right. Muscle sculpted, it's firm, it's hard, it's functional. You know, fat has some function, but body fat kind of sits on your body for the most part and you just carry it around. Muscle is functional, it helps you move.

You want muscle, it feels better to have more muscle. It doesn't feel better. Again, besides the healthy body fat percentages because obviously you can go too low on body fat, but to body fat above that doesn't even feel good. It actually starts to affect your health negatively. Now, the question is, why do we lose muscle when we lose weight? Why is that so common? And by the way, it's extremely common. Losing muscle when you lose weight is so common. It's actually expected oftentimes. And accepted.

And accepted. When you do just a weight loss program or a diet, if people are checking composition, if you're working with like a dietician or whatever, they kind of expect muscle to be lost. Now you ask yourself, well, why does that happen? Now in the past, they would say things like, oh, you're burning muscle, that's not what's happening.

It's not because your body's trying to capture the calories from the muscle by burning it. What it's actually trying to do is it's literally trying to slow its metabolism down. Try to become efficient. Your body is trying to adapt to the lower calories. Studies are pretty good at showing this when people die it alone, when they just cut calories, they lose about half muscle, half fat. So they do lose fat, but the body also starts to adapt by pairing

down muscle so that the person then, because if you're, let's say you ate 1500 calories a day and that was causing weight loss, your body, that means your body was burning, let's say 2000 calories a day. Now your body is burning body fat, but it's also thinking we need to figure out a way to operate at 1500 calories a day. Well, I like giving the analogy or get the example of what happens is you get, you get X amount of calories and let's just say, you know, your body uses so much to move all day along. And we're just going to use hypothetical numbers to get this point across. So your body like uses up, you know, 1200 of the calories.

You eat a total of 1,300 calories. So your body says it's got 100 calories left, and it's looking at all of this muscle and fat on the body. And fat only needs ex-emotic calories and muscle needs exponentially more. And so the body just prioritizes, it says, that tissue is way more expensive to keep. You're not giving me enough calories to keep that on there, so it pairs it down.

It says, it's too expensive. I can't afford to keep that muscle on there while you're this low of calories, so it partitions it to other places and pairs down muscles. So essentially you're saying, like eating less, you're burning more, your body's trying to figure out, how can we survive at this new calories?

We're burning too much. There was a very illuminating study that was done with some modern hunter gatherer tribe called the Hodza tribe, HADZA, I believe. And through some very sophisticated testing, they were able to measure their caloric burn. Now, the researchers went into this tribe and predicted that they would burn tons of calories

because they're modern hunter-gatherers. Okay, what does that mean? That means that they're moving all day long. They're hunting, they're running after prey, they're gathering, it's like they're not like modern humans. They're not sitting down watching TV or on their devices, they're not, it's like they're not like modern humans, they're not sitting down watching TV or on their devices, they're not working at a sedatory job. They're moving a lot.

So this researcher thought, wow, these people are probably gonna burn, you know, 6,000 calories a day. This is gonna be crazy. Well, when they finished the test, what they found was that these people didn't burn that much, it was like a little bit more than the average person, which blew their mind. But if you think about much, it was like a little bit more than the average person

which blew their mind, but if you think about it makes perfect sense. Their bodies adapted to all that activity because that's what keeps humans alive. Now some of them had faster metabolism than others and guess what showed that. They're lean body mass. It was their lean body mass that predicted if they'd burn more calories. It wasn't necessarily their activity. It was all about lean body mass. It was their lean body mass that predicted if they'd burn more calories. It wasn't necessarily their activity. It was all about lean body mass. So when you're cutting calories

and you're sending the wrong signals, which we're gonna get into, what your body does is it tries to slow its metabolism down. So losing weight and keeping muscle is extremely important unless you don't mind having a slower metabolism, unless you don't mind having a metabolism that burns so much lower calories than now for the rest of your life to maintain that, you're eating a lot less. People need to understand that this is not a bad thing.

The body is doing what it's supposed to do, right? This is not, but when you're trying to change body composition, it's a whole different game. You have to understand that. So when we get a client who comes in and says, I want to lose all this body fat, you've got to understand that the body is going to do what it needs to do survival wise. And when it responds this way, it's not a negative thing. It's just part of the game.

So because of that, you want to be very strategic about how you lose that body fat and you don't want to be in a hurry to get there because the faster that you try and get there by reducing calories and increasing movement, the harder you're going to make it for yourself when you eventually reach the goal if you ever reach the goal. Now, you can actually lose weight and have your body fat percentage go up. I've seen this many, many, many times. The scale could show that your weight went down, but now because you've lost muscle, the body fat that you have is now a greater percentage of your total body weight.

10 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound person is 10% body fat, 10 pounds of body fat on a 200 pound person is 5% body fat, right? So although you could lose weight, even lose some body fat because you've lost lean body mass, your body fat percentage goes up. Now why is that important? Well, high body fat percentage is what makes you look

a particular way. It's not about the fat that you have on your body. You know, a guy in my size, right, and six feet tall, about 205 pounds or so. If you took my body fat and put it on someone who's five feet tall, they would look a lot different. Their body fat percentage would be high. So body fat percentage is actually what's real important.

Now, how do we do this, right? That's the question. How do we do this? How do we lose weight without losing muscle? Well, I remember, and I shared this in a recent episode when this was extremely eye opening for me as a fitness manager at the time, and for all my trainers, it was about five,

six years into my career before we had these. So there's in our area, there's a mobile dunk tank. It's a hydrostatic way. So it's one of the most accurate ways that we could measure people's body fat. And I made a relationship with a company called Fitness Wave. And what I ended up doing was setting it up every single month, they would come to my gym.

And then all the people that were training with my trainers would sign up for this dunk. And it would be their all day long and it would just dunk all the people that have been on the program. And I remember the first couple of times we did this, it was really, I mean, all my trainers are coming back to me and being like,

oh my God, this can't be right. And this is bullshit. And I've got this client who lost all this weight. And it's saying that they've got fatter percentage-wise. Like, this doesn't add up. And the number of trainers that were frustrated was very obvious to me that a lot of us were doing, we were doing all of our clients disservice

by restricting calories and pushing them. And this was back in the day when all the trainers would circuit train clients and just reduce calories, right? To the extremes. We were trying to take them to their goal in the quickest, most efficient way possible that we thought would get them there. And that was definitely reducing calories and up in their cardiovascular, alongside their training programs, thinking that that was like just, it was a calorie gain.

Right. Right. So again, you have to understand your body. So you know those glasses that they sell now where they, if you go out in the sun, they get tinted and then you go indoors and they become clear. So those are adaptive glasses, meaning that they change based on the environment. If it's bright, they get darker, so that it's easier for you to see if you're in a darker room, they become more clear.

Okay, well, your body is kind of like that, except way more complicated, and it adapts to a lot of different things, not just the light that you're getting on your skin, which would be like tanning, but your body adapts to everything. So why does your body wanna lose muscle? It tries to lose muscle to become more efficient at burning calories. It's like driving a V8 truck and all of a sudden gasoline is $50 a gallon.

If your truck could adapt itself, if it was some kind of AI machine, it would adapt and become a one cylinder engine to help you become more efficient with gasoline. Your body does the same thing. Well, we have trucks that do that already. I believe your truck does it. My truck does that, right?

So it moves off some valves. Because we know it goes between four and eight cylinders. If it realizes that you're not running the RPMs really high, you're driving around and you're driving low. That's the way it mostly is. Yeah, the truck will drop down to a four cylinder and then when you romp on it and you, and you need more demand from it and you throttle down on it, it jumps

up to eight cylinders. Well, so your body does that and it, again, it's trying to become more efficient. So it does, it looks at itself and it says, okay, reduce energy demands. What's an easy way to do that? It's not going to get rid of your, your organs. It's not going to get rid of your brain power. You're, that's all essential. So it says, well, you don't need all this muscle. Let's bring some of this muscle down because it's going to help us burn less calories. That's why your body wants to lose muscle. It's literally responding to the signals that

you're sending it. It's not again, it's not a bad thing, it's doing exactly what he'd evolved to do. So the key to losing weight without losing muscle is to send signals that tell your body to burn body fat and keep or build muscle. You have to send that kind of a signal, otherwise it will not happen. Now the first way you can do this is with exercise. You have to send the right signal for fat loss and muscle preservation with exercise. It's funny. A meta analysis study just came out last week. In fact, Arthur Brooks sent it to me. He thought I would be very interested. I definitely am very interested in that. Yeah. The study highlighted the metabolic effects of exercise. And what it showed was that cardiovascular activity

caused no increase in metabolic rate. And it was a short, and some of those studies, by the way that it analyzed, you saw a slow down. But the consensus, because mostly studies have done short term show zero positive effect, what we would consider positive effect on metabolism,

no speed up, resistance training consider positive effect on metabolism, no speed up. Resistance training sped up the metabolism, predictably, predictably sped up the metabolism. Why? Let's let's let's let's talk about this for a second. They're both exercise, they're both activity, they both require muscle. Cardio still needs muscle. They both burn calories. Yeah, they both. Cardio still needs muscle. If I'm on a bike or running, it's not like I'm not using muscle. Why the hell does cardio not speed running, it's not like I'm not using muscle. Why the hell does cardio not speed up my metabolism? Why the hell can cardio sometimes cause my body?

It's energy, man. To lose muscle. Cardiovascular activity doesn't require a lot of strength in comparison to resistance training. I mean, you know, cardio versus doing nothing might require a little bit more strength, but cardio in comparison to resistance training doesn't require much strength at all.

Now muscles don't need to be big to have stamina and endurance. In fact, big muscles require way more energy to have stamina and endurance. Now, you can tell by looking at athletes, look at endurance athletes, compare them to strength athletes, what's the difference in how they look? Very, very different.

You don't need a lot of muscle to have a lot of stamina. So if I did lots of cardio, I'm gonna be burning a lot of calories, and my body's gonna say, hey, we're burning lots of calories, and we don't need a lot of muscle to do this. In fact, too much muscle makes this person heavy, reduces their stamina,

pair muscle down. So cardio, actually, too much cardio in particular, sends the opposite signal. If you're trying to keep muscle, too much cardio sends the opposite signal. Resistance training sends exactly the signal you want, because resistance training requires strength, and bigger muscles are stronger.

So your body says, hold on a second, we need this muscle. We need muscle. There's something important to point out though about like what's the right resistance training signal, right? Yeah, so what it's definitely not it's definitely not circuit training right where you're bouncing from Set to set to set with no rest periods now. We're flirting with being it more like being more like cardio than like resistance training The other thing that's really important too is maybe you have a good weight training program that you're doing and it's a muscle-building type of a program but you've been doing it for months or years already.

This is something that I would always do when transitioning a client or starting a client, right? With a program is when we make the transition from building muscle or like you know, focused on gaining or building our metabolism just switching over to, okay, now we're trying to lean out or lose body fat, I would also simultaneously change their programming because you gotta remember too,

even if it's weight training and sitting a signal to build muscle, if you've been sitting the same signal to build muscle for months or years at a time, the body's gotten fairly adapted to that also. So even if you're sitting a signal to build muscle for months or years at a time, the body's gotten fairly adapted to that also. So even if you're sending a signal to build muscle, but it's the same signal you've been sending for years at a time, because it's the same routine, one of the best things that you can do

is send a new signal that's weight training. So changing your programming up at the same time that you're also trying to reduce. Right, right. So here's another thing about resistance training. You want to train in a way that promotes strength. You want to send the strength signal, meaning you need to train the strength energy systems. So let me explain.

Endurance energy systems use lots of oxygen and they burn continuously. So running, cycling, swimming, circuit training, I'm going, going, going, going, going. And that becomes more of an aerobic activity. Doesn't require the lots of strength. And it doesn't, it doesn't use the fast burning energy as well as the heavy strength. It does use the fast burning energy, but then it burns out very quickly. And now you're just burning the long form of energy. So what does this mean? That means, take rest in between sets.

You want to train for strength, meaning you want to do your set for your 10 reps, rest one to two minutes, then do another set. This was a very hard thing to talk to clients about when they'd all they want to do is lose weight. We would do a set, then I'd tell them to rest, they'd be like, why are we resting? I can do a set, let's keep going. I want to burn more calories. Right, and again, this comes back to the competing signal.

Like, am I telling my body to be more efficient because I had some more cardiovascular? Or am I really trying to replenish this amplitude and be able to provide enough force outputs to then get the strength I can to move this weight. And so it's all about the environment you're creating. You have to create the environment where you need these muscles to be able to resist

this type of load. Yeah, your body will only ever be as strong or have as much muscle as it thinks it needs. Okay, that's the bottom line. It will never have more as it thinks it needs. Okay, that's the bottom line. It will never have more than it thinks it needs. It doesn't make any sense for your body to increase its caloric demands unless there was a good reason. So you have to, if you want to maintain muscle or build muscle while burning body fat,

but definitely even at least just to keep it, your body has to think that it needs it. It needs this muscle. Lots of cardiovascular activity. You don't need lots of muscle for it. Again, in fact, lots of muscle makes it more difficult for you to have lots of stamina. This is why you don't see too many body builder,

endurance athletes or body builder long distance runners, just doesn't need it. Now for strength, you need it. If you wanna bench press and overhead press and row and curl and lunge and squat with heavy weight, you know, for eight to 12 reps or sometimes five reps or even 15 reps, with that kind of resistance, your body's like, okay, we need, we need to have this muscle. This is why every study that has people, lift weights and diet, is shows a better effect on the metabolism

and a less, at least less of a loss, and many times no loss of muscle mass than when they compare it to the same types of diets without resistance training. Resistance training is the most important part of this puzzle in terms of sending the right signal. Well, we also have to talk about RAS2, because I think it, one of the things I touched

on, the, you know, avoiding the circuit training, but you see this with the F-45s, the orange theories, these classes that they know the importance of resistance training, and so they've incorporated it into these classes, but they do it while they're also jumping rope or running on a treadmill or rowing, and their heart rates are, you know, most of the people in there are 150 plus and then they go over and they do strength training and they're doing set after set after set after set and they're set.

That's still endurance signal. Right, so you have the endurance signal being sent while you're resting. Then you have the other side who also, you know, you get them convinced that, okay, I don't need to be doing lots of cardio, the resistance training is what I need to do. And so they're training seven days a week of lifting weights.

There is the right dose, right? And if we're trying to speed the metabolism up, beating your body up seven days a week, even with weights, is not ideal either. And that was a hard thing for me. I remember to really comprehend, because I always wanted to, the thinking more is better, more is better. And when I'm trying to build somebody's metabolism, that's why I lean towards more programming

like the MAPSANabolic program where it's only three foundational days a week, which is really hard for somebody who has a big goal like fat loss of 30, 50, 100 pounds they need to lose to get that through their head that you only want them doing three foundational days. It's because they're thinking to themselves, I wanna burn more calories.

And look, moving more does burn more calories, but why not have your body burn more calories on its own? Like, think about that for a second, right? Do you want to always have to manually burn calories as much as possible, or would you rather have your body on automatic burn more calories? Which one is more sustainable for the rest of your life? Which one is probably going to keep you leaner forever? More, you know, which one's giving you better odds of that? It's the one with the faster metabolism.

Now, resistance training sends this signal to get stronger, done properly, to get stronger, which tells the body, hey, we need this muscle. But you send other signals with other things that you do. One of them is with your calories, okay? If you cut your calories too low, too fast, your body, well also, even if you lift weights, we'll try to reduce its metabolic requirements

by slowing your metabolism down. Too much of a cut, if you're a man who's burning 3000 calories a day with good muscle, good metabolism, you of a cut. If you're a man who's burning 3000 calories a day with good muscle, good metabolism, your lifting weights, and you're like, hey, I want to get lean for summer. And you go from 3000 calories to 1500 calories, and you keep it there consistently.

Even if you keep lifting weights, even if you keep it doing everything, now the weights will prevent as much muscle losses might have happened, but you're still gonna lose muscle. Too big of a cut, far too big of a cut, too loud of a signal to the body that says, hey, calories have been reduced by half.

I know you need strength, but looks like food is scarce. That's more important. Let's just become more efficient. So cutting calories too much, and I see this all the time with people when they figure out their maintenance, they're like, oh cool, if I go 1200 calories below maintenance, I'll burn all those body fats so fast.

Does it work out? I mean, having clients go through that and really doing these massive cut in restricting calories, just their performance and their energy like suffers dramatically. And I mean, some people can handle a little bit better than others, but the majority of people that I've trained, that's a struggle. Now it's a struggle to maintain a positive outlook towards their programming when they're

coming into the gym, super low energy, super unmotivated, but just kind of grinding their way through when it doesn't really need to be that dramatic if we can be smarter about it. I actually don't want to see any of the scale move at the beginning, especially the first couple months. And that is really, really difficult for somebody who's been staring at a scale that says it's 30 plus pounds more than what they would like. And then they come in, they hire me and they say, okay, I want Adam, I want to lose this 30 pounds. And I say, okay, but, okay, but for the first few months, I actually don't wanna see the scale move at all.

That's a really, really tough thing one, to communicate and two, to get through to a client. So they understand that this is the process that we're trying to communicate right now, that we wanna do, and it's tough. And I get it because the mental part, your mind plays tricks on you. And when you're following a perfect routine where I, okay, I have sitting in the mental part, your mind plays tricks on you. And when you're following a perfect routine where,

okay, I have sitting in the right signal, I'm reducing, I know I'm reducing calories, it's not a lot, but I'm reducing calories. Your body is probably changing. Even if the scale week over week is saying the same, if you know you're following a plan, you're reducing calories, even say it's only 100 calories

and you're lifting weights, it's a new program for sure. Good stuff is happening. And in fact, if the weight on the scale is staying about the same, we have a nice exchange. We're probably seeing one or two pounds of fat come off and one or two pounds or so or muscle give or take that are that are adding. And that is a perfect ratio. It just takes more time for you to see a major difference. This is also why I encourage people to do like a Friday morning,

you know, anyone that was coached with me in the last decade knows it. Every Friday morning, you take a photo of yourself before you eat or anything. And it's really, it's there to help them mentally get through this. Because if you're staring at yourself every day, multiple times a day in the mirror, and you don't see the scale moving, and you're trying to have blind faith in what mind pumps talking about on the show, really, really tough for you to go. So one of the things I love to do is take a photo of yourself or measurements to, I know Sal, you're big on the circumference measurements because that's another great way.

Both those are excellent. And then start to look at two weak shots at a time and go, you'll see a difference even if the scale isn't moving. Yeah, you know what I really like? I really like it when studies start to back up what people and fitness have been noticing for a long time. So I'm going to give you an example of one and this was pretty awesome. For a long time, bodybuilders in particular,

but people who were very experienced with getting leaner without losing muscle, noticed that when they would, and they would call it a cheat day, or they'd say, oh, when I bump my calories while I'm cutting my calories, I'll bump it every once in a while. I keep more muscle, I have more energy, it seems to be better. And there weren't really any studies to support this. In fact, it got a lot of criticisms, like, oh, the body doesn't work that way or whatever.

Well, we have studies actually have tested this. You know what they find? Diet breaks is what they call it. Diet breaks actually help prevent the muscle loss that happens with diets. And we've also shown that it maintains the metabolism. It reduces the amount of slowdown that happens with the metabolism when you cut calories.

So what does this look like? Well, rather than being at a calorie deficit, meaning you're eating less calories, you're burning all the time, every once in a while, bring your calories up to maintenance, or even slightly above how many calories you're burning. Just every once in a while. This is called calorie, we call it undulating your calories. Now, what I've noticed with clients is, it keeps more muscle, keeps them stronger.

Psychologically, there's some benefits as well. They know that, you know, there's a couple days a week where, you know, this whole week, I'm eating 1,500 calories a day, which is keeping me below my, how many calories I'm burning. But Saturday and Sunday, I get to eat 2,000 calories, which brings me at maintenance. Undulating your calories helps do this. Now why? Because it sends the right signal. Remember, the body's trying to become more efficient

when your calories are low, right? What if you throw in a couple days with the calories a little higher? Now your body thinks food isn't as scarce. Maybe it's not that scarce. It's not that scarce, so we don't need to become quite so efficient. In fact, we had a couple days where calories

are a little higher. I still have this loud muscle building signal that's been being sent to me. So why don't we just not slow down as much? Why don't we build a little bit more muscle? This is called underlating your calories and it's a far more effective way of cutting your calories and just going straight to a cut and keeping it that way. Far more effective.

So here's another example, right? Let's say your total calories for the week in terms of how much your body naturally burns is 14,000 calories for the week in terms of how much your body naturally burns is 14,000 calories for the week. So that's 2,000 calories a day, right? So you're gonna cut about 500 calories a day on average, which is about 3,500 calories for the whole week. So you're thinking, okay I'm gonna eat 3,500 less calories than I'm burning for the whole week. Now, here's what you do rather than doing 500 calories less a day, fluctuate it. One day at 750 below, the next day it's 250, the next day it's at the maintenance, and the next day it's slightly over, and then it's way below again.

Move it around that way, and what studies show is that actually prevents a lot of metabolic adaptation. So, underlate your calories and actually throw in some days, you know, maybe not super frequently, of course, because this will mess you up and actually throw in some days, you know, maybe not super frequently. Of course, this is a slow mess yet, but throw in some days where you're just a little bit above. How many calories you're burning? And watch what happens. You'll end up with a faster metabolism again, because it sends the right signals. But again, now we're talking about calories. Let's break it down even more, right? What makes up calories, your macronutrients, your proteins, your fats, and your carbohydrates? How do we send the wrong signal with macronutrients? Well, I'll tell

you right now, low protein, a low protein diet, or too low a fat diet, or too low carb diet. All three of those, especially the low protein one, can cause more muscle loss, even if you're sending the right signals with your calories and your resistive straining, especially protein, gotta keep the protein high. Studies support this quite consistently. Well, this is why too, I think we, for the most part, recommend a balanced diet where you're not cutting out completely a macronutrient. I'm not a fan of somebody who's coming in who's, you know, a've heard of the ketogenic diet

or they wanna go vegan and bis because they have a friend who had success with that and now they wanna do that. You're far better off as long as you don't have any other issues where you need to be on a diet like that to be in a more balanced type of a diet. So that's one of the things for sure is recommending that people stick with a more balanced macro profile and probably one of the things for sure, is recommending that people stick with a more balanced macro profile

and probably one of the most common things I see. More so with my female clients that wanna lose weight is not getting adequate protein. And we talk about on the show that the benefits are 0.7 to one. I want at least one to one is what I'm shooting for. So one gram propound about it right? In a cut, if I'm in a cut, I wanna make sure you're getting one

to one throughout the cut to make sure that we're getting adequate. Yeah, so a high protein diet builds more muscle when you work out. And it also helps preserve muscle when you're reducing body weight. Studies are quite consistent with this. Adam said one gram of protein per pound of body weight.

That's a really, really good range. Unless your BMI is really high, unless you're really overweight, in which case I would say use your lean body weight. That's a really, really good range unless your BMI is really high unless you're really overweight, in which case I would say use your lean body mass. Obviously, a 300 pound man who's obese probably shouldn't be eating 300 grams of protein, but use more like your lean body mass. But for most people, if you're trying to lose 20 pounds, 30 pounds, something like that, you can aim for your body weight about 0.7 to 1 gram high protein just helps with that. Now, what about carbs and fats?

Well, let's start with fats. Fats are essential, just like proteins, you need to have a certain amount of fat in your diet, otherwise your body can't survive, it can't thrive. Your body can't produce certain fatty acids, you need to have them in food. If your fat intake is too low, you'll notice

changes, negative changes in your hormones, which then can result in muscle loss as well. And then you just won't feel as good. So you need to have adequate fat. Now, what about carbs? Carbs are not essential, okay? So that means that you don't need to eat them. You can survive without ever eating another carbohydrate ever in your whole life. Now, so a lot of people say, oh, low carb is the best way to get lean. It's easier for me. I get that. There's individuals that that works well with.

Here's my experience with going too low carb though. Too low of carb does result in drop in performance in the gym. You tend to not be as strong. Studies are pretty consistent with this. Carbohydrates produce more strength. Now, what happens when your strength goes down? Am I sending as loud of a muscle building signal?

In my opinion, I don't think so. I think going too low carb can actually promote maybe some muscle loss. I think it's better to have some carbs in there. So I think the balance approach is that. And then also, you know, the rebound effect with that. You know, if you go too far down with the low carb, train that you reintroduce them a lot of times,

like a lot of clients I've noticed have gone on the low carb. Training that you reintroduce them a lot of times, like a lot of clients I've noticed have gone super low carb. We'll come back in excess and they'll just make their way in because the body just starts to really crave that feeling again of this high energy and performance in the gym. And so it just becomes one of those battles where it becomes like a yo-yo effect. Well, that's a great point, Justin. One of the things that you have to be careful of if you follow something like a ketogenic diet,

you become fat adaptive and then your body uses that, becomes used to using that as a source, then all of a sudden you fall off the diet and then you reintroduce carbs and if you reintroduce to what you were used to eating before, the body just piles on the body fat because it's not used to that anymore. It's not. It's not appetite goes to the roof.

I remember when we went ketogenic for that a couple months that we did way back when we first started talking about it. And right before that, it was right in the heat of when I was competing and I was up to like, you know, 500 grams of carbs a day. Then we went keto where I'm cutting it out completely. When I came back, I mean, I couldn't eat over 250,

300 grams of carbs. Anything over that, I was adding body fat rapidly and I was totally bloated. So you gotta be careful if you do run a diet that restricts carbohydrates and then know that if you do something like that and then when you come out of it, you gotta be very careful on how you reintroduce the car. And I know some people are like, oh, I'll never, I'll just stay on this super low carb diet for ever. that and then when you come out of it, you got to be very careful on how you reintroduce to come on.

And I know some people are like, oh, I'll never, I'll just stay on this super low carb diet for ever. Sure. Now, statistically speaking, never works. Now there are some people that medically need to go on certain types of diet. Totally. Totally different. Totally different.

They have a very strong incentive, right? I got to eat this way otherwise I get sick or whatever. But for the average person going too extreme low and any macronutrient almost always results in a rebound effect. That all takes as one birthday. Out the other end exactly. Now, what about lifestyle? Can your lifestyle send a signal to your body

that tells it to reduce muscle? Yes, a lifestyle that is too high in stress can actually do this. You know, if you have poor sleep, too high in stress, your body will also try to slow down it to metabolism. Now, why does it do this? Well, lots of stress, for most of human, lots of consistent stress, I should say, for most of the time, humans have been on Earth, probably meant that we were struggling to

find food. Because the types of stress that we suffered from, again, for most of the human, because remember, humans have been on Earth for so many thousands of years, like 8% of that time, we were hunter gathers. What kinds of stress would we encounter? Oh, dangerous line, I got away, stress is gone. Oh, I'm in a war or whatever. Now I survived, stress is gone.

But what about consistent stress? What kind of consistent stress would we be under for a long period of time? Probably when it was long period of time without food. Couldn't find food. So your body perceives consistent levels of stress as food may be scarce, we need to become more efficient. Studies support this.

Studies support that these low levels or moderate levels of consistent stress promotes fat gain and it definitely reduces your body's ability to build muscle. That's a 100%. Your body does not want to become more expensive when it comes to calories if you're in this kind of stress situation. So managing stress is really important. Now people always ask, how do I do that? And you always hear the common meditate, relax, reframe things. Besides all that, which can be kind of difficult, here's something that's super easy, super, super easy,

that anybody can do that will definitely reduce the stress load on your body. Prioritize sleep, that's it. Even if the rest of your day is stressed out and crazy, if your sleep is good, it makes a huge, huge difference. It's like one of those big rocks. Well, along those lines, I mean, today are the commercial for today's episode is Felix Gray, which is Blue Blockers. And I remember the first time that I invested in something

like this, and I thought it was a little ridiculous. But just by me simply having a practice of, okay, the sun goes down, I'm going to take these, I'm going to throw them on, and then regardless if I'm on my computer or on my TV, the difference that that makes in my ability to fall asleep, you're talking about an additional 30 minutes to an hour minimum that I'm getting extra of quality sleep every single night. That should add up.

It does, and again, this is again supported by studies. If you can turn the lights down in your house, when the sun goes down, kind of mimicking the sun setting, because that sends a signal to your brain that says it's time to chill out. If you cannot eat something right before you go to bed because your organs, your stomach, can actually tell your body that it's light outside if you're eating. So, try to eat about an hour, two hours is ideal before bed, draw the lights down, or where blue blocker glass is very easy, and studies show that it's quite consistent, it helps fall asleep faster, you get deeper sleep, and you get more melatonin production.

Melatonin is a hormone, and when your melatonin production is off, there's a downstream effect on things like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone over long periods of time. So good sleep is one of the easiest ways you can manage stress, and it's very objective. Again, here's what you do. Two hours before bed, start preparing for sleep. You don't got to go to bed, but put your blue blockers on, dim the lights a little bit, maybe don't eat any food, have a nice sleep area that's dark, that's blacked out.

Watch what happens. I also think it's important when we talk about lifestyle that people recognize the other types of stress that happens throughout their day, and knowing that training and working out is another stress and learning how to have a nice balance with that. And what I mean by that is it would be really common that I would get like a type A personality,

high performing CEO, college student that's like slammed in law school and it's got finals. And they have like all this crazy other stress that's happening all day long. And then they go to the gym and they're looking for that cortisol high. So they pound the shit out of themselves inside the gym. And then they're wondering, I don't understand,

like you know, I don't understand, I've been moving like crazy, I'm not even sleeping very much, I'm like stressed in my max, I'm training five days a week as hard as I can, I'm bustin' my, and then my way to staying the same. And it's amazing how sometimes that client by simply taking a day off of the gym

and focus more on the meditating or mobility or stretching yoga. What that could do, I've had many clients where simply just doing that all of a sudden started to get them to lose body fat again. Learning to understand what a really high stressful day or lack of sleep the night before looks like and then learning to manipulate your training program that next day. This is also why all of our programs we always talk about the the moldability of it and being able to change it based off of your

lifestyle and what's going on day to day, even if it's a hard foundational day that you have scheduled because you're following a maps program. And then you but if you just had the night before three hours of sleep, you're stressed out because of what's going on with COVID, that's not the day I want you to go in the gym and hammer the fuck out of that. I want you to back off in the city. Well, I think this is the second hardest thing for some people to register

because the common sentiment is more is always better. More is always better. So if I'm in the gym, that means I'm always progressing. And regardless of whatever stress I'm in and everything else I'm carrying with me, if I didn't get proper sleep, if I haven't been really vesting myself in the recovery process, I'm just going to get gains regardless. And your body just, you have to realize what kind of state you're placing your body in.

And really, the recovery process is where you get all the benefits. So if you're gonna cut that part out, you know, you're really gonna do yourself a detriment. Right, right. So here's something else you can do with your lifestyle. That's not only benefits your health, but can help a lot with this process of burning body fat and keeping or building muscle,

which is increase your leisure activity. And what I mean by that is, we've referred to it as neat. That's non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Earlier in the episode, we talked about how doing too much cardio can send the wrong signal. Does that mean you should never go for walks outside and do that kind of stuff? Absolutely not.

In fact, those are great ways to manage stress. There's a big difference in stress between going for a nice stroll, a 30-minute stroll outside, and getting on a elliptical sprinting on this. And just going for it, you know, listening to music, whatever, the nice walk outside, or you know, parking a little further from your work, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator,

that does burn more calories on its own, but it also is anti-stress. It actually helps rejuvenate the body. And when it promotes recovery too. It promotes recovery too. It actually complements resistance training because I think sometimes people get the wrong message and think, only lift weights and then don't move at all. Don't want to send the wrong signal.

That's not true at all. I like walking. Walking is excellent, especially if it's rejuvenating to you. So if you finish your walk and you feel like you had a workout, you probably went too fast or too hard. But if you finish your walking like, wow, that was really good. My mind is calm. I feel great. That's excellent. That's the kind of activity you want to do in complement to complement your resistance training. So again, all of this is about sending the right signals. If you send the right

signals to your body, you will lose fat and not muscle. By the way, we record our podcast on video, not just on audio. You can actually go to YouTube, Mind Pump Podcast. You can see what we look like, you can see the faces that we make, you can find out why Justin is considered the handsome as person in the room. Right now again it's Mind Pump Podcast. Go make sure you watch us on video. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy

and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPump Media dot com. This counted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal and I'm in Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com.

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