The Complete Guide To Body Recomposition W/ Chris Barakat

all right what is going on everybody welcome back to the show today i am joined by chris bearcat chris thank you for being here my pleasure man thanks for having me on absolutely dude so for the listeners who might not know can you just give us a quick breakdown of who you are and what you're up to right now yeah for sure so i'll try to keep it brief so essentially i'm a full-time online coach primarily focused on dealing with physique athletes i'm a natural bodybuilder myself competitive athlete since 2011 in that space and i also teach at the university of tampa as an adjunct professor over there and i do a lot of research in the human performance lab so basically all the research that i'm a part of is related to bodybuilding in some sort of way whether it's improving strength and performance or improving body composition or a combination of the two and yeah that's that's a really short snippet of it like i said i've been doing i've been competing in bodybuilding since 2011 and over the last decade or so everything i've been doing has always revolved around training and nutrition i love it man so the main reason i brought you on the show today is to talk about body recomposition the process of what's usually defined as losing or building muscle and losing fat at the same time now before we dive into that can you just give us a quick breakdown what kind of makes you an expert on this because i know like you literally wrote the book so to speak on body recomposition can you just give us a quick background on that as well yeah for sure um well essentially when i first got into the the research field um i used to take information that was being shared through other experts in the fitness industry is black and white this is good this is bad kind of thing and once i got involved with data collection myself i started realizing that there's a huge gray area because i was in graduate school involved my first training study that was investigating auto regulation of exercise selection and what we were seeing was each individual was responding extremely different from one another even though their training was exactly the same right and their diet was extremely similar in terms of like protein intake and calories per per pound of body weight and stuff like that so i was like huh this is super interesting and that first study um we've had i think four to six of those subjects did go through a body recomposition um phase so to speak and a lot of the other subjects didn't you know some of them gained fat some of them lost muscle so i started seeing everybody respond differently and being involved with coaching you know i would see some clients kind of headed out of the park have a really amazing body composition transformation while other clients progressed at a much slower rate or it took um a lot more trial and error to really get the needle moving with them so yeah man essentially over the years just being involved the lab i kept seeing this more and more and you know this is an opportunity for me to actually have concrete data on it my second investigation that i was a part of in in regards to like a randomized control trial was in female um college volleyball players okay and you know these people aren't extremely highly trained but it's not like they've never lifted before you know a lot of them have been lifting for three to four plus years they do more strength and conditioning work it's not like they're training for hypertrophy um but in that study we were investigating velocity-based training and they also were working with a registered dietitian and a sports nutritionist so they had a lot more nutritional hands-on help during that time period and those results were insane the study was only seven weeks long and when you looked at group averages they lost um a little bit over five pounds of fat mass and gained a little bit over five pounds of lean body mass in just seven weeks right so i was like oh wow and then looking at some of the outliers in that study where some of these girls you know gained like eight pounds of lean mass and dropped 10 pounds of fat mass and just only so i was like blown away right but it was really cool to have that data in front of me so i kind of kept diving down that rabbit hole and then in 2019 jeff nifford approached me and you know told me he was really interested in in doing something regarding body composition and we just started chewing the [ __ ] and i started um kind of continuing to dig through the research that i wasn't personally a part of just looking at previous published scientific literature and i kept seeing this over and over but most people in the evidence-based space weren't talking about body recomposition or the common zeitgeist is it only happens to novice untrained people or overweight and obese people but when going through the literature i just started seeing a lot of different results pointing in the direction that this does occur and it can occur so yeah man it was a pleasure to work with jeff on that book and um it's been a great guide to help perfect perfect that is very like basically that you explained there sorry you broke up on me there but at the end but very very you've done a ton of research on this you've broken down a ton of research on this and again you literally helped write the book on body recomposition like you said it's generally put out there that like hey the only people that can build muscle and lose fat at the same time are those that have are d trained haven't trained or again like the obese but what you're saying is this is a scenario that you see happen a lot more frequently than most people will say right absolutely absolutely and um most recently to give you guys a little bit of context this past month august of 2020 our research review paper was just published in the um journal of strength and conditioning and that was a review paper on body on body recomposition and it was the first one ever um that even mentions those words body recomps so i think it's super cool um and that was a collaboration with myself my buddy jeremy pearson my mentor dr eduardo de souza and then a lot of people know dr bill campbell from usf which is up the street here in tampa and then also my buddy dr guillermo escalante out in california so that was awesome and you know besides writing the ultimate got to recomp book like the ebook and getting that information out there um it was really cool to actually work on a peer-reviewed published paper and get this out into the scientific community so to speak so i was really grateful for that opportunity and um i'm just really excited to see where kind of things go from here that is dope that you're kind of like a pioneer in this like something that hasn't been studied a ton that's super cool man trying man trying i love it so let me ask you this do you see like a couple different most common scenarios where body recomposition happens because i'm sure you have like bring on clients that are coming from like very different backgrounds very different physiques but that are capable of composit like a body recom do you see like two or three like okay these are the most common like okay this client's coming in with this body type or like this training history this is what happens sure a thousand percent so um the less amount of total resistance training experience you have the greater likelihood that you can recomp 100 and the more body fat that you're currently starting off with the greater likelihood that you can recon that is what we have seen in the scientific literature and that's what just makes sense right the kind of the further away you are from your genetic limit and your maximum potential the more you have to gain right and the faster that you can make that progress but it's really interesting because there are outliers that kind of might only have one of those scenarios so i want to share with you one outlier from one of our training studies perfect um this training study was looking at different training volumes and really well-trained individuals um it was published in 2020 i'm trying to think of the exact year the exact month i forget but the head author is my buddy dan all day so it's all day and colleagues and it's looking at um essentially different training volumes the study inside the lab they were just training legs inside the lab so when we reported like how much muscle they gained um we only reported how much muscle they gained in their quads and their hamstrings and their glutes so we utilized the dexa scan but we only we utilize this tool called region of interest and we just looked at the amount of lean mass they gained from their knee to their hip right because whatever else happened to their upper body wasn't necessarily related to the training that they were doing in the study long story short one subject came in he was a basketball player he was eight point five percent body fat to start via dexa okay so super lean basketball player okay and he fit the criteria to be a participant of the study because you need it to squat at least 1.75 times your body weight right which isn't crazy but it's clearly it's a solid number right so he was a basketball player that had resistance training experience in a strength and conditioning realm he was doing basketball style workouts mainly full body training basic stuff with a barbell he's never done like true hypertrophy training right now the crazy thing is this subject that came in at 8.5 body fat he gained like 18 pounds of lean body mass throughout his entire body and he lost fat mass damn yeah so this yeah it was just the craziest transformation i've ever seen okay absolutely insane um probably you know top tier genetics right um incredible athlete with no true hypertrophy resistance training experience right but is familiar with lifting weights knows how to squat knows how to bench press so on and so forth and that was just the craziest transformation i've ever seen and seeing stuff like that now i never want to tell people hey you're also going to gain 18 pounds of lean body mass it's absolutely insane right but i also don't want to tell people hey you're really lucky if you gain two to three pounds of lean mass in the entire year right because at that point it's like if they go in with that expectation and that's their belief two things might happen a they might not even be motivated to try anymore because that doesn't sound exciting enough right those results aren't motivating enough in itself and then b if that's their expectation i truly believe like that's going to be a limiting component in regards to how much progress they actually do make um so i i like to have realistic expectations but also i'm not trying to shoot someone in the foot before they even before they get started because we don't know who has top tier genetics we don't know what someone's truly capable of until they a give it their best effort and b start kind of crossing all their t's and dotting all their eyes right right okay okay perfect so then taking it back to like these most common scenarios where you see it in then is there so it sounds like in that case dude was super lean but he also built a ton of muscle and got even leaner so then typically it's thought to like past a certain like body fat percentage body fat four so to speak it's very like nearly impossible to build muscle like i know for me personally for the longest time anytime i would go into a cutout well [ __ ] it like i guess i'm not gonna gain muscle for the duration of this cut and i know like even speaking of the mindset piece of it a little bit for me like when i actually saw some of the research on that that completely like flipped the switch for me and i did like actually make way more progress in my cuts as well so i can definitely speak that as well but it sounds like here basically we're saying is this dude was lean he was already relatively well trained and maybe not like in a hypertrophy aspect but he was already well trained so that's definitely not a limiting factor like i think most people would think that's probably the least common scenario where it happens right yeah i mean he was lean but i would consider him a skinny athletic build you know what i'm saying to start um and he was trained where he was very competent at squat bench press all the barbell moving patterns through strength and conditioning with a college basketball team you know what i'm saying um so he knew what weightlifting was it's not like he's never been into the gym but at the same time i would not consider him a bodybuilder you know it's not like he he's been bodybuilding training for three to five years he's just been in and out of the gym weight training as a means to compliment his sport but right man um it just again you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot before you even get started and exactly yeah it's super super impressive i couldn't agree more man i feel like one of the most common scenarios that i see a body ring comp and like the people wouldn't typically expect is like the individual that comes on into coaching they've already been working their ass off but they've been doing something like crossfit or for example i have a dude that he just started coaching with me but he was doing orange theory like dude worked so hard he was trying very hard to eat clean but he didn't have specific macros he didn't actually know where his calories were and he had been doing orange theory like six days a week so we got him he's basically following like a functional bodybuilding style training so basically more geared towards hypertrophy his macros are on point and dude has recomp like crazy yeah i see the exact same thing too and like a lot of crossfitters that come on again they've been like working very hard but kind of like you mentioned there like training might not have been geared so much towards just hypertrophy so when we switch like okay now you still have the ability to put on a lot of lean muscle yeah or like maybe your nutrition wasn't super specific then again like i think that's another situation where people don't really wouldn't think that you're capable of recall but you very much are oh 100 100 so in regards to the clients i work with a few things happen right off the bat a we improved their training approach where they're being more efficient with their time and their effort in the gym and then b we totally kind of revamp their nutritional approach right and it's typically increasing protein it even comes down to increasing their meal frequency so i know a lot of people say oh if you eat as long as you eat the proper amount of protein on a daily basis doesn't matter if you have two meals per day or six meals per day i personally disagree with that um from what i see with my clients and what some of the research has pointed towards and um yeah man i mean there's there's always more variables that you can improve so you need to ask yourself okay my effort is where it needs to be but how has my training progress actually been am i getting stronger if you're not getting stronger you need to assess why you're not getting stronger and then fix that and then b from a nutritional standpoint if you don't even know how many calories you're eating and what your proteins at i mean you have to start there and then you have so many um other variables that you can improve upon but you need to at least start with that you know so let's just say you do have your calories in a good spot and you do have your protein in a good spot then you can start talking about like okay well what's my meal frequency look like am i getting three protein feedings a day or am i getting four or five or six um what's my pre-workout nutrition looking like am i ensuring that i'm going into this training session you know well fed and with the proper amount of fuel and the kind of the right fuel sources to to really make sure that i sustain energy throughout this entire workout that i can perform my best and then b what am i doing post workout to really start that recovery process not only right away but also am i maximizing my recovery capabilities you know right and then another super important variable is sleep i getting five to six really poor quality hours in or am i getting you know a solid eight uh eight hours of sleep a night so once you start combining all of those things you start kind of aligning all the tools in your toolbox to have body recomposition be a more likely outcome for you 100 and i know at least as far as my coaching service goes and i'm guessing you've probably seen this a ton as well i feel like most everybody that comes on will recomp at least for a bit because again i feel like for most people it's the first time you've been focused on like all of these details at the same time like i know for me i'll speak from my personal experience i know we mentioned before like uh talking about our mutual coins coding with broome right i first hired him as a coach like three years ago i had already been training for seven years but i was very much like okay like i'm not having that much fun with my training i'm sleeping five to six hours a night just like you're saying they're like total protein feedings like my total protein across the course of the day and nutrient timing isn't that important yeah yeah then when i started i was like all right dude i'm all in like i'm sleeping eight hours a night non-negotiable all my macros are on point pre-workout post-workout nutrient timing yeah crushing into my training and i re-comp like crazy i got a lot more i built a lot more muscle so again i feel like it's like and this is very much like if a client comes in trying to chase like hey i want to recomp okay we need to be a lot more focused on the details even if just like that gets you more bought into the process i feel like that brings about such better results than just like you're saying like okay hit your overall calories and protein right yeah yeah no 100 man so this is the thing um a lot of my my niche market so to speak is competitive natural bodybuilders right um and i'm not saying that if you've been crossing your t's and dotting your eyes for the last 10 years that you're going to recon and i'm not saying that should be your goal however the majority of people that go to a commercial gym they're not crossing their teeth they're not that in their eyes and there are so many things that they could do that kind of align with that typical bodybuilding lifestyle right and the more the more that they do that the better their body composition outcomes are going to be and i mean i i genuinely think it can be really common and uh doable or realistic for so many people because they're leaving a lot of low-hanging fruit you know out on the table there's plenty of that for them to catch 100 and i would say to add to that like if you haven't had your training your nutrition and your recovery like all on point at the same time for a good period of time you're probably again like leaving a lot on the table yeah um one thing i'd like to mention is like i think a lot of people go wrong where if their primary goal is fat loss so a lot like basically everyone wants to build muscle and lose that at the same time right like that's the holy grail that's everyone's goal at the end of the day um but what i see is a lot of people kind of prioritize fat loss as their first goal and muscle building as their second goal so what i commonly see is a lot of people jump into a calorie deficit right off the bat so they have this training plan in place and they put this diet together to help them reach their goals and they start off with a calorie deficit because they know that's going to you know best lead to the greatest fat loss results right um however what that does is it's going to slightly decrease their ability to build muscle and improve their training performance and more importantly it's also going to decrease their ability to adhere to the plan because their hunger cues are going to go up at some point and your body kind of just senses that deficit as a threat depending on where you start off at so what i often do is have a lot of my clients start off at theoretical maintenance okay and just focus on improving their macronutrient ratios throughout the board and then improve upon their nutrient timing their meal frequency and all these other variables i just kind of called it like good habit building right so focus on building those habits and then we can kind of choose like okay you're in this position let's go into a surplus and let's start to actually intentionally want to gain weight or okay let's go into a deficit and i actually want to start seeing the scale trend downward but i like starting i like starting people off at maintenance and focus on uh developing really good habits and then kind of go in one direction or the other if even necessary okay okay perfect on that note let's dive into nutrition a little bit man so it sounds like almost always then you're gonna somebody's coming in like yo i wanna recomp i think i'm very capable of it sounds like most of the time you're gonna start them in a maintenance phase correct for the most part yeah um you know i determine what theoretical maintenance is and then based on their seven day averages let's see if that theoretical maintenance is is holding to be true right just depending on their actual execution adherence and yeah man i mean basically take it from there um super important for them to take circumference measurements so a lot of times what happens is their body their scale weight stays essentially the same you know plus or minus one or two pounds up or down or literally like spot on right in the middle right and their circumference measurements go down so that's a great sign like hey your waist is getting smaller you're probably losing some body fat even though that the scale is staying the same so you have nothing to panic about we're kind of doing exactly what we want to do let's keep it up 100 okay i can't agree more man i feel like that's such an overlooked piece and i feel like that's what people like get bummed out like they're not making progress it's just strictly tracking scale weight when there's like yo no you're actually crushing it um are there any situations where you would start someone in a deficit right out of the gate for sure if they're obese like genuinely obese or or you know heavily overweight mama start them off in a deficit right away um and that's not going to it's honestly not going to hinder their muscle building abilities at that point as long as proteins high enough because they have so much extra energy reserves from their fat storage that they can still build muscle in that period okay okay and then it sounds like most people you're starting in a maintenance phase they're focusing mostly on building changing habits etc from there like for the relatively lean individual so let's say like someone comes on there about 15 percent or let's say like your typical some they come on they're feeling kind of skinny fat right do you feel like if you we could talk about like okay here's how we're kind of like periodizing your nutrition so to speak is it mostly like a maintenance phase we're taking advantage of like three or four months of gains and then go into a cut to like get rid of that last bit of fat or how do you structure that typically yeah man so if someone's skinny fat i focus on the word skinny more than i focus on the word fat like that means and that means that they have a greater potential to build muscle because they're so far away from like their maximum potential right right so i try to focus on strength performance getting them stronger in the gym getting them to really enjoy chasing the log book to a certain extent where they're more excited about benching 225 instead of 145 and they're really excited to train hard than they are about like oh i still have you know unwanted fat around my love handles um if if you can kind of just shift their their focus to like i'm getting strong and this is really fun let's like let's keep doing it i actually take them from maintenance into a slight surplus and focus on building muscle and maximizing that as much as we can because i feel like at that point they should be able to gain more lean body mass than they do fat mass right so as they gain they should be able to lean bulk really really well and they should actually like the way their physique looks as they're gaining weight because that ratio of lean mass the fat mass is favoring the lean mass gains and you know their body fat percent can be going down even though they're not losing fat mass okay okay that makes sense yeah no no 100 um so what about the individual that comes on they are relatively well trained but maybe they haven't had a nutritional point so like they've been following the smart training program for a long time they maybe haven't had their nutrition as on point so they're probably just a little bit fluffier than need be would you say like yo let's again start you up maintenance and you probably have even more ability to build because your nutrition hasn't been dialed in even though like you probably have a good amount of mass or maybe in that case we push to get leaner any like recommendations there yeah it's always like a given to take depending on how set they are on losing body fat but if someone's really focused on like hey i really really want to cut then hey you know let's do that um it might be a pretty short cut it might be six to eight weeks um you know let's improve your body composition get you into a spot where you are more you know so to speak insulin sensitive and you kind of can tolerate carbohydrates more and we kind of start feeling your performance a bit better that might motivate them to a get into a better spot and then once their body composition improves now they actually might be able to make more progress at a faster rate because they are a bit leaner and it can be actually healthier for them so it totally depends man like being too too lean is very unhealthy hormonally and being too heavy is very unhealthy hormonally too so some people that again this depends on their starting point but some people that are heavy and have a high percent of body fat they can have really poor sleep and they can have just poor mood and poor motivation um so if getting them a little bit leaner improves their sleep improves their motivation that needs to be the first move and then we could focus on really building muscle and quote-unquote recompense our second phase if that makes sense okay okay so this does this somewhat then tie into this idea of now i know this so much depends because it's so variable like how did you measure your body fat that it's hard to actually know with if within this range anyways but like for a long time you'd hear people talk about the p ratio right like this is where we get the most optimal nutrient partitioning like 10 to 15 for men 15 to 25 for women does that kind of tie into this yeah yeah i would say so um and it's everyone's set points slightly different um so it's going to vary but like for me i know it is between honestly uh as low as 10 and as high as 14. once i go above 14 um i feel like i don't gain any muscle and i just get fatter at that point um and then once i'm below 10 um i'm basically just preserving my lean mass to the best of my ability and i'm not really expecting to gain lean mass if i'm below 10. um so right now i'm pushing calories personally and i'm i'm probably around 12 and a half ish right and i'll i'll push up to 14 15 and then i'll i'll trim it back down but yeah it depends for everyone and then for females um i would say the 15 to 25 is a little bit on the low end i would say most females feel really good between 18 on the lower end and you know 28 ish on the higher end okay okay yeah for like you know athletic physique competitors in their offseason right right okay okay perfect so as far as setting up macros go protein do you have a specific like okay we're probably gonna aim for this many grams per pound of body weight yeah a thousand percent man so um in the guide we have protein on a sliding scale and what i typically recommend is the the scale goes from 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass all the way up to 1.6 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass and the more body fat you have the lower your protein needs are and then the leaner you are the closer to that 1.6 range you need to get and a lot of people ask well hey man i really don't know what my body fat percent is i don't know how to test it if you're off by five percent you're totally fine and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to guesstimate within a five percent ballpark so you don't need to know if you're twelve point five percent or twelve percent right you just know that you're between ten and fifteen if that makes sense so i feel like as long as you can guesstimate um what your body composition is literally by looking at photos or by doing skin caliper assessments or by using a really cheap bio bioelectrical impedance um it'll give you something that should be within a five percent range and then from there you can kind of start off with your protein protein requirements yeah okay um and then one other thing i'll say about protein is you know if i have a client come to me let's say it's a female client and they're used to eating 70 grams of protein a day 60 grams of protein per day like a very typical american kind of diet i'm not going to tell them to eat 120 grams of protein overnight just because i do think that's optimal for them right you know i'll take them from 60 to 80 then 80 to 100 and 100 to 120 just so they get used to adding in proteins for their diet so it's not something that you have to do overnight but um i do think that 1.2 to 1.6 grams per pounding body mass is ideal for body composition purposes okay okay i love it and definitely as far as the protein i can speed that as well like if a new client comes on and yo we're we need to double your protein yeah i think one of the least effective things you can do is like right away bump it to that but rather like okay what's your lowest meal in protein right now i feel like for most people it's breakfast how can we add another protein and then just open it up from there but absolutely as far as so as far as ratio of carbs to fat go do you have a preference like you typically hire a car kind of balance what are your thoughts on that yeah um so this is a little bit more context dependent and that's super important um so generally speaking the leaner you are and the more physically active you are the higher carbs i i kind of partition and then the more sedentary you are and the higher your body fat levels are the more fats you have and the less carbohydrates you have so i actually set protein first i said so i set up calories first utilizing something like the mifflin saint jor or the harris benedict whatever it may be set up their calories first then i determine protein and then based on their current body composition and their lifestyle i determine fat and i personally use percentages for fat so i never go below 20 of their total calorie intake coming from fat and i really never go above 35 of their total calorie intake coming from fat and that's also on that same sliding scale so if someone's extremely sedentary and they have a current high level of body fat they might be close to that 35 percent of their total calories coming from fat and then i fill in the rest of their calories from carbohydrate and on the opposite end of the spectrum if someone's leaner or just really physically active you know they can have a kind of labor-intensive job where they're constantly moving then they're going to have less total calories coming from fat closer to the 20 end range and then more carbohydrate but i think 25 fat is a really good sweet spot for a lot of people if they're not too sure and then you can kind of adjust thereafter super super helpful so basically you're saying set your protein needs such determine your fat needs and then fill the rest your calories with carbs 1000 love it um as far as new and it again like you said there but i feel like we should probably drop a couple disclaimers in here too like this is all very much like it does so much depending on the individual as far as you're capable as the recommendations so i'm glad you threw that in there as well but venice i want to dive into nutrient timing just a bit as well so can you give us like just some general okay we probably want to be a little bit carb heavier here a little bit fat heavier here anything like that yeah absolutely um one thing i'm actually a an advocate for is having one meal per day primarily be protein protein fat and fibrous vegetable a lot of people think that's super bro of me but i do see merit there and typically it's either the first meal of the day or the last meal of the day but it depends on the time of day that you train and you exercise so let's just take a standard american that works a normal nine to five and then goes to the gym at you know 5 45 6 p.m after work i really like starting off your day with a high fat high protein fibrous vegetable breakfast so that can literally be like a vegetable on it with whole eggs and egg whites or turkey bacon whatever it may be that's going to really keep them satiated for quite a few hours because they're having high fat high protein and high fiber from the vegetables but it also kind of forces them to continue utilizing more fat as fuel and i think that this can help with metabolic flexibility over time where you just constantly program your body to do this day in and day out and i do genuinely think a lot of people in the states in just modern society right now are a bit insulin resistant if you look at people's resting blood glucose levels fasting blood glucose levels they're usually a bit elevated so starting off your day like that can be advantageous and you're not forcing your body to secrete a bunch of insulin with every single feeding you know if you have carbs in every single meal you're forcing your body to do that over and over so give your body a break um have a high fat high protein meal with fibrous vegetable at least one time a day and then and then as your day goes on you'll have your your carbohydrate meals and like moderate fat higher carb higher protein and go out throughout the day that way then on the opposite end of the spectrum if you kind of train early on in the day maybe your final meal of the day is like a salad with a protein source or just fibrous vegetable protein and fat that makes sense perfect again super super applicable so as far as nutrition goes last thing i wanted to ask you for like that client that you're working with that is in a deficit are you going to but they're chasing recall are you going to implement more like diet breaks refeeds anything like that or just a straight deficit um for sure i'm gonna continue talking about nutrient time real quick just because i wanted my bad my bad no no you're good i just want to provide the listeners with a little bit more nuggets that they can apply right away so another thing to consider is i just want to talk about pre-workout and post-workout super quick because that can really benefit their performance into recovery so i just want to kind of talk about that for them real quick in regards to pre-workout nutrition i'm a really big fan of utilizing multiple transportable carbs so that just means utilizing a starchy carbohydrate and a fruit source and hairing them in that meal i typically use low glycemic carbs as my pre-workout carbohydrate source um that's going to keep your blood glucose levels a bit more stable it's not going to have that spike in that crash so it's going to prevent you from going hypoglycemic while exercising and feel and just kind of feeling fatigue mid-workout also it's going to lead to a little bit of more acute bad oxidation while you're actually training so i really like doing that an example would be doing like like old-fashioned oatmeal with you know blueberries or some sort of fruit you know cut up apple or something like that okay and then obviously having your protein your protein source with it okay and then post workout i keep it kind of old school um even though it's not super necessary to do like a high glycemic carb if you're not training more than twice per day and you're just doing one training session like most of us i still like utilizing high glycemic carbs so it might be something like a rice krispie treat for me and a whey protein shake um something really simple really fast to digest and obviously getting in a full bowl is a protein post workout as well i love it again man i feel like all that's so applicable and i know pre-workout i typically love to do like uh berries mixed with oatmeal um i sometimes like to mix it with greek yogurt as well but always like some type of protein like a whey protein in there as well yeah say same and depending on my timing what my training session is i usually add like a little bit of walnuts or a little bit of almond butter or a little bit of coconut flakes or something like that got a little bit of fat but it's primarily carbohydrate protein and just a little bit of fat right okay sounds like you're applying that exact same like pretty low fat high carb always relatively high protein post workout correct yeah perfect perfect so then going again kind of to this client that's in a deficit are you going to like in the case of a recomp are you going to implement more refeeds more frequent diet breaks anything like that or just get the deficit over with um yeah i mean it always depends but i utilize refeeds and diet breaks pretty regularly so um i'll say a how much body fat does this client need to lose or want to lose in in what time kind of time period that's going to be a huge factor so if someone needs to lose a significant amount of body fat and they're willing to do this what i would say in a smart and safe way so they're giving themselves enough time i'll absolutely utilize diet breaks for them for the psychological benefit as well as the physiological benefit and it's something that when they know how long that this fat loss phase is expected to be and they have a realistic expectation they can buy into okay i'm really excited for this longer process right i'm also looking forward to having those periods of five to seven to up to 14 days where i'm going to be eating closer to maintenance if not at maintenance and kind of taking my foot off the fat loss gas pedal and giving my body a time to recover from that stress alone so yeah man i utilize diet breaks and refeeds pretty regularly to be quite honest with you um some people refeed once to twice per week um that can be on a higher physical activity day or a week body part training day or a super high volume day or even a day that you know they just have more physical activity and then i also utilize refeeds with my female clients very regularly post mental cycle right after they get their period from a hormonal standpoint they're a bit more insulin sensitive their basal metabolic rate is slightly elevated so they're burning more calories at rest and they're able to utilize carbs a tad more efficiently so i typically increase their carbs a bit and drop their fats a bit right around the end of their cycle yeah week two of their follicular phase so like how much then would that is that an overall increase in calories are you just swapping carbs for fat um it's the slight bump in calories um it could be up to uh at least 50 calories higher but sometimes even more than that depending sometimes they even take diet breaks uh that entire week and just have their carbs higher it it depends on so many factors but it's something to look into um a really good resource is wild mcdonald's i think it's just called the women's book great book um yeah yeah and and he talks about that a bit there so pretty cool stuff there perfect perfect i feel like all that is super helpful so as far as do you feel like refeeding themselves outside of like the psychological components do you feel like these are going to help people preserve or build more muscle mass in a deficit or is it mostly just the psychological benefits that you're looking at i do think it's going to preserve more lean body mass while dieting and it's pretty cool dr campbell out of usf he just recently published this study that basically demonstrated those that were utilizing refeeds and diet breaks throughout a calorie deficit did preserve more lean mass and actually preserved their resting metabolic rate to a higher degree so it's cool to see the evidence start and come out and support these tools and techniques um i think it's going to come from a few reasons when you're taking those refeeds and you're kind of refilling some of your glycogen stores a you're going to just have more water in your muscle cell which is going to read as lean body mass to a certain extent but b it theoretically should help you maintain your strength performance your strength endurance performance so you're going into the gym you're able to keep your volume higher your volume load higher and that should lead to you preserving more right where right if you're super fatigued then you're never getting those refeeds and your performance just continues to drop how are you going to really hold on to that muscle mass if you're just kind of getting weaker and weaker over time so yeah i think it's a great tool 100 perfect dude so as far as nutrition goes um before we move on anything else you would like to touch on there anything else you feel is important um no man just you know if there's if there's a variable that you can improve upon try to make that adjustment to to kind of cross that t or dot that i um and again it can be as simple as right now you're doing four protein feedings per day all right try to let's try to increase the five maybe do an additional shake you know right before going to bed maybe do a casein shake or if you're not if you have one meal per day that's super low protein you know get that to an adequate amount where you are maximizing muscle protein synthesis for that specific meal it doesn't have to be a drastic change but just find a hole in your diet that you can improve upon and make that improvement i love that dude again i think that's super applicable so i wanted to dive into training real quick and we likely won't have as much to go into because this is all very much again it depends on where you're coming from are there some general like hey these are typically the biggest things we shift like when somebody comes on board chasing a body recomposition it's just really surprising to me how many people don't track their lifts in the gym i couldn't agree more right so so many clients come to me and they're like yeah i've been lifting for three to seven years for example and they send me their training program or they give me an idea of how much volume they currently do or they're constantly changing up their exercise you know their split may stay the same but they're kind of just going into the gym and winging it right and they they never ever track their lifts um they make so much progress alone just by doing that and their workouts become more time efficient so let's just say you're doing a leg extension machine and you know that last week you did 120 pounds and 140 pounds for your true working sets you don't need to go in the gym and like guesstimate like okay what weight am i going to do today right now and so many people again this is this is not for a hardcore competitive bodybuilder which is a large percent of my my niche but so many people that go to the gym they say okay i'm going to do xyz exercise and i'm going to do those exercises for 8 to 12 reps or 12 to 15 reps and they just pick a load and they do those 8 to 12 reps or they do those 12 to 15 reps but they could have done 15 reps on the sets they're doing 12 with and they could have done 20 reps on the sets they're doing 15 with and it's like they're working so far away from failure that they're not creating enough of a stimulatory effect from the training session itself to induce the adaptation they're looking for which is gains and strength and gains in size right so i mean just look around at any commercial gym and take a look at someone's first rep and take a look at their last rep if their concentric velocity is exactly the same that means they're nowhere near their failing point right like if they do their lat pull down at this speed and the bar is moving at this speed for their first rep and their last looks the same as their first rep they're so far away from failure that like how do you expect that that's going to stimulate a change right so i think that's where just gen pop goes wrong not competitive athletes but if you just go to your normal la fitness or crunch fitness or whatever it is like that's what i see like everyone stops their set so far away from failure a hundred percent man and i i feel i've even seen the clients that do maybe have a good understanding of like here's how i use the rpe scale or here's how i like track rir still like no matter what if you go in there what you're doing even if you're doing the same straight as you did last week or the last eight weeks it's still gonna feel hard if you've been training for a couple years but like you're saying like it's so important to okay let's what did i do like last this corresponding set last week so let's say you're doing back squats okay what do i do sets reps load last week okay can i maybe like push to can i add another rep here can i add a little bit of load but if you don't have a log book you're just going in and doing [ __ ] that feels even like if it feels hard it's very easy to like not make progress for a very long time training like that absolutely absolutely and um something that i've recently changed over the past 12 months or so 8 to 12 months is my approach to my warm-up sets um i think early on in my training career i wasted a lot of energy and essentially did a lot of junk volume with my warm-up sets okay so let's just say i'm doing let's just say i'm doing incline dumbbell chest press just random examples and my goal is to work with the 90s like those are my my working sets i would do like 50 pounds for 10 60 for eight 70 for eight maybe 80 for four and then i would get into it um now i'm doing a similar number of warm-up sets but like i might do 50 for 10 60 for 55 seventy for two eighty for two and then okay i'm ready for the nineties um so i'm conserving my energy on my warm-up sets right so when i get to my true working set i can attack it with more energy more focus and i'm not essentially pre-fatiguing myself before getting into my working sets because at the end of the day it's it's those working sets that are going to actually change my physique and drive the adaptation i'm looking for so i think a lot of people go go wrong there too okay okay again i feel like that's super applicable i probably fall on the other end of the spectrum i love training i hate any type of warm-up work so i think i've probably underdone that a little bit as much as you've overdone that as far okay so as far as cardio goes then you have actually one more thing on training i feel like it's probably one of the i know you touched on this a bit it sounds like you typically like you mentioned with that basketball player if you haven't been training for hypertrophy again you have a like a very typically large ability to like add a lot of muscle more quickly right 100 um and and then another thing i'll say with training just again speaking gen pop and even even more well-trained people i see so many people not controlling the load throughout the entire concentric and the entire eccentric um you want your lift to look like you are controlling the weight and the weight is not controlling you so that means when you're squatting as you're performing the eccentric you're you know the rate at which that eccentric is happening because you're controlling how slow you're going down you're not kind of just dive bombing right and letting the weight push you through the eccentric same thing with a bench press the weight isn't just flying down to your chest because you're dealing with a heavy load you know exactly how slow that bar is moving because you're in control of moving it and then boom you're pressing it you're pressing it as explosively as you can with as much control as you can and then the amount of weight you're utilizing is going to determine how fast that actually moves right right so if you're using your 10rm that first rep is going to move pretty quickly but if you're using your 3rm it's going to move extremely slow right um but yeah man just being in control and just pausing and the fully shortened fully contracted position right like if you do a leg extension or a preacher curl when you're at the top of the movement when the muscles fully shortened pause for a slight second don't just start your yeast down trick and squeeze it there and feel the actual muscle working i think if your goal is hypertrophy you need to start thinking like okay my goal is to train this muscle so i actually want to feel what's going on internally i don't want to just move the weight from point a to point b because i'm not power lifting and i'm not just trying to pick up this bar from the floor right you know what i'm saying so i think that shift in mindset is super important and if you're a gen pop person and you don't have any competitive goals but your goal is to improve your physique then you re like you should care about this even more because you shouldn't care about how much weight you're lifting right because you don't have a competitor like you're not trying to show off someone you're just trying to take care of your body and build your physique right so a you're going to reduce your risk of injury tenfold and b you're going to just get greater results so it's like you should really focus in on dialing dialing that form in focusing on that internal mind muscle connection it really makes a big difference i couldn't agree more man i know that was one of the biggest shifts for me like when i first learned okay volume like if we wanted to find it as sets times reps times weight okay i'm squatting and i'm gonna sacrifice my range of motion like maybe i just barely hit parallel but yo i put more weight on the bar so that's more volume right yeah but if the goal is to my goal is to build jack quads and i can actually like squat acid grass if i cut that weight by a good amount then i'm stimulating my quads more and like the weight on the bar isn't near of course it's important but like yeah i think too many people fall on that trap so i know for me one of the most helpful things has been really identifying okay where's my start and my end point of every single movement so like when i squat like okay hamstrings touch my calves that's start or the end point however you won't have to find it but like we have these two checkpoints we hit right because otherwise i know like for me for the longest time and i think this has been super helpful for my clients as well i was like okay i added weight this week or i added a rep this week but then like okay my squat depth was like a little less a little less a little less so there's another easy way to fake progress i think those are also important thing just think about a thousand percent i mean that's a great point you make um something i want to share is we use volume load so wait times reps time sets as a objective way that is supposed to determine how much work you did right right it's a way that we we objectify workload but it's only true it's only a true measurement if that workload is staying standardized right so if you just if you did 10 000 pounds of volume with perfect form and then you did 11 000 pounds of volume with perfect form you did successfully progressively overload if your form was standardized right 10 000 pounds of volume with perfect form and then you did 11 000 pounds of volume with [ __ ] form on paper you might think that the 11 000 pounds of volume was more total work but in reality it probably wasn't especially internally on the muscle my first study as the primary investigator as the pi head author was looking at bicep training okay and we had subjects the same subjects come in one week they did nine steps of bicep curls on a cable column right with their shoulder at zero degrees and then the next week they came in and they did three sets with their shoulder extended so their bicep was stretched three sets neutral and then three sets with their shoulder flexed okay and we controlled intensity so they have to be getting extremely close to failure on all of their working sets but we didn't control volume right and what ended up happening was their volume load was essentially exactly the same there was no statistical difference between volume load between conditions but the group that varied their shoulder joint angle had a significantly greater muscle activation okay so that's to me that's an internal stimulus versus an external objectified workload so even though volume load was equated the in internal signal that leads to hypertrophy generally speaking um was greater when they vary their joint angle so that can you know give some benefits or allude to some benefits of varying your exercise selection in a very logical evidence-based way but yeah you know it's not the same what's happening internally to the muscle and how much volume you're doing doesn't always correlate with one another so so interesting and i love having one and we could dive into this a bit more because i feel like that could straight up probably be a whole nother podcast for sure but as far as training goes then do you mind diving into cardio real quick i'm not sure how much more time you have but i'd love to as far as cardio recommendations um like do you all are you generally going to prescribe cardio for somebody and i know again it it depends and then like versus list any take on that yeah absolutely um so when it comes to cardio the most important thing is why are we doing it is it as a tool to increase calorie expenditure as a means to increase fat loss or are we doing it for the goal of hey this person wants to improve cardiovascular health um and maybe they have some sort of issue going on so i'm personally a bigger fan of both ends of the extreme when it comes to cardio i typically do lists or i do hit um personally i'm not someone who does medium intensity steady state for a long period of time so like i'm not going to jog at a relatively high intensity right for extended periods of time but i actually did fasted cardio this morning i did 30 minutes on the elliptical at between 120 and 130 beats per minute okay i consider that low intensity some people consider like just walking and taking steps as low intensity um i think it's important to kind of make that differential because i don't think you're really going to get much cardiovascular benefit at all from just taking walks so to speak it's a good way to burn more calories but i do think you'll you will get some benefit of you know being in that 60 of your your heart rate max zone right right so i think that's important to determine um i do utilize cardio for my clients and for myself and again they're depending on their goal um for some of my sedentary lifestyle clients even if they're not in a fat loss goal i still have them do cardio a couple times a week just for overall health i also think it can improve their recovery which a lot of people argue with they're like oh if you're adding in cardio you're adding in another another stimulus or an another training mode that requires more recovery um capabilities right and that's true to an extent um but again if you're doing low intensity work and you're kind of just getting total body blood flow and you're getting your body moving you're increasing positive mood hormones like dopamine serotonin it could be a great way to start your day right so you got to take all those things into consideration during a contest prep for people that are trying to get really shredded i typically utilize a combination of hit and lists but yeah there's so many variables that make it depend you know um do you have any specific questions on cardio that i could answer so typically as far as cardio goes basically my question would be like when would you implement hit because i know same as like you're talking about here like aerobic work is generally going to be beneficial for most people right like you talked about it's gonna like both from a fat loss perspective it's going to help burn more calories but also it's likely going to help your recovery like if you have a better aerobic system you'll recover better between sets between training sessions yeah and even like tying into your nervous system a bit like you might be able to get back into a parasympathetic state quicker post training session so like when would so you said like your contest rap like you're getting ready for um a show you want to get shredded is implementing hit just out of necessity like yo we need to burn a lot of calories we just don't have that much time or like what's the thinking behind that yeah um so again generally speaking i actually start off some contest preps with more and way less lists okay and the goal there is to kind of increase their recovery capabilities um and get them in a position where their and they're recovering in between sets really well throughout their entire prep because we have increased their aerobic capacity so much by doing hit and then as they get leaner and leaner once their risk of losing muscle mass increases i might pull it out because it does require more fuel to recover from and at that point their calories are lower and lower so their ability to recover is hindered right so then i kind of transition into lifts and then something that i do that a lot of evidence-based people don't do or don't talk about is fasted cardio i still implement that for myself and some of my clients and there's a whole bunch of reasons there but um me and my colleague dr guillermo escalante we wrote another um research review paper on that so um i'll send that over to you to check out for sure i would love to check that out because all this is super interesting and i feel like again this could be a whole other podcast that that makes complete sense though what you're saying as far as starting off with hit and kind of tapering it to more like lists as the prep goes on that's definitely a different approach that i've heard and i've generally in the last couple years falling on the camp of like and i work with a lot of gin pop clients but generally like we want to do more like lists or we could consider it it might not feel necessarily low intensity but if we look at like aerobic versus anaerobic yeah you're primarily using your aerobic system here right yeah but that's super interesting i feel like i want to be super respectful your time man this has all been super helpful um super applicable for everybody listen i'm sure before i let you go and i'll give you a chance to plug anything you want in just a second is there anything else all you want to add as far as it goes to a body recomposition how to make it happen um man i think we covered a lot i really i had a great time chatting with you and and i appreciate you having me on here um one thing i'll say about the hit too i think towards the end of a contest prep um there comes a point where you kind of just do whatever it takes so just because i generally like to do hit early on and pull it out there's plenty i'm you know if some of my clients are listening to me right now like damn i was doing hit at the end of my at the end of my contest prep and you know there comes a point where you just do whatever is needed to be done um and then when it comes to how you approach it with gen pop i think it's really important to realize that even if you get a gen pop client from like 15 body fat to 8 body fat and you get them in great shape for the summer or something like that um there's such a massive difference between eight percent body fat and like five percent body fat for stage lean so um that's something else to consider so i mean yeah just all these variables come into play man um and then in regards to body recon i think we covered i think we covered most of it um don't shoot yourself in the foot essentially believe in what you're capable of and be honest with yourself assess your training assess your nutrition see what can improve make those adjustments and get after it and you'll be presently surprised with the results you can make or the progress you can make i should say utilize tools like circumference measurements utilize tools like skin calipers and don't just rely on the scale right when people get into bodybuilding type training you'll be surprised how much more glycogen your muscles start to require and they start storing so your scale weight you know you can actually start gaining weight because you're storing more intracellular water as you're storing more glycogen so so many things go into body composition and the scale is literally just one tool that's only measuring your total body mass and utilizing tools like skin calipers or the the waist circumference goes a long way and even taking really consistent progress photos in the same lighting in the same spot can also be a great positive reinforcer and positive feedback to kind of keep you on top of your game and let you know that you are making progress so keep up the good work kind of thing i love it man so many nuggets throughout this whole podcast um this is such a great guide to body composition before i let you go um and again i'm super appreciative of you being here dude anything at all you would like to plug uh yeah so just for everyone that you know wants to check out more of my content and get a better idea of things i do definitely check out schoolofgains.com gaines is spelt with a z at the end um it's a little bit more anabolic that way and on there you will find um you know free blog articles um youtube videos um sometimes i do like a research review every time time um and you'll also find all of my published research you can access it there you can find all the links to it there and then you can look into some of my coaching services and stuff like that with my team and i and that's also where all of my programs and ebooks are available so the ultimate guide to body recomposition is available there um and also you can find my training programs there so um what i can do if if you don't mind man i can put up like a 15 discount code right for people that use you know your podcast name so um would you want me to make it something specific um just let's say lean 15. my podcast is living lean to lean 15 is great all right cool so um yeah i'll make it lean 15 so everybody who is tuning into this podcast can check out the ultimate guide to body recomp for 15 off dope and again as someone that has the book um i've grabbed a couple of your training programs too actually learned so much from all that so i will link all this up on the show notes of course i'll have only 15 in there as well thanks but again i can't recommend it enough to everyone listening to this i'm sure they have already gathered from listening to this great resource for learning more about all this and like you in general programming you know all your research has been so helpful so again thank you for coming on man thanks man it's been my pleasure and uh last thing my most active um form of social media is on instagram so follow me there just my full name at christopher.bearcat perfect dude i'll link all that up in the show notes thanks man i appreciate it absolutely all right take care guys

Channel: Jeremiah Bair

Views: 22,157

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Id: 8Xncv3dmG2Y

Length: 67min 23sec (4043 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020