Weights and Plates Podcast - #7 - Strength Training Is Not Fat Loss Training

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Let's be real. Most people come to the gym so they can look better naked. For many people -- the so-called "skinny fat" demographic -- that's going to mean gaining muscle mass to improve their figure and lower their body fat percentage. For others that are legitimately overweight or obese, a BMI over 30, they need to also lose bodyweight to reduce their adipose tissue. Strength training is a great start for those folks, but it's not the end, and they need to make dietary changes as well.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome back to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Howdy, howdy. Today we're going to continue our discussion on the wonders of diet and training with the topic being strength training is not fat loss training. It's an interesting topic. It's an important topic because as a strength coach, we find that we get a lot of clients or you know just regular people that are inquiring about how to lose fat because you know if you haven't checked america has gotten very obese over the last 50 years i think we've leveled off so we're not we're not getting fatter thankfully

but i think it's something like 30 to 40 percent of the country is overweight or obese haven't looked at the most recent figures. Yeah, it's not exactly cause for celebration. No, no, but we've leveled off. We've flatlined, last I looked. Unless there's been an uptick in the last three years. I wonder, I mean, do you know, does that include last year, 2020? You know, that's why I'm saying there might have been an uptick.

Yeah, I know a lot of people who just kind of sat around for several months. Yeah, yeah. And did nothing. Well, you know, at risk of, you know, I think the one, we were talking about this a little bit offline, and it's going to sound on the surface like we're contradicting ourselves. Because a couple episodes ago, we talked about the physiology of strength training and what happens to your body when you lift a heavy barbell. And one of the claims that we made, which is true, is that when you strength train, you start putting on muscle mass. And when you start putting on muscle mass, that mass is very calorically expensive, if you will. It raises your resting metabolism quite a bit when you pack on a lot

of muscle mass. And so all else being equal, if you take the same person eating the exact same thing as they did day zero, and they train for a few months and add a lot of muscle mass to their frame, then all of a sudden they're going to have a much higher metabolism and it's possible for them to turn around and have lost some inches off their waist that's something that we experience a lot as we coach novices but there's a big but here that's assuming that all else is equal and that's not reality all else is never equal and um i think you, I'll see what you think about this, Robert, but in my experience, when people start lifting, they get strong, they might see some initial, uh, weight loss. Well, I won't say weight loss. They might see some initial waste loss, like loss of, of, of body fat around their waist as they're putting on muscle, but that tends to taper off pretty quickly. You know, after month three, they're not really losing a lot of body fat unless they're really paying attention to their diet, which for a lot of people that are overweight might mean they also need to be putting themselves into a caloric deficit. So I just want to put that out there right off the top. Like what we're saying, what we said before was true, but it's also true that just training for strength alone is not going to cause fat loss.

You still got to actually, you know, put yourself in a caloric deficit. No, I completely agree. Yeah, the percent change in body weight is marginal if you start lifting. The percent change in waistline or, you know, certain fat depots can be a little bit bigger than the percent change in weight, for instance. But if you're purely trying to lose weight, calorie restriction is the key to that. Even aerobic activity could burn more calories than a traditional weight training workout, so far as we know. But even then, what are you going to burn off a meal? 400 calories?

Right. It takes a lot of work to out-train a bad diet. There was a meta-analysis published years ago. I wish I remembered the author. But basically, they analyzed all the randomized control trials on aerobic training for the goal of weight loss. And the assumption is all things equal. They started doing aerobic training. And they measured body weight over a period of time.

And the numbers they came up with were that in order to get a statistically significant weight loss just by adding aerobic training and doing no other manipulation, You'd have to run at a moderate intensity, which is, you know, 60 to 65, like 65% or, you know, 65, 70% of VO2 max or of your max heart rate or of heart rate reserve, depending on which measurement you're using. But for layman's terms, a hard one hour run. Okay. So a hard one hour run or a hard one hour bike ride, seven days a week for six months and a statistically significant weight loss was about five to seven pounds. So yeah, try to sell that to the 300 pound guy. So, you know, you can't out train a bad diet. It takes a lot of hours of activity that most of us don't have. Obviously, you know, when I would swim, I was swimming six hours a day as a high school swimmer, so I'd gain some weight in the off-season. I'd lose it during season, and I was often eating more, but I was swimming for six hours a day.

Most of us don't have six hours a day to swim or run or bike. So why do we lift then? Well, if you just want to purely lose weight, then you can starve yourself and purely lose weight, but most people who have had to do that have found that at the end, they look skinny fat. And I'm not talking about loose skin that requires surgical intervention. And there's really nothing you can do about that. But I'm talking about, you know, when you lose weight, you get to the end, and then you look skinny and close and everything soft. So why does that happen? Because you've lost muscle mass too. And why do you gain the weight back and then have a hard time losing it next time? Well, because you've lost the muscle mass. So now when you're losing weight after regaining the weight,

it comes off slower. I had somebody ask me that today, why is this diet so much harder than last time? And my response was, and you know, I'm not trying to be condescending by any means, you know, I know that some of my people that I work with listen to me on here and, you know, I like to bust people's ass, but I'm not being condescending. These are valid questions. I don't think this stuff is educated very well on. I'm more frustrated with the conventional wisdom that has been pumped into people that has basically created a market for me. Obviously, I have a job to do now, but it upsets know, people are being taught wrong. You know, if you've lost weight purely through diet with no serious lifting, that means you've lost more muscle mass than the person who's lost weight with, you know, a properly balanced diet and serious lifting. So now you have less muscle mass than you had before you lost the weight.

Okay. Your thyroid activity is going to go down because you're eating less, right? You're eating less carbs. You're probably getting in less iodine and selenium. So, you know, you have less thyroid activity, less muscle mass, and now you're probably going to binge and gain the weight back because you haven't been told that you need to intentionally take a break, maintain, and develop good eating habits.

So now you gain back the 40 pounds you lost, and now you're going to start the whole weight loss journey again with less muscle mass and possibly a less active thyroid. This often happens. I get a lot of clients with hypothyroidism. I'm not saying this happens to everybody, but virtually anybody who just loses weight purely through diet restriction and extreme cardio is going to lose muscle, which means you're losing metabolically active tissue, which means if you gain the weight back, you're starting with a slower metabolism than when you were fat the first time. Yeah, exactly. So we, we, I want to reiterate two things that we've talked about in previous episodes. It's kind of remind people of them. Number one, your, your base metabolic rate, you know, we talked about, there's a few ways to measure that resting metabolism,

basal metabolic rate, but if we, let's just call it resting metabolism for simplicity's sake. That accounts for somewhere between, if I remember correctly, 60 to 70% of your caloric burn is more or less your resting metabolism, right? Yeah, just you sitting around, you know, being alive. Yeah, so your muscle mass has a huge impact on your metabolism because most of what you're going to burn, regardless of your level of activity, is coming from rest. So that's number one. Number two, we've mentioned this in the previous episode on physiology, is that whenever you gain weight or lose weight, you're going to be gaining some mix of lean mass and body fat in the same way in the reverse direction. Whenever

you lose body weight, the number on the scale goes down, you're going to be losing some mix of body fat and some mix of muscle mass. And so part of the reason why we strength train is that when you are gaining weight or losing weight, you can skew that number, that mixture to retain more muscle mass and lose more body fat if you're losing weight. Or on the other side of the equation, if you're gaining weight, you can gain more muscle mass than you do body fat. So I just want to bring those two points up before we kick off this episode and really get into it, because those are really important points that underlie what you just said in people's practical experience with losing fat and dieting. Yeah, no, that's 100%

correct. Basically, when you train, you're offsetting the muscle loss, obviously, when you're losing fat. But before we even get into that, let's discuss what is fat loss, right? Fat loss is when you lose body fat, obviously, right? Is there fat loss training? Not necessarily, because we just established that it's very difficult to out-train a bad diet, and it's not practical for most people. So let's get out of this nonsense of fat loss training. Obviously, you're going to burn some more calories if you do more exercise, so I'm not going to deny that. But without creating that negative energy balance, which is mostly achieved through diet for most people on a normal schedule, you're not going to lose any body fat.

So when you hire a typical personal trainer at a globo gym, because most people, this is probably at the heart of the problem, most people when they think, I got to lose fat, they think it's time to go to the gym and i'm not going to disagree with that you need to go to the gym absolutely you should need to be active if you're not already active most of the people in this demographic tend to be sedentary throughout the day i don't typically get uh you know construction workers coming through the gym unless they just you know want their back pain to go away but not typically for hey dude i want to look good naked look good naked. That's not what the more active laborers come to the gym for. They come for other reasons. But typically people in your typical sedentary white-collar job will typically come to see a trainer for fat loss.

They'll say, I want to lose weight because I'm fat. Either they're legitimately overweight or obese or they're skinny fat and they don't like that they have quote-unquote man boobs or, you know, belly fat or whatever it may be. Cellulite if it's female, you know. Right. Yeah. Do we get cellulite? I haven't had a male complain about cellulite.

But, you know, they want to get less squishy one way or another. That's typically what people walk into a gym for. Now, the reality of this is most people in this demographic really want to exercise but achieve the results of training. So we'll come back to that statement as I define it. When you go into a globo gym, you know, your typical two-story commercial gym with racquetball and pools and endless rows of machines and towels and all these other amenities and hire a trainer there, they're typically going to put you on a program that makes you sweat and a diet that makes you starve. So I call this the sweat and starve program. And it's the oldest program in the gym business. You sweat and starve. Whether you're lifting

weights or you're on a treadmill, you have to sweat and your heart rate has to go up because otherwise you're not losing fat. This has been the mainstream belief by the trainers themselves because oftentimes they're taught wrong, and the customers, the members of the gym, and the personal training clients. And I've had the pleasure of working with many people in this demographic, and what I found is when you tell them that they have to do three to five exercises and just lift heavier, they don't think they're doing enough, first of all. So, you know, if we can get past that point, you know, we've already made progress. So the common reaction is this isn't enough. Why am I only doing three sets of five? That's not enough exercise.

Right. And I say, well, you know, I've tried several different ways to address this, the psychology of it. I say, well, you know, you can do more cardio. You know, more weightlifting might hurt you, you know. You don't need to do that much lifting, you know. And then so that's issue number one. Issue number two is, oh, this is boring. I'm doing the same five exercises every single time.

So then, you know, I have to pepper in some arms and calves and, you know, hip thrust and other things while still making sure the lifts are going up. Well, then you get into the most common challenge that you probably ran into, that many strength coaches have ran into, that I even run into with strength lifting enthusiasts. This is just hard, and I'm just mentally stressed out going into the gym, and I hate going to the gym now. this is just hard and I'm just mentally stressed out going into the gym and I hate going to the gym now. Because once you get to a point where you're grinding out a set of five or a triple or whatever the rep range, and, you know, the last rep you barely feel like you can make it and it scares the shit out of you and you're doing this for three sets every single workout, you know, that wears on you. It wore on me and I pushed through it because I do this for a living. But a lot of people that hire me do not do this for a living.

They just want to look good naked and probably perform better sexually. That is the average, typical, personal training client. Sure, yeah. So to bring it all home, the point is you still need to lift, but you don't need to – your lifting doesn't need to turn into cardio. And you'll hear me say this probably in every episode at some point because it's something that I run into regularly. They go to the gym for fat loss. They think that the workout in the gym should be a workout that is quote unquote fat loss, which means lots and lots and lots of movement. So sitting around is evil. Resting is bad. Low reps is bad. I don't need to lift heavy. I don't need to be a power lifter

says the person who's squatting 45 pounds it's like well you're not at risk of becoming a power lifter unless you enter a meet and squat 45 pounds which you're welcome to do local meets will allow you to do that there's no qualifying total but uh i haven't mentioned anything about a meet and uh by the way we press and do uh chin-ups or lat pull-downs uh you know power lifters don't compete in those lifts. You know, we've covered this in other episodes. But my point is that because the market has created the sweat-and-starve program that has existed for the last 40 years, you know, perhaps longer, but certainly in the last 30 years it's been very popular, that is the expectation when

somebody hires me after they have done the sweat and starve program and failed many, many times. Right. So, you know, first of all, it's like, okay, well, we're going to try something different. You need to lift heavier because why do you need to lift heavier? Because you need to build muscle and you need to lift heavier. Well, this so-and-so said I don't need to lift heavier to build muscle. Yeah. Well, so-and-so is squatting and deadlifting 5, 6, 700 pounds. So if that's true, then why is he lifting heavy? Right. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of psychology in what you just described, the sweat and starve program.

All right, we've talked about the science behind lifting heavy and why it works. But the science behind the sweat and starve program is psychological science. It's market derived sweat and starve program. It's market. It's market derived. And so, so what, you know, I think, I think what most people, what most people do when they come to the, to the globo gym on January 1st or January, well, it's January 2nd, right? Cause they're hung over January 1st, but, uh. So January 2nd, when they start at the gym and it's almost like they willfully will sign up for long-term programs.

They'll sign up for a year-long gym membership, two-year-long gym contract, whatever's being offered because they see themselves in this new body that they don't have yet. And they're like, yes, yeah, sign me up. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it this year. This is going to be the year. And the, whenever you're starting something new, it's exciting. You're imagining what could be, you're thinking about those long-term goals and visualizing yourself achieving them. And then you start

working with the trainer and the sweat and starve program satisfies those, that emotional appeal because you start, you sweat. And after that first session, like, man, yeah, I'm my show. My shirt is soaked. This is great. I'm getting towards my goals, but it doesn't match up with, with, with physiology and the way it weighs our body work. And so we need a different approach. So how are we going to modify our diets to achieve this fat loss? All right. So let's assume we've got somebody now who has bought in and they're like, all right, I'll try it your way. We'll go on a linear progression and I'll start lifting the barbell and adding weight to my lifts

and pushing that. What now do they need to do on their diet to start to achieve fat loss? Well, number one, any diet targeted at fat loss calories need to be restricted. That includes keto. The thing about keto is it happens unintentionally because you're full all the time, but you have to restrict calories. So now because you're restricting calories, doing shit is hard. Okay? Yeah, right. Anything that's physically difficult becomes physically more difficult because you're not eating enough.

You are intentionally putting yourself in a state of under-recovery. This is why I say training for strength is not training for fat loss. You can use training to maximize your body composition changes while you're losing fat. That's what we're advocating for, so that you're not losing muscle and fat and that you maybe even gain some because most of you listening are probably novices still or have started and stopped a program. I just can't stress this enough. If your goal is to look better, you need to train to some extent. Some people don't need to train. You know, the guy who's repping out a 500-pound squat for a set of 10, he doesn't need to train. And then he's going to tell you that you don't need to lift heavy, you know?

I wish I met all these people that are squatting 500 for 10, by the way. You see them on the internet. They're the ones saying, oh, you know, tonnage and hypertrophy and all this stuff. And then, you know, the more honest ones like, you know, Mike Israetel, he'll go on there and say, you know, most novices will benefit from strength training because, you know, teaches you how to manage weight and they're going to adapt to anything anyway. So let's, you know, improve their neuromuscular system before they go into hypertrophy, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's true. And the thing is, most personal training clients are novices to weightlifting.

And oftentimes, I get many that have been in the weight room. So to them, they're not a novice. They've been in the weight room for 20 years. And I'm like, and yet you're still here. So how about you entertain an alternative opinion? Because you're asking me to program you in a way that you've been programmed before and you ended up where you are today. So, you know, back it up. You're hiring an expert, right? You know, I don't see myself as an expert, but, you know, I am credentialed.

I'm experienced. There's still always more to learn. I don't like the word expert because I think of, you know, oh, morons in the government. because I think of, you know, oh, morons in the government. But, you know, I have years of experience. I have expertise. There we go. You're paying for expertise, right? I would call you a master coach. Sure. There you go. So, what I'm saying is that strength training has to be part of the equation. Now, the sweat and starve program is not training. Let's be clear on that. Sweat and starve, that's exercise. And training,

to many people who tend to appeal to the sweat and starve program, comes across boring. I get that a lot. This is boring and frustrating. Well, yeah, it's boring because nothing changes. You're doing the same exercise all the time. What changes is the load, right? The exercises themselves stay the same. It's frustrating because you may not be very coordinated. So guess what? You're going to spend time lifting the same light weight a bunch of times until you do it correctly because I don't want you throwing out your back.

We can put on some muscle doing other things, but I'm of the position, and people are welcome to disagree with me. I'm of the position. There is no machine that can challenge the back and the abs the way that a deadlift does or a squat does because you're balancing your own body weight while you're lifting the heavy weight. You can't replicate that if ranges of motion are fixed. You can't replicate that. So how are you going to address that? I did every row under the fucking sun, and I didn't see anything happen with my traps and upper back. When I did chin-ups, it got wider, but, you know,

I just had this wide, flat back because I wasn't doing any isometric work. You're just not going to get that in a fixed range of motion. You know, I did dumbbell rows, cable rows, single-arm cable rows, single-arm dumbbell rows, bent-over single arm cable rows, single arm dumbbell rows, bent over dumbbell rows, bent over barbell rows, all this scapular retraction shit, thinking, oh, if I target these muscles directly and dynamically, you know, with isotonic muscle contraction where they're shortening and lengthening, surely they'll grow. No, no, they didn't grow. I haven't tried shrugs, you know, and no, they didn't grow. Deadlifts got them to grow though. Interestingly enough, deadlifts got them to grow though interestingly enough deadlifts

got them grow traps got my deltoids to grow but anyways um yeah shrugs are like the leg press of the exactly it's the leg press of the upper body anyways i i wasn't training my back muscles and my abdominal muscles and my obliques in the way that they primarily that they primarily work which is isometric so yeah figure out a way to do that with heavy weight without using a barbell by all means. But you have to get that isometric work in. And that's my biggest argument for barbell training. And the problem is most people have no idea what their back is doing at any point in time. And when you have them train with a barbell, teaching them that takes forever on the internet, and it's still challenging in person, but you know,

can be done. And you're getting so many other benefits from it. But okay, let's be fair here. You just want to look good naked, right? So you still need to do that, though. You still need to get over that. And it may take you several workouts to get over that. It may take you several months if you're very uncoordinated. So this becomes frustrating. It also becomes boring because they're not feeling like they did anything in the weight room, you know? But at the end of the day, the alternative is I can have you exercise and maintain the muscle mass that you have while you starve down some weight, but you're not going to look any different than you did last time you lost weight because you're not building any muscle. And in order to build muscle, building muscle and strength training is probably more –

I hate that strength coaches are unfortunately in the same category as personal trainers when it comes to the general fitness market, I guess. Things to rip, I get people who've read the book and are bought in. So there's a market there for that that just wants to get strong and modest fat loss is the goal, not extreme fat loss. Yeah. But because I'm in a weight room, therefore, I'm in the same category as a personal trainer. But a strength coach is probably more similar to a sport coach. You know, if you play football and you want to get better at football, it's actually very boring because you're just playing football all the time, you know? Right, yeah. So, you know, you're not going

to go and play hockey to get better at football. You're not going to swing a baseball to get your golf swing better. So why would you change the exercises you do to build muscle? And I try to explain this to people. And then at the end of the day, what I've learned from this experience is that most people in the commercial gym demographic want to exercise but want the result of training and there's only really one way to achieve though there's two ways to achieve that you're born with it in which case you're not going to be a member of those gyms you're going to make fun of lifting and be too lazy because you already have it or you take steroids and exercise then you'll probably gain muscle you know yeah right it'll be it'll probably gain muscle, you know? Yeah, right.

It'll be plenty for you. You are unlikely to be competitive for bodybuilding, but you'll look better than you did. I don't think you should do that. I'm not advocating that anybody hop on steroids and exercise. That's not what we do. I think that you're, you know, I think you're, you know, you are fucking lazy if you do that. But there's plenty of guys that do it. Go to any globo gym you'll see these guys doing a bunch of silly bullshit workouts not really adding any weight

every week and they'll have nice at arms you know yeah yeah huge biceps huge biceps huge packs they'll bench and do arms every day you know guys like us make fun of them you know and uh they look fine because they're probably on an anivar or testosterone or whatever drug they're taking right deep ball back in the 80s yep yep um so unfortunately because steroids were were and are so prevalent in gyms and in sports you know these bodybuilding workouts and you know these sweat and starve type of workouts have gained a lot of traction over the years because the guys doing them look good. And they're attributing the results of the drugs and possibly their genetics

to the training program or the diet that they're doing. When you eliminate drugs and obviously genetics, because if you have genetics, you're not asking me for help. You already have it figured out. But when you remove the drugs from the equation, obviously things are going to change. You're not going to see those changes as fast. You may not even see those changes at all, which is more often the case. I followed all those little cookie cutter body building templates for years. And the only areas that were building muscles kind of what led me to this, the only areas that I saw muscle growth were in the areas that were trained

by the barbell. The bench press made my pecs bigger. The pull downs and pull ups made my lats wider. And the squats made my thighs thicker. You know, I used to complain about arm growth. Well, I wasn't pressing. I started pressing and now my arms are proportional to the rest of my body. And there you go. But for a while they were out of proportion, but I just was not training that movement, that overhead strength took care of that. Arms, shoulders, all that shit got bigger. You know, I talked about this before. There's some muscles that you have to isolate.

You want to get your calves bigger, you got to do them all the damn time. You're welcome to do that or take a job as a postman. You know, they've been successful for centuries probably, you know know, developing, you know, championship calves. But yeah, no, if you want to exercise, you can exercise. You can hire me as an exercise coach. Just know that's what it is. You know, exercise is not going to give you the results of training. Exercise is not going to give you the results of dieting either. You have to restrict your calories. If you restrict your calories in exercise, you're likely to keep whatever you have, assuming you're doing some weightlifting workouts in that exercise, and you'll lose the weight.

That'll work. But if you've done that before and you weren't satisfied with the result, then you're going to have to lift heavier to get those muscles bigger on the other side of that weight loss. And that's where training comes in. You know, training means you're going to, you know, progress at something, which means that, you know, a certain metric, in this case, load is going to change, but the movements are going to stay the same. If you want to diet while you're training, you're going to have to, you know, restrict your calories, keep your protein high. You should keep your protein high, whether you're training, exercising, or being sedentary, because that minimizes muscle loss. That in and of itself minimizes muscle loss. So protein stays high. Carbs need to be spared as

much as possible. I say as possible, because at some point you do have to cut them, because you have to pull calories from somewhere, but you want to keep the carbs as high as you can keep them while still driving weight loss so that you're not passing out in the gym or getting a little blood sugar or feeling dizzy throughout your whole workout or seeing spots. I want to dig into that a little bit more. Hopefully, if our theoretical trainee here that we're talking to is still with us, they're like, all right, okay. All right. I see. I hear what you're saying. Exercise doesn't work. Bodybuilding doesn't work unless you're strong already. So I'm, I'm in, I'm going to start. No, bodybuilding works if there's a progression. If there's a progression. Yeah, right. Right. And it's, it also assumes some other things,

assumes a genetic predisposition and probably are already strong if you're going to see a lot of results from bodybuilding training. Usually they are. We've mentioned that. Yeah. We've mentioned that on other shows. Um, but so they, they say like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do it. They start the barbell program. When would you recommend that people who are barbell training start to cut their calories if they want fat loss too let's say they want to get strong they're bought into getting strong but they also want fat loss okay do they start from day one and start cutting calories or would you have them train for a while and then start cutting calories well if uh if they're actually fat, you know, BMI of 30 or higher, and not just, you know, soft and detrained, they can start right away.

And they'll probably lose fat off their waist and build muscle mass and may even lose a good amount of body weight if calories are restricted and still add weight to the bar. And this is assuming that person's a rank novice. A fat power lifter is a different story. He's probably going to lose some performance, you know? Right. Sure. Yeah. But if the person is just skinny fat, and, you know, let's say they're 5'8", 170 pounds,

and, you know, man boobs and, you know, belly fat or whatever the hell they're bitching about, and then that person needs to just train probably keep their calories high enough to get through the workouts and scale them up in accordance with the training so as the lifts get harder you add more carbohydrates you add a little bit more fat and you just keep doing that but you know a guy who's 5'8 170 doesn't need to get down to 150 so he can see his visible abs and look sick otherwise it's just not it's not necessary. That guy probably needs to gain weight. Yeah, he's going to. Probably.

And not in a month because he's going to quit. He's going to freak out and have a meltdown because, you know, he still has man boobs after six weeks and, you know, his belly got a little bit bigger. But, you know, you want to kind of take it slow so you can keep the person engaged. And, you know, they're still going to make progress. They're still going to make progress. You just don't want them to see a bunch of fat in the first month because that's the easiest way to lose a skinny fat client.

The best way to explain it, and I'll explain it right here, and this is 100% true, no gimmicks here, you are going to increase calories in accordance with the demands of the workout the the the calories need to match the demands of the workout and not to the point where like oh my god i ate for a training day skipped a workout and i'm having a meltdown no we don't need to take it that far but in general your general caloric consumption throughout the week needs to match your workout so if it's week one you can probably eat practically nothing and add weight to the bar because of all the neuromuscular shit that's going on, right? But if you're in like week 15, now you're into some heavy weights.

And in order to keep progressing, you have to build muscle. And you will feel that. Those lifts will get harder. You will start missing. And then you add 50 to 75 carbs to your diet. Then suddenly the lifts get easier for a little bit. So that's what that person needs to do. The underweight person needs to gain weight, obviously.

But what will end up happening, if you have a fat guy or female that's losing weight, there will come an inflection point where additional strength gains are no longer possible because the calories are too low. And that's where you make a choice. If you still think you're too fat and you want to lose more weight, then your coach or you, if you're doing it yourself, needs to change your program to accommodate the lower calories. You need to do something that you could recover from. By that, I mean that's typically where you raise the volume. You can do more reps or you can do more sets with less weight or you can spread out the intensity. Instead of adding weight to your squat three times a week, you can become an artificial intermediate.

You're artificially intermediate because you can't recover workout to workout, but you can't recover workout to workout because of the diet. And I've done that approach as well. Sure, yeah. I have a guy right now, a good example. He was 318 when he started. He's 267 right now, a good example. He was 318 when he started. He's 267 right now. And he does six-week cuts because beyond six weeks, he's a data guy. He likes numbers.

Great client. And he's kept track of his data. He said after six weeks, he gets hungry, cranky, and his joints feel like shit. So there you go. He does six weeks on, six weeks off six weeks on six weeks six weeks off i've been with him for you know several months now and he's down almost uh you know almost what 60 pounds getting close to 60 pounds there it's fantastic yeah and you know he just pulled 415 for a set of five he's squatted in the mid threes for five you know working on form it started

creeping up high after a certain point and he's's pressing the, you know, like 140 to 150 range. He's benching in the low twos. And, you know, he's starting to get more joint stiffness. And I know it's because we restricted calories. And he's mentioned that. When we restrict calories, he gets joint stiffness. So I've decided to move him to tens because the intensity is lower, you know. And for some people, volume causes joint stiffness too. So I've decided to move them to tens because the intensity is lower, you know, and for

some people, volume causes joint stiffness too. I know Rip himself complains about reps and joint stiffness. So, you know, I try to accommodate that, you know, like I typically won't have somebody do three sets of 10 if they're reasonably strong. Usually it's about two sets of 10 on the squat, you know, typically one or two sets of 10 on the deadlift. And if I want to put in more leg work, I can have other exercises in there. But, you know, there's a fine line there.

You know, you don't want to do five, six, seven, eight sets of 10 on the squat when, you know, that's going to be 275 plus for a lot of guys. Yeah. Right. Sure, there's guys that do it, you know. Doesn't mean you should. So, yeah, no, he's complaining of joint stiffness and i know it's because the intensity of the weight you know now that he's been training for he's trained long

enough to where neuromuscular shit's done newbie gains are pretty much done additional gains need more food if he was fully fed longer he'd probably progress further right right yeah so now at this point i have him doing tens for a while and And when he goes back into maintenance, we'll drop the reps, up the intensity, see if we can eke out some more strength, go on the next six week cut. And that seems to work well. I did it myself. I was like, I want to challenge the idea that you can't keep your strength while cutting. So I was, my program was five sets of five squats and then five sets of three pause safety bar squats, and then, uh, seven sets of five bench press and five doubles on the deadlift. That was a one day workout to me, four hours. And, uh, then I do a bunch of other shit throughout the week. Yeah. Oh, it was freaking, my back was fried. So when I got to the end of that, I was 165 pounds. I lost 5% of my strength, which my strength which is not bad but you know like my back got so fried after one squat workout that i couldn't deadlift 275 and that's a weight that i could have done 20 plus times at the time you know so as an aside i've heard uh

i've heard dorian yates claim that he tried to tell ronnie coleman not to do stuff like that so supposedly i i don't know i don't follow bodybuilding very closely, but supposedly Ronnie Coleman, during competition prep, as he was getting close to a competition, Ronnie Coleman's a famous bodybuilder, by the way, if you hadn't heard his name. When he was getting close to competition, unlike a lot of other guys, he would continue to lift heavy. And we're talking about heavy compound lifts heavy squats

heavy deadlifts for a bunch of reps i mean he was a 700 plus pound squatter 700 plus pound pound deadlifter and he would continue to do this not just during the off season when these guys were bulking up and intentionally just trying to add mass but also when they were trying to to cut down and get super lean and uh apparently dorian yates you know warned him it's like you're gonna trash yourself man and look at ronnie coleman now his he's had i don't know how many back surgeries the dude just completely wrecked yep now that could also be if you go and watch his deadlift technique it's pretty atrocious. He was super strong. He had bad technique and he did a shitload of volume on those lifts, you know?

Right, right. But yeah, there you go. That's just a really extreme example of what happens when you're starving yourself, because that's what bodybuilders do. They essentially starve themselves during competition prep and you try to do a bunch of barbell training. prep and you try to do a bunch of barbell training. But I think that's helpful. So essentially, if I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is that if somebody who has gotten pretty strong doing a linear progression and is now somewhere in that intermediate stage, and they're also trying to lose weight, I mean, sorry, lose fat, and they hit a point where it's just too hard on their joints, or it's just too physically taxing to get through the workout to continue adding weight, they can switch to 10s for a while and, you know, try to preserve some of that muscle mass that they've built already while they're cutting down. And that actually makes sense to me because I just

thought about this, you know, when you go from doing a whole bunch of heavy fives and threes and progressing in a linear fashion, and then you go and do a bunch of tens, that's a novel stimulus. That's something you're not adapted to. And so you can kind of, anytime you're not adapted to something and you go and do something new, you're going to get a little pop of gains out of it. You're just going to basically get another little novice effect, if you will, when you do that. So that's, that's a nice way to stimulate some, some muscle mass in a way that hasn't been, that you haven't been doing in a while. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, I think we could sum this up as this stuff is not complex.

You know, wanting to lose body fat, but then also look better. You've got to get strong, you've got to strength train, and you've got to cut calories if you're going to lose body fat. And then we're talking about somebody who is truly overweight or obese and needs to lose body fat. You got to have those two ingredients. Now, that doesn't mean it's easy. It's actually very hard, but it's not complex. It's simple, it's boring, but it's effective. If you played high school sports or even college sports,

if you played sports of any kind, your lifetime is similar to that. You're clocking in, clocking out, doing a handful of movements and trying to improve upon them over probably a two to four year period if you want to maximize your results. What I've noticed is it tends to level off beyond that. I remember reading a guy writing about that eight years ago and I didn't disagree. I was just curious to see if that's how it would play out for me. And I'd say after, you know, the two to four year period, then, you know, your muscle gains level out, it tends to slow down. And that's assuming you've trained seriously the whole time. So, you know, that's what you got to plan for if you legitimately want to look more muscular than you do now. You're looking at, you know, some rapid gains in the first year,

you know, some sustained gains in the subsequent two to three years, and then, you know, some rapid gains in the first year, you know, some sustained gains in the subsequent two to three years, and then, you know, a leveling off effect, a ceiling effect that you're eventually going to reach. You'll still keep getting stronger over time, but the increases are smaller, and so are the increases in muscle mass. If you want to just lose fat and, you know, if you want to look like a marathoner, you can go run marathons if you have time to do that. or you can go run marathons if you have time to do that. But if you want to, like most people in the Globo gym want to look like a fitness model. And in order for them to get from where they are to that, they have to build muscle. Because most of these people that want to look like a fitness model don't have as much muscle as the fitness model. And the fitness model probably had it to begin with or is on Anovar. Right.

Or both. Or both. Or both. Yeah, for sure. So if that's not you, then you have to train. And this is the best way to do it. It's just going to take time and it will be boring and repetitive if you're into CrossFit or boot camp or, you know, hypertrophy style training. Exactly. And, you know, I'll say this, like, I think it's okay to, if you've legit put in your time and you've paid your dues and you've trained for, you know, a year, like put in a solid year of training. And I do this myself. I'll give myself six to eight weeks, you know, once, maybe twice a year, usually once a year, I'll give myself six to eight weeks where

I just get to screw around and do fun stuff. And for me, I find that that keeps me mentally in the game. And for me, it's usually like, I'll try some bodybuilding movements. I'll just do a bunch of dumbbell stuff. I'll work on like, you know, this year I was trying to teach myself how to bent press, you know, just using a kettlebell. Maybe this next year, I don't have access to kettlebells right now, but maybe soon I can, I can bent press the barbell, learn how to do that. You know, am I really training at that point? No, I'm, I'm exercising, but that's okay. But I've also put in years of training at this point. And so I've got to have something to kind of, you know, keep me fresh and, you know, it does, it becomes a grind, you know, even, you know, sometimes you have a good few months of training or it's just a good few weeks.

And then sometimes you have a few months where it's just a grind and it's no fun. And that's a reality. So if you've legit put in your time, it's okay to train, to exercise every once in a while. But if you haven't yet put in a solid year of training and getting strong, you're not there yet. Just keep going. Pick up the lunch pail and go. Yeah, I would agree with that. I like the sports metaphor.

I think that's good. Yeah, when you play football, you get to play. I mean, if you're a starter, you get to play. I mean, if you're a starter, you get to play once a week during the season, but like, you know, if you want to get any better, you don't, you don't practice tackling somebody by tackling, you know, runners in the open field in the game. No, way too many variables. No, you have to learn how to like position your body first. You're going to do a ton of footwork drills over and over and over. And then you're going to do a bunch of like, you know, contact drills where you're not tackling,

but you're making contact. And then you're going to do some controlled tackling and working on the dummies and stuff. It's not, it's not like you're, you know, out there putting the hit stick on running backs all day. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I just want to point out too, because some, you know, because of the psychological component here, you know, I just want to point out, too, because of the psychological component here, you know, just before we wrap up, I think this is important. You know, exercise has a lot of benefits. Mental health benefits are one of them. And if training is causing you a lot of problems to your mental health, then maybe you shouldn't train, you know? I mean, it helps mine. I have, you know, I have the type of personality that I need something to let aggression out on. You know, lifting heavy weights is good.

I've always wanted to, you know, get into like a fighting sport. I just don't have the time for it. You know, I like target shooting. Things like that, high impact stuff, heavy lifting, that stuff works for me, you know. But for some people, it creates a lot of stress. You know, I had a woman that used to lose sleep and have digestive problems before her next heavy squat in the LP. And, you know, if mental health is, you know, a big part of the reason you're going into the gym, then I think it's still valuable to learn the movements because you have to do

them anyway. But maybe you shouldn't push, you know, shouldn't be pushing yourself to the limit and maybe doing this so competitively, you know, and by competitively, I mean, you know, shouldn't be pushing yourself to the limit and maybe doing this so competitively, you know, and by competitively, I mean, you know, trying to add more and more and more, not necessarily getting on the platform. You know, you might want to go on a slower trajectory. So there's value in exercise. You know, there's value in exercise. Just know what it is and know its limits. I guess that's what we're trying to teach you here today. Know the limits of exercise. It'll make you feel good. It'll burn some calories. If you haven't done anything before, you'll build some muscle from it, but it's not going to put the most muscle you can gain on your body. And don't imagine Ronnie Coleman because you need a bunch

of drugs for that. You know, you listening to me right now, the drug-free person, if you're lucky, you might gain 20 pounds of muscle in a lifetime, Okay. If you have good genetics, you might put on 30 to 40, you know. But if you want to maximize your muscle gains and your skinny fat, and you want to look like that fitness model that has 15 pounds of muscle on you, you're going to have to train and it's going to be miserable at times, you know. So just understand that exercise can't do that for you. Exercise can put on a little bit of muscle from the novice effect. But then that's about as far as it's going to go, but it will make you feel good. It will be fun. It will be entertaining for people that like that. But if your goal is to lose fat and build muscle, you're only going to go so far with that. At some point, you're going to have to train to change your body

and you can fuck around with exercise for years to come and hope that that does it for you. Or you can, you know, block out some time and say i'm gonna do some no bullshit training for a year you know and uh you know we encourage it but i don't want to completely discredit exercise either because it can't be fun you know i i just surfed this week i haven't done in eight years i love surfing i got really deconditioned at swimming which is sad because i was a high school swimmer when i moved to la i was able to you know get past the break no problem with no surfing experience now that's not the case takes me longer to get back there my delts and fucking lats are burning

up the whole time I have no muscular endurance now because of you know eight solid years of you know continuous strength training so uh no exercise is good I enjoy that I was never gonna you know be a competitive surfer but I'd like sitting out in the water. It made me feel good. It was quiet, and there's no way to interrupt me out there because no devices are on me. Right. And, you know, I like hiking. I like hiking, but I'm not going to go hike Mount Kilimanjaro, you know, or, you know, anything like that. You know, I ride a mountain bike, you know.

There's things that I do that are exercise, you know. It's just not in the weight room. In the weight room, I'm going to work, you know. Exactly. That's just not in the weight room. In the weight room, I'm going to work, you know. Exactly. That's the difference. For some people, you know, exercising in the weight room is fun. And, you know, you should do that. I encourage that if that's, you know, if that's therapeutic for you.

But if you want to build muscle, you've got to train. That's right. I think that's what we're really trying to drive home here. If you want to lose fat, you've got to restrict your calories. Do it intelligently so that you hold on to your muscle mass while losing. And that pretty much sums it up, you know, the role of the weight room and how to construct your diet to complement that. Yeah. So I think in another episode, we need to talk, well, we need to do a couple episodes. I think we need to go a little bit deeper into macros

and how you manipulate those in this scenario. I think we need to lay out this groundwork first just to understand kind of the big picture here. And, you know, I think in future episodes, we're going to get more into the nuts and bolts of, you know, sort of week to week, what you're doing, manipulating your macros as you're losing

body fat. I think the other discussion we need to have in a future episode is, you know, what's enough? That's a hard question to answer, you know? And I don't mean, I didn't say how strong is strong enough. Right. That's one of the conversations, but it's also like how, you know, how lean is lean enough? Um, how, how cardiovascular fit, how lean is lean enough?

Um, how, how cardiovascular fit, uh, is fit enough? Because I think, um, you know, nowadays, I don't know if this has really ever changed more recently, but certainly we have a lot of access to a bunch of different types of athletes and we're coming up on the 2020 Olympics, which are happening in 2021. And everybody gets really excited watching these incredibly high level athletes compete at their given sports and wants to look like them and be like them. But, uh, I think we don't really always appreciate how, how tough these athletes work and the sacrifices that they make. So I want to have that discussion about for the general, for the general fitness person, what does it actually mean to go to that really high level of fitness and why they probably don't want to do that. But we'll leave that as a cliffhanger, a teaser for next time. All right. Where can they find you on the social medias?

I am at weightsandplates.com. If you are local, my gym's website is now, we've split it apart. Finally, it's got its own website. It's exciting. Weightsandplatesgym.com. It doesn't look much different, but at least you can find everything now. I am at Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana or weight double underscore and double underscore plates. Excellent. You can find me on my website, www.marmaladecream.com. Check out my audio production website, but you can also get in touch with me about training. You can also find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream. All right. We'll talk to y'all in a couple of weeks. you