The Peter Attia Drive - #205 - Energy balance, nutrition, & building muscle | Layne Norton, Ph.D. (Pt.2)
Episode Date: May 2, 2022View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Layne Norton holds a Ph.D. in nutritional sciences and is a phy...sique coach, natural bodybuilder, and previous guest on The Drive. In the first half of this episode, Layne dives deep into the topic of energy balance, including the role that macronutrients and calories play in weight loss. He describes how many people struggle with tracking food and calories on their own across a variety of diets and how all of this can impact nutritional habits and behaviors. In the second half of the episode, Layne discusses the importance of protein and weightlifting for improving one’s body composition and increasing muscle mass. He explains how he would prescribe different training and nutrition programs for two hypothetical clients—a 50-year-old female who is entering menopause and wants to improve her health, and a 40-to-50-year-old male who wants to maximize muscle mass. Additionally, Layne discusses a number of supplements that could potentially benefit a training program including whey protein, branch chain amino acids, creatine, nitric oxide boosters, and more. We discuss: Defining energy balance and the role of calories [2:30]; Defining a calorie, whether they are all created equal, and how much energy you can extract from the food you eat [8:00]; Factors influencing total daily energy expenditure [12:15]: The challenge of tracking energy expenditure accurately, and the thermic effect of different macronutrients [23:30]; Challenges of sustained weight loss: metabolic adaptation, set points, and more [34:45]; Weight loss strategies: tracking calories, cheat meals, snacks, fasting, exercise, and more [40:45]; Sitting in discomfort, focusing on habits, and other lessons Layne learned as a natural bodybuilder [52:15]; Commonalities in people who maintain long-term weight-loss [1:01:15]; Does a ketogenic diet result in greater energy expenditure? [1:03:15]; The metabolic benefits of exercise, muscle mass, and protein intake [1:15:00]; The impact of lean muscle and strength on lifespan and healthspan [1:20:00]; Hypothetical case study #1: Training program for 50-year-old female [1:27:45]; Muscle protein synthesis in a trained athlete vs. untrained individual following a resistance training program [1:31:30]; Protein and amino acids needed to build and maintain muscle mass [1:37:15]; Nutrition plan for the hypothetical 50-year-old woman starting to build lean muscle [1:42:45]; Dispelling myths that excess protein intake increases cancer risk through elevations in mTOR and IGF [1:55:30]; Hypothetical case study #2: Training program for a 50-year-old, trained male wanting to increase muscle mass [2:04:00]; Maximizing hypertrophy while minimizing fatigue—is it necessary to train to muscular failure? [2:11:30]; Ideal sets and reps for the hypothetical 50-year-old male interested in hypertrophy [2:16:15];  Maximizing hypertrophy by working a muscle at a long muscle length [2:22:15]; Recommended lower body exercise routines and tips about training frequency [2:24:00]; Nutrition plan for the hypothetical 50-year old male wanting to add muscle [2:29:00]; Cycling weight gain and weight loss when building lean muscle mass, and expectations for progress over time [2:33:30]; Supplements to aid in hypertrophy training [2:38:30]; More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast.
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Now without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Lane Norton. Lane was a previous guest on episode 163 back in May of 2021
in that discussion. We only got through about half of what I wanted to so it was pretty clear that
Lane was going to come back for round two. In this episode, we really dive into two major topics.
The first thing that we get into is energy balance and what role macronutrients and calories play in weight loss.
This really gets into the energy balance equation and what it means, what it doesn't mean is a calorie, a calorie,
and what this means in various contexts around different diets.
We also speak about the struggle people have
with tracking food and calories on their own
across a variety of diets,
and how all of this can impact someone's nutritional habits
and behaviors.
The second half of our conversation really looks
at the importance of protein and weight lifting
through two different case studies.
So the first is how Lane would work
with a roughly 50 year old female
who wants to improve her health
through nutrition and exercise,
but was more interested in cardio than lifting weights.
The second is a case study looking at a 40-50-year-old male who wanted to begin to focus on maximizing
muscle mass.
Now, again, these are both hypotheticals, but I kind of chose them because I think they
can be quite illustrative of what many people are going through.
We end this conversation by looking at a number of supplements,
including way protein, branch chain amino acids,
loosened specifically as one of the branch chain amino acids,
creatine and nitric oxide boosters.
Now, by way of background, Lane is a bodybuilding figure
and physique coach, a natural pro bodybuilder,
and a professional power lifter.
He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry
and a PhD in nutritional sciences
from the University of Illinois. So without further delay, please enjoy my second round conversation
with Lane Nordy.
And Lane, good to see you again, man.
Yeah, I'm happy to be back. I'm stoked for this. We had the marathon session the first time,
and I think we got through like a third of the topics that you were interested in, so we'll see how we do this time.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and of course, a lot of people had a bunch
of follow up questions, so it's some combination
of all the things we didn't get to talk about the first time,
plus some new things I thought about,
and you and I have had a bunch of emails exchange
over the last few months, coupled with some
of that residual stuff.
But one of the topics that people really want to hear you
and I talk about, because I think there's this belief
That we are going to be so orthogonal in our views and we will have not a single thing in common
Although I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be the case is on energy balance and the role of calories in weight gain
So why don't we just lead with the fireworks that everyone is hoping for so
Talk to me about energy balance, calories, and weight gain. So I think one of the big misunderstandings is people don't really understand what energy
balance truly is.
If we look at what most people think it is, is, well, I track my calories in, I track
my calories out.
Therefore, if I am burning 2500 calories a day and I'm tracking 2000 calories a day,
I should lose one pound of body weight per week, linearly, and that's just how it should go.
Perfect math. And when that doesn't happen, they go, we'll see this doesn't work.
And there's a lot of different reasons for that. but before we get into that, let's talk about what energy balance actually is.
So it is calories in versus calories out,
or the energy you consume versus the energy you expend.
And as we're talking about real quick
before we get into that,
what do we mean by energy?
A lot of people say, well, calories don't even exist.
You can't look under a microscope.
No, you can't look at them under aron. So what we're talking about is the energy stored in the chemical
bonds of food. And when you break that food down, when those molecules go through
metabolism and they go through glycolysis, the crebs cycle, that energy is
liberated, but captured ultimately as mostly ATP, which is our high energy phosphate.
But you can't just store a bunch of ATP.
It's not practical for the body,
and ATP is very unstable molecule.
So we evolved to have fat stores,
or adipose tissue, basically the store excess energy.
Now you can store some in glycogen.
I would argue that you really can't store some as protein.
Some people will say, well, you can break down lean tissue. To me, that's kind of like saying, let's build a house,
so it's a reservoir for wood. I don't really think that that's a...
It's a great analogy. I built this amazing teak table, such that if I need fire wood,
I've got it right there. Right. In practicality, are you right? Sure. Yeah, you could, but that's not
why you built the table. Yeah, that's the nuclear option. Yeah. Right. For sure. And if you look at the
contribution of glycogen to your relative energy stores, it's actually really small. I mean, you're
talking about 1500 to 2000 calories of energy. So you're adiposed by far the biggest store and you
store it that way because one, it's economical for space because you can fit a large amount of lipid in the small area and it's energy dense and it's relatively easy to convert to ATP
And it's in hydros so therefore it's
Incredibly well packed as you said glycogen has to track with all that water
It's not a very efficient way to store energy correct. You would be 800 pounds if you were trying to store the same amount of energy as glycogen.
There's a lot of really practical reasons
why the body evolved that way.
Now, when we say calories,
calories are literally a measurement of energy.
And so this is really important to understand.
When people say, well, are all calories created equal,
that's like saying are different notches
on your speedometer different.
No, this is just a unit of measurement, literally all that is.
And you truly have to think of it as energy.
So if we think of it as the energy stored
in the chemical bonds that can be transferred
throughout these various metabolic processes,
and that's what metabolism really is,
is trying to capture that energy.
When we look at what the energy inside of things is,
that is essentially the metabolizable energy in food. There's a couple of important caveats to that.
Notice I said metabolizable energy, because not everything in food is metabolizable,
especially with regards to fiber, and specifically insoluble fiber. It used to be thought that insoluble fibers can't digest it at all.
It's absolutely zero calories.
And I wouldn't say that there's good evidence, but there's starting to be some evidence
that suggests that our gut microbiome can actually extract some calories from the insoluble
fiber you eat.
That's coming from a friend of mine, Suzanne Devkota, who's one of the premier gut microbiome experts in the world. She actually did her masters at the same lab
I was doing my PhD and very smart person has been to like the Nobel ceremony
incredibly well-respected scientist. So there is some evidence of that. And then
when you come to soluble fiber, it's pretty variable. It's like anywhere from
one to four calories per gram. So anywhere from an almost carbohydrate amount to one calorie and it also probably depends on your individual gut microbiome
Even before we get to the calories outside of thing
We see that there is some variability and probably some individual variability and how many calories one person can consume and
Then actually have available as energy.
Lane, I like that you started with this. I'm just going to add a couple of points so that we can build off this together.
So let's even give people the definition of a calorie. And I think we should remind people that when you and I and most people are talking about calories,
we're really talking about kilocalories, and some people will get those confused.
So big C calorie is equal to a thousand little C calories
or a K calorie, but regardless of that nomenclature,
I think most people when they're saying
I eat 2,000 calories are of course referring
to kilocalories, one of those, if I'm not mistaken,
and you're gonna be probably remembering this better than me Lane.
One calorie, I believe, is the energy required to heat one gram of water
from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees Celsius at one atmosphere, correct?
Bingo. About right. I actually have specifically forgotten the exact definition,
but it's basically the amount to increase the degree of water by one degree Celsius.
So again, to your point, it's simply a unit of energy, just as we would think of a jewel
as a unit of energy.
I also want to highlight something you said, which I think is a very important thing for
people to understand, which is when we talk about the conservation of energy, that also
implies when you change forms of energy. So when you eat food, the energy,
as you said, is stored within the bonds. It is chemical energy. We turn that into electrical energy,
via electron transport chain, and then we turn it right back into chemical energy, both in the
immediate sense of ATP, where you, you again now create the energy in the phosphate
bond, but more importantly, as you said, when you're storing it, you're putting it right
back into a hydrocarbon. And it's those carbon-carbon-carbon hydrogen bonds that if my memory serves
me correctly are the most energy dense bonds within our body, much more than say a carbon-oxygen
bond would be. And that's why we see fatty acids have much more calories or much more energy per gram
compared to carbohydrate because carbohydrate has more oxygens.
Whereas fats through bed oxidation where you're having lopping off two carbons with hydrogens,
you can pretty much, I mean, it's not direct, but you can pretty much create a cedal
coay right from that, which then goes into directly into the crev cycle.
Whereas glucose, there's a lot more involved in generating ATP from that. Now glucose does have benefits in terms of
amount of oxygen required to generate the same ATP. It just depends on the metric you're looking at.
The final point you make there, Lane, I think is worth restating because it is so important,
which is, and this will come up later, I think, when we talk about genetic differences in tolerance
to amounts of macronutrients and things like that.
But you can really liberate different amounts of energy from the same foods, depending on
many things, but presumably, based on your gut microbiome.
That's probably one of the things that's going to create a pretty sizable delta.
When it comes to how much food you're capturing, in other words, how much of that chemical energy you're able to recoup and repurpose into electrical energy.
There is evidence, for example, that obesity prone people, they have a gut microflora that is better able to extract energy from the foods ate.
Now, that could be reverse causation as well. It could be that obese people eat a diet that causes this kind of gut microflora to bloom, so on and so forth. So we got to be careful about
establishing correlation versus causation. And I will say that, because they can
actually assess how much energy is lost in fecal matter. It's usually around
five to 10 percent depending on people, and most of your 95 percent of your
Gaussian distribution falls in there. It is a significant difference, but what I would tell people is be cautious about saying,
well, this is what we see huge differences between individuals, maybe for certain individuals,
but I think for the vast majority of people, unless you're literally an outlier, probably
going to be somewhere relatively close.
So I think establishing that we understand that there is some variability in how much energy
you can extract from the food you eat.
And I'm going to come back to that as well because there's another aspect, the tracking
portion that we need to talk about as well, that confuses people.
Now let's talk about the energy outside of things because this is way more complicated.
So different ways people have broken it down, but essentially you have your BMR, which
is your basal metabolic rate.
And that's usually about 50 to 70% of the energy people expend per day.
The way I told is it's basically the cost of keeping the lights on.
And we would determine that if you were putting somebody in a metabolic chamber, I believe
that we don't require them to be sleeping, but it's laying there
but being awake, correct? And that's slightly different from your energy expenditure while
sleeping.
Yep. You have RMR and you have BMR and there are some subtle differences between the
tube. I mean, essentially, it's very similar. I've had my RMR assessed, which is basically
you go into a lab, you lay down, they make sure you're stable for 20 minutes, you don't
talk, you don't listen to music,
you don't do anything, you lay there and breathe. RMR and BMR are going to be very similar.
I'm going to simplify it for our audience just because it's an already complicated subject.
The other way to think about is if you were in like a coma per se, where you're away
having some brain activity, that sort of thing, you're not moving, you're not physically moving.
That's still about 50 to 70% of people's total daily energy expenditure.
And that's what we've referred to as metabolic rate.
And when you had yours measured lane, did you have it done using indirect calorie
imagery?
Yes.
And I had it done on anywhere between 1900 and 1950 calories per day, pretty consistently.
Tell folks how that works because I think when most people say I just had my BMR
measured, it's usually not the rigorous way that we're talking about using indirect calorie
material. It's usually relying on heart rate and respiratory rate, which can probably give
some approximation, but it's probably important for people to understand that there's an enormous
error that's introduced when you make that approximation. So what's the rigorous way to determine
energy expenditure? So direct calamitry is the most rigorous way. And that is literally kind of bomb,
calibrator. Right. You're in a metabolic chamber. And they are looking at how much heat
you're generating, essentially. And from that heat that you generate, they're able to determine
your totally energy expenditure and then using an equation based on your oxygen consumption versus your CO2 production, they can determine
what from that is your BMR, which is actually the same way they do it for indirect
limiterate.
You're inside this like hood, you're breathing into a tube, essentially.
Basically your metabolic rate is very closely associated with how much oxygen you consume.
How much oxygen you consume versus how much CO2 you expire
will one give you a really good idea of your metabolic rate,
because the end products of metabolism are CO2 and water.
So when everything goes through this process of breaking down carbohydrates and fat say,
if you talk about what happens to body fat, it ends up a CO2 in water. So if they know that and you can use a constant for water,
if they know that, it's also why they can use doubly labeled water
to estimate energy expenditure. We'll get to that later.
But if you know that and you know these constants and you make several assumptions,
I mean, again, this isn't direct. You're making assumptions.
You're making assumptions about how much is being generated.
You can come up with a relatively accurate estimation of your
metabolic rate. And for reasons that I can't explain, this is something I can never forget,
which is the coefficients for that equation, the weir coefficients, right? So energy expenditure
is 3.94 times VO2 plus 1.11 times VCO2. So as you said, it's heavily weighted to oxygen consumption.
It's nearly four times the consumption of oxygen plus about one times the production
of carbon dioxide, and that gives you that. And for anybody listening to this,
who's ever had a VO2 max test, I would encourage you to ask the lab that does it for you
to give you the raw data, because what they'll spit out for you, usually in 15-second intervals, is VO2, VCO2. And while the purpose of that test might be to
determine your maximal VO2, you can also plug in these two variables to the Weer equation and get
how many calories per minute you're consuming or requiring to maintain that energy output all the way to your max
It's actually quite remarkable when you consider that a highly trained individual will easily get to
20 calories per minute of energy demand
If you think about we say lean mass is by far the biggest correlate told total daily energy expenditure and resting minimum all of great, lean mass requires quite a bit of oxygen
compared to like adipose tissue,
which is relatively non-bascular.
It makes a lot of sense that you would see that.
And then if you think about activity,
obviously if you start doing activity requires a lot of oxygen.
So we have our BMR, which is about
in terms of the energy outside of things.
And I guess I should define that.
Energy out is your total daily energy expenditure.
So all the energy you expend in a day, that's your TDE, we call it.
And the biggest portion of that is your BMR.
For most people, now if you're an elite athlete who trains like six, eight hours a day, you
can get to the point where your physical activity is actually greater than your BMR.
Those listening, don't be dogmatic about these numbers.
But for most people, 50 to 70% is a relatively accurate representation.
For me, it's probably about 55 to 60% of my total daily energy expenditure
because I do train like two and a half hours a day.
So that is a significant contributor.
So we have that.
Then we have what's called TEF, which is the thermic effect of food or diet induced thermogenesis.
And this is anywhere from five to 10%
of your total daily energy expenditure for most people.
Very, very hard to measure.
Usually it's expressed in terms of calories per minute
because they're only looking at it in the short term.
And when we do studies of total daily energy expenditure,
I mean, usually what they're doing is using a constant for TEF. They're making an assumption because
it's just so hard to measure unless you're just measuring that over like the course of
a couple of hours or maybe a day at most. But we feel relatively confident based on the
studies out there that it's about five to 10% of your total daily energy expenditure.
So not a big contributor, but still.
But it also seems to be macronutrient dependent, correct?
It is, it is.
We'll come back to that when we get to you.
Yeah, yeah.
And then if we look at the last component,
we have our physical activity.
And this encompasses all physical activity.
So people hear this and they think exercise.
But actually, for a lot of people,
their biggest component
of physical activity is actually what's called meat, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
That is something that's actually extremely modifiable. We see it in terms of one people
who are obese resistant, what we term obese resistant, they tend to fidget a lot. They tend
to move a lot. I was like this as a kid, I still am.
Whereas people who are obese prone
tend to have very low need.
In fact, there was a study done by Lebel in 1995
where they overfed people by,
I wanna say a thousand calories per day,
they looked at their totally
the energy expenditure in a metabolic ward,
so very accurate.
And then they took that number
and added a thousand calories
on top of it.
And they looked at how much weight people gained.
Some people gained more than they expected.
One person did not even have significant weight gain.
And what they found was this individuals meet
their spontaneous physical activity, went up so much,
it just compensated for that extra calories.
So I think this is what people really don't understand
as well.
I want to be very purposeful about how we define need,
because when it comes to need versus exercise,
exercise is purposeful.
So something I'll hear a lot is,
well, I'm going to go do a walk and get my need up.
No, you're doing exercise.
Maybe I'm being a little bit pedantic,
but it's important because need is what I'm talking about.
I'm waving my hands around,
I'm moving from one foot to the next.
I've seen Peter that like you kind of move your fingers
and you'll twitch your neck, all that stuff.
Even though it seems like nothing,
thousands of those movements over the course of the day
actually add up.
So then I have people say,
well, I'm just gonna tap my foot to get need up or fidget. Well, guess what's going to happen?
Whenever you try to do something that also requires your brain, you're going to stop doing that
because you actually can't really do two things at once in terms of thinking about it.
So this truly is spontaneous energy expenditure. It appears to be modifiable by about
five to 600 calories per day. And we do
see this with overfeeding and underfeeding. And we'll get into talking about metabolic adaptation
and how this affects things. But people who lose like 10% of their body weight, they've seen up to
a 500 calorie reduction in meat. So that's a big portion of it. And then obviously you have your
purposeful exercise. If we look at energy in, metabolizable energy,
energy out, BMR, TEF, meat, and exercise,
I'm simplifying this equation a little bit,
but that's essentially it.
If people wanna invalidate energy balance,
what I always say is, listen, you ate those carbons.
Something must happen to them.
They don't flutter off into oblivion,
and you don't create them out of nothing.
Something has to happen to them. And we have a lot of metabolic tracer studies to pretty
much know what happens to them. I think the confusion becomes, well, I tracked my calories.
I ate in a 500 calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight.
First off, if we look at where these mistakes come in, people weigh themselves sporadically.
If you only weighed yourself once a week, I would say it's virtually meaningless. When we are trying
to get data on people, we're very regimented with how we do it. So it's UAN, first thing in the morning
after voting your bladder and bowel, if possible, fasted. First thing you do, as soon as you feed
it the floor after you've gone to the bathroom, weigh in and then we take that weight every single day and then we look at the average and then we compare week to week averages
Because anybody who's ever tracked their weight. I'm sure you've had this experience Peter
You're eating very consistently. You're tracking your weight
It'll easily fluctuate by one to two percent per day
So if you're 200 pounds you could be
204 you could be 196. And I always tell
people, it's like the stock market. Sometimes there's a good explanation for why it goes
up and down like that. But other times, there's no good explanation whatsoever. You don't
just want to take like one isolated data point. And this is also with people who get Dexas
done and they freak out because I've lost a pound of lean body mass. Now you went and
had it done at a different time when you're less hydrated.
Or on a different machine, different software, yeah, yeah.
I don't want to tell them not to get dexas done,
but unless you're going to do it same tech, same machine,
same conditions, unlike cool,
doesn't really mean anything, but you have it.
So when you look at that,
so you could have somebody,
I've shown this example with clients,
where I've said, your average weight is down by a pound
But if I had weighed you on this day last week and this day in this week
You would think you were up by two and a half pounds
So people will start doing a calorie deficit diet and those are well, I see I gained weight
So this doesn't work. No, that was a fluid shift
day-to-day changes in weight are much more dictated by fluid shifts than they are at a post tissue levels.
But your weekly and monthly changes in weight are much more dictated by your actual body
mass.
So, that's one thing that confuses people.
The other thing I think that really confuses people is their idea that they can actually
track their energy expenditure correctly using one of these.
The wrist worn devices, there was actually a study
that was published in 2018 where they looked
at about 20 different devices and found that they overestimate
exercise energy expenditure anywhere from 28 to 93%.
So you're doing this exercise that tells you you burned
500 calories when in reality you probably burned something
with like 260 to 400 calories.
So again, people say I burned a thousand calories on the treadmill today.
And I always tell people, what do you think is more likely that you have found a way to violate the laws of thermodynamics
or that this watch might not be accurate?
Because I'm gonna go with the latter. It's very funny how people are very distrustful of certain things and other things.
They're just like, oh yeah, I totally trust this thing. So there's that. And then there's also the fact that we can't
completely accurately track calories in either because there is up to a 20% error label that's allowed
in foods. I think that's where some of the confusion comes in. The other thing I will say that's worth saying that will really upset
some people is people are horrible estimators of their energy intake. There was a study done,
I think it was back in the 90s, where they took people who were self-reportedly resistant
to weight loss. These were people who said, like, eat 1200 calories a day, I can't lose weight.
They put them in a metabolic ward and they also had them do
doubly leveled water, which is basically a free living way
of determining energy expenditure.
Plus, they had the direct calamity.
And they said to them, we want you to track your food
and report it to us, but we will know if you're incorrect.
We will know.
So the average under reporting was by 50%.
So they were under reporting their energy
and take by 50% on average.
And that's right in line with a lot of the other studies.
If we look at people who are overweight, no beasts,
most of them under report by 30 to 70%,
the demographic of obese women tend to be at the higher end
of that.
Obees men tend to be at the lower end of that.
Even lean people.
Yeah, I was about to say, for lean people,
would the same bias, I mean, bias might be the wrong word,
but would the same error and reporting still exist?
There is an error, it's less.
I think it's around 18%.
But even dieticians, underreported by about 10%.
That's kind of amazing that they could be within 10%.
Yeah, some of the subjects actually argued
with the researchers about it, which is funny.
But people don't like that self accountability sort of thing.
Now, the message people will hear when they hear that is,
you're saying I'm a liar.
And I don't think that people were necessarily lying.
I think people are horrible estimators
or their food intake.
Because if I put a salad in front of you and I dump
50 grams of oil on it versus 20 grams of oil you will have absolutely no idea of the difference
You might be able to taste like a little bit of difference in mouth feel but most people go ah, it's a salad
It's got some dressing on it probably 200 300 calories. Meanwhile, it's got nuts. It's got some dressing on it, probably 200, 300 calories. Meanwhile, it's got nuts, it's got bacon, eggs,
it's got oil, all that kind of stuff.
I'm not saying any of those things are inherently bad.
I'm just saying, it's all energy.
I think that's another big component.
Is people are just horrible estimators
and their food intake.
And what I'll tell people is if you really believe
that you are not able to eat in the calorie deficit,
lose weight, I want you to just for one week track every single piece of food you put in your mouth.
No licks, no bites, no snacks, not an account of our not saying you got to this for the rest of your life,
but just do this for one week.
And usually I'll come back with people who are mind blown, they'll say,
well, I thought I was eating 600 calories.
I was eating 2700 because I didn't realize it like they grabbed that handful of nuts
or they grabbed a handful of potato chips or whatever it is when they take a bite of a candy
bar.
Yeah, an isolation, none of that stuff is a big deal, but when you accumulate it throughout
the course of a day, it can be a big deal.
Eight years ago, when I was really, really interested in this topic, I had the luxury of being
able to spend probably about a total of six days in total inside a metabolic chamber
in two day blocks. So three two day blocks or four two day blocks inside of the blockchain.
Probably wasn't actually very much fun at the time, but actually it was the most fun thing
ever lane because it was everything I love. First of all, I got to be in a room. Nobody could bug me
and we had arranged it so that I could do all my exercising. So I had my bike on a fluid trainer.
I had tons of weights in there, plyometric box, a bed. It was literally a vacation.
And I had this amazing food being prepared by a metabolic kitchen. Like you've got this staff that is making to the gram,
everything that we had agreed at the outset, we were gonna be testing.
And then after the fact, I went and did
the 10-day doubly labeled water experience,
which I guess we could explain for people what that is, right?
So water, everybody knows as H2O, hydrogen,
two, oxygen, one, but it turns out there's a heavy form
of hydrogen called deuterium, and there's another form
of oxygen that doesn't have 16, oh my God,
I'm so glad in my chemistry now.
Is it 16 protons? Or is it the neutron?
Neutron, 16 neutron. So instead they have one with 18 neutrons.
And so you drink a D2 regular O and then an H2 heavy O.
When you drink this, you basically get to exploit a trick, which is by collecting your urine, you're measuring
the hydrogen that's coming out without measuring the carbon that's coming out.
So you can impute what your VCO2 is effectively, and you collect urine serially, and over
the course of 10 or 12 days, you get an estimate.
And so the only instruction to me when doing this was try to be weight stable for that period
of time, which I was able to do.
And it was interesting.
That was the time in my life when I was really tracking ins and outs pretty well, mostly
just out of curiosity, not because I was trying to lose weight or gain weight.
I wasn't.
And by my calculations, I was about 4400 calories in, which would imply about 4400 calories of energy expenditure, the DLW ended
up being 4200. So I was surprised it was pretty close because I expected it to be way far
off. But it was such an amazing experience. And it's like, I almost wish stuff like that
could be done commercially. Because of course, I had to do this with an awesome guy named
Eric Ravison at the Pennington Biomedical Research Institute and Eric Staff had done this for me.
So I was able to do this in a research lab.
This would be an amazing thing that I wish you could order a home kit, drink this stuff
down, run it out for 10 days, and truly get a sense of your energy expenditure.
What I would say is since you're supposed to be weight stable, most people could actually
do it just by default because at the end of the day, if you're weight stable within reasonable amount, then whatever
you're eating is actually for all intents of purposes, your total daily energy.
I'm just saying it's so hard for people to your point. That is a hard thing for someone to do
unless they're going to have a food scale with them everywhere and they're, yeah. And then the
other thing is it becomes a little bit of an artificial exercise because even if somebody says,
I'm willing to, for 10 days, measure everything, then you get this sort
of hot horn effect of they won't take that extra bite of the candy bar because they don't
want to measure it and they won't grab the handful of nuts and they won't do this at
the other thing.
Whereas if you say, look, I'm just going to eat the way I normally eat for a week and
not measure anything, all I have to do is maintain my weight and do what you're saying,
right? Every morning you get on that scale and you kind of tweak it up and down.
Then you can say, okay, in a truly free living environment without the Hawthorn effect,
this is my energy intake.
So, funny you say that.
In science, we know that right down to individual particles, when you observe it, it changes its
behavior.
And that's true for just on the atomic level, and it's true for people.
We have a coaching team called Team Bioline where we do one-on-one coaching.
We have a team of seven coaches.
And one of the big things that we train our coaches on is like, hey, if somebody's like
really resistant to something, just see if they'll just track what they're already doing
to enlighten them.
We'll tell them, like, listen, we want the raw data, we don't, don't change anything. And almost every time,
just by them doing that for a week. Wow, you know, I lost half a kilo or a kilo this week.
And it's like, yeah, like you said, you didn't take that extra bite of snacks.
We have that problem actually in our practice with our patients because for at least half
the patients, once we do our intake, we realize nutrition is going to be an important thing
to modify.
And a lot of times we want to see what the baseline is.
We go one step further, which is we do exactly that, which is we don't want to see you do
anything different.
But we really go out of our way to say, please do not change anything.
In other words, eat that
candy bar and grab that handful of nuts, pour that glass of wine a little taller than you
think it should be. Do everything naturally and even still to your point, it's almost
impossible to get a true baseline once you apply those constraints.
That just shows you how inaccurate 24 hour food recalls can be and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah.
And so I think those are some of the biggest misunderstandings.
Now, I do want to address the whole, is it calorie-calorie thing?
Yes. All calories are equal because again, calories are just a unit of measurement.
All sources of calories are not equal in terms of their effects on energy expenditure
and metabolizable energy.
We already talked about soluble fiber and insoluble fiber.
And then if we look at the TEF of various foods, let's start with that.
That has the lowest TEF. So if we talk about TEF,
it's basically the amount of energy the system has to put in to extract the chemical energy out of food.
So you can't just put it in and then boom,
you have the energy, your body has to do work to get it.
Now it's always a higher net,
even on stuff like, people say,
well, celery is a negative calorie food,
because your body has to put more, no, no, no.
Unless we're talking about tree bark,
there is no energy negative food.
Even celery has like 50 calories,
I think it's, or it might be five calories per hundred grams.
So very, very low, but still not negative.
We would not have lived long as a species if we had energy negative foods.
If we think about how much energy has to go in to get energy out, we have how many calories
you consume and present as metabolizable energy.
And then how many calories we net out of that after the energy expenditure required to get
the chemical energy out is done.
So if you look at fats, fats of the lowest, and they're about zero to three calories, meaning
if you eat 100 calories from fat, you net about 97 to 100 calories.
And then we have carbohydrates.
Corbal hydrates are about 5 to 10%.
So if you eat 100 calories of carbohydrate, you net about 90 to 95 calories.
Protein is around 20 to 30%.
So if you need 100 calories from protein,
you net about 70 to 80 calories.
People will hear that,
and they make a much bigger deal of it
than it actually is,
because when you consider how much of a proportion
of your overall energy expenditure it is,
and I do this example where I'm like,
let's double your protein and see how much more TEF you get.
It ends up being like 150 calories, if you double your protein and see how much more TEF you get. It ends up being like 150 calories if you double your protein.
And we're talking about people already eating like a standard amount of protein to a really high
amount of protein. So yeah, it helps, but it's probably not the cure for the obesity crisis.
To push back on that for a second, one of the challenges when thinking about weight loss,
sustainable weight loss of our long enough period of time is how much is enough on a daily basis
Before an adaptation would take place that would correct it. So for example if we were talking
You're asking the right questions. You're asking the right question. Yeah, yeah
So so if we were talking about
Let's just say one of your dietitians came to you and said Lane. I've got this idea
I've got this patient who is truly by every metric 50 pounds overweight.
We could do it on lean body, mass, body fat, whatever.
If this guy's 50 pounds lighter in a year,
everything about his life has gotten better
from a health perspective.
And this person said, look, I'm gonna double their protein intake
and let's not make it the extreme example
of where you're getting an extra 150.
Let's just say it's 100 calories or 75 calories.
If you could create an energy deficit, and this again assumes that you can change nothing
else and there's so many silly assumptions, but think of this almost more as a thought
experiment, if you could create an energy debt of 75 calories per day by a macronutrient
shift to more protein, over a long enough period of time, could it be relevant?
It could, however, what we're neglecting to talk about is something I briefly mentioned
which has been a ball of adaptation.
I think this is the other big thing that confuses people.
They think energy in, energy out, these are static things that do not affect each other,
and the reality is they are intrinsically tied to each other.
Anybody who's ever tried to lose weight, if you went on a, let's say a 500 calorie deficit per day,
which is a pretty significant deficit.
Do you just lose linearly one pound per week until you no longer exist?
You die because there's no more body weight.
No, we all know that eventually like that plateau.
Now, part of that is just because you have less body mass.
So your body has to expend less energy
in order to just maintain upright posture in those sorts of things. But then there's also the
meat component. As you lose weight, you become spontaneously less active. We see this in animals
all the way up to humans. Then, not just that voluntary exercise tends to go down past a certain
point. Like, if you're very obese and you start to lose weight, it's not really gonna affect this that much
because you have such an energy surplus.
But especially people who are going average to lean,
your will to exercise will go down.
I've definitely experienced that during contest,
perhaps getting very lean, just having to like
will myself to get up off the couch.
And then if you look at their BMR,
you actually get a reduction in BMR above what you would
expect based on the loss of lean tissue and fat tissue because fat tissue is somewhat
metabolically active.
There's actually up to like on average a 15% reduction in BMR.
Almost at every level of energy expenditure, your body is kind of fighting you to get back
to homeostasis, to reestablish homeostasis. We see this in people who lose weight, so if we
take people with the same lean body mass and fat mass, people who have never been obese,
people who have been obese and weight reduced, the weight reduced people will have a lower BMR
than the people that have
never had to lose fat.
John Speakman had a really good paper on this, this is kind of getting into set point theory
that we have this kind of native set point that the body likes to be at, and the idea is
kind of, okay, what's regulating the ends of that set point?
So we understand that if we get too lean, lose too much fat mass, we die.
That's a really negative outcome for evolution.
Can't pass on your DNA if you're dead.
At the higher ends, there are things
that work against obesity.
Like we already talked about that,
neat goes up if you overfeed.
Your BMR also goes up if you overfeed.
But obviously based on what's happening in society
with this shift towards adiposity,
the regulations
going up are not as strong as going down.
If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, the risk of getting too overweight
in the short term, because obesity is not going to kill you when you're 40, it's going
to be the difference between you dying at 80 versus 70.
That's what the research tends to suggest.
The risk in the short term is predation
or fighting or that some sort of physical altercation
where you can't defend yourself very well
or you can't run away.
The risk of predation after man learned how to use tools,
pretty much went to zero.
Yes, you have shark attacks and you have these things,
but I mean, they're essentially lightning strikes
when humans get killed by animals or even other people.
I mean, it's very, very rare.
But then we look at the risk of starvation.
It's very real even now in some parts of the world, and was very real in this country until the 1900s.
I mean, even into probably the early 1900s. And so it makes sense that the regulatory mechanisms were more powerful on that bottom end
to prevent people from becoming too lean than they are on the top end.
And so bringing this back to energy balance, you have to think of energy balance like a
car that changes its gas efficiency based on how full the tank is.
So think about it if you had a car that when you have the gas tank filled all the way up,
it gets horrible gas mileage.
But as that gas tank starts to go down and think about your gas tank as your body's out of post stores, your energy stores.
As that gas tank starts to go down, you become more and more and more efficient
to buy the time there's very little gas left. It's just sipping gas. It really is kind of
a dramatic comparison. It is an apt comparison. And I think the biggest thing to take away
is we cannot know. We can know it a snapshot in time what your energy expenditure probably
is. But it's likely to change, and it's a sliding scale,
and it depends on a lot of variables.
That's also led people to say,
well, see, we can't accurately track calories in.
We can't accurately track calories out.
There's no point in tracking calories.
And what I would say is that you're kind of throwing
the baby out with a bath water.
I'm not saying you have to track calories to lose weight,
because obviously you don't,
because there's all kinds of methodology that people use to lose weight that doesn't involve tracking calories
But it would be like saying well
Keeping a budget is worthless because I have multiple streams of revenue and I have investments
And so I can't know exactly how much income I'm getting and also things pop up like your car breaks down
You have repairs to your house. You can't exactly know what your expenses are going to be.
So therefore, keeping a budget is worthless.
So the comparison I make is, you don't have to keep a budget to save money, but it's a
useful tool.
It gets you in the ballpark and it gets you a baseline.
And I would say the same thing about tracking calories.
The act of keeping a budget alone is what enables you to think twice before a frivolous purchase.
As one example, right?
And we know this too.
What's so funny is the parallels here.
So did you know that the average person, I kind of a finance nerd,
average person under reports they're debt by about 155%.
And again, it may not even be a lying thing.
It might just be, they have really horrible ideas
about how much debt they actually have.
And so the same thing, when you have people
track their budget, well now all of a sudden,
they're on their best behavior
because not only do they don't want to admit
to anybody else, they don't want to admit to themselves
where they're actually spending their money.
I use that comparison a lot when it comes to tracking calories
and we use it a lot with our clients.
Hey, look at this thing like a budget.
So Peter, you made the example that you were maintaining your body weight on 4,400 calories
a day.
By the way, for the listener wondering, I was training a heck of a lot more than I trained
now.
That's when I was truthfully probably exercising three hours a day.
You had a very large budget.
If you have a large budget, if I'm talking monetary, it's a sports car a good purchase
I mean if it brings you happiness enjoy sure, but not if you can't afford it
If you have a large enough budget that you can pay your mortgage and you can pay your utilities and you can do all
The responsibilities that you need to and you still have some left over to buy that sports car and it brings you happiness
I would say go for it. By the same token, if you make 50,000 a year and you're going to buy a $70,000 or $100,000 sports car,
I would say that's probably a really bad idea, unless you've got a ton of money sucked away in the bank.
By the same token, when people see what I really tend to utilize, flexible dining for myself,
and a lot of our clients, people say, well, they're just eating junk food all the time.
No, no, what you're seeing is people are posting this because they're so shocked that they
can eat some junk food and lose weight that they tend to post that stuff.
And people will say, well, you know, that can't be good for them.
And my response is, everything is on a continuum here.
There's a big difference between somebody having like a small bowl of ice cream that they
fit into their budget for the day, that
allows them to feel less restricted and feel like they're not missing out, that prevents
them from having a huge binge session down the road when their willpower eventually breaks.
It doesn't work for everybody, but it works for some people.
If they can have that little ice cream, but they're still getting enough dietary fiber,
they're still hitting their protein, they're not going over calories. They're getting micronutrients in.
I would say, what's the problem with that?
This is probably the question I actually get asked
the most, Lane from Patients, and I'm guessing you do a lot,
which is Peter, do you think it is better
to be completely restrictive
or to have frequent cheat meals,
like one meal a week or one day a week where you go completely off the rails,
or just to have a little bit of stuff that is in indulgence every single day.
And actually, I don't have a great answer for them other than there is no right answer here,
even for an individual that might change.
And I'll use always my example, which was for three years,
I was on a ketogenic diet with the exception of one day, whatever, 365 times three is, for that
many days, I never deviated from a ketogenic diet except for one meal when I had about seven
pieces of cake at my wife's birthday. And I said, that was really interesting. I'm amazed,
I was able to do it. I look back at that period, which was 2011 to 2014.
And I think I don't know how you did it.
I could never do it again.
It would be very hard for me to go on a ketogenic diet
for more than two weeks now.
Someone put a gun to my head and said,
I really want you to do this for a year.
The reality is like that would be a very different thing to do.
So for me, like I can definitely get away
with a daily indulgence or a weekly indulgence,
and it's very easy for me to get right back on program
because I basically follow a very simple rule,
which is never do two bad things back to back.
If you ever miss a workout, which sometimes is gonna happen,
the single most important thing is making sure
the next day you work out.
And if you ever have a complete blowout meal, the single most important meal is the next one.
That works for me.
I also realize in working with so many people, there are some people who do very well in
a highly, highly restricted environment.
When they deviate from that restricted environment, it sets them off on a path that doesn't
make sense.
Do you have any insights for helping someone predict where they're going to be?
Or did you just say, now, you know what, just try them all out.
Try all of these approaches and let's revisit it in a month.
Part of it depends on person's personality and their individual psychology.
What we know is that if you want to lose weight specifically, you are going to have to
use some form of restriction, whether it's calorie counting, points,
carb restriction, fat restriction, unprocessed food, whatever.
You're going to have to use fasting, you're going to have to use some form of restriction.
Either some form of dietary restriction, calorie restriction, or time restriction.
You have to do something there.
When we say calorie restriction, we talk about counting calories and active loop.
But all of these things work because they restrict calories. That's also important to note. I want to come back to
that by the way because this is to me the crux of where I think people will assume you and I don't
agree, but I'm pretty sure we do agree, but let's go with that thread and then I'm going to come
back to the jugular question around that. Very simple. You have to have some form of restriction,
but you should pick the form of restriction that feels least restrictive to you as an individual. And this is where people get really crossed up.
And I'll give you an example. People find will find that form of restriction that felt really
unrestrictive to them. And you hear it all the time. So I tried intermittent fasting. It felt like
I wasn't even dieting. I lost 50 pounds and it wasn't even hard. Then they will assume
that one, this is the right
approach for everyone because it was the right approach for them. And we tend to retroactively
then try to justify why physiologically that also is the best approach. And this is why you hear
people make crazy claims about whether it's low carb or intermittent fasting or any one of these
diets, which are all excellent tools.
People think that I don't like ketogenic diets
and that I don't like intermittent fasting
or anything like that, and that's not true.
I just am not a fan of insane claims
about those particular diets.
I think part of the problem is people will say,
I tried restricting calories, I didn't work,
I went on a ketogenic diet
and I was eating more in the lost weight.
You probably felt like you were eating more.
But unless you were weighing out again, you were weighing out.
And the other thing that we should talk about is when you go to a ketogenic diet where you
have really limited food choices, there's not a whole lot of options for snacking.
You're mostly eating defined meal food.
Intermittent fasting, you're not really snacking.
You're having defined meals. By the way,
that is a very, very, very vigorously present characteristic of people who lose weight and keep
it off is they don't really snack. They have defined meals. I realize I'm going on a tangent
here, but there is something to be said for snacks do not appear to be assaciating, not just because
of the food, but because of
the mindset, because when you snack, you tend to do it not being mindful about it.
And it doesn't have the same satiety effect.
So one of the things we tell our clients is, hey, stop snacking.
Again, if you like snacks and they work for you and you can fit them in your calories,
it's fine.
But if you're having trouble, try stop snacking.
And they say, oh my gosh, I
didn't even really feel like I was that less hungry and all of a sudden I'm losing weight
again, cut three, four hundred calories out.
Oh, I'd point to that line, which is I agree just empirically that if you can absolutely
eliminate what you eat between defined meals, and that could be two or three meals per
day, most people will have not just an improvement of body weight and body composition,
but biomarkers get better. I mean, you tend to not be snacking on the best things to begin
with. Actually, this is where one of the things where I have found fasting to be a valuable
tool, because if you put somebody through a three, five, or even longer day fast, I'm talking
a water-only fast. Even once in their life, they learn a very important
lesson, which is I'm not going to die if I'm hungry. Acutely, if I made you fast for 40
days you might die. But I pretty much don't think there's a human being on this planet
outside of the most sick individual who couldn't go five days without food, subsiding only on water and minerals.
And something about doing that,
even if you do it once, for no other reason,
it teaches you a couple of things.
One, you can do it.
That's a big, aha moment.
Two, hunger comes in waves.
So that five-day period of eating nothing,
you will have periods of time when you literally want to eat your
arm and you will have periods during that five days when you have forgotten that you're
fasting. And so when you take that mindset into, okay, Lane, I just put you through this
five days of very difficult fasting. Now we're going to go to a regimen where I just don't
want you to eat any snacks. And that means from noon till six, I don't want you eating anything.
And now all of a sudden you're like three o'clock, I'm really hungry.
But you now anchor that to something that was so much more severe, which is, wait a minute.
I'm really hungry because I have an eaten in three hours.
I'm going to eat in three hours.
I think I can make it.
At least for me and for a number of patients that I've used this sort of method with,
it's a very powerful tool and you don't need
to become a fasting guru to do this, right?
You don't have to do a quarterly fast to experience this.
I think just one fast will teach a person this lesson.
I certainly remember the first time I really had that aha moment
when I did my first really long fast and realized everything that I knew intellectually
but all of a sudden it emotionally made sense as well. Well, people confuse hunger and appetite a lot.
Here's the other big thing. People say, well, you don't get as hungry on the ketogenic diet or
you don't get as hungry on a plant-based diet. You don't get as hungry on XYZ. I say, that's true,
but there's a lot more reasons people eat other than hunger.
In fact, I would argue that some of the major reasons people eat has nothing to do with
physical hunger, and that it's actually societal cues, stress, and various other things.
One of the things will tell our clients,
Bordam is a big one for me.
Absolutely.
One of the reasons exercise works so well is one that sensitizes you to satiety signals.
That's actually the most powerful effect it has on weight loss.
You actually become more sensitive to your satiety hormones.
But two, you're spending an hour doing something physical.
You're not bored and eating.
It makes a difference.
But one of the things we tell our clients is like,
listen, if you want to lose weight,
you're going to be hungry at some point.
Physically hungry, you will be.
This is coming from somebody who has been stage lean
as a bodybuilder with absolutely minimal amounts of body fat.
When I talk about the level of discomfort,
it is an all-consuming, you cannot think about anything else
other than when you're going to eat next.
When you finish your meal, your hungry five minutes later,
and already thinking about your next meal,
and the level of fatigue is so high finish your meal, your hungry five minutes later, and already thinking about your next meal.
And the level of fatigue is so high that the best way I can describe standing up off a
chair is a monumental effort. There's no other way to describe it.
And we talked about this in the first podcast, but just because I find it so amazing, can
we relive a few minutes of that lane? So going into a show, we're obviously referring
to your bodybuilding stuff, not your powerlifting stuff,
you'll be what, 4% roughly on stage?
I've calibrated 2%.
Dexa is the gold standard, but again, I tell people, unless you're a cadaver and they're
exercising your adipose tissue, you'll never know exactly what your adipose tissue is,
because all these measurements make assumptions.
On Dexa, I was probably 5% or 6%.
That's where a lot of stage lean bodybuilders end up being.
So how many days leading to that moment on stage are you really in the throes of this
type of discomfort that you're describing?
I will tell you that on Calipers, I can get to about 7% come down from like 14 or 15.
If I'm up to like 230 pounds, I'll be 14 or 15, probably more like 15 on calipers.
Get to seven, no problem. Doesn't even hardly fade at me. I've done it so many times.
From seven to two or three percent is exponentially more difficult.
That'll take you how many weeks?
Probably 12 to 16 to go for those from seven to two.
Because again, it's not just losing the weight.
It's also sort of maintaining the lean mass too.
Maintaining the lean mass as a drug-free athlete
is extremely difficult.
That's the conversations I have with our team
battling clients all the time.
And if we want to do a show,
it's 12 weeks is not going to do it if you're drug-free.
Unless you're already extremely lean.
The best natural bodybuilder I ever coached
is him was Brian Whitaker.
And he won the WNBF lightweight world title six times. was Brian Whitaker and he won the WNBF lightweight
World title six times and is the only man to win the WNBF overall World title and the IFPA
overall World title which were the two biggest federations the only man to ever unify them.
And this guy at 12 weeks out you would say he's ready and then he would lose 10 more pounds from that.
Of those 10 pounds how many would be fat? Probably six or seven.
This is the problem is the loss of body fat and lean mass.
What we see, and I realize we're going off of the tangent, but this is really interesting,
is when you're looking at people who are like overweight and obese, they can lose almost
a hundred percent fat tissue.
Now, what people don't realize is adipose is actually about 13% lean tissue. Now, what people don't realize is adipose is actually about 13% lean tissue. So it
is very normal to see about a 13 to 20% loss of lean tissue when dieting because even
if you lost just adipose tissue, you would lose some lean mass.
You mean lean mass in terms of some of the water loss?
Water and adipose also has protein in it as well. And part of that is lost during the remodeling of the tissue.
You have that, but then as a drug-free bodybuilder, again, it's important to make that distinction, because if you're on steroids, that obviously changes the physiology and tilts things much
more towards retention of lean mass, if not building some, as you get leaner and leaner,
you are going to have a progressive shift of more and more lean body mass loss.
For a few reasons, one because your adipose stores are lower, your body is sending out hormones
to try and conserve fat tissue. Think about it from this perspective. If you are 200 pounds and 190
of that is lean body mass. You're 5% body fat, yeah.
That lasts a little bit of body fat.
Now, guess where the biggest reservoir of energy is.
It's the wood table.
So now we're in emergency mode and okay,
well now we can start to tear the house down
because it's more important to keep this fat tissue
than it is to keep this massive amount of lean tissue.
So it really is interesting.
So for him, people might look at that and say, well, he lost 10 pounds and almost half of
it was lean mass.
Yes, but fundamental things that people do not understand is the best way to look as muscular
as possible is to be as lean as humanly possible.
And I would encourage your listeners to go look up a guy named Brian Whitaker.
He's actually a professor of economics
at Oklahoma State, one of the greatest natural bodybuilders
of all time and also a very smart guy, lovely person too.
His gluteus muscles, he's so lean that he has veins
in his glutes and striations that look like fingers.
It's really incredible.
I remember the first bodybuilder I ever saw that in, which is not to say it was the first bodybuilder it appeared in,
but I remember as a kid seeing that in Samir Benu, who was the 1983 Mr. Olympia.
And I was like, I remember as a kid, like, you know, I'm maybe 13 years old, seeing him,
looking at the striations in his lower back and in his glutes and it was exactly that look that you describe.
To think that one could achieve that without steroids and diuretics is pretty amazing.
Brian was about 160 to 165 pounds on stage and he's 5 foot 9.
If you saw him in his shirt, you would go, oh he's a nothing, he looks athletic.
If you see him with his clothes off, he was, oh he's 200 pounds, at least.
And sorry, you said he's five nine and was 165?
Yep.
You can't hardly see it, but the photo right there, we did a three times body weight
dumblift challenge at Oklahoma State years ago, because Brian's also very strong.
That's him there.
And he would walk around at what?
In his off season, 185, 180 still looked very lean.
So again, when you talk about bodybuilding,
and I realized we were probably lost about 90% of the audience talking about this.
We'll bring it back to the other stuff in a second.
But I think bodybuilders can really teach important lessons about physiology
in terms of energy metabolism.
I think it is such an underappreciated discipline because it's very easy to dismiss bodybuilders
as drug using whatever.
And everything you're saying applies to the steroid using and the natural.
It's just that in the natural, it's a bigger lever, but it's still a huge lever if you're
a drug competing bodybuilder.
Whenever I interact with these guys, I am blown away at how dialled in they are on their nutrition.
Insane.
And so one of the things we tell our clients and one of the things I've heard so many times
from different competitors is you have to learn to sit with your discomfort.
That can apply to many things. I mean, even in business, I'm sitting with my discomfort right now because we've expanded
our businesses and our expenses are way higher.
Now, we're making good revenue, but the 20-year-old lane in me goes, it would just take one bad
month and these expenses will crush us.
That voice is in there.
So it's talking yourself through and sitting with that discomfort.
When it comes to food, it's really asking yourself, okay, am I actually hungry?
Or am I just queued up to eat right now?
And then the answer is yes.
If it truly is physical hunger, it's really talking yourself through this and saying, okay,
what are my goals?
What's important to me?
Could I eat
sure? Is it going to make it more difficult later? Like, for example, if you're hungry at
11 a.m., okay, well, if I eat a big meal now, I'll feel better now, but then what's it going
to be like later? All these things weigh in, and again, there's no right or wrong answer
to this. But what I would say is most people can handle a lot more discomfort than they
think they can just because you're uncomfortable,
doesn't mean you have to do anything about it.
You can sit with that.
I think a lot of people really haven't done that,
and even that like internal conversation.
Again, this is why obesity is so difficult
when we talk about people,
because people want to make it about the X's and O's.
It's not about the X's and O's.
It's not about eat this protein carbs fats.
It's not about any of that.
I remember when I first got into coaching people,
you know, 15 years ago, I was like,
well, if I just tell them to eat this,
they're going to lose weight.
And then you realize that stress and trauma
and hard-wired habits and behaviors
are so difficult to change.
And it really is, if you look at the research data, habits and behaviors are so difficult to change.
And it really is, if you look at the research data,
it really is more about changing people's habits
and behaviors than it is about the Xs and O's.
And I mean, even right down to like sports,
I'll use this comparison.
Xs and O's matter, but you know what really matters
for a head coach, leadership but you know what really matters for a head coach leadership?
That's what really matters.
Communicate and get everybody on the same page. They call it changing the culture. This person came in and they changed the culture of this team.
That's not X's and O's. That's habits and behaviors. There's a really great
systematic review by a gal Morish Breckley.
She's doing her PhD over in England.
Humble Bragg, she actually messaged me and said
that reading my book is what inspired her to go do her PhD
and now she's done this great systematic review.
So that's always like the most cool thing
when I hear that.
She did a systematic review and looked at people specifically
who lost weight and kept it off.
What did they have in common?
What were the things that identified as being really difficult?
And what were the things that they identified as being really motivating?
The things that came up weren't dietary really.
It was their environment.
It was their habits, their behaviors.
One of the big things that came up was support.
Either good or bad that support made a big difference and specifically support in terms of I believe in you.
I know you can do this. How can I help you? Those sorts of things versus the criticism,
micromanaging type of support. And then also stress was a big one. Trauma was a big one. Ben
cheating was a big one. That's a really underappreciated part of this is the
binge eating component. I think a lot more people struggle with that than would
like to admit. Because if you look at people, I would say Monday through Friday,
a lot of people do great. And they get to the weekend and they get the pancakes in
the morning. They're drinking throughout the day.
By the way, everyone, alcohol has calories and it's really calorie dense.
And it also causes you to make not so great food choices.
And so a lot of people eat 1500 calories a week and then they'll easily go 4000 calories
on the weekends.
A lot of this is just reprogramming habits and behaviors.
And that's what really came up in that systematic review was it was not hey this diet came out
as this was what these people were using no there was no
one diet that came up as being superior to the others
What came up repeatedly was these series of habits and behaviors that people had that helped them do this?
Yeah, and I think bringing it back now to the energy balance question, I think today we
know a lot more than we did 10 years ago. I think 10 years ago, at least for me personally,
there was still an open question about the impact of different macronutrients on energy
expenditure, both deliberate and non-deliberate.
So, but I think when you look at the body of literature, so I used to be part of an organization
that actually funded two of the really big studies in this space, one out of Boston
Children's Hospital by David Ludwig, and then one was a consortium of people that included
Rudy Libel, who you mentioned.
I'm going to go, Kevin Hall was the PI Eric, Ravison, Steve Smith, etc.
That's like the heavy hitter's name of metabolism right there.
The six PIs on this study were six of the biggest names in all of this space.
And this was a very rigorously done study.
Look, was it a perfect study?
No, it was a pilot study.
It was really designed to be the study to work out the kinks to do the enormous study that
actually never got funded
But it was still a very good study and it still answered an important question
Which was at least comparing a relatively clean standard American diet to a ketogenic diet
It'd be hard to make the case that there was
more than 50 to 150
Calorie difference in energy expenditure at an
isocholoric swap. There's different ways to interpret that. Some would say that's
huge. If you have a 50k, which is what the difference was in the chamber versus
150 or 160, which is what the W labeled water showed, that could still be very
significant over a long and if period of time. There has been a significant
debate about the validity of W labeled watereled Water in a ketogenic diet.
You mentioned John Speakman, he and Kevin Hall wrote a review about this, suggesting that
W. Labeled Water really doesn't apply. There's an artifact in a ketogenic diet.
So if you just look at the chamber data and say, well, 50 K. Cal per day, does that really matter?
Not sure. But regardless, it wasn't 250 or 500 K. Cal per day. Does that really matter? Not sure. But regardless, it wasn't 250 or 500 KK per day.
And to me, that was a very important insight. Because prior to that point, I didn't really know,
because if you look back at the Vermont study from the 1960s, if you look back at Ansel Key's stuff,
where they didn't have metabolic chambers, they're on wards, but it wasn't quite the same. It was really unclear to me. I would say today, the evidence has to be overwhelming
that if, for example, a ketogenic diet produces remarkable weight loss, it has to be doing it
through intake reduction, not through an increase in energy expenditure.
I think that you're 100% right,
and I'm gonna take that kind of piecemeal.
So the first thing I will say is,
let's throw out the energy expenditure stuff for now.
And I know we just spent a lot of time talking about energy
mountains.
It's important, but we're assuming that these measures
are accurate.
There's even air in direct calametry,
because you can only measure as accurately
as your equipment
that you have to measure in.
Those numbers I just touted, you could argue that they were at the limit of detection, at
least for the indirect calorimeter.
The 57kcal per day was probably right at the detection, so it could have been zero, it
could have been 100, were really on a razor's edge of detection.
The point you made was that the carbohydrate insulin
model obesity would predict a much bigger change
in energy expenditure.
So therefore, at least that version of it,
it has to be falsified based on that.
And even with the 150 calories,
that would not explain the difference.
And again, if we look at studies that assess loss of body fat
under controlled environments, we just don't see differences between low carbon and low fat when calories and protein are
controlled.
We don't see it.
In fact, there's actually very small favoritism towards low fat.
But again, I think that that's probably a data artifact and not actually a real difference.
There was, you mentioned David Ludwig,
there was a recent, more recent meta analysis he did
that got a lot of buzz because basically his assertion
was that, well, if you look at the short term data,
yes, there doesn't appear to be much difference,
but if you look at after 17 days,
there appears to be a large difference in the energy expenditure anywhere from like 150 to 300
calories per day, favoring low-carb. Was that with doubly labeled water again? That's it. So the
issue was, and I went through this with a fine tooth comb. And again, the metanalysis itself was
very well done. The statistics were very good. But when there was Metamolk
Chamber data available or doubly labeled water, they used doubly labeled water. What I would
tell you is that's like saying, I've got caliper data available and dexidated available,
but I'm going to use the caliper data. Well, that's fine, but keep in mind that dexas
what calipers are validated against. So you're talking about a primary measure versus a secondary measure.
By the way, I've already forgotten Kevin Hall and John Speakman's primary criticism of
DLW and KD.
Do you remember the just of the thesis where the artifact comes from?
So basically, there's more CO2 produced than is accounted for in the constant of the
equation.
The 1.11 is probably too low a number.
Yeah, so you overproduced CO2 compared to what the prediction would be based on that equation.
Basically, what that means is that in a low carb setting, you're probably getting an
artificial increase in energy expenditure.
Oh, so the 1.11 would actually be too big.
It's probably too big a coefficient.
What I went back to is I said, okay, you know what?
Let's say that this is in an artifact, an effect of the differences in measures.
And again, direct calamitry, if you're on a standard diet, the association with double
libel waters is an RF.8, which is pretty good for like free living stuff.
It ain't .99 either.
Right. .8 is .99 either. Right.
.8 is good, but not exceptional.
And then a low carb is .5, which is a pretty big difference from a .8.
It basically just means it's not as tightly correlated.
But let's throw all that out.
I went through every single one of those studies that Ludwig looked at and then looked
at, did they measure body composition?
And what did the body composition stuff say?
Because what do we really care about?
Do we care about what energy expenditure says on a readout?
Or do we care about losing body fat?
I think most people would say we care about losing body fat.
Not one study saw a difference between the low carb conditions
or the low fat or balanced diet
when calories and protein were equated.
So to me, that's truly the metric.
And that's what we care about. So to me, that's truly the metric. And that's what we care about.
So to me, that's actually great news because what it says is, hey, do whatever diet you prefer.
If you like low carb, heck yeah, it's certainly not any worse than doing a low fat diet.
If you don't like low carb, there's other options. By the way, you can just do a balanced diet too.
There's nothing wrong with that. I think balanced diets sometimes can be a little bit harder for people to moderate unless you're
doing some kind of portion control. But yeah, it says that pretty much you can do what
you want and still lose body fat. So I'm not trying to throw shade at David Lovewig even
though I have on Twitter before. It just goes to show you that if you change the inputs
for a study, and this is one of the really fundamental problems I think is out there, some doctors and scientists just aren't
equipped to understand studies, to interpret studies correctly. And people have asked me,
like, how can I get better at reading this stuff? And I hate to be somebody who sits in an
ivory tower, but I'll tell them, if you really feel so passionately, go to grad school,
because I can tell you sitting down with my PI, Laman who I'm sure you're very familiar with and just
talking about studies and having him
literally
Not in a nasty way, but just
Crush me
so many times
Based on my hypotheses and everything and say what if you consider this
That was so enlightening for me.
I mean, the best part of grad school was just sitting
around a table with graduate students and my and Don,
and just wrapping back and forth and doing these studies.
And you just really get a good idea
for how to look critically at this stuff.
And now I'm to the point where I tell people,
I'm like, I don't get excited about one study.
Wake me up when there's 10. You know what I mean?
Wake me up when there's 10.
And even then, I'm gonna look at how it was done
and make sure, and I tell people, I hear this a lot.
I don't trust science because this study says this thing,
and this study says that thing.
I said, if you truly understand what you're looking at,
you understand statistics, you understand research design.
When you go into the methods and you look at the results,
don't read the conclusions of the authors.
Look at the actual results, look at the methods
and you can usually understand
why they seemingly found different results.
Yeah, I'll put in one shameless plug for something
we did, we have a series on the blog called
Studying Studies where we go through all of this methodology,
but I agree with you, it's not a substitute
for getting reps on the field.
In other words, that's sort of like reading everything
about playing a sport, but you actually have to play.
And one of the things we've done internally,
and we've toyed with the idea of if we should just
put them out there is journal club.
What you describe is basically journal club.
That's really how you learn how to read studies.
You sit around with a bunch of people and it's formal.
We had it every Monday morning, I think, or maybe Thursday afternoon, I can't remember,
but twice a year, depending on the size of the lab, or four times a year, you present
a paper for an hour and everybody else's job is to see how you've maybe missed something
or misunderstood something and really poke and pry and so
Every single week you're getting those reps on the field and you get pretty darn good at reading the fine print
We do this once a month internally with our team in part because it's just such a fun experience and
Two, it gives us a chance to pick a paper a month and really dissect it
So maybe at some point we'll put those out there just so people can at least watch. It's one step closer, I guess,
to doing the reps, but yeah, you kind of have to do it.
Yeah, it's tough. There's no substitute for that experience. Now, that being said,
understanding this, I started thinking about, how can I help people with this? And so we're actually
going to have like a periodical research review coming out monthly through
our website that's going to be subscription based that we're going to take.
There are other research reviews out there, but we're really going to try and make this
for the layman for somebody who has no, we're going to say, here's what they looked at.
Here's what they found.
Here's what we think they found if we disagreed because I've read studies where I'm like,
I read the authors conclusion, I'm like, I read the authors' conclusions, I'm like,
well, that's not what you found.
You actually found this.
We're gonna say, here's what it means for you practically.
So that's funny that we both seen that need.
And again, a lot of this is also media driven
because it's about what's the most punchy headline
we can get out there.
I remember a great example was,
this happened so much with mechanistic stuff.
It's like there was an article and it was something to the effect of smelling your partner's
farts might help prevent cancer.
What the research study actually showed was that one of the volatile fatty acids that's
produced by the gut microbiome in response to fiber may have a protective effect on breast cancer
when they gave it to animals in a high dose.
And it's like, that's a long way
from you taking a sniff of your partner's fart
and preventing cancer.
But that's what confuses people.
All right, let's pivot to another application of this.
Everything we've talked about so far
has really set the stage for understanding the role that
macronutrients but more specifically calories and energy intake and expenditure play and weight loss.
Let's now talk about a very specific macronutrient which is protein and its importance in muscle acquisition. So I have a saying that I'm sure many others have said and I'm sure I'm
paraphrasing it from somebody, but never in the history of civilization I will assert
as a 90 year old person said, I wish I had less muscle. That can't be uttered.
If you want to be metabolically healthy, the best thing you can do is have lots of lean body mass. It is a
metabolic sink is the best way to describe it. If you look at people who are even like obese,
who are power lifters, they might have some elevations in blood lipids and whatnot, but
usually their insulin sensitivity and blood glucose is still okay.
If you look at people who train really hard, even with excess adiposity, they see this
with people who are obese, who they start them just exercising.
Exercise is one of the only things that we know of that without even weight loss improves
metabolic health.
Substantially, really substantially.
I was actually on the Rogan podcast, and on one of the points I made a few years ago
was I said,
this was the one with Dom.
Yes, so I said, you know, a lot of people get real caught up
and carbs and fats and all this,
and they're not even exercising.
You are stepping over dollars
to pick up fractions of pennies right now.
If you just got active,
and it's not even a high dose that's required, it's
not. I mean, a high dose is great. But just going and being sedentary and walking, you
will see improvements in health markers for a hundred minutes a week. That's it. And
then obviously there can be a linear effect. People will look at me and I remember I had
my blood work done a while back. Now I do have familial hypoclusterolemia, so my LDL tends
to run a little bit high. But people who were spec Now, I do have familial hypocluster olemia, so my LDL tends to run a little bit high,
but people who are speculating that I would have
like really high inflammation because I talk about,
I still will eat probably around 70 to 80 grams
of sugar a day, but I'm also getting 60, 70 grams
of fiber along with that.
It was, oh, your CRP is gonna be all of it.
My CRP wasn't hardly detectable.
It was on the low ends of detection.
Again, that just speaks to the fact
that there is a big difference between somebody
who is an athlete training hard
who has a lot of muscle mass versus somebody
who's sedentary with excess adiposity.
But it's just not even comparable
when you talk about food choices and whatnot.
You have a lot more you can get away with
with a lot of muscle mass.
Your point that being older and frail,
people don't think about this. The funniest thing I get, Peter, is people say,
oh, you do all that heavy lifting, you're going to be in pain when you're older. You're
going to be in pain when you're older regardless. You might as well be in pain and strong
versus in pain and weak. I have members of my family who I love dearly who have been sedentary for a long time,
who have all kinds of sciatica and back issues. I mean, I have had back issues from heavy lifting,
but they come and they go and I'm still here. I'm still able to lift.
And honestly, I find most people who have experienced activity and inactivity will almost always tell
you if they're being deliberate and how they recall it.
You're generally in more discomfort when you're inactive.
I don't remember where these zingers came from, but none of them are mine.
But this is one of my favorites.
Siting is to lower back pain.
What bourbon is to alcoholism.
Hell yeah.
The worst thing you can do is be a mobile.
I say as I'm sitting here, right?
I notice you're standing, but yeah.
Yeah, part of Journal Club in grad school,
we had seminars every week where people
would either present their exit seminars for their PhD,
or we'd have outside speakers come in.
And one of them, interestingly,
was a lower back pain specialist.
And this would have been circle like 2007, 2008.
And one of the interesting things he said was,
which is now common knowledge,
if we MRI an elite athlete, a lot of times I'll look at their MRI and go, oh my God, you
must be in horrible discomfort. And they go, really? No, I feel fine. And they've got all
these dis bulges and herniations and whatnot. And they're completely asymptomatic. He said,
we'll have sedentary people come in and they'll be in excruciating pain,
and I'll pull up the remoriant,
and they've just got a little tiny dis bulge.
There is probably no more diagnostic test
that is uncorrelated from clinical outcome,
than an MRI of the Lumbar spine.
Not a specialist, you know,
I've spoken with Lumbar specialists like Stu McGill.
It's data, it's kind of like a Dexa,
but it shouldn't really dictate treatment.
Treatment should be based on pain and what triggers your pain.
And that's a whole nother rabbit hole.
The pain world is a whole nother rabbit hole.
People think the human body is like a bag of meat that's just connected to your brain
and now we know that pain is more like an emotion than anything.
I digress.
So let's talk about it now through this lens. I want to talk about it.
Whether we're dealing with a 50 year old woman who comes to you who's never lifted a weight
in her life.
Okay?
So she's the mom of three has never touched a weight.
She's going through menopause.
So now she's actually starting to put on a little bit of weight.
Maybe for the first time in her life.
So she's actually starting to put on a little bit of weight, maybe for the first time in her life. So she's actually starting to get a little chubby and she's not overweight.
Her clothes are getting a little bit snug. And her assumption is, I need to do more cardio.
I need to be more active and it probably needs to be disproportionately cardio. You look
at her and you make the diagnosis, ma'am, we can do some cardio. We got to put some muscle on you.
You do a dexa on her and she comes back, 30% body fat, but it's kind of skinny fat.
Her ALMI is six, puts her at the 10th percentile of muscle mass.
What are you going to do with her and what are you going to make her eat?
Yeah.
I think the first thing to say is that muscle is a lot like bone in that you
want to lay down as much as possible because eventually it's going to start receding.
But it is still possible to add muscle, and people will hear that and go, well, I'm 50
and I might as well not even...
Yeah, it's exactly.
No, in fact, right across the street from my lab at the University of Illinois, trying
not my lab, the lab I was in, right across the street at the University of Illinois, trying out my lab. The lab I was in right across
the street at the exercise physiology building. They did study an 80 year old frail elderly.
Well they basically had them start where they would squat to a high chair and come up.
Gradually they put the chair down. This was like a 16 week study and I don't have the citation
but I just remember talking to the other grad student about it. So please forgive me, everyone out there.
But they said they were amazed because by the end of it, one, these people as a percentage
of their body weight increased their lean body mass pretty much the same amount that a
20 year old does.
The relative increase was similar now that they had less overall mass they put on because
their weight was lower to start.
And they said by the end, some of them were actually able to add weight.
Squat with weight, yeah.
And squat all the way down to a parallel chair. The people in the study were completely
mind blown that this was possible for them. And it's 16 weeks. It's not even a long time.
And we're talking about people who like probably think that they're heading for a wheelchair.
It is never too late to get active.
And let's bring it back to your finance example. It's never too late to start saving.
It's true if you can be one of the fortunate people who write out a college or who doesn't
even go to college and go straight to work out of high school or whatever, and you can start
saving right away, well that's fantastic. But just because you've made it to 40 and you've
been scrapping by and you haven't been able to save, but now you come into a little bit of disposable income and you can start saving.
There is zero downside to that.
Better late than never.
Absolutely.
That's a great comparison.
I actually never thought about that before, so I'm going to steal that for later.
So I'll give correct attribution.
And then as far as diet wise, when I see that woman in my practice, which I see all the
time, I'll tell you what she looks like.
And I want you to compare it to your version of that.
But when I see that woman, she looks exactly as I've said, right?
So she's 50.
She's going through menopause.
She still looks normal, but the composition of her body is really changing.
You do that, Dexas.
She's 30, 35% body fat, very little muscle mass.
You take us close scrutiny of what she's eating. She's
getting 50 to 60 grams of protein a day on a good day. And when you do a strength metric
assessment on her, she is incredibly weak. Even if you were to compare her to another
female at an appropriate age adjustment, I have a very stark conversation with her
and I pull up something called the death bars.
So the death bars are this analysis that Bob Kaplan did
for me, God, probably about six months ago, a year ago,
which is basically just causes of death by decade.
I double click on accidental deaths.
This death bars is so cool
because you can double click on it all over the place and
Once you call out accidental deaths, you realize something really interesting
Unlike cardiovascular disease cancer Alzheimer's disease
Which are very age dependent meaning the older you get the more the incidence goes up generally with cancer
It actually comes down a little bit in the last decade
Accidental deaths are basically the same forever.
So from 10 year olds to 20 year olds and 80 year olds to 90 year olds, they all have
the same number of accidental deaths per year, more or less.
What differs dramatically is the type of accident.
So in young people, it is disproportionately sadly overdoses that are the lion's share
followed by automotive accidents.
In the oldest subset of the population, it becomes almost entirely accidental falls.
And when you show somebody this graph because it's so pronounced, I've never seen a person
who doesn't just stop in their tracks because they cannot believe
how much morbidity and mortality results from falling and frailty once you reach about the age of 70, 75.
I mean, the data is there to back it of lack of muscular strength or lack of muscle.
And if you look at, they've done these meta-analyses of mortality, showing that your lean body mass is inversely proportional to your risk of mortality after age like 50. And by the way, strength is even slightly higher.
So the hazard ratio for being strong to not strong
is about 3.2 for all-cause mortality.
Think about that.
Big hazard ratio.
Fork in staggering hazard ratio.
You talk about on the level of smoking right there.
No, it's higher than smoking actually.
Smoking is about two.
So to put that in perspective, end stage renal disease
is about three.
And the only thing that's higher, and I
talked about this on another podcast,
is elite, meaning top 2.5% tile of VO2 max,
compared to bottom 25th percentile of VO2 max.
That has a delta of five, 5.1 is the hazard ratio.
And of course, these are not mutually exclusive.
So why not have remarkable cardio-respiratory fitness,
muscle mass, and strength?
So I think one of the big barriers,
especially with the type of client you're talking about,
is, well, I don't want to get too bulky or too muscular.
Can you dispel the myth of accidental muscle, please?
Yeah, so as someone who's spent their entire adult life trying to get too muscular
and basically just looks really fit in a t-shirt, don't worry about that, you're going to be okay.
And if you do start to get too muscular, you can always just back off, pretty easy.
That's like saying, I mean, literally let's use a financial comparison.
I'm worried about getting too rich. I might get too rich. And if you're worried
about that, we've got some great philanthropies that we can introduce you to. Yes, exactly.
So it's like getting in a car and worried about becoming a NASCAR driver spontaneously,
you know, just the amount of benefit you will get from three times a week, 30 to 40 minutes of resistance
training, not even crazy intense resistance training, just an amount that forces your body
to adapt will be unbelievable in terms of your level of fitness and your ability to live a long, healthy life.
So tell me what you would do. So let's use this, again, this generic, but rather very specific example
of this 50-year-old woman who is not completely unfit. So let's even give it to her that she still
does yoga, walks, does some stuff, but she's never lifted weights before.
Tell me what her first four month program looks like from you.
First off, what's reasonable for her lifestyle?
Like, what can she actually do?
So let's say she says, Lane, I'm willing to commit to 45 minutes three times a week in
the weight room.
I think that probably lower body strength is a little bit more important than upper body
strength in terms of preventing falls.
I mean, we always think about falls from a bone density perspective.
We don't want people to fall and break their hip because that specific fall is pretty much
a death sentence if you're over the age of 65.
People worry about the bone density.
Well, if they didn't fall in the first place, if they had the muscle mass to catch themselves,
you wouldn't have to worry about that.
And also, by the way, bone density is increased by lifting weights much more than anything
you'd ever get through your diet.
So I would say, let's just see what you can do.
And then I would probably do two lower body days, one upper body day, could even flip
flop it on alternating weeks if you wanted to even it out.
And it would mostly be honestly just some machine stuff that's very easy for her to do to
get in there because honestly, she'd ever trained before, everything's going to cause an adaptation.
And that's what we're looking to get.
And I'm not going to have her come in and try and free squat or deadlift or anything like
that.
That's a really horrible idea.
It's just going to frustrate her and not actually
apply the load where we want it because she's not going to be able to balance it very well.
So when you say machines, would you be thinking like, look, you'd be happy with her doing a leg
extension, a leg curl, a leg press, yeah. Would you have her do anything that's a little more compounded
and complicated, for example, holding dumbbells and stepping up onto a bench where now she has to manage grip
strength with a bit of balance and also getting the leg load.
Or is that not first cycle?
I probably wouldn't do that in the initial weeks just because the soreness is going to be
so high, it's going to impede a lot of that movement well.
And people tend to think about soreness in the wrong way.
It's correlated with muscle growth and strength, but it is not causative. And so what I'll tell people is, if you're sore all the time, you're probably training
incorrectly. If you're never sore, you're also probably training incorrectly. So it's something that
if you're doing an appropriate amount of volume and intensity, there probably should be some soreness
from time to time. But if you're getting sore all the time, then your programming is pretty bad.
Well, I'm trying to do in the initial stages is just actually get enough to adapt and not cause
enormous amounts of soreness. Can discourage her as well? It can be discouraging. That's it. I mean,
if you can't go about like everybody's knowing that feeling after their first like hard squat
day, good luck doing anything. And so that's going to be a discouraging thing, especially if somebody's got life, not all
of us are meatheads who love that feeling.
Also it's going to impede her subsequent sessions, especially if you're talking about something
like a step up that requires more coordination, if you're overly sore, that's going to be
really, really difficult.
So I'm probably going to try and get her through like four to six weeks, which if we look
at the data on muscle protein turnover, I think we talked about this last time a little bit, you don't really see increases in hypertrophy during the six weeks, which if we look at the data on muscle protein turnover, I think
we talked about this last time a little bit, you don't really see increases in hypertrophy
during the six weeks, the first six weeks of resistant training, what you're getting
is actually a remodeling of the tissue to be stronger, more resilient, and it starts
protecting itself against damage.
That seems to be where muscle protein synthesis goes up, but muscle protein degradation also
goes up.
So basically, you're kind of in this feudal cycle where it's just turning over the tissue.
After about six weeks, muscle protein degradation tends to go down, muscle protein synthesis
stays up, and that's where you start seeing those increases in hypertrophy and lean mass.
Does a trained athlete also go through that or have you long since passed through that
and are you now generally at the point where degradation is not having
this disproportionate rise relative to synthesis?
I thought you might ask this, so I actually have a paper from Dhammas at all pulled up,
which is really interesting.
So, if we look at myophybrilin protein synthesis in response to resistance exercise, we see
what tends to happen is the amplitude of muscle protein synthesis in trained people is a
little bit lower than untrained.
So you don't have quite the same response.
It depends on when you measure.
If you measure it 16 hours post, they're about the same.
They're about a 40% increase.
If you measure it four hours post, train is still about 40 percent, untrained
is about 70 percent. So you've got a little bit of difference in amplitude, but what really
is the difference is the duration. In train people, it's back down to baseline about 10 to
20 hours after the initial resistance training bout. Whereas the untrained people still have
elevated rates of protein synthesis
even like two, three days later.
And sorry, Lane, this is just synthesis or this is net accumulation.
This is just synthesis.
Got it. So it could be offset by degradation.
It could be. And degradation is much more difficult to measure, unfortunately. If we get
into the techniques that are used to measure this, what you find is you really can't measure all three things at one time, unfortunately.
So you can measure kind of the net balance.
We do that with what's called an AV balance.
You take a labeled amino acid, you're infusing it, you're sampling in the arterial of a muscle
bed, and then the venius of the muscle bed.
And so basically, depending on how much of that label shows up in the vein versus the
artery, we know how much is being retained in muscle, so that we know what the net is.
You can infuse a second label to presumably get synthesis as well, and then you can figure
out the difference of degradation, but the problem with this is it requires a steady state.
You can't do it when you've trained or had a meal or anything like that.
It's pretty much exclusively fastened, because there's too many assumptions you have to make
about the rate of appearance versus rate of disappearance
and those sorts of things.
You can measure synthesis very easily,
well, I wouldn't say very easily,
but much easier than degradation.
And you can measure degradation,
but the problem with degradation is how you're measuring it.
We know that, for example, out of every amino acid
that's used for protein synthesis, seven out of
eight of them are actually from degradation. So, it's amino acids being recycled.
Of all the things we talked about in our first episode, Lane, this was the most novel to me,
and it's the one thing that I literally find myself thinking about every day when I finish a workout and go and get a protein
shake is, I wonder how many of these amino acids in said shake versus these amino acids that I've
just eviscerated from deadlifting are actually going to be the ones that form through the summation
of new myofibral synthesis. Well, I would say is don't think about it that way. What I would say is don't think about it that way.
What I would say is if you want to maximize muscle mass, you want to maximize protein synthesis
obviously and maximize deposition.
The theory at first was all right, if it's only one out of every eight and you can only
really deposit about 5 to 10 grams per day net in muscle overall of amino acids, I mean
that's kind of the max.
Wow. Say that again. So about five to ten grams a day, if you do that over the course of a year,
every single day, I've done this calculation before. So I don't remember exactly so I'm going to
estimate. Look, if you do the math on 10 grams a day, that's eight and a half pounds.
But what do we know about muscle tissue?
It's about 70% water.
We're just talking about the actual protein content.
So if you take that 8 pounds and we divide it by 0.3.
Yeah, 0.3.
Yeah, it's about 26 pounds.
About 26, that's a lot of lean body mass.
I would say that's a lot of lean body mass even for a novice trainer.
So we know the max is probably
about 5 to 10 grams per day in terms of drug free. Do you know how much that can go up to with
antibiotic steroids? I'm not sure quite honestly. There's just a dearth of information about that
just because it's hard to get IRB approval for doing research on steroids. Yeah, I mean,
it would simply be basically the anecdotal evidence of looking at a professional
bodybuilder and asking,
Correct.
I think the magazine's exaggerated a lot of stuff and I would even say 30 pounds of
actual skeletal muscle wet tissue would still be a ton for someone on drugs.
I mean, that's a lot of skeletal muscle tissue.
Go to the store and look at 30 pounds of beef.
We just had a female patient in our practice who went from being not very active to getting
very active. And she had a dexascan separated by five months, which I generally don't like
doing dexas that close together. But the cardinal sin was just through circumstances we're
done at different facilities. The dexas suggested she gained six pounds of lean tissue.
One of these dexes was wrong.
Six pounds of lean tissue in five months?
I mean, is that possible?
She probably did gain some.
Would that be expected to?
I mean, we'll know, I guess, when we repeat it
at the one-year mark from the beginning,
because maybe it'll plateau,
and this would be this remarkable adaptation out of the gate, but it struck me as a lot of lean tissue.
But I mean, if you want to gain eight pounds of lean tissue on a dexa, it could be a lot
of water.
Yeah.
I think a dexa jump off, drink a gallon of water and jump back on and you'll have gain
eight pounds of lean tissue.
So that's my point.
There's the hydration artifact and all these other things that could be doing it.
Yeah.
She probably did gain some.
Most people's lifestyles are in that volatile that you see that difference.
So she probably did gain some.
But in terms of muscle protein synthesis and how much you deposit muscle, people say,
well, if you only need 50 grams to meet your requirement in terms of being a positive nitrogen
balance, because that's how that's determined is nitrogen balance.
Can we dismantle the RDA in a minute?
We'll kind of get to that.
People say, well, they just throw 10 grams
of amino acids on top of that.
10 grams protein on top of that.
I mean, you're there.
That's not how it works.
You're assuming that every single amino acid
after that just goes straight to lean tissue.
You've already mentioned the thermogenic effect.
How much of that is actually coming from the protein itself
being inefficiently
metabolized versus a stored energy source? Do we know that?
I would say it's more about the oxidation of the protein and where it's going, but I'll
get to that in a moment. The thing to keep in mind is that in order to maximize your
deposition, to get that 5 to 10 grams, you need to maximize protein synthesis, but to
maximize protein synthesis requires a disproportionate amount of total protein.
So in order for you to maximize protein synthesis, we think it's around 1.6 to 2.4 grams per
kilogram of body weight.
So we say that again, 1.62...
2.4 grams per kilogram...
Of lean body weight or total body weight.
The men analysis on this was total body weight.
But if you want to say lean body mass, then you could pump it up to like 2 to 2.8 grams
per kilogram of lean body mass.
And you're pretty much at the same number unless you're like obese or super lean.
People will like quibble about that.
Now, let's just get in the ballpark.
The exact same.
Which kind of winds up at that old 1 gram per pound of body weight number. You need a disproportionate amount of protein to maximize the deposition.
It's just kind of an interesting fact.
And the other thing people will say is one of the ways that protein is assessed or needs are assessed.
It's what's called the indicator amino acid method or they also look at direct amino acid oxidation.
But usually the indicator is kind of the one that's the gold standard.
But if you look at direct amino acid oxidation, but usually the indicator is kind of the one that's the gold standard. But if you look at direct amino acid oxidation, I did this.
I pulled up a bar of direct amino acid oxidation, which basically is like, if you feed a certain
amount of protein, or if you're feeding increasing levels of protein, and you look at the oxidation
levels of a specific amino acid, it'll be kind of flat, and then you'll hit an inflection
point and it'll go up linearly.
And they've said, okay, that inflection point right there where you start increasing amino acid oxidation, that's obviously wasteful.
That's extra protein. You don't need any more than where that inflection point is. And
then if you look at what actually increases muscle protein synthesis, it's right at where
amino acid start getting oxidized.
And do you think that that's just an association?
I think it's an association.
You don't think that that's causative. No, I don't think it's causative. I think it's more, if you think about that's just an association? I think it's an association. You don't think that that's causative.
No, I don't think it's causative.
I think it's more if you think about it from a teleological perspective of evolution,
to me, and this is one thing Don Laman was great about, he would always ask me, why do
you think this is happening from an evolutionary perspective?
It would make sense that at the same amount of protein that you could start using it for
energy, that you could start using it for energy,
that you could also start building extra tissue. To me, that actually kind of makes sense.
You've got such a surplus that now you can begin to build more lean tissue.
And did you say that on average, that was going to occur at roughly 2 grams per kilo?
That's going to be the higher end of that linear bar.
So maybe even two and a half.
You're probably going to see amino acid oxidation. I don't know the exact number I could find
it if I dug through enough stuff, but probably around one gram per kilogram of body weight protein
and take something around there. Oh, I see. So you even start to see that at such a low level.
Oh, yeah. Once you pass the RDA, you'll probably just start to oxidize amino acids.
So you really got to think about protein as you've got
to throw in a lot more to get out what you wanted.
So it's just a very inefficient system.
Correct.
Which works to your advantage because again,
that wasteful feudal cycle is wasting energy.
You're expending more energy.
And is that all through gluconeogenesis lane?
All of that oxidation is it going to the liver to make glucose?
It's been a while, so forgive me. I could be wrong.
There is, I believe, some direct amino acid oxidation in terms of,
you have to deaminate it first. But after that, there's some pretty quick ways to oxidize some
of those intermediates. And some of them can enter the crebs cycle directly.
That's right. Yes, yes, yes. We do see some paths for amino acids to enter.
Think about kid glute rate. Alpha kid glute rate. Yeah. Exactly. So that's a direct, I believe,
from glutamate. There are these places. I think it's like 60% of protein is gluconeogenic.
That's right. Not all of it is. Yeah yeah. There is some specific ketogenic amino acids.
If I was still in grad school, I would know this.
This is a dumb dagostean question.
He would know this, right?
I think one of the branch chains is actually ketogenic.
There are pathways to both,
but that's what the beautiful thing about metabolism
is like nothing is actually wasted.
If it's given off as heat or something like that,
it's because there was a reason for it. If it's metabolized in the glucose, it's because there was a reason
for it. It's one of the beautiful things. In fact, one of the pieces of artwork I want
to get in my office is the chart of metabolism. It's just such a cool thing to look at. And
almost as a scientist, I can look at that and go, you know, I could believe there's a
God. Just from like how beautiful that is, you know what I mean?
This is actually great background. So let's go back to our woman. You got her in the gym.
She's there three days a week, 45 minutes at a time. We're doing two days lower body,
one day upper body to start. For the first six weeks, the goal is don't get hurt, don't
get too sore, build up the habit of doing this thing, find some enjoyment, get the tissue
resilience. You're probably overly degrading muscle
and not so much synthesizing,
so don't expect to actually add lean mass.
When you do your intake assessment on her,
you find out she, let's say she weighs 135 pounds,
so that's what 60-ish kilos,
and you find out she's eating 50 grams of protein a day.
You can probably think better through how many calories she's probably getting on average, but let's say she's getting 2300 calories per day of which only 200 is coming from her protein.
How do you change her macros with obviously the most important being a protein.
I think one of the biggest things that I really work on people, especially with like our app, carbon diet
coach.
Tell me what the app is again.
I've seen it on Instagram.
Yeah, it's called carbon diet coach.
So basically it's, if people feel like they have a little bit more independence or they
can't afford a one-on-one coach.
So basically the app is a nutrition coaching app.
If you put in your metrics, it will give you macros.
To follow has a food tracker.
And then every week you check in with the coach,
which is an algorithm, and it will adjust your macros
based on your progress.
We've had thousands of awesome testimonials,
so it's pretty cool to see, but one of the big things
we'll get, especially from like gin pop,
is how do I hit these protein recommendations?
And when I go in, most of their protein sources
are really fatty cuts of meat, that's one thing. And so I'll say, okay, one, pump up your portion size, but let's select
leaner cuts of meat. Because you're not necessarily trying to increase their calories,
you're trying to basically keep them almost isocaloric, but shift more to protein.
Absolutely. And sometimes even like in her case, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it,
because she's
already kind of small. But if people do have a little bit of excess body fat, especially if
they're new to training, they can recomp, absolutely can recomp, lose fat and gain muscle at the
same time. And in that case, that might be a place where I would do it. Just because it sounds
like she has a little bit more body fat than she probably should for her body weight.
Let's assume her height is such that by BMI, she's totally fine.
She said BMI at 25, but we would love to see her be at 22% body fat in two years, instead
of 35% body fat.
In two years, I'd like to see her have 10 more pounds of muscle.
That's pretty reasonable goals.
And so one of the things I would say is, okay, let's look at the portions of, if you are
eating meat, let's look at the portions of meat you are eating. What's your protein target for her?
A lot of it's going to be one, what can I get her to eat? Starting from theoretically,
exception. Yeah, I would probably say if we could get you like 120 grams,
about a gram per pound almost. Yeah, it probably could be a little bit less 110,
doesn't have a lot of lean body
mass. So probably 110 is going to be just fine. Anywhere in that range it can be just fine.
And then your strategy is what? How much in shake? How much in yeah? First thing is breakfast. So
breakfast is where most Americans are very low in protein because most breakfast foods are
they don't eat breakfast or it's a banana or it's cereal or it's oatmeal or whatever. Oh, and sorry, I'm going to just keep making shit up to be funny.
She says, but Lane, the thing that has been so helpful for me is I do time restricted eating.
I do just two meals a day lunch and dinner. So first thing I would say is, okay, why are you doing
time restricted eating? And she'll say because it really helps me maintain my weight.
Thing I would say is, okay, you can probably still get the vast majority of the benefits
of timer-stricted eating, just throwing down a lean protein source or a shake in the morning.
You're getting in, boom, another 25 or 30 grams of protein, you're stimulating protein
synthesis, and protein itself, high protein diets actually mimics some of the things
that go up during fasting.
I would say that protein acts a little bit differently.
And one of the things I said to people, if they are trying to increase or maximize lean
body mass, but they want to do time restricted eating for the benefits of satiety and lifestyle,
cool.
Do that, but throw in a protein shake in the morning. Just because it's not gonna mess up
many of those things and it's gonna help with lean body mass.
If she said, I mean, maybe I'm saying this now,
but just what about M-Tore?
M-Tore is responsive to amino acids
and of course, I'm gonna argue you're not getting much M-Tore
suppression with an overnight fast and skipping breakfast,
but what about low IGF and all of these other things?
Aren't these the important pillars of longevity
isn't all this extra protein you're making me eat
at odds with that?
Let me answer that question after I get
to how I'd add more protein.
I was talking about somebody about this the other day
and so many people mess it up.
The next thing I would do is, okay, let's look at lunch,
where can we get more protein?
If it's not a shaker or anything like that,
let's pump up some lean protein in the sandwich or let's add it to your salad or whatever it is. I don't want to fundamentally
change how she's eating if the calorie amount is okay. I want to make small changes that
aren't going to feel disruptive to her current lifestyle. The minimal disruption to the
current lifestyle. In fact, the research shows that in terms of dietary adherence, the
less you can change, the better they will do because it's already close to their current lifestyle.
Then if we get to dinner, which is where most people get about 65% of their protein, again,
assuming we've got 20-30 grams of breakfast, 20-30 grams at lunch, and again, people say,
well, how many shakes can I have?
Hey, if you like having shakes, there's nothing wrong with shakes.
Absolutely nothing wrong.
Go ham. There's nothing wrong with shakes. Absolutely nothing wrong. Go ham.
There's nothing wrong with it.
And then at dinner, obviously, okay,
if they've been having fattier cuts of meat,
which a lot of people, they have a ribeye.
And again, I'm not saying you can't have those things,
but again, if calories are a consideration,
ribeye, t-bone, those sorts of things, okay,
well, let's move to like a sirloin or a filet
or a chicken breast.
You can get pork chops that are really lean too that are
very tasty.
Venison, I was at a place called Steelbock here in Tampa and they had a Venison rib eye
or something like that.
I think it was a Venison rib eye.
Amazing.
It was like four grams of fat per serving.
Amazing.
By simply changing the cuts of meat, you can pump up the protein, reduce the fat, your
calories kind of stay about the same. By simply changing the cuts of meat, you can pump up the protein, reduce the fat, your calories
kind of stay about the same.
I like to use shakes wherever somebody just says, hey, I just don't have, especially as
people get older, they tend to consume less protein and have less of an appetite for protein,
especially like the mass vacation as people get older, they just don't like having to chew
as much.
And so shakes can be a really, really useful tool.
And even if somebody's having a carb heavy breakfast
typically like a cereal, something like that.
This such good ready to drink shakes out there right now,
instead of milk on your cereal,
just put a protein shake of vanilla protein shake.
And boom, you've got 30 grams of protein instead of eight.
Now, I mean, Peter, I'm sure you can speak to this.
Compared to what I started like in the late 90s,
early 2000s, I mean, literally I got'm sure you can speak to this. Compared to when I started like in the late 90s, early 2000s,
I mean, literally I got a can of unflavored protein
from GNC one time.
I was like, oh, I can do this because it was cheap
and I was a college student.
And I could not do, it was like chalk.
It was literally like chalk.
When I was in high school,
there was this brand called Sheckley, I think.
Yep.
Yeah, it was, it was pretty bad, but boy, we would.
And the protein bars. Again, not the best tool, but again,
what are we replacing it with? So if you're having a protein bar
instead of like a really burger or something like that, great
alternate substitute. And there's some great tasting ones out
there now. Now your question about ImTor and IGF1.
Before we wrap up her, the biggest change you've made is you've doubled her protein intake,
which in reality is almost an isochaloric switch.
It's a rounding error in terms of how many additional calories you've had.
Are you paying attention to what percentage carb versus fat in this woman given that our
primary goal is going to be hypertrophy over the next couple of years?
So the research on hypertrophy leads me to think as far as carbs and fats go,
it mostly doesn't matter as long as you're not at the extreme of either.
If you are very, very low fat, it can impair testosterone levels.
Now, they've not really shown like an impairment of lean massacrural,
but they haven't really measured it either.
And I would say that if it impairs testosterone enough,
you may gain impairment of lean body mass. As far as
how much fat that is, it's very difficult question because they've done it as a
percentage of calories, which to me is almost useless because obviously if 10% of
calories, if you're eating 5,000 calories, is still probably enough fat. And as you
have more calories, you can also create fat or spare fat from oxidation by using
more carbohydrate.
So first off, it's a calorie amount issue as well. But I would say if you're getting at
least 20% of your calories from fat, you're probably safe. And as an absolute floor,
40 grams of fat. Again, I'm guessing. So please don't be dogmatic about these numbers to
those who are listening. But then also like a ketogenic diet does appear to impair lean
body mass
accrual probably through a few different mechanisms. Even though carbohydrate is
not stimulatory for muscle protein synthesis, they do inhibit muscle protein degradation.
And fat doesn't appear to have the same effect. It's probably an insulin effect.
insulin doesn't inhibit muscle protein degradation.
It's almost impossible to be on a ketogenic diet if you're actually generating
sufficient ketones and that's your metric for saying you're ketogenic with the amount
of protein that we were talking about anyway because for someone your size, it would be
very difficult for you to get high levels of beta hydroxybutyrate with the amount of protein
that you would need to be in that positive nitrogen balance anyway.
Correct. The other way that it probably impairs lean body mass accrual is through just
effect on training because resistance training is anaerobic for the most part.
So her glycolytic capacity goes down. Yeah.
The research shows that if we're talking about ultra endurance or even endurance in terms of
under 65-70% of a VO2 max, ketogenic
compares to be just fine. But once you start getting over
that 65% VO2 max, there does seem to be a significant
impairment in performance. So there was a couple of
12 week studies looking at lean body massacrual and
showing an impairment with the ketogenic diet. My
guess is it's one through not inhibiting muscle protein
degradation as much and two just through not performing
as well.
And they did show lower strength of cruel as well in the ketogenic diet group.
So you're fat to carb ratio in her given that we're not going to go to any extreme.
I notice in your programming, some of the stuff that you've written about, you talk about,
look, here is where you customize it based on how you respond to carbs.
So some people carbs really increase their appetite.
They create brain fog all sorts of things. If you're in that camp, you're going to push
to a lower carb variant here. If you're someone who tolerates carbohydrates very well,
you could easily be on a higher version there. That becomes the secondary fill after the
primary bucket of protein is established.
Absolutely. Protein and calories, most important to things. How you distribute your carbohydrates
and fats should be based on what you could adhere to and what you enjoy. I could argue
brain fog or appetite that it depends on the type of carbohydrate and a lot of it might
be possibly placebo as well, just based on things that have been said in the media. Regardless,
if you know that you just prefer a lower carb diet, then there's absolutely nothing wrong
with doing it, as long as you're not getting to the extreme end of a low carb diet.
And even then, it's a balancing act.
It's okay, you know what? I really, really enjoy the ketogenic diet.
My goal is, in to be the biggest, most muscular person I could possibly can be.
Well, you can still gain lean body mass on the ketogenic diet.
This is where nutrition communication really requires nuance.
Because what somebody might hear what I just said is
Lens saying you can't gain muscle in the ketogenic diet.
I'm just saying you can't gain as much,
but you can absolutely gain muscle.
Same thing with intermittent fasting.
You can absolutely gain muscle and intermittent fasting.
Are you going to build as much?
Probably not quite.
But again, it depends on what your goal is.
If your goal is, my primary focus is muscle mass, then I would say, okay, protein calories
and making sure you have enough carbohydrate as well.
But if your primary goal is maintaining body composition, and if you put a little bit less
muscle mass, but you like being low carb, then do it.
So it's really going to boil down to, for this individual lady, what do you like best?
And then even for some people, if they get overwhelmed by like protein carbs and fats,
they'll say, hey, hey, just track your calories
and track your protein.
That's it, those are the big buckets.
And then if you wanna get more granular, you can.
Like I get granular because I wanna make sure
I'm kinda getting a consistent amount
of carbohydrates and fats
because I don't want my performance to fluctuate very much.
I also don't want my body weight to fluctuate a ton
because I use that to track various metrics in our app.
For most people people calories and protein
Two huge buckets and you're getting 99 99% of the benefits
Now I want to come back to your what this person might say about mTOR and IGF1
I forget these things are bad. I know Davidson Claire has brought a lot of stuff and saying you know
I really try to limit mTOR and IGF1 and it will never cease to amaze me how many
IGF1 and it will never cease to amaze me. How many scientists do not understand the difference between a short-term,
truncated, acute response to a stressor versus
dysregulated signaling that persists indefinitely?
And what I mean is when you look at
mTOR elevations that lead to cancer and whatnot, those originate at what I would say mostly insulin resistance.
So you're having elevations in insulin, you're having elevations in insulin signaling through AKT, which can then transmit to imtore.
It's like this chronic low level pushing that button.
As opposed to a pulsatile.
low level pushing that button. As opposed to a pulsatile.
That is a big difference between a dose of protein that causes mTOR to arise, go back
down in a natural rhythm.
Also tissue-specific.
We're talking about in skeletal muscle, not liver, not brain, necessarily those sorts
of things.
IGF1, same deal.
And what I will say is, where are all the resistance trained people that are getting cancer
by the droves?
Because if you want to talk about amplitude of response from MTOR, resistance training dwarfs
what protein does.
If we look at the meta-analyses on cancer incidents amongst resistance trainers, and
there's getting to be some now. We see lower levels of cancer
in people who resistance train. So what that tells me is there's a difference between these two
signals. And I want to point out something there because I think it would be very quick to say,
but Lane, there's a healthy user bias there. Bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, I don't think what you're
saying is that that proves that lifting makes you live longer. I think what you're actually saying is, no, it's the contrapositive.
It demonstrates that lifting doesn't increase
mTOR to the point of it being detrimental to your health.
That can be asserted, I think, from that observation.
Or that it's also tissue-specific.
That's part of it.
Let's use a different example.
So let's look at exercise in general.
Peter, if you got educated medical school but nothing about exercise.
This is one of my favorite discussions.
You know where I'm going with this.
And I told you, I'm going to do something that's going to make you elevate your heart rate,
elevate your inflammatory markers, elevate your reactive oxygen species, raise your blood
pressure, increase hepatic glucose output.
What would you say to me about that?
Yeah, of course I'd say, yeah, this can't be good for you.
Don't do that.
And what is exercised?
It does all those things.
Why is exercise good for us?
Because that is a short term stressor.
I mean, we use the term hormesis if you want.
The body responds to, and it actually acts kind of like a vaccine.
I realize that's like a really triggering term
for a lot of people right now, but it's like a vaccine. I realize that's like a really triggering term for a lot of people right now
But it's like it's like a vaccine right? It's a controlled dose of a stressor that your body can handle and I kind of look at
protein I wouldn't say proteins are stressor necessarily, but again, it's this acute response
Versus a chronic hum your inflammatory markers people who deal with
elevated inflammation
It's not actually super high
elevations, but it's just all the time. That chronic pulse on that, that is the problem. That is the
issue. Again, they might say, well, there's health and user bias there, and I would say, well, so what?
Okay. So you're saying that people who have high rates of IGF one and
ImTor who are healthy, okay, will show me them getting higher incidence of cancer.
You can't. You can't because all these things are tied together because people who have high
levels of ImTor activation and IGF one typically have insulin resistance.
They have poor dietary habits and poor lifestyle habits. So I would say,
okay, that's a fair point. There's confounding variables, but all these things are tied up together.
You can't really separate them. Am I saying that MTOR plays absolutely no role? No. But again,
it can be cart before the horse sort of thing. Like, people say, well, rapamycin is an
MTOR inhibitor, and that's a cancer treatment drug. And I would say, yes, but do you think it's a good idea
to do chemotherapy to prevent cancer?
It's not even really true, because rapamycin is not really...
I mean, it's never really been a particularly successful cancer therapeutic
used constitutively, which is how it would be used.
I think rapamycin does have significant longevity benefits in basically all models
that aren't humans.
So the extrapolation would be pulsatile rapamycin is probably beneficial, but in that application,
it's not really being taken to constantly suppress mTOR.
Because remember, if you took it all the time, you're suppressing mTOR complex 2 and mTOR
complex 1.
So I agree with that point, actually, completely, which is that tissue specificity and time
course are very difficult things to infer from the outside, which is sort of the meta-view
of all things equal, you know, IGF levels have a J curve with mortality, and therefore
very, very high levels of IGF must be problematic and high protein increases IGF levels have a J curve with mortality, and therefore very, very high levels of IGF
must be problematic and high protein increases IGF and therefore must be bad.
And I think it's important to also understand the following.
And that is, I think I might have missed this on the last show, but I think we have this
idea that there's this perfect diet out there that's going to be the one diet that's
going to reduce cancer and cardiovascular disease and mortality.
And the fact is that there's probably trade-offs for everything.
I know there's people out there that will say that protein increases cancer.
Well, there's a ton of confounders to that, like somebody saying, well, there's healthy
user bias, sure, but there's a ton of confounders to people who eat high protein.
Most protein in these men and analyses looking at cancer, I mean, you're talking about high protein
is above 70 grams of protein per day, or 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight.
Okay, well, where do most people, most Americans eat high protein by definition of the RDA,
but where is it from?
It's from burgers and hot dogs, and like a bunch of processed meat.
What does the cancer incidence say about people who have high protein, but an overall healthy diet?
And there was a really interesting cohort study
out of Alberto and 100,000 people,
where they said, okay, we're gonna look at meat intake.
And I think even red meat intake, specifically.
We're gonna look at low, medium, and high levels
of red meat intake, but also with low, medium, and high levels of red meat intake, but also with low medium and high levels of
fruit and vegetable intake.
And because here's the big thing, is most people who eat high levels of meat and protein
eat low levels of fruits and vegetables.
What they found was that at the highest levels of meat intake, but also with the highest
levels of fruit and vegetable intake, there was no difference in cancer incidents between
the lowest level of meat intake and even with the highest level of fruit and vegetable intake, there was no difference in cancer incidents between the lowest level of meat intake and even with the highest level of fruit and vegetable intake.
It's not an issue.
In other words, it's a marker for overall diet quality.
Bingo.
I don't want to extrapolate too much out of one study, even though it was a large study.
But what that would seem to suggest is that overall diet quality is the big rock that
we're looking at here.
And you can achieve good diet quality on a whole host of different diets.
I mean, you can have a ketogenic diet that's very poor quality diet.
You can have a ketogenic diet that's very high quality diet.
You can have a plant-based diet that's very low quality.
And you can have a plant-based that's very high quality.
You can have intermittent fasting that's low quality and so on and so forth.
A lot of it boils down to like, what are the food choices you're making on balance?
Are you getting enough fruits and vegetables and minerals and micronutrients?
And even then, it's so interesting.
Every time we try to say, okay, well, fruits and vegetables have these benefits on health
that we see pretty consistently.
So let's try and take out these isolated micronutrients and give them an assuffement.
We're always disappointed with the results, and it just seems to be a little bit of mother nature's kitchen.
Kind of have to eat the whole food to really get those benefits.
Again, if the Intor story were true in terms of dietary protein, we would have expected that study to see a
linear increase in cancer, especially at each level of fruit and vegetable intake. But we didn't,
what we saw was more of a linear inverse association with fruit and vegetable intake is what we saw.
So let's not talk about a different example of a person who comes to you.
So now let's just use a male instead of a female last one.
And let's talk about a 40, 50 year old male.
So they have a training background, but they are also realizing what you said earlier,
which is, hey, I'm going to start losing muscle mass at a pretty good clip once I'm in
my 50s. And certainly by the time I'm 65, it'm going to start losing muscle mass at a pretty good clip once I'm in my 50s.
And certainly by the time I'm 65, it really starts to nose dive.
So the aha moment is I need to build up as much of a reservoir as possible.
So this is a person who says, look, I've always been an athlete.
I've always done x, y and z, but I've never really thought about muscle mass.
I want to start thinking about it now.
Maybe I've got a decade to pack as much on as possible before I'll go into that,
just maintain it as long as I can mode.
Okay, so this is a person who,
they're lifting weights three days a week,
an hour at a time, they squat, they deadlift.
Let's say they do a whole body split every day
for those three days,
and let's say their Dexas scan is 20% fat,
so they're probably 25th percentile actually for a 50-year
old. And now they come doing, they say, Lane, okay, I want to go all in. I want to know, can I be
10% body fat? So they're not trying to be a bodybuilder. They want to be 10% body fat in two years.
And let's just assume that their BMI is 25 as well. No, let's say it's not.
Let's actually say their BMI is 27.
So they're technically a little bit overweight
and they've got a little extra body fat.
How are you gonna change their training?
How are you gonna prescribe nutrition?
Yeah, so let me ask a question back.
I have they've been training consistently up to this point.
Yeah, they've been training relatively consistently, but when you look at it, you realize they're
not really in a progressive overload mindset.
They've become a little comfortable in their training.
If you dig under, you'll notice that they haven't really increased the weight in anything
they're doing in five years.
The first thing is looking at the resistance training is, okay, just what you said.
All right, you're doing three sets of 10 on everything
and you slap a plate on, you slap two plates on
and you do the same thing you've been doing.
Adaptation is never comfortable.
So what you're trying to do to grow muscle,
you're trying to induce adaptation.
Muscular hypertrophy is an adaptation
to a stressor placed on the body.
In this case, the stressor is
volume and mechanical load. So either you need to increase the weight, the repetitions,
or the number of sets. And doing so is going to be uncomfortable. Your body is going to tell you it's uncomfortable. Even my own coach is coaching me for nationals this year for powerlifting. It's so funny. I was starting to kind of have this linear effect coming back from
these injuries I've had. Then one week at a dip in performance, I also was feeling
really beat up and he just responded one line said, adaptation is never
comfortable. It's so true. It really is. And we talked about this sort of thing.
So just mentally gearing this person up for the idea
that, hey, you've been comfortable.
We're going to go start doing some things
that are uncomfortable.
And whether it's those particular exercises he's been doing,
and it sounds like he's been doing big compound movements.
So probably going to keep him on that.
I would like to get video feedback to see what his form is like,
especially with injury considerations as we age and pain.
So getting some feedback on those,
making sure that he is getting the reg
with an amount of load, progressive overload,
and also at this age, and with trying to push now,
it's also about knowing when do we build in some tapers
so that he can actualize those gains and recover as well.
Because here's the thing about adaptation at a certain point
if you've been training for long enough and
You're old enough
The amount that you need to cause adaptation versus what is going to cause you to overreach is gonna become closer and closer and closer
When you first get into training you need almost nothing adapt. You come in and do one set of leg
extensions. You will give an adaptation from that. If you do it consistently for several weeks,
been training five years, one set of leg extensions is going to do absolutely nothing. It might
maintain what you have. That's it. And so if you want to push adaptation, you have to push
harder, which is going to create more of a recovery deficit.
Recovery capacity is going to increase as you get older and have a greater training experience.
It's not going to increase as much as the amount of stress that you're going to have to apply to
adapt. Again, I think having built-in tapers is really important. Whether you do them responsively
in terms of, okay, this person is being been getting weak to weak, we've seen,
he's adding five pounds, oh, this week we had a dip
in performance, now maybe we reactively do a taper.
That's possible, or whether you build them in
systematically to try and get ahead of that curve,
either way can work.
In the ladder lane, what is the typical duration
of a build cycle, taper cycle? It's probably going to get progressively closer together, the more advanced you get.
My situation is kind of unique, so I get my kids week on, week off.
And we have noticed that the weeks I get my kids, I get less sleep, I have a little more
stress.
My performance goes down a little bit.
I track bar velocity as well.
How do you do that?
What equipment do you use for that?
I use a device called Rep1, which is a accelerometer.
It's available for purchase by private individuals.
It's about $400, so it's nerd stuff.
If you're really dialed in, if I don't push the weight,
I can try and look at the speed and see comparatively,
okay, compared to last time,
did I move the same weight faster or slower?
When we look at my performance in terms of strength, RPE, speed, all those measures consistently show
that on typically on weeks that the kids are with me, I'm just not quite as good. I'm about 90 to
95% as good. So we've actually built in micro cycles of tapering. Sort of a push week,
a slightly back off week
at one week at a time, yeah.
Now overall, through these micro cycles,
we're trying to walk up the volume
and the progressive overload.
And then after probably four to eight weeks,
we'll do a much bigger taper where we pull back on everything,
but we do micro tapers in between.
So for this guy, for this guy, probably four to eight weeks.
Okay, so you'd say, look, I'm gonna guesstimate
that split the difference.
For six weeks, I'm gonna push you,
and then you're gonna back off how much and for how long?
So I like to back off the volume
and also the intensity a little bit.
So whereas maybe we're up to a 7, 8, 9, RPE on most sets.
And when I say RPE, we're talking about rate of perceived exertion,
and an easy way to think about it is if it's a 7, RPE on a set,
then that person could have done three more reps before they hit absolute failure.
So, most RPE's, to me, for advanced advanced people should be close to seven or eight with a few sets pushing into a nine and very rarely should you push to a 10.
There's quite the amount of
recovery deficit it creates.
The amount that of taxation it creates is
disproportionate to the stimulus. So what we really want to do is maximize
hypertrophy and stimulus while minimizing fatigue. Yes, sure, you can get a similar stimulus by going to failure, and maybe even just a little bit more. But if it then causes you to have performance decrements the following
week, or not be able to push as hard overall, we have to think about this as an overall training
program and not just isolated workouts. I'm very purposeful. I tell people I go into train. I don't go into
workout. Working out is just an isolated workout. And I've had so many people with big egos who say,
well, I couldn't possibly not train to failure. First of all, I've watched them. They're not actually
training to failure. I know what actual muscular failure feels like on a squat, for example, a free
bar squat.
I've seen this on Dr. Mike Israel's Instagram too, because he talks about training shy
failure a lot as well.
And people will say something like, oh, you train like a whoosh.
This isn't that hard.
What I want to say to them is I have done probably one of my most impressive squat sets is
I did 480 pounds for 14 reps.
And I've done 405 pounds for 21 reps before I couldn't move
Afterwards first off it probably took me five minutes just to get my breath back
Just to breathe enough to like be a functional human after that
Then as far as like going to do another set first off when I hit that 480 and I grinded out that last rep, that 14th rep, I was so
fatigued, I couldn't rack the right side of the barbell because for whatever reason I'm a
little bit lopsided, it sits just a hair lower there. I could not fully lock out my glutes
and lower back and I couldn't rack it. And there was actually somebody had to run over from
across the gym to help me rack it,
even though normally it's no problem.
And then I laid down for five minutes,
just trying to get my breath back.
And then when I got up, if you told me
I had to go squat for 80 again,
I'm telling you I couldn't have gotten a single rep.
Even after resting 10, 15 minutes,
there's not a chance in hell.
So you're telling me if I stopped too rough shy of that,
that that would have felt easy.
You're insane.
Or that it would have failed to produce.
Bingo.
Benefit, yeah.
And actually, with compound movement specifically,
you don't have to get as close to failure
to get the benefits with compound movements.
By the way, I feel so much better hearing this.
Today was a deadlift day, and this cycle I'm doing
Trap Bar, which actually don't like very much,
but I did sort of my trap bars. And then I was supposed to go to hip thrusters after. And I was
not feeling great. It just didn't feel like it was going to sound like, you know what? I really
missed doing sumo deadlift. So I went and did sumo deadlifts and they felt great. But on the very last
set, I added a bunch more weight on. And at the sixth rapper, eighth rep, I was like, I feel really good.
But something tells me if I try to get to 10 today, I was like, I feel really good, but something tells me
if I try to get to 10 today,
I'm gonna push just a little too much.
So I sort of bagged it at eight.
And afterwards I was like, I'm really proud of myself.
I didn't do something stupid,
because today is one of those days,
because to deadlift, two different deadlifts on one day,
and it's at the end of the workout,
those are the moments when you make mistakes.
And that was probably truthfully,
I think I probably had four reps in me left.
So that might have only been a six or a seven RPE,
but you still get benefit.
Absolutely.
And the research shows that what was popular
a few years ago was kind of the effective reps hypothesis.
I don't know if you've heard of this.
No, what's that?
Basically, the idea is that the majority of the stimulus
that you get for muscle growth
is in the last five reps before failure.
Oh, yes, it is.
So whether you're doing 20 reps means you need to get to at least 15 reps to really get
a similar stimulus.
And in terms of volume and progressive overload, you really need to think about volume in terms
of just number of hard sets within a five-RP.
But the research shows that that's much more accurate for isolation stuff than it is for
compound. So compound lifts are kind of their own beast. You can train at a sub 5RPE and still get
maximal EMG recruitment and quite a bit of hypertrophy. Whereas with isolation, you pretty much have
to take it close to failure. And then the other thing I would say is that exercises are not equivalent. That's a big thing. It's like, all right, let's do a five RPE on a squat.
And then a nine RPE on a leg extension, I'll tell you the nine RPE on leg extension, I can do that
all day. I was just about to say that is infinitely less painful. Exactly. Versus a big compound movement
that requires core and stabilization and breathing and
creating intra-addominal pressure, all that kind of stuff factors into fatigue. So for this individual,
yeah, so tell me about sets and reps here. So let's assume he's much more interested in hypertrophy
than strength. He's not going to power lift. What's the rep range you're going to keep him in
for compound movements and for isolated movements?
Variety is the spice of life.
The research shows that from one rep to 30 reps,
you can build very similar amounts of muscle.
So this is amazing, right?
Because the conventional wisdom says,
oh my God, if you're doing fewer than,
I don't know what the number is that they would say, if you're doing fewer than six reps, there's no hypertrophy,
it's all strength. That's what conventional thinking would say. There are benefits to being in that
hypertrophy rep range of six to 15 reps that's kind of like traditional. Here's the benefits
and downsides. One of the nice things about the six-15 reps is you can accumulate quite a bit of metabolic
fatigue, you can use relatively heavy loads, you can get quite a bit of volume in that
rep range.
If you're doing really heavy weights for low reps, say under 5 reps, you are going to
induce more...
You functionally would have to double your number of sets just to get the volume, right?
Probably not because it's more about the number of hard sets.
But doing a hard set of five is not the same thing as doing a hard set of ten.
You have fewer of them in you, presumably, right?
Probably.
There's probably a greater fatigue effect.
But some people, again, like me, if you told me I couldn't train under five reps, I'd
be like, I'm just gonna be bored.
I don't like doing high reps, I'd be like, I'm just gonna be bored. I don't like doing high reps.
I get bored.
For me, in the same thing with clients, again, adherence is number one.
So if he says, I'm not worried about creating strength, but I really like lifting heavy weights.
Okay, we're gonna find a way to incorporate that.
But it might be where, hey, we're touching one set that's under five reps and the rest
are gonna be six to 10 on these compact exercises.
And then on the isolation exercises, you know, we'll go 15, 20 just for some variety and
whatnot.
But really, the research, at least in the short term, and when I say short term, I mean,
like 12 weeks, we don't see differences in hypertrophy between anywhere from low reps
up to 30 reps, as long as the number of hard
sets are equated.
So really it says, do what you like, do what you enjoy.
What is that sweet spot for hard sets if we just pick 10 reps so then we can do the math
and go up or down.
So the sweet spot is what maximizes per body part is probably about six to 10 sets in a session.
They don't really see improvements above 10 sets.
Now, this gets a little bit complicated because if you rest longer,
each set actually becomes more effective as a stimulus for hypertrophy.
Presumably because you perform better and you can use more weight and do more reps on
that individual set.
So, the number based on the meta regressions out there, and I think James Krieger did a really
good one.
The number seems to be like if you're resting more than three minutes between sets, six
sets, if you're resting like one to two minutes, it might be more like ten sets.
But again, the other thing to keep in mind is you don't have to just jump to 10 sets immediately, per body part. That's a lot of sets. You should probably use
what is ever allowing you to adapt at the time. If you're somebody who is relatively
new to training, you start doing 10 sets per body part. One, what's going to happen once
you plateau? That's a lot more sets you're going to have to add on top of that. And two,
you're probably going to outpatient recovery capabilities.
When people tell me they're going to do, I know you talked about covering squatting
and deadlifting every day.
What I would say is you better be in very good physical condition to do that.
And even then, there is an expiry date on that.
And I've talked to people who have done this.
To be clear, I've never done this.
I look at the people who have tried it in awe.
I'm not willing to give up so many other things I do exercise-wise to just make sure I squat
and deadlift every single day.
But what I notice that they're doing is they're being very clever.
Every day is not a crushing set of that, right?
I mean, some of those days it's a very, very low volume, low intensity that functions effectively
as a recovery day where they're basically working on the muscle memory in the form.
So for example, in the case of this guy, if he says Lane, I'm willing to train as much
as you need to tell me to.
So even though currently I'm doing 360 minute workouts a week, if you tell me I need to be in there five days a week with two rest days
And that should be two hours a day. I'm willing to do it. Where would you say again?
Let's assume that his form is decent. You're not concerned about overuse. Where would you want to put him?
If he's not looking to power lift, he says I don't really care about exercise selections pick whatever
he says, I don't really care about exercise selection, just pick whatever.
Probably not going to be doing a lot of free squatting
in deadlifting, even though that's my personal love.
Because those do create a very high recovery debt.
And not just that, it's very mentally taxing.
When my wife Holly moved over,
and she's a phenomenal athlete,
went to the junior world games as a track athlete,
won the natural Olympia two years after she
started lifting weights. I mean, just incredibly genetically gifted and hardworking person.
But she would look at me doing like triples on squats and then resting 10 minutes between sets and
say, why are you resting so long? That can't possibly be that difficult. Meanwhile, she's over
there doing sets of 10. She's slapping a plate on each side doing sets of 10 and resting a couple minutes. And I said, well, you'd have to really do a power lifting me to understand.
And then she did one. And then she was like, yeah, the amount of intense mental focus it requires
when you have that much weight on your back. And you know, this could literally kill you. Now,
obviously you have safeties and spotters and whatnot, but just strapping 600 pounds across your back and you know, this could literally kill you. Now, obviously you have safety and spotters and whatnot, but just strapping 600 pounds across your
back. I mean, those are reason you're adrenaline spikes. So, after that, she
understood, but that's a lot of recovery debt to create for something that you
could get a similar stimulus by doing a hack squad or a leg press or that sort
of thing. As long as you're working through a full range of motion, that's the other thing.
Very important to work a muscle and a long muscle length. In fact, there was actually a recent
meta-analysis that came out looking at partial range of motion, but partial range of motion
at different muscle lengths and found that while partial range of motion at
shortened muscle lengths does not produce the same hypertrophy as full range of motion,
partial range of motion at length and muscle lengths produce similar hypertrophy as full range of motion.
So let me make sure I understand that lane. So let's just use a bicep because it's easy.
At the length and part of the bicep, when you are straight armed,
you're saying a partial rep from straight to say 90 degrees
is more effective than if you just do the top of the bicep.
And then it's assumed you do the same range,
but because at the shorter range,
you're not seeing presumably as much adaptation
or with improvement by the muscle.
Presumably, although the bicep might be
a little bit different because you would actually have to be on like an incline bench to truly get the
stretched range of motion because otherwise in a traditional dumbbell curl, the top end is actually
the more difficult component of the rep. Whereas if you pre-stretch it, now you can make that bottom
part a little more difficult. So, but if we think about something like a squat, like a partial range of motion squat, if you're
doing a partial range of motion in the bottom half, that is not going to be easy.
So I think it's more about working the muscle in the difficult regions, but the stretch component
does seem to be important.
So what I would say is, I really am a big fan of like something like a hack squat for leg development
If you don't care about being strong on free squats because if you get a good machine
You can take it through a really full range of motion
You can really get a good stimulus for the quadriceps and some of the rest of the leg muscles and it's not crazy fatiguing
So something like that a leg, there's also like really good
pendulum squats, I really like a good pendulum squat, if anybody's ever tried that.
What's that? So it's kind of like you sit in a seat, it's on an arm, so if there's a pivot here,
and the weight is loaded here, and you get in here, hopefully I'm just displaying this. And then
as you go down, the weights here, basically as you get lower,
are your hands loading in front or are you loading? Yeah, yeah. They're right here. As you're
getting lower, it gets a little bit easier because of the pendulum. And then as you get higher,
it gets harder, which actually works on your strength curve because the hardest part of
the squat is near the bottom and the easiest part parts near the top. So I really like those two because those are exercises that you can really
work through a nice full range of motion and create a lot of stimulus. And like I said, I think full
range of motion or training in that stretched position is very, very important. And so I usually like
to have two main exercises for a big muscle
group like that. You probably don't need it. You probably could just do
haxquats for five or six sets, that sort of thing, but people like variety. And
I would keep those between, you know, a six and an eight RPE most likely and
then go to a leg extension and leg curl and those sorts of things. And well, I'd
probably do an RDL, some sort of RDL, because it's not as fatiguing as
a deadlift, but you're still activating similar muscles.
Once again, keeping that between a 6-8-RP.
Are you going to coach that with, obviously, one leg?
Are you going to do Ipsi or Iso grab on the kettlebell?
I would probably do a barbell, honestly, and do both legs.
If we felt like there was some imbalance or something like that, or they just wanted
some variety, you could do single leg.
If muscular hypertrophy is the primary goal, you can create more stimulus using both legs
at the same time.
Then doing some isolation stuff, low rest periods, higher reps, 10 to 20 repetitions, going
to a little bit higher RPE, like an eight or nine RPE, I think those are fine.
And then if somebody said, you know, I just got to take a set to failure.
It's part of my credo. I came from the 80s bodybuilding. I said, great.
Take the last set of the last exercise of an isolation to failure and go nuts.
Do something like that. And that might be how I build on a leg session.
The bigger compound exercise is a little bit lower reps, maybe five to 10, then as we progress through more isolation, going into the higher end of
the rep range and maybe taking some a little bit closer to failure.
And is he going to do this two or three times a week?
So frequency, interestingly, I think that the men analyses so far haven't been sensitive
enough to pick it up. But what it says is that for legs, it doesn't matter.
One time a week is enough, but for upper body two times a week, I think probably multiple
times a week for both is beneficial.
Your pH-3 program is about five days a week, right?
So it's five days a week, three days of squatting, two days of deadlifting, three days of bench
pressing, and also accessory on those days as well. What I will say is for the most part, frequency is more of a tool to distribute volume than
it is an individual hypertrophy stimulus.
But it does seem to me that it would make sense, and again, a lot of people, scientists have
gotten in trouble saying, well, this just makes sense.
But it would seem to me that if you have a muscle protein synthesis response, especially in trained individuals,
that's only 16, 20, 24 hours,
that multiple doses of that are probably better
than just doing one dose and thinking you got it all.
So again, I think part of that's just,
we don't have enough studies yet
and we don't have the sensitivity to detect that.
And also the studies are so heterogeneous
in terms of the population that's used,
their training status, the type of exercises that are used, how RPE is measured, how intensity
is measured, how volume is measured. It's really hard to get good meta-analyses of these sorts
of things. The amount of hypertrophy research that's come out in the last five to ten years
is literally an explosion compared to pre-2010.
I think I read one meta-analysis on hypertrophy from resistance training in the entire time
I was in graduate school.
Are there a couple that we should link to in the show notes here that are, if someone's
going to say, like, I'm willing to wade through two meta-analyses on this, are there a couple
you'd recommend?
Some of that would be some of the stuff that's been done by James Krieger and some other
folks that really kind of looks at our like set number and volume and those sorts of things.
But for this guy, I mean really putting out like an actual program day to day is difficult
just because it's a lot of it boils down to personal preference in terms of how I'm
in a program it.
And presumably you'll get feedback, right?
So you might say, this is what we'll start with, but we're going to modify it after
this first cycle.
Let's talk about his nutrition now.
Let's pretend that you assess him.
So I forget what I said.
He weighs.
Let's make up a weight.
He's 175 pounds.
He's 180 pounds.
I don't know whatever.
And I think we said he's 20-ish percent by Dexa, low 20s.
And let's say he's eating 120 grams of protein a day. So right
off the bat, you're going to say, Hey, you're a little light on protein. This guy is going
to be willing to eat anything you say. Where do you want him? You want this guy at 180
grams a day, 200 grams a day?
Well, this is body weight again. Let's say 180.
If he likes protein, I would say you not have any downsides to having 200 grams a day.
And that's a nice number to shoot for. So I would probably start somewhere around there making sure his calories are adequate as well for facilitating recovery and
enough carbohydrate and whatnot. In this guy's case, because he really wants to gain lean mass,
how do you think about cycling him in terms of making him hypercaloric? I mean, where are you trying
to put his energy balance? How much weight do you want him gaining? Since he's been training for a long time and he's older,
the likelihood that he's gonna be able to gain lean mass
without at least some body fat is probably pretty low.
I get this all the time for people.
I want to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
Well, if you are subject,
A, the lady who'd never trained before, absolutely.
I mean, you heard me.
I was like, yeah, we can reconp her.
No problem.
She's gonna gain some muscle, lose some body fat.
When you've been training for a long period of time, you have to have
everything lined up just to gain ounces of lean body mass. Part of lining
that up is also a slight caloric surplus. There is a new meta analysis that
came out that showed that an energy deficit. It's not quite the same
thing, but they did show an energy deficit in pairs-leamed body massacrual.
It makes sense because we do see in an energy deficit decreased rates of basal protein
synthesis.
So, it makes sense.
I mean, if you earn an energy deficit from mechanistic perspective, it activates AMP kinase, which
can hit with an inhibitor rim tour.
It makes sense, and it also makes sense from a teleological perspective that if you don't
have excess energy, this remodeling is extremely energy expensive.
Why would we want to create more of it if we don't have the energy to support it?
So a protein sparing fast isn't necessarily going to save you from losing lean mass. It might be better
than a carb fast. In other words, if you're going to eat a thousand calories a day, you're
probably better off having them be as much protein as possible. But just because you have
200 grams of protein in your diet, if the calories are exceptionally low, you're probably
losing lean mass. Is that how I'm hearing you?
A day of an energy deficit is not something I'd really be worried about. or resure exceptionally low, you're probably losing lean mass. Is that how I'm hearing you?
A day of an energy deficit is not something
I'd really be worried about.
No, no, but I'm saying let's say somebody took this approach
and said, look, for two weeks,
I'm gonna go a thousand calories a day,
virtually all protein in an effort
to get as lean as possible without losing lean mass.
You might be able to not lose lean mass,
but the likelihood you would gain lean mass is very, very low for somebody who's been training for a while.
It's one of those things that the more advanced you get, the more things you have to have lined up correctly to continue to push, especially if you're drug-free.
And you can do it in sprints, you can do it in different section. I went from I was in the 230 pound class back in 2019
and then I just started to drop back down to my original weight class of 205 pounds. I did that
over the course of about a year, but that was taken in sprints. I would do fat loss sprints,
for example. So I would do like two or three weeks of like a pretty aggressive deficit,
like 750 to a thousand calories a day. And I'm sorry, this is for powerlifting.
Yeah, that was for powerlifting.
And what body fat is your performance at its best?
Because you obviously don't want to be powerlifting
at 7% body fat.
I'm still pretty good at seven.
Really?
I'm still maintaining pretty well.
Maybe not quite as good.
I can still perform well at seven.
But if I have a couple days where I'm not dialed in, I'll start to feel it. I'm right on that edge. I'm teetering on perform well at seven. But if I have a couple days where I'm not dialed
in, I'll start to feel it. I'm right on that edge. I'm teetering on that edge at seven,
on calipers, that is. So I did it over the course of the year and I did it in sprint. So I
would do three weeks, lose like target trying to lose five, six pounds, and then I would
go to maintenance for like at least as long. And I kind of built that into my lifestyle.
I really like that for a lot of clients. Actually, a lot of our of our team, violin coaches use a lot of what we call diet breaks for the
people who are eating at maintenance.
So it's like, okay, vacation coming up, diet break for two weeks, everything looks like
it's going to be normal for three, four weeks.
Boom, let's do a fat loss sprint.
So coming back to building muscle, I'll do sections of, okay, I'm overfeeding in this slight
caloric surplus for about eight weeks.
Okay, we gained three pounds of body weight.
We're going to maintain for a little while just to make sure it doesn't get too out of
hand in terms of body fat level.
Now I've kind of got adjusted this.
Now I'm going to do another six to eight weeks.
But what I'll tell people is if fat loss should be slow, at least for people who are well-trained,
if fat loss should be slow to retain lean body mass, then weight gain should be slow, at least for people who are well trained, if fat loss should be slow to
retain lean body mass, then weight gain should be snail's pace.
What's a rule of thumb for this guy then?
If he's going to gain five pounds of total body weight, of which we're going to hope three
is lean to his fat, is that a good goal?
Yeah.
How long would you want him to take to gain five pounds?
Probably at least 12 weeks.
Okay, so he's doing that once a quarter.
But it might be something more like
where it's six months, but there's 12 weeks
where we get him up five pounds.
And then we say, okay, let's trim a little bit
of this fat back off that we put on.
We lose three pounds.
Then we do another gaining cycle.
What tends to happen is the composition gets a little better each time.
Now this is completely anecdotal my coaching experience.
But when you put on weight and we see this in studies, for trained people, it really depends.
But it's somewhere around 50-50, lean mass to fat mass.
Sometimes even 40-60 if you're really well trained.
So 40 lean 60 fat.
Wow, so the implication, by the way, is when you're gaining weight, you're getting
fatter by body composition because you're presumably starting out at a less than 50%
body fat.
Well, it depends on the training status and a whole host of other factors.
So that's an important thing for you to tell this guy, which is, hey, if you're going to be
rigorously following body comp, don't be disappointed if your body fat goes up in that cycle.
We're playing the long game here. It's like investing. You're taking money away from you now in
this immediate moment that you could have, so hopefully you have more money later. The good thing is that when we lose body fat for resistance training, we tend to lose mostly
from body fat.
So if we're doing this cycle over time, hopefully each time it gets a little better.
Now, there are limits to this.
Eventually, you bought up against your genetic limit of probably your genetic limit.
What I always say is you never really know if you're your genetic limit.
And what I'll always tell people is I show them this picture of me at 21 years old
Where I'd been resistance training hard for three and a half four years where most people say you hit your genetic limit
Somewhere around there and I show that picture and I show a picture of me now at age 40
And I mean the difference in my leg musculature and my overall musculature is enormous.
But if you had just gone year by year,
you would have seen very little difference.
And so what I'll tell people is
you might think you're a genetic limit,
but you're probably not.
It's probably more like an asymptote.
You're familiar with an asymptote.
Yeah, yeah.
You never really hit like a hard cap limit,
but the gains become so minimal that it's almost
not measurable.
Yeah, I think when it comes to this kind of person, one, really focusing on, okay, making
sure that they can do a lot of resistance training because it is going to take quite a
big of a stimulus to get in there, focusing on stimulus versus fatigue, so doing high
stimulus low fatigue movements so that they can accumulate enough volume without overreaching all the time, because if they can train for 12 weeks
without needing a taper versus six weeks, I mean, that's more stimulus.
And then putting them in a very slight caloric surplus.
And when I say slight caloric surplus, I'm talking about 100 to 200 calories a day over
their maintenance.
And now, what does that look like?
Well, that means that you're going to have weeks where you don't gain anything.
Anybody, I don't know if you've ever done this Peter, like try to do a super lean, gaining phase.
What tends to happen is people get really frustrated because the weight comes on so slow that
they end up just throwing down a bunch of calories so that they can say they gain the
weight and it doesn't go well.
What tends to happen is weight gain comes on in chunks.
Just like weight loss tends to happen in chunks.
Weight gain tends to happen in chunks.
You can be stable, stable, stable, even though you're in a calorie surplus, and then all of a sudden, boom, your weight's up
two pounds randomly, and it sticks. And we don't have all the explanations for why it happens
that way, but just know that that's normal for those listening. And again, don't look
at, oh, I gained two pounds from the past three days. It's not going down, it's staying.
Look at the fact that you've been doing this
for four weeks now and you gain two pounds on average.
So you're right in line with what the goal was.
So you wanna look at that monthly,
month to month average in a gaining phase
and say, okay, am I hitting my milestones
in terms of like the overall rate of progress
and try to not worry too much about those little things?
I don't know how we did this again, we're at this point where I've got through about
a third of what I wanted to talk about, but nevertheless there is one other thing I wanted
to kind of talk about and it actually feeds really nicely into this case study of this
man and this woman, which is that of kind of the most important supplements or the supplements we most hear about and what is their utility for the purpose of hypertrophy training.
So let's start with the most common of these, which is protein.
We talked about it already.
You alluded to the fact that this woman might not be able to get enough protein in actual
food, so you might talk about shakes.
So where does way protein stack up in the hierarchy of proteins?
And should we be looking at other sources? Top of the list, wave protein, high in
leucine, high in brachial amino acids, high in essential amino acids, generally taste good,
generally well tolerated. I will say if it's a straight way concentrate, a lot of people have
difficulty tolerating a straight way concentrate, but a blend of concentrate and isolate is what most proteins out there are, and most people can
tolerate them well. What's the source of protein in way? Where does it actually come from?
From cow's milk, if you centrifuge off the fat, so if you centrifuge off the fat,
and then you take what's left over, you precipitate out the chasian, the non-soluble fraction of cow's milk.
The soluble portion that's left over is way, it's what's called way.
And mostly consists of proteins called lactile humans.
It's just a very high quality, easy digestible, very bioavailable source of protein.
In terms of muscle protein synthesis, it's the tip tops. It always scores the highest.
In our research, it was always the highest.
It was no statistical difference from egg,
but when we did it versus egg,
it was always just like a little bit better.
So my guess is if you had a high enough subject number,
you could maybe pick out some statistical difference.
Is there a brand that you favor,
or are there brands that you think are the best brands
to go for?
Incoming shameless plug.
So I actually have my own something that line called outwork nutrition.
Outwork.
Outwork.
Okay.
We have a way protein islet.
The reason we did an islet, a little bit more expensive than like a concentrate islet blend.
But there are people with lactose intolerance.
There are people with sensitivity to the lactobumans.
And so an isolate is generally well tolerated.
Some people with really high sensitivity to the lactobumins can't tolerate an isolate.
And if that's the case, they could probably do a hydrolysate, which is a little more expensive
and doesn't taste as good, but still a good option for those that have really sensitive
GI's.
Like I said, an isolate is generally tolerated well by people and ours is called outward
nutrition build.
So it's just low carbohydrate, low lactose, low fat, high protein, high loosing.
So I think our loosing contents over 11%, I think it's actually 12%, which is very high.
And then the carbohydrate content, depending on vanilla or chocolate, is like one to four grams
and then the fat content is less than a gram of fat.
In fact, the vanilla is zero.
Are there any other brands that you would say, hey, I trust that brand.
One of the things that I think is we talk about supplements, you always get a good
result.
Yeah, there's a bunch of good ones.
Yeah, what would be three other brands that you would put in your body?
Legion, they make good stuff.
And I think, you know, some of the big companies, Optimum, has been doing protein for years, and most companies are sourcing the same stuff.
To me, a good company is somebody that markets responsibly. But then another one, EAS, has
been making stuff for years, and they make stuff that's very, very third party tested,
all that kind of stuff. There's a bunch of good companies out there. What I would say
is, make sure nobody's using a proprietary blend, proprietary blends,
or usually just a way for people to hide stuff, to make sure that nobody is doing what's
called nitrogen spiking.
So what you can do to pump up the protein and nitrogen content of some of these proteins
is add individual amino acids that have nitrogen that are actually lower cost than just
the protein itself. They actually put creatin in some of these, not that creatin isn't good,
and creatin does work, but you're not taking away protein necessarily to get
creatin. You take creatin to get creatin. They do that because it's actually
cheaper. It pumps up the protein content.
And how would you know that when looking at the label?
Oh, it's on the label. For example, I think they spike with glycine too.
So if you look on the label, it might say,
way protein, sweetener is preservative, oh, glycine.
Well, that's nitrogen spiking.
So I would make sure that companies aren't doing that.
And to me personally, I mean, even if a company makes a good product,
if they make insane claims, I mean, I would love to say that our protein
is the most animal-like protein on the market.
But the fact of the matter is, I would love to say that our protein is the most animal protein on the market.
But the fact of the matter is, it's a high quality, way protein isolate at a competitive
price point that tastes really good.
And you can get another way protein isolate that would build just as much muscle.
So I'm not going to claim that.
The ethical side of me says, just look for something that's promoted responsibly.
Yeah, those other companies are just fine.
And I would recommend them.
So let's look at a subset of that.
Is there utility in using branch chain amino acids specifically in workouts where these
are typically coming as far lower doses, right?
There's only three branch chain amino acids and they're typically giving you five grams
per serving.
Any utility in the in workout BCAA.
So this was something that I've changed my mind on and I will tell people like my PhD specifically is on Lucy
I mean, it's right back there who says
Lucy right on the cover, you know, is one of the words and I used to say hey, I think self-millibranche chains are useful
I can't support that anymore. If you're getting enough total protein in it doesn't seem to be a benefit to self-millibranche
I mean, no, asses the only thing I would say that there might be something
is they may reduce muscle soreness,
but it's never been compared straight up
with like a comparable amount of way protein.
So it's possible that that's just a protein effect.
The only case I could really make besides maybe soreness
is also for people who just cannot get high quality protein.
And so for example, if you're a vegan and you say,
I don't want to take way protein
and I can't take X, Y, Z, and my stomach doesn't tolerate
these proteins and I want to pump up the quality of my meal,
then supplemental brash chains could make an impact.
And we actually did a study in our lab
where we looked at way protein versus wheat protein.
We saw that way protein obviously
had a much bigger response than muscle protein synthesis compared to wheat.
That's obviously gram per gram, right?
Gram per gram. Yeah, we, isonitrogenous. But when we added
loosing to match the loosing content of the way, we actually got the exact same response.
So if you're somebody who's plant-based and you're concerned that you're not getting enough
high-quality protein, you could actually add supplemental breast to amino acids, two,
your meals or your protein, and you would pump up the protein quality doing that.
But obviously, the best outcome is just getting it through diet or shakes, and then if you
have to add something to the breast change, you can't.
Any role for supplementing lucine specifically, so if someone says, Lane, I'm buying your
brand, I'm consuming it, I'm just gonna add five grams of Lucine every time.
And by the way, Lucine tastes horrible.
Horrible.
It's literally one of the worst tasting things.
It's horrible, yeah.
No, I just don't think there's a benefit to it.
I wish there was.
I did my PhD thinking I'm gonna find the secret
animal like trigger and just get enough protein.
You mentioned it already, creatine monohydrate,
very popular.
Back in the day when I was a kid, it was 30 grams a day loading and then a maintenance phase.
I think these days people are kind of just doing 5 grams a day every day.
What you're looking to do is saturate your phosphocreatin stores and your muscle cell.
And you can do that through loading or you can do it through maintenance phase.
If you do it through loading, it'll saturate in 5 to 7 days.
If you do it through maintenance, it'll take about three to four weeks. Downside to loading, more GI discomfort, more bloating,
more just overall discomfort, but you get saturated faster. Downside to maintenance just
takes a little bit longer to get the benefits. That's all.
What are the main benefits of creating? Are they on the strength side, the hypertrophy side,
the recovery side?
All above.
It increases lean body mass, increases strength, exercise performance, and we're actually,
there's possible, there's cognitive benefits as well, interestingly, we're finding out.
But I would tell people, do not get caught up in the hype of these other forms of creatin,
creatin model hydrate has been shown to saturate the muscle cell 100% you cannot get more than
100% and the other forms of creatine are simply in existence to remove more money from your
wallet. I used the comparison of big screen TVs. My first big screen TV I bought it was
42 inches big screen LCD screen I bought it in 2008 and was $1,000. What would that go for now?
You could probably get it for $200.
100 bucks, yeah.
Yeah. Here's a stick of gum. Can I have that 42 inch screen TV? Sure. Why? Because everyone
makes them and there's such a competitive market that the margins are this big. So what does
everybody have? Everybody has creatin in their supplement line. The margins are so thin nobody makes money on straight creatin.
They have to come up with other forms of it to justify charging you more.
And you hear things like, well, our creatin doesn't blow to you or our creatin doesn't cause water retention.
Well, I would tell you that the water retention hydrated cells and anabolic resell,
the water retention from creatin is inside the muscle cell, which is a good thing.
And those research studies to show this that it does not increase extra cellular water,
that's actually interesting little water. So, are you saying that your creatin's not anabolic then?
And then you have things like buffered creatin. You don't need to buffer creatin.
Creatin is stable in stomach acid. And then there's creatin ethyl ester, which has actually been shown.
So there's just a ton of marketing nonsense. Yeah, creatin trimalate.
Do you make a creatine supplement?
We have a supplement called recovery.
And creatin is one of the ingredients there.
So there's five grams of creatin monohydrate.
Is that a daily thing someone should have
even on their non-lifting days?
Probably don't need to take it on your off days
from lifting.
If you're doing cardio on a non-lifting day,
do you benefit at all from creatin there?
There's no real studies to know. What I would say is it's very cheap. You're not really on a non-lifting day. Do you benefit at all from creatine there? There's no real studies to know.
What I would say is it's very cheap.
You're not really missing out on anything
by having an extra dose.
So I would say, take it daily.
If your budget is really rail thin,
then take it on the day you should train.
Any other brands that you respect
and just trust that they're not doing any nonsense
or just basically the same.
Look for the no claims in the trusted brands. No crazy claims. No pushing other forms of
creatin is better. No proprietary blends. One of the best ways to know. The great thing is there
are a lot of good companies out there that are marketing more responsibly now. Okay, last one,
nitric oxide or these nitric oxide boosters. I remember this was one of the things that got so
much attention. I want to say like
10, 15 years ago. Truthfully, I don't know how much attention it's got now, but I did see a paper
about it recently, which is what made me think about it again. Nitrates, manitrites, do appear to
enhance exercise performance, beetroot juice and those sorts of things, and sources of nitrites. So
there was a recent man analyses looking at this and the effect size was actually pretty impressive for power. There's like 5% or something. It was huge, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. Really impressive. Five percent, which I mean, that's the difference between first
and last, if you don't know about the Olympics. The effect size was a .42, which isn't considered
a large effect size, but it's approaching a modest effect size, which for supplements is really
impressive. I mean, that's on the order,
I don't know off hand creatin effect size
in the meta-analysis,
but it's gotta be close to that.
What I will say is a lot of supplements appear
to not have in them what they say they have in them
in terms of these nitrates.
The other thing I will say is like something like
citrally malate, it can be recycled into arginine
and then into nitric oxide.
So citrally malate, or citrally and specifically,
actually increases blood nitrate levels
more than arginine itself.
So it actually increases nitric oxide more than arginine.
And arginine is the direct substrate.
That's because citrally is actually much more bioavailable whereas arginine. And arginine is the direct substrate. That's because citralline is actually much more bioavailable,
whereas arginine is mostly extracted
by the splint-naked tissues, the gut liver.
So you're actually better off taking citralline,
which is in our pre-workout, of course.
So there's another shameless plug.
But really, if you're looking at citralline specifically,
six to eight grams at a dose.
And this is more to increase performance than hypertrophy.
Is this going to?
Yeah.
Presumably, if your performance goes up, you have more stimulus.
You might see the gains there.
There is some evidence that citralline can actually stimulate mTOR, but I'm not sure it's
enough to actually create hypertrophy on its own.
So were you consuming something besides water or electrolytes in the workout?
You've obviously got a pre workout.
So the citralline would be before, obviously the way would probably be after.
Where's the creatine falling?
Post or pre?
The timing doesn't seem to be real important.
There does seem to be a little bit better response to after.
Not sure why, because it really, to me, with the mechanism, it shouldn't matter because
it's a long-term thing.
But that's actually why we included the creatin in our recovery product and not the pre-workout
for a couple of reasons.
One, it's not an immediate effect from creatin, so might as well take a post.
It might be a little bit better effect post, so there you go.
And then in the pre-workout specifically, there's a couple of things in there that are already
semi-gut irritants for some people. And creatin can be a gut irritant for people.
We didn't want to compound those too much.
So, that's why we kind of separated it from our pre-workout.
But there's a lot of pre-workouts that do have creatin in it, and especially when you
pair it with a large dose of caffeine, it can just really give people a lot of GI discomfort
if you're not careful.
So, then in workout, are you drinking something?
I usually just, people are going to laugh at all,
like a Gatorade Zero or something like that, you know, in water.
I've looked at the intro workout stuff.
If you're working out for two, three hours at a time,
maybe it's useful to get some glucose and carbohydrate in
to maintain performance, but I think bodybuilders or weightlifters tend to overestimate
like how difficult their workouts actually are.
You only need to work about glycogen
or synthesis the speed of which
if you're somebody doing multiple events per day,
if you're a bodybuilder,
you're gonna be 24 hours to your training in any way.
You're gonna recenthize that glycogen
as long as you're making enough total carbohydrate.
So I'm not real huge on intradirt workout nutrition.
As long as we're not talking about really long workouts, we're not talking about multiple
sessions per day.
Well, Wayne, I've taken a sway past our time, but as always, super enjoyable.
Can't wait to do it again.
There's a lot of stuff to follow up on here, so the show notes will have a ton of the
detail we've talked about in offline.
You and I can connect and make sure we've got the links to some of the things we spoke
about.
So thanks again, man.
I appreciate it and congrats on being by the water.
Thanks Peter, I appreciate it, man.
Really enjoyed it.
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