Why You're Not Losing Fat & Building Muscle (Avoid These Mistakes) | Dr. Andy Galpin

the vast majority of people that go to the gym they're in there working out all the time they never see any substantive gains why not what are people doing wrong well I'll say in general there are a few Concepts that you need to hit and then there are infinite methods so the way to frame this entire idea is regardless of your goal gaining strength losing fat all those things you listed there are always these fundamental concepts if you hit those you're going to see your goal if you don't it doesn't matter what method you're using you're probably going to either not hit a goal or you'll hit it very shortly and then come back down and you'll have this yo-yo battering so all you really have to do is ensure at the most fundamental level those concepts are hit and then we can talk days and days and days about all the intricacies of the different methods because they are different especially as we get to the level of nuance but for most people at this level it is that big stuff so what does that look like the number one thing is what we call Progressive overload such that you need to be asking a change in your physiology and remember probably the biggest Advantage we have in biology is the fact that we are optimized for adaptation and I want to reiterate that point what that means is your entire physiology is based around a single goal of adapting the stimuli it's the best trait we have why that matters here is if you're asking it to do something it is going to respond and so you need to be very careful with what you're asking it to do if you are putting a stress on it it's going to change but if you're not stressing it it's going to revert back to homeostasis this is that Baseline so ask it to change and then be diligent about what you're asking it to do in this context we call that Progressive overload so you're going to continue to ask it to do a little bit more and more and more so that it will continue to adapt doesn't have to be harder or longer or more sore or more fatigue it just needs to be overloaded and there's a bunch of ways we can reach overload that can be more weight it can be more repetitions could be longer it could be more complexity it could be more novelty there's a ton of ways in which we can ask our body to learn a new task but that is the the one that jumps out to me is the first fundamental issue is folks will go to their Fitness routine and they'll sort of perform the same thing every time and that's great and you're going to get changes up that level but once that is a new homeostatic balance you're not going to proceed any further so Progressive overload is is the number one tactic there okay and so I've heard you talk a lot about consistency that certainly is um a problem that a lot of people have they are not they're just not going enough they're maybe they go work out once a week it's super intense but when I think about the problem of consistency should I be thinking about it in terms of that even if you go in and do the same thing you're going to make some mild gains but it plateaus quickly because I think most people are thinking about it in terms of do I need to be in the gym six days a week do I need to be in the gym five days a week or can it be less than that like what is the amount that is sort of the Baseline if we want to add muscle so that's a great question because what you're actually asking is the methods question and I say that through iterate that actually not that it doesn't matter but this is a second level question so that gives you options if within your schedule or your preferences you want to work out twice a week that could work if you want to do six days a week that could work as well you have the ability to do either one or anywhere in between still reach most people's fitness goals and so what it really comes down to is the question beforehand which is what is that goal if you're trying to say optimize strength and you're fairly highly trained then you're probably going to have to work out more than once a week but if you're saying hey look I want to Simply maximize my fat loss that could be done plausibly in once a week could be done wouldn't be optimized but it could be done and so the other question is again are we looking for optimal or effective those are not the same questions so we have a lot of room to grow in general for most people if you're doing some sort of what we call structured exercise a couple of days a week at a minimum and then the other days you have some sort of Baseline physical activity then you're probably okay this could be something like a step count so are you hitting your ten thousand steps a day plus then two days a week of structured exercise okay that is probably enough for most people to get by if that's all you're looking for great if you're saying I'm not interested in just getting by well now we're having a different conversation so again ultimately it really comes back to what is the actual goal and to determine what these steps are and the methods we need to execute that goal but to go back to our first point it's still Progressive overload I'm still moving and I'm still training the other thing we need to discuss here is the difference between physical activity and again structured exercise those are not to be treated as the same thing for most people um easy example let's say you went to the gym really hard 20 minutes exhausted at the end of your workout you do that three times a week and then the rest of the week you engage in a thousand steps and sat the rest of the day you could look at the science here you can also look at intuition they're both going to lead you to the same spot which is to say this is not an Optimal Health strategy you might feel great in those workouts but you're not in a great spot the polar opposite would be oh I don't really work out because I walk a lot and I move great also strong science to show that that's not optimal for health either and so the balance that you're going to play here between my physical activity and my movement my taking the stairs my gardening my standing desk like all those General things versus your more structured exercise it's a balance game but it depends on the specific goal you're going after we could go through different goals if you'd like and I could give you more tangible examples but before we do that definitely we will get into especially muscle gain and fat loss but first I really want to nail down why most people don't make the kind of progress that they want so we've got the progressive overload we've got consistency you're going to need to do both my question is though why don't people do that so taking them one at a time well one is there something more than consistency and Progressive overload yeah there's a handful of other Concepts but the other big one that I think you're actually you're getting to if I'm reading the right direction here is they don't necessarily have a specific plan and so what the evidence will show you scientifically is having an actual plan regardless of how great that plan is is more effective than not having a plan when you say plan so I'll use my own Journey as a mile marker so my plan was look like Hugh Jackman and Wolverine amazing uh or in the X-Men when it came out so is that are we calling that a plan that was certainly a goal that's a goal but I had no idea how to get there so I just bought Arnold Schwarzenegger's book of bodybuilding and started going after it Progressive overload I understood so I was I was really trying to push myself I was trying to add more weight constantly yeah but this brings me to the the big Avenue I want to go down are the things like why why are people lazy how do they get injured that kind of stuff which I think plays into it but I have a core thesis that I want to run by you that I think is a big part of this so you started by saying that humans are the ultimate adaptation machine my words but that was your concept which I agree with very much but what I don't understand is why we have such a use it or lose it stance at a biological level so the thing I don't understand you're you're fighting against constantly if I let off the gas even a little bit I slide backwards so you get this a it's very hard to move forward you have to put yourself in what I'll call an adapt or die State I remember lifting if I wanted to increase size and strength I I had to go in there like I was trying to kill myself like it's not like oh just do a little bit extra it's like two hours in the gym to the point where I remember one time I put pressure on my hand like I was leaning on something and my arm just collapsed because I had been doing tricep work and it was like when I was working out like that I made gains when I stopped working out like that I wasn't making gains and so there is something that I don't understand about why the body is so hesitant to put on to increase VO2 max and maintain it to put on muscle and maintain it like all these gains lactic threshold and maintain it like all these things that we can do they just end up sliding backwards so it would be easy to say okay people don't understand Progressive overload Fair it would be easy to say people are lazy Fair it would be easy to say that people hate working out I certainly do but my question becomes why does working out suck and I think it's meaning it is physically unpleasant at least if you're wired like me it is not fun there's nothing about it I've seen you joke about people vomiting like it it is a horrible experience for me from top to bottom now my body is telling me stop doing this that's the part I don't understand why is my body screaming stop doing this and then why does it slide back so fast if I actually do stop doing it there's so many fun things there uh I was trying not to smile interrupt the entire time there's this is a topic I find endlessly fascinating right the biological Drive of what we do I have a lot of things to react to on that and I'll try to stay organized with my response because that is very fun number one I need to push back hard on you on it is absolutely not required to train that hard to make progress uh I would actually love to go back to your training records and to see what you're doing but I would I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that the training program you were doing or what you're asking your body to do outside of that was massively off and so this could mean that your training program was terrible uh technically right what you were doing probably or your other factors that go into your physiological adaptations so the way that we characterize this is remember adaptation happens as a result of stress okay and people think stress they think bad that's not the case right it's pro-stress negative stress there's scientific terms for these but just think about it though good stress bad stress right so what actually happens is people use an analogy of like a stress bucket so you have a certain size of a bucket say this coffee cup right here and there's some water in it right now and the water is full of 60 okay now once that thing overfills then it starts spilling out okay so you have a couple of options you can either increase the size of your cup or you can reduce the amount of water in the cup in this case the water is the total stress load this is called allostatic load or allostasis that's a fancy science word for stress load so if I want to be in a position where I can put a little bit more water in that cup again two options make the cup larger or take the amount of water in there and reduce it but remember in order for me to adapt I have to add water that's the signal that's the stress so just not adding water means backwards adaptation right so what most people don't realize is that water is actually full of two types of stressors these are what we call Hidden stressors and visible stressors the visible ones are the ones that you see or feel or react to you know you didn't sleep last night you know you didn't work out yesterday you know you drank alcohol you know you did things like this but then there's a whole Cascade of what we call Hidden stressors so these ones are not symptomatic these are micronutrient deficiencies these could be parasites these could be inefficiencies in sleep or recovery tons of things going on that are outside of your perception so one of the things that we do is to make sure that that hidden stressor is as low as possible and so I've lowered that water line how do we care because it's going to because you're from pushing myself no uh great question I'll come back the more water I can put in your cup the more adaptation I get got it so the more stress I can put on you but if your cup is already 90 pre-full and I can only put in that last 10 and then you start overflowing overflowing would be injury breakdown fatigue things like that so this is why it's important to understand the two types of stress I may be feeling a cup of dumb stress and not useful stress yeah exactly and that thumb stressed and useful stress uh could be again something you're aware of or unaware of and so by simply reducing the amount of unwanted stressors I've increased your ability to put more stress in the system which increases your good stress to adapt right it's targeted stress it's saying for example you're having a stressor in your physiology because of a poor nutritional intake if I can remove that then I can add that same amount of stressor in by more exercises I can do it I can Target where the stress is coming in which means I can Target the adaptation what we're looking at here is saying all right let's make sure that that stress cup that bucket is minimized with non-targeted stress so we can maximize our targeted stress so we can maximize our targeted adaptation so I would say again that either your training program is not great which means the stress you're putting in wasn't great because you're saying your fundamental assumption is that I should not have to work that hard to make those gains yeah no like that I would technically that's an assumption but I would say just because of our years of experience all the science um I would not believe any other truth is that that training program is not great or something else that was going on in your internal physiology your hidden stressors or your visible stressors was causing your cup to be pre-full too high to where everything was just blowing over and there was no ability left for an adaptation so one of the actual markers we test for is adaptability we can measure this um through a bunch of labs and stuff I would imagine your adaptability was extremely low and so you had to push hard hard hard hard hard to get any moderate amount of change and so this is kind of the equivalent of working extremely inefficiently we would have came back and said we're going to get you more progress by simply removing these other things and you're going to do the same work in fact less work and you'll make a lot more gains give me some of the standard bad invisible stress that build up in people's lives that they're unaware of yeah the ones that I mentioned earlier uh very common to see either inflammatory markers hormone profiles micronutrients that tend to be off there can be other things that are more difficult to ascertain like heavy metals uh think pollutants in the air there could be things in your sleep environment that are volatile Organics that are coming out of your mattress like formaldehyde or out of your wall like lead I've heard you talk about that before it so let's break down commonality of these stressors like is is it like you're just walking straight to people's bedrooms testing the formaldehyde leaking out of it and going all right we got to switch out your mattress or is that like it's mostly people's diet and you're just eating a [ __ ] diet and that's the reality okay it's all back up what um what our system is is comprehensive so we build stuff for these high performance individuals whether they're athletes or non-athletes and our approach is basically if if we wanted to take money out of the equation and figure out the answer for everyone Let's do an unbelievable amount of Diagnostics so that we could come back and say you have a very specific and simple solution plan and what we're looking for is what we call Performance anchors so these are anchors that are holding someone's physiology back the last time we had our conversation we talked a lot about not wanting to overuse Technologies and fitness and that's still true and so we believe in the power of your own internal physiology which means I want to let your physiology do what it wants to do with all the great technology we have right now we still don't necessarily understand why physiology runs the way it runs so that all being said then we are looking for the things that are constraining your physiology if I can remove those three to five performance anchors or constraints and then let your physiology do what it wants to do then I'm in a much better spot and you're going to be in a much better spot so I'm on the hunt for what those three to five things are maybe seven maybe two for each individual person do you approach them in the same order meaning you just expect some are common not at all no yeah so this is answering your question directly there's been plenty of people that will run these full evaluations on you're talking you know well over 500 biomarkers the environmental analysis we're doing sleep tracking at the highest level you're running full clinical grade sleep analysis this is a sleep study done in your own bedroom every night things like that right you're not going to a sleep lab we're doing all kinds of other tracking and we're going to figure out and this has happened plenty of times yo you just need a psychologist yo you just need to eat a reasonable diet that your performance anchor is all nutrition based sometimes it's the opposite they're doing all the visible stressors great sunlight and stress and community and connection and purpose and good diet and exercise and all those things are great but then something is happening internally that they just never would have spotted this could be an inflammatory marker this could be any brain chemistry things like any number of neurotransmitters off something like that and so that person might be on a different protocol another person might be something like you need to find purpose in life that you need to find an activity or volunteer or you need and you need to do this more style of training right so any combination we're really trying to find again what are those like three or four or five things that are going to make the most impact and then we can just get out of the way and let physiology do it so my brain when you were saying that earlier is look of all the I've dealt with professional athletes in probably 15 Pro Sports and this is at the highest level so you're talking NFL MVPs and Cy youngs and all-stars and all pros and Olympic gold medalists and world champions in the UFC in boxing and all these things we've dealt with hundreds of people in our executive programs I've never seen anybody that has to train that hard to get progress wow so I just don't believe that that is I believe that was true in your actual experience but I would say something was not great with the program or something else in your physiology was kind of strained to a level that your adaptability was just smolderingly small and so we would need to figure out what that was at the time could have been job stress could have been CO2 tolerance could have been connection to your own physiology like there's all kinds of areas that this could be in and we've seen them all and or it could have been you know something else going on so we would have gone and found those things and said we're having you do a b and c could be very simple could be not and then here's your new training program and I'm I'd be willing to bet a lot that that your training would have resulted in and much more Effectiveness okay I don't want to uh litigate sort of in theory and I certainly don't want to argue for my limitations but I do want to uh I'm gonna pose some questions and you tell me um where I'm crazy is there such a thing as a hard Gainer I've seen for people that haven't heard that phrase somebody that has just a hard time putting on muscle yeah there's actually we've I'm in this um there's a nice review paper on this handful there's been a couple of now that have come out I'm looking at simply the the physiological factors specifically in muscle um and there's there's a whole host probably over a dozen now of the cellular processes that go into muscle actually adapting that have been looked at and none of those are really jumping out in fact I literally read a paper this morning looking at muscle fiber type this would be fast twitch or slow twitch and that didn't seem to predict hard gainers versus um fast scanners either ribosomes are probably the most leading candidate but satellite cells have been looked at gene expression signaling protein and so there is clearly it's clearly happening and there's no question there are hard gainers but we still haven't figured out in my opinion really any strong evidence suggests what's happening inside the muscle cell despite a lot of research and a lot of papers on this topic which again gives me more ammo to come back than say I don't know if it's muscle it's it's something else potentially that's leading to it there's no question that some folks will have an exaggerated response so central dogma is basically this if your muscle adapts you have to have some signal coming in exercise this could be the cell wall the muscle fiber stretching this could be a hormone that's activating a receptor on a cell wall say say an androgen receptor um it could be testosterone like any number of things on my gf1 stuff like this so it could be mechanical stretching exercise stuff like that or or a model but that signal has to be then transduced across through the cell into the nucleus which holds the DNA inside the cell that has to then activate what's called gene expression that tells your muscle to express the genes that code the proteins that make your muscle fiber so three-step process signaling is one gene expression two and then protein synthesis actually is the third process there's clear evidence that if we were to take all of us in this room do the exact same workout and then biopsies some of us would have an exaggerated either signaling response or maybe not but it'd be an exaggerated gene expression response or maybe not or maybe even just a more effective and faster protein synthesis process so in all three of those individual layers there are differences between folks but they don't seem to predict at this point which one is going to be the the hard Gainer or not and so what I tend to come back to now having taken so many people through our comprehensive process is you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today there's probably some other hidden stressor and those individuals there has been some stuff on older uh individuals in in studies where they try to look at this and what they find is they give them more volume and they tend to respond they get the same gains as the other people once they've had more volume other papers feeds into um my sort of underlying hypothesis which is that I did need to work that hard or are you saying that hey yes add more volume but if you're going to the point of not being able to support your own weight that you've gone too far I wouldn't say that like I'm a strength training junkie like I love that part of it um but when I say volume I'm specifically referring to not necessarily how heavy or how hard you were going but maybe you needed an extra day maybe your workouts were too long on one day and you needed to do it more frequently maybe the recipe for you was a total amount of sets that you're hitting or repetitions you're hitting per week it's also possible that you are exceeding that and so what you were actually doing was you were compromising your recovery capacity that was reducing performance in the next workout and so by the end of say the month you were actually getting a total tonnage less than you would have had you been saved a little more gas in some of the workouts and put it to the next one so it could be a combination of things or expressing it um I did you want to acknowledge though that it is still absolutely fundamentally true some people are simply going to respond better there's there's clearly a spectrum of hyper responders to low responders so I'm not saying that that is false what I am saying though is you could have made a lot more progress uh had things been dialed in no question could we have put you in a position where you're the fastest muscle grower ever no like probably not going to happen but we could have improved your status quo for sure and I'll make that the default assumption and I don't for the viewer's sake I don't want this to be about me what I did or didn't do but I just want to better understand like what the sort of bracketing functions are so uh hard gaining is a real thing but you probably don't have to worry about that is what I'm picking up from you this might be well a bad stress issue it's a volume potential issue addressing those things yeah actually kind of give you two just real quick action points on that one if you do feel like you're a hard Gainer number one is make sure everything else is truly dialed so get the lifestyle stuff that's within your control as high functioning as possible before you start blaming the workouts or your own physiology make sure you're doing your due diligence and the things we talked about earlier can I run through what I think you'll say is to sort of remove all those basic things uh make sure you're getting plenty of sleep make sure you're getting sun exposure make sure that your diet is I'll call clean maybe we'll get into that later but you're basically eating Whole Food whenever possible I'm sure you're gonna say protein intake is going to be pretty important if you don't have the building blocks for the muscle you're not going to be able to build them you mentioned purpose earlier which I love hearing I think that would be very important so that psychologically you have meaning and purpose in your life you have loving relationships uh uh what am I missing that's probably pretty close to the 80 20 rule yep you covered most of it you could throw in a couple of other things like a social connection uh maybe you folded that into purpose maybe didn't but loving relationships yep that's it's great there maybe hydration yeah we're gonna get into hydration I won't derail us now but okay great understood but you've hit most of them okay so um one thing then assuming that we have those basic things taken care of I I have maybe a misconception you will blow my mind right now if you tell me that this is just a protocol problem I will love you forever but I have a belief that adding muscle is brutally difficult and that if you're not in the gym working really hard really consistently meaning uh you have a high volume of lifting and a high volume of days that you have lifted so um I if somebody came to me and said hey I'm trying to add muscle what should I do uh I'd obviously look at their diet first and then I would say you need to be working out probably six days a week is there anything in that assumption set that you think is broken in terms of the difficulty of adding muscle mass yeah I say you're again exaggerating the need for training okay let's pick a physique so here's more base assumptions that Tom has um when I watch a Hollywood star get jacked like Hugh Jackman uh in a call it six month period that they almost certainly did steroids reasonable assumption um in that Community that's pretty reasonable okay now I'm fortunate to know many of the individuals that actually are the ones behind those folks and I'm I'm gonna maybe not say names uh though I'm actually although I'll take it I appreciate it but um very good fun friends with um uh the gentleman responsible the the Henry Cavill and his stuff for Superman and things like that um sorry Michael Blevins that's his name I'm sorry Mike if you didn't want me to say your name or not you can always leave it out if you want to ask him yeah um but he's he's um he he spoke about this at length he juices him up no um in that case I don't know if Henry does or not it doesn't matter my point is though he's gone through a number of those things and I know a lot of these things many of those individuals are are on um anabolic agents which fine who cares right I don't have a beef with it I just want to better understand how hard muscle is to gain some of those folks are not I can tell you though we've worked with plenty of individuals that to our knowledge are not on that and I've seen countless people add to their physique without needing any things like that so it's it the challenge Mike would say would be if you want to use that as an excuse great there are that excuses right there if you want to use the excuse that all those folks have all the money and the time and the to train and to eat and the chefs and all like that and that's the excuse you need to have in yourself to not uh go through your own body transformation then great use that excuse all true why does it matter to you though do you want to make the journey or do you not if you want to make the journey and you don't want to go on the anabolic agents no problem we've done that personally countless times and across the world it's been done millions and millions of times can you get to the level um based on your starting point to finish looking like Arnold no but can you again you go through your own transformation absolutely can you improve your physique sure can you look like Henry Cavill I don't know without drugs I don't know did he use it I don't know I don't even really care for the most part so the question should be framed back on you is this something you're willing to go through now do you need to get dialed in a little bit sure do you need to work uh two and a half hours a day in the gym six days a week absolutely not absolutely not that again we have extensive evidence for that are some individuals going to have to work harder than others probably are you going to have to make other changes in your life potentially um but if you don't want to necessarily go all the way to Hugh Jackman level but you just wanted to make some improvements that are noticeable in your physique that can absolutely be done at a much more reasonable time frame to also be clear it won't be easy either right we're not gonna just add a bunch of stuff at 45 years old by you know just eating a couple of protein shakes today and lifting a little bit harder very ages of you yeah it's not going to happen right and so there's a truth here in between um let me ask you how assume I'm 27. yeah how many pounds of muscle without anabolics can I add to my lean muscle mass can I add to my physique in a year I would say in a year at 27 years old 10 pounds would be very conservative okay yeah that can certainly be done um that's going to be a standard deviation right some folks a little higher a little less but I don't think the average person 10 pounds would be very reasonable um you could certainly do that in much shorter time frame but given life and all those things trying to factor in a practical answer that'd be a that also scales if you're coming in at 145 pounds to start or 215 pounds to start and that number scales it's harder to put on muscle when you're you know 40 in size yeah well when you're already big in terms of just physical size so for somebody who's 215 pounds to put on 10 pounds it's not a high percentage of their total body mass so that wouldn't be that hard somebody's 150 pounds easier for the big guy definitely got you definitely because absolute Size Matters a ton for someone 145 pounds to put on 10 pounds of pure muscle that's a big percentage of your body weight so that would be a much slower process but you could be done interesting so we have a guy here at impact theory that uh has really been trying to put on muscle and he's very solid like if you touch his shoulders they feel firm and but he just he's like if I don't concentrate all of my energy on eating all the food that I'm supposed to eat for a day he was like over a weekend I'll lose five pounds and I'm just like that is so weird to me as somebody that if I look at a photo of a dessert I'm gonna gain weight I just find putting on especially fat is so easy this kid shovels food into his face Non-Stop and you just can't you can't add yeah you know I've been answering those questions for 15-year career now again I don't know I will always acknowledge the uniqueness of physiology there's always weird things about your guests though my guess is I'm gonna call it a guess I'll be more arrogant than that um you're just not doing it right the lifting or the eating both and my other thing would be not to harp on this but again something else in your physiology um is constrained and and that is the answer once nothing is concerned then you just take off like a rocket ship no question so a lot of folks do things that make them feel like they're smashing food all day as but the food choices are incorrect or they're actually at just totally unnecessary volumes or something else is happening unnecessary volume of food yeah so okay interesting now he is I don't want to derail us on diet just yet but he's eating the standard one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass that he uh I don't know if he's doing it for where he is or where he wants to be does that matter uh it's sort of pedantic at this point it could be could not like probably pretty close meaning you're just not sure what the thing is that's constraining I mean it is close enough probably is a rough one whether it's you know you're talking you're splitting hairs of 10 or 15 grams maybe 20 grams of protein a day it's close enough okay so if I'm trying to add or he's trying to add is 10 pounds of muscle over the next year um is he going to be able to do that with the three days a week or does he need to yeah you could you could for sure um is there any advantage to more days or is it just volume in the days that you work out so the the most strong predictor of muscle hypertrophy and again we're not talking fat loss or strength or endurance or any of the other goals but for hypertrophy total volume is is the answer and so whether you want to get that done across three days or six days a week there may be a small advantage to breaking it up I'm actually more recent research has gone back and forth in this point of frequency right so if you equate for volume uh and you just the only variable is three days a week or five days a week or six days a week you could find evidence on both sides of that equation probably practically it's easier to do it six days a week because the volume needed on three days a week is then double on each individual day so it's just hard to get that all in but that being said again I don't want I really don't want people at home listening thinking well I don't have six days a week to lift weights and I'm not going to do it for an hour and a half so there's just no way I'm going to try to add muscle and I like I really need to dispelier absolutely because it's not true it's absolutely not true because they can spread it out because a minute ago you said hey it's a question of whether you want to go on this journey and whether you're willing to put in the work or not which I think Remains the fundamental question but now I feel like you're backing off that so help me understand okay so here's what I'll say there's a difference between trying to improve your physique and trying to maximize any of the most possible ever for the fastest and largest gains and so I guess I'm differentiating there if you want to go to optimize then that's great um technically it's probably easier for you to execute that volume over more days per week but it doesn't have to be if three fits your schedule fine also if you're like look I'm 80 20 on this thing I don't need to get the most amount of muscle gain possible in six weeks I just want to gain 80 of it can I back it down to three days a week and do an hour can I do four days a week in 45 minutes the answer is yes you can absolutely gain lean muscle a noticeable amount in three to four workouts a week if you give yourself three or four months or some reasonable time domain so that that's maybe the differentiation I'm drawing that's that's absolutely possible what I don't want people to do is think that that is binary if I can't do six days a week 90 minutes each session then I might as well do nothing and that that is like very much not true we again we have people that do this very routinely and if you look at the research that has looked at a variety of volume uh so total amount of volume per week if you want to count the amount of sets that you do the number you're going to look at there is about 20 to 25 sets per muscle group per week so if you think to 25 sets per muscle group okay now that seems to be about optimal having said that the groups that did 10 still grew muscle and so that's why I'm saying like you can still now if you take the example of 10. let's say you did three sets of biceps three days a week that's ten I mean you're at nine right there so like 10 sets a week is not a insane volume if you did three sets of ten of two different bicep exercises on one day that's six total sets do that twice a week now you're already at 12. so you're already getting there and you're going to grow muscle it's just not at the same rate maybe that those folks that I did 20 or 25 sets and so it's a question of again are you trying to maximize or are you just happy with some statistically significant scientifically measurable progress in muscle mass which is still very important and so it's to give people options and to not scare them away of saying if you can't go to all the way to the end that doesn't mean go nowhere you can still go somewhere and have effect um that's also kind of what I was referring to when I was saying if you're not willing to do the work and you don't even want to go to the first couple steps so they don't expect anything but don't think that just because you can't have a full team a chef at your house anabolics and all these things then that's an excuse to do nothing if you want to do nothing do nothing but you can still make a lot of Transformations under whatever constraints that you really have I would like to take a moment to do a PSA for anybody out there considering lifting and adding muscle mass there and getting lean I think both are going to matter there there is something fascinating psychologically at work for the human animal as you as for both sexes but from a guy's perspective I will just tell you when you transform your physique when you get stronger when you add muscle there are going to be few things in your life if anything that will make you feel better about yourself I don't know why it is but it is it is unreal now I'm not at as big as I used to be and we will get into injuries in a minute because hopefully live here you're going to be able to help me overcome some that I've struggled with for a long time um but there was a period when I was younger I could bend over and pick up almost 400 pounds it was amazing I loved it the most I've told the story my my poor listeners a million times but I once I was at a pool party with my wife a woman climbed up out of the pool and asked my wife if she could pet my abs it was one of the greatest moments of my life Petty yes for sure but it was amazing uh and so it it's worth it and I want people to hear that before I say what I'm about to say it's really worth it it will do something deeply to you psychologically to get strong to have a physique that you're proud of what you have to do to your own mind to be consistent to show up every day to progressively overload to get your diet right to do all those things to care enough over an extended period of time the rewards are tremendous and even though I absolutely despise working out the results are so unbelievable psychologically and and physically but psychologically the results are so incredible and they apply to so many areas of your life look at Schwarzenegger he's been able to apply it to all these different areas of his life same for me some of my biggest breakthroughs in business were born of the discipline I developed in maintaining a physique all right hopefully everybody heard me say that and now I'm going to say when somebody comes to me and says that they want to add muscle I'm just like you're never going to do it they're never going to do it and uh it's interesting because I don't know as much as you I take a totally different approach to why they're going to fail uh to me it people do not want things badly enough because they don't want it badly enough they will not suffer and while you are making it sound easier than my experience leads me to believe you're the expert I want to completely acquiesce to that and I cannot wait to learn more about how to do this more easily uh it's difficult it takes a lot of time nobody will stick with it the vast vast vast vast majority of humans will give up long before they make gains and of this reversion to the mean that you're going to slide back if you take two weeks off you're gonna notice and so if you take two months off forget it three months and it feels like you never worked out in your life it's bananas how fast you will go backwards because of all that dear listeners the vast majority of humanity will never do this do you agree with that I would agree with much of that okay what's the part you don't agree with I still think the charge is worth the effort yes I started with that yeah I started with that Andy totally agree um there are many other benefits of strength training that are going to pay off dividends the rest of your life yes I'd get that but what I want you to get into is what breaks people so we've covered they've got these hidden stressors cool we're going to address those what I'm talking about and so stressors and their approach probably isn't right but now talk to me about the the mind game of this all like where do what factor do you think that plays because you work with Elite athletes man they've already walked over some sort of threshold where they're like I'm committed I'm gonna do this but do you encounter the sort of average person and where they trip themselves up yeah so our entire rapid health and performance companies all non-athletes for the most part so we've been to this plenty of times uh gone through this transformation the folks in here range everything but you've got people running billion dollar companies in there the no time is my point right you've got mothers of three kids and running companies and startups and so these folks do not have the time they're not committed they're not 25 year old and they're not even on anabolics for the most part some are but some aren't and so we face this challenge plenty of times a couple of processes that we go through step number one actually is we can actually come back and talk about common biology we started this earlier and be happy to come back to that that's a fun conversation but our process looks a lot like this number one are you choosing the right goal and this is really not us trying to play uh psychologist or therapists but is really making sure based on your physiology this is where we think you need to go so let's say the example is uh muscle growth and they come in and they say we want to I want to add muscle and add 15 pounds of muscle okay the first question we would ask is why right if is it just a personal goal great that's fine is there something else going on that you think you need to add 15 pounds of muscle and when we run this complete analysis and this is top of mind because this just happened with one of our clients and we looked at it in his uh his aerobic capacity his metabolic efficiency was very very low and there's actually good research recently showing that going through about six weeks of pure aerobic exercise prior to high cardio straight up cardio you're talking cycling just steady state cycling not intervals not anything like that six weeks of lower moderate intensity cycling prior to going through hypertrophy training resulted in more muscle growth by the end of the study than those folks who did not do that aerobic part before do they have to keep doing the aerobic part nope so six with some sort of primer it was Primer and it's most likely an improvement in aerobic capacity which makes the workout less painful recovery it's all recovery from the training right so now you have the mechanisms that allow you to actually enhance your recovery which allows adaptation to occur if you dig too deep down that hole of fatigue all you can do is come back to Baseline but if your recovery is higher then we can actually get the results that we're earning and so in this individual it was a similar story where we're like you need to go through some basic aerobic fitness first before you start launching into hypertrophy because number one you won't even get to the training you'll be so fatigued you'll be so sore you'll have all these problems and so we need to set this Foundation of aerobic fitness prior to getting into that so that would be one of the things that I would say is is what are we looking at here and what's truly why you want to get there and if you want to get there let me guide the ship on how we get there just trust the process if you were willing to wait six months we will get you farther by the end of the six six months than you would have had you gone on your own it's gonna look like we're calling off course here but this is what we need to do to get you there so that would be reaction number one right is to say why do you want to get there in the first place is it just a personal goal or do you think it's something else going on and so the process then says okay we've decided we want to get 10 pounds of muscle in the next six months that's the goal and we went through the whole process and we're all in agreement that's the goal okay great second step is in all right let's look at what we call your quadrant so your quadrant is take everything in life and we're going to put into four unique buckets okay now I got this from my colleague Kenny Kane's always Mike to make sure I give him credit he created this I did not but pocket one is what we just call business okay this is whatever work finance things like that and the one is what we call relationships this could be family friends social time going out concerts parties whatever thing it is for relationships that you do social connection volunteering whatever bucket number three your physical training again this could be walking hiking gardening exercising lifting kickboxing I don't really care the fourth one is recovery and Recovery is everything from mental recovery emotional recovery physical recovery etc etc and there's huge crossover something that lands in a recovery bucket for me might not be recovery for you Etc so it's just it's personal right in those four buckets you get 10 total points and you can allocate those 10 points total not per category total however you'd like and so we run through this assessment and we say okay you're putting five in your business right now you're putting three into your kids okay great you now we have two points left you're gonna go one training and then two into training and no one recovery not gonna work right and what we're trying to do is run them through a very high level analysis of allostatic load all stressors are stressors right we have to account all these things business stress all this stuff matters into the system and so we look at that and we say where are you at now and we come to an agreement and then we say where do we need to be to allow that actual goal to happen six months down the road we need to make adjustments all right and so we're going to take a point off of business we're going to take a point off of maybe relationships maybe we're not hanging out with friends as much maybe whatever it is right and Recovery has to be at least half of training right so if you're gonna put three into training you can put one into recovery it's not going to work right you're not going to have enough recovery to actually get the adaptations right you're just going to be stress stress stress no adaptation or no recovery no adaptation so we build that thing out we come to an agreement and in that that agreement goes on a postcard literally physically if possible and that goes to three unique people person one is Udu and that thing goes it is a contract between you and yourself of where we actually need to be to allow that adaptation to occur that's the goal we set we agreed on that you made that goal we're going to do the work we're not going to do the work here's how we get there this is how we have to allocate that and I encourage them to put that in the place of vulnerability or weakness so if they're addicted to work then that goes on their laptop or that goes in their computer screen if it is addicted to Netflix it goes on their TV it goes in some place when they start violating that rule they see it it also goes to person number two which is the person most likely to ask you to violate that rule this is your friend who always wants you to go out this is your boss this is your someone else is asking to work late this is the person who's gonna push you against it and that person knows this is Tom's New Deal like this is not non-negotiable anymore three the person most likely to be hurt besides you by the violation so this could be again your kid this could be someone else who says Dad like you committed to x amount of time with me and you're not following you you did that meeting you did that other thing you weren't supposed to whatever it comes down to right and that's an accountability system of person who's going to violate you you're going to violate yourself or the person who's gonna be most hurt by this and then the last step is okay great we know where we're going we know how to get there now all we have to do now is set very specific boundaries which are extremely specific and there are things that we call what life actions do you need to take to ensure those things actually happen and so just to give a random example say we have agreed to take one point off of business amazing what are we going to take to ensure that it's not just like oh yeah I'm going to try to work a little bit less that's never going to work right it is okay I'm going to commit to never working on Saturdays or I'm going to commit to never working before 9 A.M or after 6 p.m or something right whatever makes sense for you and your scenario same thing with recovery I'm going to commit to doing x amount of recovery minutes per week period I'm going to commit to this a much dollar investment whatever whatever it takes for that thing once you have all those you're still going to have some failure no question but you have very specific guidelines and then when you do fail it's very clear what happened and why and so that's the process we take our folks through and we don't have a hundred percent success rate but I'd like to think it's pretty high well I know it's pretty high and I'd like to think it's higher than most folks so um this is kind of the soft part of coaching right not the X's and O's but this is the reality of what we take our folks through and I think that would be what I would recommend um to the scenario you set up is going through a process like that so it's very clear on where we're going and when we started the conversation one of the major Concepts I said is people not having a plan I was really talking about like actually knowing what to do in the gym but this is also part of your plan so you ensure when you get to the gym you're in there in the right frame you're not rushing to get out of there in 15 minutes because you got to go to work or you're not rushing there so knowing exactly what to do so you're not making your workout up as you go based on what machines are just open that minute but then making sure you have the space like this is the commitment I'm going to spend or not right I'm only going to commit to 45 minutes in here I can't drag this out to an hour and a half so I have to get off my phone immediately I have to get right to my warm up it doesn't matter if my playlist isn't right because I have to be out here in 45 minutes because I committed to this other thing I have to get to so there's no time to drag this on so that means I have to have a very specific training plan which means I need to either have a professional helping me ahead of time or some other thing but tomorrow's success is based on today's preparation right so having that plan in place just simply having that plan will take your execution so much higher than not having something written down so having that done ahead of time is what's needed that's a great process I like that a lot I'm going to point a lot of people to that clip um so now talk to me about the the final piece in this people just don't make gains movement here so homeostasis and the reversion to the mean take me into the biology of it why like I understand muscle is calorically um greedy yeah expensive perfect so that I get what the body doesn't want to keep more muscle than it absolutely needs but like VO2 max I don't understand why that would ever especially if it is if Peter OT is right and it's the number one predictor of longevity why on Earth would we revert to less why would we revert to a worse resting heart rate why would our heart rate variability drop like all these things are good so why do we revert to a mean that is sub-optimal well what I'd say is I'm going to poke a little fun at Peter here I consider Peter a friend so I can do this depending on what study you look at you'll actually find the leg strength is a stronger predictor than VO2 max interesting yeah um I'm really just teasing him they're they're both incredibly important obviously I'm a strength training guy so I'm going to give most of the little bias just a touch right unbiased towards lifting and Physiology if you haven't picked that up so interesting well I think the biggest issue is you're personifying the approach you're good in batting physiology there is no good and bad in physiology Andy you sure about that very sure okay give me your North Star there is this point the North Star is adaptation uh-huh that's the thing it doesn't know good or bad chemistry doesn't know good or bad there are no toxins there are things that's just what they are right um so we don't have bad inflammation we don't have good inflammation they have inflammation I don't have toxins we have chemicals like this is not how the world works so number one you're fundamentally approaching this is good and bad when that's not actually what happens because why would physiology do it if it is bad and the answer is it wouldn't step back it's playing a game over here you have immediate gratification over here you have delayed we call this optimization we call this adaptation you're pushing one end of the spectrum with every single thing you do the better day you have today may make it worse later immediate gratification delayed gratification this is what your physiology is doing every single second every interaction every thought every uh insult every injury is all pushing further on one side of the spectrum and so when you're asking like why is it doing this why is it doing this if you're not pushing for delayed gratification you're pushing for immediate gratification which is rest recovery so it's saying if you don't need this VO2 max up here because it is expensive then we're going to conserve energy now because we don't know when the next lot of energy is coming and so it backs down think about it I'll give you another way uh you're probably familiar with the autonomic nervous system parasympathetic versus sympathetic this is rest and digest versus fight or flight now which one is better obviously it's not right it is a situation if you want to be able to maximize both if you said right now like why is my body fighting me I have so much such low energy like my body is and you'd have all these negative words and I would say it's not no no it's doing exactly what it needs to do it's going there on purpose you just haven't figured out why it's going there you have the car pointed down the wrong Street don't blame the car for driving down the street blame you for not pointing it in the right direction it's not going to drive there and be up now this bad car the car is just driving where it's being told to be driven so if you don't tell it anything it's going to revert back to we don't know if we're going to live 10 or 20 or 50 years so we're maximizing for this current moment that's what's happening until you convince it to maximize down the road it's going to maximize for right now so why is it going to reduce muscle mass muscle is expensive there are also resources in that muscle that can be used for something else um think about it this way what do you think the body will choose to give an advantage to muscle or organ definitely you're going to die tomorrow or today if your organ is going to failure you are not doing anything with your health if your muscles get weaker right now you have years to work on poor muscle and so it's always going to revert towards number one your brain all things default we're going to keep your brain alive second thing keep your heart beating third thing keep your organs alive fourth thing organ systems right skeletal muscle nervous system etc those will be preserved last and so you have to understand the choice you're making right now and you need to be convincing your body do this adaptation that is expensive and it is costly it is using resources and is using energy now we're specifically talking about ATP and then resources like uh like amino acids now you think about this in the context of building muscle but amino acids are also needed to build red blood cells to view immune cells to build any other tissue in your body and so it's not that it's holding on to them or preserving them so you can get more jacked but it is saying we're going to conserve these so that we can rebuild your liver there's damage happening there right the liver just the Torso gets kind of the crack kicked out of it all the time right especially by some people more so than others but things like the kidney are not as resilient um you don't want a lot about it you don't have a lot of adaptation happening there and so that's what's actually fundamentally happening you're pushing it there if you make choices that maximize current optimization that maximize immediate gratification think about those two is the same thing optimization and immediate gratification okay it's it's slightly different but they're representing the same idea right now what's happening is you're going to feel better in the current moment so this could represent yourself something like I feel less stressed right now I'm more relaxed I'm more down regulated more parasympathetic I'm more recovered I'm not sore I have a lot of energy because I'm super chill that's great but if you continue to be in that super chill moment you actually start regret regressing back down to inefficient because your body's like yo we don't have to be this inefficient and let's take I'll give cardiac output a very specific example so cardiac output is calculated by the amount of times your heart beats multiplied by how much blood is coming out of the heart per pump that's your cardiac output right so when you get very exercise trained and you get really fit your resting heart rate goes down okay why is that well because you can actually have a stronger contraction per contraction so you get more Blood Out per squeeze so you don't have to squeeze as often so the aerobic demands of you sitting here are the same whether you are fit or unfit Robo demands are identical you're not using any more less energy basically so your body says I can get that same amount of blood pumped in less pumps so don't pump as often so resting heart rate comes down but if you lose that strength in the contractions because you weren't training it then it has to bump bump bump more frequently to keep cardiac out but the same and so as you go into recovery mode you feel better but you're automatically not putting stress on the heart to be strong so it starts regressing back to being weaker so your heart resting heart rate has to then come back up if you were in a state of over training whether we're talking about non-functional overreaching or actual true over training this is how you recover this is how you Peak for performance this is how we get people to have these uh into the periodization tapers and and you know peaking on the right day or the right year or the right month like in the case of the Olympics making sure they are being perfect for that world championship fight and they feel the best I've ever felt on that day not a week earlier a week later in that exact moment right so we can time physiology to be correct the other Spectrum if you're always choosing delay gratification you're never going to be feeling as good as you can in the current moment and so if we look about think about this from a the same perspective going all the way to the end end and saying training training training train train train train as hard as I can more adaptation more adaptation more adaptation doesn't give you the recovery capacity to actually see the changes and so then the system breaks last example and I'll pause here think about this from the perspective of happiness such that if you choose delayed gratification all the time you tend to not be present you don't celebrate wins and you don't you're not happy in the moment right something great happens with your company or success and you just want to move to the next thing because you're choosing delayed gratification those folks don't tend to do very well right if you're they don't do well in what in terms of uh they're not maximizing longevity uh they're gonna struggle because they're never present a delayed gratification person definitely so you're always choosing the leg gratification um and so what I mean is like the current wind just moves to the next thing this moves the next thing you don't you never celebrate you're never in the moment you're never right here because you're just thinking about the next thing already right it's not a win right now I'm not tracking how that would add up to let me let me pack this one the opposite is those that choose immediate gratification all the time so all they do is sort of celebrate in their current president right now and they're not paying any attention to the next step down the road those folks are going to struggle because nothing is is planned out in the head there is no drive there is no forward progress right they're very very present but there's no leaning forward so what you clearly need to have is pulse of these things they are not good or bad they are just two different things right depending on how you want your life to go you may hedge a little bit more towards being more present you may hedge a little bit more towards great that was awesome mini celebration now we got to get back to work into the next thing I'm not judging either side here people have been wildly successful and happy in both approaches or somewhere in between but as a fundamentally different approach to how you're going to handle the problem of immediate versus delayed gratification right I would think most would argue you don't want to be fully on the end of the spectrum of either one of these things right there has to be some um worry and planning for the future but then there also has to be some enjoyment of the the current moment an ideal scenario you're able to flicker back and forth between both right some present and then some forward stuff and then potentially even some password leaning um stuff there but that's the psychological equivalent of the same thing your physiological body is doing when it's saying yo do I need to maximize today or am I banking for the future but if you continue to bank and you don't allow recovery processes there's going to be a problem that occurs okay so man really interesting idea that what we are optimized for is adaptation my gut reaction to that is that the adap the we we are the the dominant apex predator because of our ability to adapt there's no doubt about that I'm a huge believer in humans is the ultimate adaptation machine that seems though to me like a path and not the North Star so when I think about what is evolution optimizing for it's optimizing for you surviving long enough to have kids that have kids up uh adaptation is the way in which the human animal achieves that I see you have a reaction to that yeah no so all right the North Star thing is so fun because let's take stress now I would argue the entire existence of the human race has had one fundamental goal outside of reproduction which is clearly the the absolute number one right and this is really how do we get to reproduction and that is stress and we spent our entire existence trying to mitigate stress so initially it was thermal stress so let's create housing and then it was stress of attack so let's create communities and then it was Trust of food so let's create more sustainable and our Agriculture and farming and better hunting and all things like that right and then earlier in this Century in the previous one it was let's create more safety nets so this is uh cities and governments and and economies and things like that so that less people have as less extremes less likely right so we've been charging deadhead at this path of minimizing stress and we take this one step further and I know you know exactly where I'm going here this was probably not a great idea it probably was for the first hundreds of thousands of years around but it's very clear whether you look at the astronauts that are coming back from space or you look at any of the films or literature or just the thoughts that are going through people's edits it's like oops maybe minimizing stress was not the right of actual North Star when we come back and we put ourselves in a position where we actually have eliminated stress in the context that we understand stress to be we get really unhealthy very very quickly you've talked about it multiple times now what happens when you take training stress away just for even a few weeks we come crumbling back to Baseline right that's how important stress is in our life if you take an astronaut put them up in space for a minimum of like seven days and they come back you see massive physiological changes I think the numbers are something like 30 days of bed rest is equivalent to 30 years of Aging and skeletal muscle this is how big a deal stress is uh people sort of joke about Mars you know getting there but that's a human problem that's a physiology problem more than it is a rocket problem obviously I'm a physiologist I'm quite biased but how do we get people alive in a situation up there this is where we're spending you know billions of dollars trying to figure out that's how critical stress is we've had to re-engineer put exercise back in our lives we've had to now figure out oh my gosh we can't be isolated that's not good for human mental health when we're engineering all these things that are stressed back into our life right maybe we should actually go out of our way and spend tens of thousands of dollars to get hot again to get cold again to get hungry again like we have to do all these things because we realize again for most of our life we our species existence that stuff was good we absolutely needed to keep people away from those things but now once we kind of got there it's like oops we need to figure out how much that stress needs to come back into our system and so figuring out what is the right amount of stress that's on the biological system to make it actually live as long as possible as healthy as possible is an unanswered question at this point and I was sort of smirking so much when you were talking about that earlier because I don't think we have any idea what the North Star really should be we thought it was stress reduction but I don't I think that that's pretty clearly misguided uh is it optimizing stress in or not I guess that doesn't feel right it doesn't feel profound I don't know if we've learned anything there besides the fact we realize if we don't have any stress in our life this is a problem and I think the reason I defaulted for adaptability being the actual Northstar glitter is because if we drill down on stress why do we even care to have it to begin with going back to First principles why is stress even necessary and I think it's because our body functions best when it is pushed to adapt so I actually think right now the best process I have come up with is that the optimal state is adaptation Andy this is very interesting so um I have a maybe slightly different take on that so there is I think it was Lisa Feldman Barrett that said this to me and it was really eye-opening uh she was like Tom you're asking me the classic is it nature or nurture and she said the reality is we have a nature that requires nurture definitely and I was like ah that is so true when you were talking about stress I don't know that stress is the I don't think that we have optimized to remove stress I think that's a result of two different factors one I think that um we have a nature that requires stress and the reason we have a nature that quote unquote requires stress is because there is stress in the system for an animal nature is completely indifferent it it does not care if you survive but if you put um an a gene apparently under uh the rules of evolution it will adapt or it will develop a survival Instinct because the ones that have their survival in sync are going to be the ones that survive like people are even saying that this may happen to AI which is sort of one of my fundamental pushbacks about AI I won't derail this conversation for that um but that to me makes a lot of sense so if a Gene's response to being in an environment where it is the survival of the fittest then it will develop a survival Instinct and to survive in an environment that is replete with stress you're going to an organism that has a survival Instinct will develop the ability to adapt to that and that's why as the the greatest adaptation machine that nature has ever created we have gone farther than any other animal and we have a level of control that they do not the other part of the equation is that nature only has Pleasure and Pain and so to get whatever Behavior it wants those are the only two levers that it has to pull on and so this is really the the thing driving my initial question of why does working out suck like if I should be doing it why isn't it fun um but so if nature only has Pleasure and Pain in order to get me to survive then the question becomes what did it leverage to make sure that oh I want to do this thing that's going to keep me going and as far as I can tell that thing is progress so what you're saying is US optimizing for stress I would say is the Pleasure Principle at work where nature had to make something pleasurable so that we would move towards so it gave us this freakish desire for progress in our lives now the reason that I think that this ends up playing out weirdly where it looks like uh ooh we're now without stress and that was a huge mistake is because if you have this incredibly strong desire for Progress you will make problems to fight against in order to feel like you're progressing and so that devolves into madness this is one of my earliest like insights about um people when I first got into business this uh random thought popped into my head which is some people need to be chased by a lion because I was just like dude what are people are getting up in arms about some [ __ ] I'm like why are you even worrying about that and then I realized whoa It's because they have the Cycles to worry about it the food is there they're not struggling with temperature like there is no line around the corner that's about to eat them and so all of that desire for Progress to they're optimized to overcome stresses simply because it's been in the environment now they start there's like a almost sort of weird derangement of like I'm gonna find a thing to freak out about because things get too good and then you get into collapses of civilizations and how they it it is it is rarely when they are galvanized against an external enemy stroke stressor to your point that they collapse it's when they don't have something from the outside galvanizing them internally they're all in total disarray and when times have been good for too long and they've gotten weak then the enemy comes in they're no longer prepared for it and boom they they collapse and it least the Roman Empire which is the one thing I've started looking into the collapse was distressingly slow it was anyway this is going to really derail this conversation but it that that to me is a really fascinating take on why people end up failing because that's where this started why why does the body default to backwards sliding and you're saying from an evolutionary standpoint it would make sense that they would want to go back to that okay so that's a really interesting sort of how it plays out at the psychological level can I jump in here actually I think there's a nice tie-in the reason current people probably I'll say that maybe this way one of the reasons people are failing in this scenario you outlined there's just not enough incentives to what to succeed why do they really care about adding muscle if they don't really really care there's no lion chasing them to do so it doesn't matter enough to them right if this is a personal goal for just looking a certain way so you'll get somebody to pet your abs if the person is wired mentally the right way that might be enough we certainly have plenty of crazy ass people on our program it's like okay great if they're not then that that's going to be exactly the scenario you laid out a few weeks few months don't care enough why because their family doesn't depend on it their survival is not depending on it nothing matters right if you fail in your physical fitness journey right now how many folks out there are really going God if I don't do this I'm screwed versus how many people are saying if I don't do this yeah medicine will probably catch up there'll be gene therapy like someone else will take care of this eventually so like I know I need to like work out but like I'm not gonna die it's not really gonna like someone else is gonna so I think actually when you're saying like there's no lion chasing them that's probably in big part what it is right these are again we had to add in exercise as a fake stressor a very recent thing right there's a whole the history of exercise structured exercise is really fascinating to me and there's a whole Arc you could take it through but I'll kind of jump through some of the ends and one of them where you see this catastrophic rise in specifically strength training is post um pumping iron right it's Pumping Iron it's Conan and then all of a sudden Terminator and then it's just a rocket slide right the whole thing launches off and I think what happens in is my position that people look at this in Prior to those things exercise was something you did either for sport great small segment of the world playing sport or you did it because you liked it it was pleasurable the reward all those things small percentage of people right more people probably more like you right I do it because I know I'm supposed to but I don't really particularly enjoy it that's the bulk okay well now you've inserted a new thing which is yo I can make you a superhero wait what oh no literally look I mean picture that prior to that there is Adam West Batman that's what a superhero looked like right and then we saw that thing and it's like yo how did that happen it's like oh protein shakes and lifting yeah well even if I can't get all the way there that's pretty [ __ ] rad like I wanna I can literally become a superhero so if you think about that consciously or subconsciously that grain is planted going yo you could literally become a superhero holy some percentage of the world was like whoa that's incredible I can take that I can grab that and that is my new lion that's the chasing thing because it's like yo I'm gonna be a superhero and this is all the things that are there and whatever mentally is going on for that desire I don't know who cares healthy or not healthy irrelevant right but you've got a big push going on there and that's all great where we're at now though is like we've still left a giant bucket of people I were just like I don't care about being a superhero I don't care about kicking a ball better or fighting somebody better like I'm not doing any of those things and I don't like working out doesn't feel good okay great where's the net to catch those people well the net should well initially was scare tactic it is if you don't do this you're going to die earlier quality of life etc etc and if I think we have enough evidence to suggest that doesn't work very well whether it was scaring through food whether it was scaring through death like people just are not motivated by not dying it's the wildest thing right they're just not motivated by not dying particularly probably because they've already bred or passed their breeding window so maybe that instinct is just gone I don't know but even folks prior to that like just don't seem to care so much and so I was trying to figure out like what is the thing and I don't think we've ever well actually I think it's pretty clear that anything we tried Civil War is just epically failed well this is information guidelines um although this is monetary it's nothing really works for people so I don't know what it would take to figure out that button to push on people well we haven't got it there and it would be again my current thought would simply be the fact that this is not enough on the back and there's no payout for these folks there's no instinct to go if I don't do this I'm gonna lose my job or I'm gonna have some other suffering and so the suffering of I'm comfortable now I have income housing friends engagements uh social media like I have all these other Rewards exercise only represents something that I don't feel good right now and secondly something that is going to potentially Help Me Maybe years and years from now but someone else will probably come fix that anyways would probably be why most folks don't have a lot of desire to exercise I think those are all wrong but that would be my guess um okay there's something I want to wrap up is is VO2 max expensive you've said that the body will will back off of the things that are expensive yeah is VLT Max expensive depends on how you want to look at it so in general vo2max has a couple of components there's a central component in a peripheral component Central being that first thing cardiac output so it is it has the heart has to squeeze with a certain amount of strength and then it has to pump a certain amount of blood per pump okay well the second half of that equation is what's called avo2 difference a stands for arterial and v stands for venous side so it's the part of your vessels that go into tissue and then the part that leaves tissue goes back to the heart to get re-oxygenated so it's the arterial versus the Venus O2 and the difference in sides what that means is let's just give it a number if uh 20 molecules of oxygen came into the tissue just call it 20. and then it went into the muscle and we'll just call muscle for now comes back out goes back to the heart and instead of 20 being in there because muscle took some there's five left so the difference between 20 and 5 would be 15. okay the higher that number the better the higher the VO2 max right because you're multiplying it it's cardiac output multiplied by a VO2 difference so if I come in with 20 and I leave with 10 that difference is 10. good number but if I come in at 20 I leave with 5 that difference is 15 that's a bigger number if I come in a 20 I leave a zero the numbers if you have two difference is 20. that's an even bigger number so the bigger that number the higher VO2 max meaning you took more of the available oxygen extracted it out into the muscle and didn't have any just circulating back in the tissue which is you're more efficient at doing that so how do you improve avo2 difference well a couple of ways number one is you increase the amount of capillaries right so you put more capillaries because what happens is these vessels go into tissue and then the way they actually get into tissue again in this example call it muscle is they diffuse through capillaries and the more these capillaries the more that it slows the blood flow down because now picture a river you have a giant River coming in and all of a sudden it's moving at this rapid rate and disperses into 50 little tributaries by hitting that because the surface area and pressure changes now it just slows way down the blood then moving through that muscle slower allows muscle to grab the oxygen out of it just based on physics right moving fast through an area or slower an area we can grab more things out of it circulates back out and then has to be recycled right so increasing the amount of capillaries you have in that particular space is is the primary adaptation there secondarily you have to have mitochondria because the mitochondria are the part in the muscle cells that are going to actually be able to use the oxygen to power recovery or any other process all of aerobic metabolism happens in mitochondria there is no other way in all of biology certainly in humans right so we have a demand for extra capillaries we have a demand for strength of contraction of our heart and we have a demand for mitochondria those things have required maintenance right I have to keep up the capillaries they get damaged and recover repair mitochondria have themselves the demand for energy to stay alive we have to repair them we have to build them we have to increase them and then the strength of the contraction we have to produce the energy for that and we have to produce the recovery capacities for that so all of that is is quite costly now having said that your instincts are actually quite good here so I'll ask you a question and see if you can get it there if we take muscle mass muscle strength and VO2 max and you stopped training all of them which one goes away the most the fastest and which one is the most stable in other words holds on for the longest amount of time strength size or aerobic capacity I'm gonna guess oh God I don't know so this is just a guess I'm gonna guess your instincts for good here so take a second and think about it because your instincts are the bad news is all I have is a gut instinct so uh you lose Fitness really fast meaning VO2 max so my guess is that one goes first okay then I'm going to guess that I would I would say that um God's strength and size that's my gut instinct but you do lose size pretty fast I don't know that's my rough gut instinct so you said uh use the max first and then we'll choose that right strength then size okay great you perfectly screw that all up yeah I'm I'm not surprised so this is what's interesting so you lose size first then strength then VO2 max will hang on the longest strength is probably going to go first yes so that was my mid so I didn't get it completely wrong then okay then you're gonna potentially lose the muscle size and VO2 max hangs on the longest it's extremely stable interesting really very stable whoa yep I'm shocked by that yep so in fact if you see this um if you look at things like a maintenance dose if you reach a certain level of muscle size a single dose of training per week is enough to maintain that current level of size for a very long time really wow and that's actually pretty clear until you're at the extremes like you're you know very high level bodybuilder or something like that but for the majority of people a single dose a week will maintain size so if you can do that initial work get and add some muscle size and you can just do something to keep it around one session a week is enough we actually know more and more about the mechanisms of that the other benefit is the second time you go to grow that muscle it will come much faster than the first time this is the cellular side of what was called muscle memory and so again we know a lot about the mechanisms behind that with what's going on with satellite cells and some things there but the first time is hard and it's long but once you get there it doesn't take much to hold on and two if you ever have to slide that slide and come back it will come back much faster the second time when you compare that to strength strength is thought of well as a skill which means just like if you if you take a professional golfer we work a lot with PGA golfers uh they'll they'll be on the PGA tour for seven or eight years they'll have won tournaments and majors and stuff and they take two weeks off and they come back and they feel like they don't know how to get a golf ball that's how fast their skill slides down right and they'll be like Oh I'm just so terrible yet they're still top 10 in the world but they're not one in the world because that's how much they've regressed by taking a few days off right Jesus we have one golfer that I've worked with for a while very high profile guy and last year he's you know he told the media hey like I'm just going to take a bunch of time off and and I was like oh my gosh like what's going on with him like in his mind that was like eight days so he took like anyone's like think he's gonna be out for like months or a year or whatever and he was like he played in the next tournament like what the hell he's like yeah I took like eight days like it was time he's just like that's how fast skill comes out that will skill come back quickly absolutely okay it will come back but it's very sensitive to what you do like within the day almost right um our major league baseball players will say the same thing right do you know what's happened is that a neurological it's exactly right yeah so it's a very very tight switch you also have to remember they're trying to execute motor control with unbelievably small margins of error and so it's not that they forget it's just that they don't have that fine-tuned Precision um that's unrealistic to most of us ever point is skill slides quickly and strength is a skill so you're timing the neurological sequence muscle firing activation patterns um the position you're in that stuff requires a lot of skill not as much skill as a golf swing or a baseball uh thing like that hitting a baseball but more skill than just being big more skills never heard anybody call strength a skill that's a total reframe for me it is absolutely a skill is this I've heard you talk about uh intent intent a lot with gaining muscle yep and I wrote a note saying does he mean like you're literally folk Arnold used to say I think of my biceps becoming a mountain is that what you're talking about that's exactly what I'm talking about okay yeah so there's a couple of ways um one of them is called the muscle mind connection and there's again science behind this as well but literally thinking uh of the muscle it's funny you mentioned that but like Arnold nailed it a hundred percent thinking of the muscle watching it grow in your mind there's been studies looking at whether or not you watch the muscle in the mirror while you're training or not right so you've seen people that are like lifting and looking at their bicep in the mirror and that's quite effective it helps absolutely interesting I did not expect that yeah now it's not going to work for skill based movements so it's not going to help your deadlifts right it's not going to help your your snatch or your cleaning Jerk It's not going to help you perform any better effects I would argue as the skill coach that's going to make things worse right but from a muscle growth perspective that connection between your mind and the actual muscle is very important and is a great way to add percentage increases of your results by doing nothing or size or both it's mostly size so the Mind muscle connection is clearly important in strength but what we're talking about here is muscle size and development so this is when we would say intent matters and now that is actually good research on intent for speed and strength as well such that what we're saying here is it doesn't actually matter how much you lifted or how what speed you achieved but the intent to go as fast as possible will lead to Greater adaptations than lack of intent so intent matters across all of these things no question about it but in this this part of the conversation we're talking more about thinking about the muscle you want to grow watching it paying attention to it and having a strong mind connection will enhance your results for muscle growth as well very very interesting okay so uh long and short going back to VO2 max it is expensive so there are reasons why the body is going to back off all of that it's really interesting now let me round that out though Sorry I know we're finished no please so this is why if we work our way all the way up to VO2 max though it is expensive but it is not nearly as expensive as holding on to an exaggerated muscle mass or as nearly as expensive as the neurological motor control very difficult to keep those patterns alive and that feel alive very difficult to keep muscle at a particular size relative to Simply maintaining capillary density mitochondria density this is not as much and so if you look at in fact we've done this we did a project with a cross-country team years ago they need a three week taper and for this project they got down to 50 a total of weekly miles were dropped by 50 this is a lot if you're a competitive Runner right college level cross-country Runners and we biopsy them before and after we did VO2 Maxes we did actual this is in Seasons the NCAA season and what we saw is despite a 30 reduction in training there was no change whatsoever in vo2max no drop there was no change in any of the molecular and cellular enzymes responsible for aerobic capacity so any of the um synthase or any of those things that are important for metabolism despite the fact you had a huge reduction in training volume those things did for almost a month now they went nowhere race performance went way up so they all had more improved performance and at the muscle level the fast twitch muscle fibers increase their size and strength by almost about 10 percent over the course of the taper so I would reframe that all they did to increase their fast twitch size and strength was to Train 50 less hmm now that's probably because that they were like a little bit pre-fatigued in the prior in the three week one but the point is nothing changed and their aerobic capacity at all and if anything things got a little bit better now taper for a competitive Runner is not the same that's just like an average workout for the average person that's they intentionally do too much volume on purpose to have this kind of super compensation but the point Remains the Same aerobic capacity will hold on for a very long time if you just give it a minimal dose so it is what we would call one of the most stable physiological parameters so it is expensive but not nearly as expensive as the other ones which is why we say you really do need to invest in the strength training and the hypertrophy training because those are harder to maintain and just do something if you absolutely have to to maintain your view to Max and that'll hold on pretty tight that's interesting that's good news because I if somebody like me I much prefer lifting to doing things that really stress the cardio system that is not nearly as fun um can you add muscle and lose fat at the same time you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today you can it depends on how specific you want to be if you are fairly untrained or lowly trained or sedentary however you want to call that more possible you get to moderate to decently fit then that becomes basically fundamentally impossible if not physiologically practically pretty impossible so a challenge to do for sure all right so what are the environments that you need to create in your body in order to add muscle what's the environment need to create to lose fat and why do they collide well you're going the opposite direction it's basic physics or basic chemistry right so fundamentally we are all organic uh compounds what does that mean we're all made of carbon that's what organic chemistry is carbon based um all life when we go looking for signs of life effectively we're looking for carbon right carbon-based life forms is what we're after and why that matters everything in your body that we use for substrates for energy are big carbon chains so your carbohydrates that's what they are it is a carbon that has been hydrated so one carbon molecule attached to one water molecule that's the chemical formula for like glucose is C6 h12 o6 meaning it is one carbon attached to one H2O glucose is six of those carbons so six C6 double the hydrogen and six oxygen other forms of carbohydrate are smaller chains like fructose and starches or longer chains smash them all together but fundamentally all carbon all carbohydrates are just carbon chains attached to water fat is the same thing fat is also just big long chains of carbon whether you're a free fatty acid now in fact that's what we call different fatty acids depends on how many carbons they have so if it has six carbons or eight carbons or 12 or 18 then it has a different name steric acid or whatever else right if it has um any breaks in the bonds between the carbons we either call them uh polyunsaturated or unsaturated or monosaturated or saturated if they're all all the bonds are perfectly saturated we call it a saturated fat there's one break it's the monounsaturated if there's more than one break that's a polyunsaturated if it's stored as a triglyceride you have three that's why we call it a try Right One Two Three fatty acid chains and you have a three carbon glycerol backbone so it's a triglyceride so it is one three carbon glycerol backbone and Three fatty acids coming up big chains of carbon is all we are right so when we're talking about manipulating wait um what we're talking about is more carbon going out than carbon coming in you can split hairs and talk about how much fat versus how much carbohydrate or whatever you want but it doesn't matter fundamentally because it's all just carbon and when you take a breath in that's oxygen coming in basically when you take a breath out that is carbon dioxide going out the difference between O2 and CO2 is the carbon where that carbon come from it came from you whether that carbon came from fat that was stored behind your neck and a triglyceride fine whether that came from glucose that was in your blood fine it doesn't really matter carbons are going out carbons are only coming in and humans when we then consume Foods so we eat carbohydrate we got carbons we eat fat we got carbons weed animals we've got like you haven't mentioned protein is there protein is not a very effective fuel so you want to think about still carbon not really interesting so give me I know nothing about organic you're looking at nitrogen that's really what you're looking at right so you're basically consuming a whole host of of nitrogen and amino acids for protein so you can technically take those convert those into carbohydrate molecules gluconeogenesis and the liver are different different ways like that but fundamentally protein is a very poor fuel source if you want to look at your metabolic process you're looking at maybe five percent of your calories or energy is going to come from protein if you're using protein as a fuel you're probably in a pretty bad spot like something is going wrong for that to happen it's kind of like a little bit of a backup system but you want to think about this if you're going to build a shelter and I said okay great um I've got some metal pipes and things like that and then I've got some paper and I've got some wood and things like that and uh great go ahead and build a shed you would almost certainly say the structure of this shed is going to be made out of metal can you technically melt metal and make a fire yeah but if you're if your goal to stay alive is melting metal to make a fire uh you're not in a good spot right something really bad has happened what you want to do is say hey we have tons of wood this light's on fire very quickly it's easy to manage we're going to use that as our fuel to make our fire and then we're going to use the fire to melt down some of that metal and reshape it and reform it into the exact structure we want the analogy here is the protein is the metal it's hard to break down hard to rebuild and you don't want to do it very often but when you do it correctly you can get an awesome structure that should stay there for a very very long time wood is very easy to manipulate back and forth now what is wood made of carbon right if you were to take a log and you were sliced off a very thin slice of a log you would use that and you could write on it and you could call that Papyrus or now we would call that paper right amazing well if I take that thing and I settle down a tiny little sliver of that and I put a little bit of stuff on the end of it I could make a match out of it it's all carbon it's all coming from wood in this analogy a match is great I can light that thing really quickly and I can get a few seconds of usable energy fire that's phosphocreatine that's the role of creatine in your body very very quick but burns out in however long it takes a match to burn out I don't know seconds 30 seconds something like that great if you were to take that thing though and get the paper going if you ever made of uh fire in the woods and you used paper you realize well that's great it'll last a lot longer than the match will but it's not a permanent fuel source either that's carbohydrates right if you were to then throw the wood on the fire and you said hey look if you want a sustainable fire use the match get it going light the paper take the paper light the logs on fire it takes forever to get the logs going but they're going to stay there for a very long time that's fat okay now obviously I made a bunch of physiology and chemistry errors there on purpose it's an analogy folks right just getting to a rough idea here that you have different ways to create Fuel and the point is like we talked about earlier it's not bad or good it is simply giving you options right so we can have faster fuel sources we can have more sustainable fuel sources there are pros and cons to both sides right if you are maximizing carbohydrate only metabolism you're going to have major limitations if you're maximizing fat metabolism you're gonna have major limitations this is just the nature of of our world right pros and cons say that ideal scenario for either one of your cases fat burning or muscle growth is we have the proper fuel from those sources found in carbohydrates to then reform and rebuild the protein into the shapes that we want it to be in we used our metal for that and we don't keep ripping off our siding to put in the fire when we should have just got more wood right that's a bad spot to be in so the conditions that you need to have to have both of those goals are fairly similar if you want to lose fat you have got to be in a negative caloric balance that's just simply going to have to happen more carbon has to be coming out of you than carbon coming in you now how do you make that happen you have two options you consume less carbon option two you expel more carbon option three I guess you do a little bit of both so if you want to reduce the amount of carbon you're eating great you want to increase the amount of carbon you're expelling I.E more work more energy more movement great the fundamentally that's all you have to do if you can do that while holding on to enough of your protein then you're not going to lose as much muscle mass but you'll lose fat okay that's the key trick there and this is why people will say hold your protein fairly High keep that around but then reduce your calories from fat or carbs or both or some different way which it's almost irrelevant which one you choose or what combination for this goal alone then you're going to be able to lose mostly fat and not lose a ton of muscle along for the ride you're going to lose some muscle that's just the nature of being in a caloric deficit but you can try to lose as much fat as possible if you want to gain muscle then you go the inverse Direction which is to say I need to have the cellular energy to power the workout to drive the stimulus we talked about earlier I need to have the cellular energy to go through protein synthesis remember when you break a chemical bond right so these carbons are attached in a chemical bond you break that Bond that's either going to give off energy or require energy and in the case of humans that's going to give off energy so you broke a bond and that gave off energy well now you want to reform a new bond that doesn't exist you want to put two amino acids together you want to synthesize them that's protein synthesis that synthesis process requires cellular energy not just the energy for the workout but you actually have to have the fuel mostly in the form of carbohydrates to power that connection process you have to have the supply the amino acids and you have to have the fuel to form that connection that's what we're really going after so so sorry I'm going to pause you there uh because there's something broken in the way that I'm tracking this so that sound if I need fat or glucose fat fat or herbs so I need one of those to make the muscle yes primarily carbohydrates okay so then uh maybe you just answered it so what I was thinking is if I need the fat in order to build the muscle why do I not naturally get leaner as I'm building muscle yeah because it uses carbohydrate as a preferred fuel source for that why just as it burns faster it's just like a quicker thing a couple of things it's faster and it is immediate so you store your carbohydrates in the actual muscle tissue you don't store much fat in the actual muscle tissue interesting is that why you store weight so you're using carbohydrate both to build the muscle and to work out so there's something in the contractile process that it needs carbohydrate for yeah so effectively the way that muscles contract is you have two major filaments is what they're called myosin and actin and uh just think of it as as the is the myosin reaches up and grabs the actin and it squeezes the actin together so in the actin molecules if you're watching on the video sorry audio friends I'll try to describe this but you have two I'm pointing to my hands at each other pointing my fingers so my middle fingers are touching each other my thumbs are pointed in the sky okay um that's the direction now if I were to slide my fingers past each other and stack them on top of each other you see how the height of the bottom of my pinky to the top of my pointer fingers increases because I'm stacking them on top of each other that's the actin molecule so if I flex my bicep and I pull the actin over top of each other the height gets larger I'm stacking the molecules rather than being end to end they're now stacking light gets shorter but they stack up exactly right now for that process to occur that requires ATP which is cellular energy right now if I wanna if I have all the time in the world I can break down that triglyceride stored behind my neck I can go through what's called use that example all the time why always behind your neck is this the one that like I think I want to make it differentiated from the exercising muscle got it right it is not coming from when if you use this analogy and you talk about it just like a different part of the bicep it doesn't make um I don't think it's 6000 people's head as much that is coming from all parts of the body basically equally right so there's no targeting of fat loss specifically in the exercising muscle that much relative to carbohydrate burning so if I'm using my bicep I'm going to burn the carbohydrate in the bicep but if I'm using fat for some part of this process it'll come from wherever it's mostly coming from everywhere else in the body which is why when people lose fat they don't just lose it in the area that they were working out they lose it equally in their face in their jaw their fingers or toes and all these places very upsetting that I lose in my face but yeah I feel your pain yeah yeah so if you wanted to use that to power that protein synthesis process you'd have to go through that delay you have to liberate it you have to put it in tissue you have or you have to put it in muscle or Bandit burns more slowly right um kind of um so it's only getting it uh available in the body that makes you call it a slow fuel right so think about it that's a storage mechanism thing not an actual 100 if you want to think about this from the bigger perspective it's not exactly right but carbohydrate is your immediate fuel source fat is your backup this is why I can only store so much carbohydrate the capacity is very limited with how much it's limited by physical size of my muscle and my liver and my blood right the only other if my muscles full three places is stored period three places give me ratios I'm guessing the vast majorities in my muscles unless I'm really small you've got a couple of tablespoons in your blood total like this is it right so if you run to the actual math you probably have gone wait a minute I've got some blood done and they said it was like 80. okay what that really means is the equivalent of a couple of tablespoons of total glucose in your body in your blood if you think about your liver kind of this right side there and you just you know if you ever had a whole liver you pull it out it's kind of like the size of a hand you know a little maybe uh a flattened softball or something like that in humans you know a little bit bigger it's pretty big but muscles everywhere so it's physical dimensions wise if you just take the ratio physical size that'll explain to you exactly much so if you said okay my liver is about the size of my right glute well every other part of your muscle then is storing a glycogen all over the place right so we can store way more in a skeletal muscle and the more muscle I have the more I can store the more trained I am endurance trained the more I can store so it scales that way this is one of the reasons why and you mentioned Peter earlier uh Tia but um you know in the podcast I've done with him we talked a lot about the importance of muscle for health and one of the major factors there is it is your primary glucose storage place people don't realize like this is the biggest place to store glucose and carbide so if you're worried about blood glucose levels or things like that if you don't have enough muscle you're just adding to the challenge of being able to handle and manage your glucose so you want to put it there um going kind of back earlier when we were talking about you have to mobilize and liberate the fat it's got to go into blood it's got to go in the blood then it's got to get into the tissue then it's got to go through the tissue into the cell it's got to give in the cell then it's got to get into the mitochondria and there are rate limiting steps specifically on the cell wall the mitochondria to be able to get it into that thing and then actually use it now is fat slower at the mitochondrial cellular level then so the beauty of it is once you get into mitochondria aerobic metabolism between carbohydrates and fat is identical but what about getting into the mitochondria is that so it's already in the cell tissue for carbohydrate so you can stay outside of the cell not have to worry uh uh using fat as a fuel source is 100 aerobic meaning it requires oxygen carbohydrate is both anaerobic and aerobic so you have way more flexibility so not only is it stored in the actual tissue but if you don't have the time to even wait for oxygen and you can't don't want to wait for it to get into the mitochondria to go through the aerobic side of the equation you just go anaerobically you go right now now it is a lot less efficient so this is what we call anaerobic glycolysis splitting lysis being splitting glycan being glycogen or glucose it doesn't really matter you're splitting glycogen or glucose boom you're getting a couple of ATP like two to four ATP total very small when you take that molecule though and you put it through the aerobic side of the equation so the second half now you're going to get like 25 28 30 ATP you take one molecule of fat for that entire equation you're getting 300. Jesus so you're going it's it is getting you way more packed because think about it this way glucose is six carbons but if you had a triglyceride that was three fatty acids that had 15 16 carbons each you got 16 16 plus you got the three glycerol backbone well you have so many more carbons to deal with every time you break the carbon ATP ATP ATP H so you just have way more carbon to break so you're going to get a lot more pack for it but it requires oxygen and requires that mobilization and movement process anaerobic glycolysis can happen immediately it happens right now to round the story out have to have a signal have to have gene expression and then you're going to go through protein synthesis right There's an actual time component here that signaling process happens within seconds okay and it is over you stretch a muscle then that Cascade happens immediately you go through a workout you go through some sensor or receptor is attached signal happens and that thing that process is over in seconds to minutes so if I were to biopsy you 25 minutes post exercise those signaling Cascades are probably back to Baseline they're done already that Signal's over with the gene Cascade kicks on and that is elevated depending on which marker something like three to four hours post exercise now the protein synthesis part is elevated still up to 48 Hours post so my point is saying I don't necessarily have the time to wait because the genes are expressed almost immediately and the signal is already dead after a few seconds so if I have to wait to mobilize and use fat I'm gonna slow down that process when it is ready to go and it is trying to to get going such to say that doesn't mean you cannot grow muscle in a low carbohydrate State and I'm certainly not making any claims about low carbohydrate diets this is like not what we're referring to at all but are you optimizing growth well that's a different story entirely so differences there between possible versus optimal okay uh you have made a very bold assertion in terms of my Layman's understanding of carbohydrates versus fat uh your the implications of what you just said is that um me putting on fat doesn't really matter if my diet consists of high carb or high fat doesn't matter it's just total intake of carbon so uh your what you just said make some predictions let me go through them that I'm gonna have a very hard time getting obese on a high protein diet if I'm not in taking fat and carbs true or false I would say true okay so something called rabbit starvation I tested this uh when I got my leanest I was basically eating protein only it was miserable by the way and I was inflamed just an unimaginable amount it really sucked but I got lean okay so that's interesting I mean that's just an anecdote but uh it's interesting certainly in keeping with what you just said predicts um but it also I would say by the way on that point that would be pretty common finding that that will hold that's yeah yeah we um we have seen a ton of problems with inflammatory markers with folks that are uh tend to be very very very low on a particular either nutrient either macro or micro so when you pull things away like that some people can be fine with it apparently but the folks we've seen they don't do well on things like that they may feel okay initially but their biology is pointing the wrong direction pretty quickly so I would say what you experienced uh going on it was basically like a protein but very low carbohydrate very low fat diet is that what you're saying yeah so it's yeah it was basically just boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli for two years and look it wasn't it obviously I was taking in occasional fat but it it really was pretty rare and it was that'll mess you up yeah my wife pulled me aside and was like you you're not fun to be around anymore like you need to change strategies and before I went on the the because I really wanted to get lean and before I went on it I said look I am I'm hyper disciplined so if I set my mind to something it does not matter the amount of suffering I'm gonna keep going and so I said that means you have to be in control if it gets to the point where it's gone too far then just signal me and I will change and so she did and ultimately had to find out oh man you cracked me up could you do things the hard way I do things the hard way that is a very uh astute we called out the road uh the robot mode yes I like going in a robot mode that's great but if you're gonna do that you better make sure that that robot is pointing the right direction yeah that's a really good point I don't want to derail us and I will bring us back but as a quick no no it's very interesting at least to me uh my wife has said we I finally had to decode her language and the more I go into robot mode the more she's like I want my husband back yeah but because I value robot mode and virtually everything except my relationships get way better the more time I spend in robot mode I can't help but value my ability to stay in robot mode uh but anyway my wife keeps using it you just need somebody who's guiding that ship that's that well from uh don't go too far that would definitely be my wife and I wouldn't say not go too far but I would say let's make sure we're getting that in the right path yeah in terms of what's your goal is the strategy the best way to get there the tactics yeah like there's we can get people extremely lean and and not have to eat like that very interesting okay so that that's where we're headed right now because the other prediction that what you just walked through made is that um calories being equal it will not matter if I'm on a high fat diet or a high carb diet that one breaks several of my assumptions uh this is anecdotal but let this be the jumping off point for your dismantling of my assumptions if you give me somebody and say uh Tom you can either control this person's diet or their exercise and they are going to do exactly what you say but you have to um improve their body composition so I have to reduce their fat and I need to positively impact biomarkers that would lead one to longevity so things that occlude the arteries for instance that's going to be bad mojo I would say I don't care about exercise whatsoever just let me control their diet and I'm only going to need to pay attention to one variable and eighty percent of people I will get eighty percent of the way there through one variable and that will just be blood sugar and if I keep their blood sugar call it 85 or less they are going to stay a reasonable body comp just period end of story like I I'm not even asking how many calories are eating could they stuff their face full of fat yes but they probably won't so um it's really in my my assumption is it's really only when you start elevating your blood sugar that you run into a Cascade of problems but that means that carbohydrates matter a lot okay so I would say a couple of things what you're what you're talking about is a question of practicality versus physiology okay so the a lot of things you put on there are issues of well this will be more practical more people will do this they'll execute it better they'll get better results because they're um they're hearing more right and if you look at any intervention for nutrition adherence will be the number one predictor of success so you're not wrong in that charge right to say if I can set somebody up for more adherence I'm more likely to have success that is absolutely the number one starting criteria a diet not done is irrelevant right you can talk all the theory you want but if they don't do it it's completely irrelevant that is separate from physiology and I would say physiologically is very very very clear you can manipulate either one of these things and have success if you want to look at uh chemical signaling if you want to look at randomized controlled Trials of outcomes you're not going to see any difference in successful weight loss by manipulating carbohydrates more or fat more if protein is is held consistent right that's very very clear scientifically again though what you feel like is more realistic for people who will execute higher and more success that's a separate question and again as I argued a second ago maybe more important I'll give you that um whether or not you can fundamentally base this exclusively on blood glucose I think if you want to put this across 30 000 people I think the mission you laid out there would probably be pretty successful actually I'd say it's probably really successful at the individual person um I'd say that's also something that's not really that important so you can see tremendous progress in Folks by not worrying about blood glucose at all I've actually encountered we go back and forth in this we'll use things like a CGM sometimes and sometimes not some people it is really really helpful in a lot of ways and then other folks it's just an utter disaster with what happens to them when they see that they get so fixated I was gonna say orthorexia is that the only that that can be it they just freak out there's a lot of assumptions built into cgms that are false so the assumption that you should just never be over a certain number and like things like that we certainly go into that but those things are all really wrong so people will make all kinds of weird things and do things because their number went to a certain level one time and and so we're very cautious on when we see gems other folks it's it's a game changer it's a complete Game Changer you throw that on them and you just walk away and then there's like holy cow and they just stop eating Doritos all day and stuff you're like you know sorry if Doritos is the problem they're not is the problem with Doritos just that people overeat calorically no uh you're never gonna find things being a single a explainer so probably issues of overeating calorically sure probably compromising reducing other items that they should be eating that are now not coming in so now you have fiber deficiencies or you have micronutrient deficiency there are other issues there so it's not just what they're eating it's what they're now not eating okay because this isn't tracking with my understanding of what you were saying uh so when you say the difference between carbohydrate and fat for fat loss doesn't matter does that uh assume that you're not eating highly processed carbohydrates okay when I say it doesn't matter what I mean is not that it's irrelevant I'm saying you have options either way that's really what you can lose weight on a high carb diet absolutely you can lose weight very successfully on a high carb diet you can lose weight very successfully on a high fat diet I I would say that there's there's so many studies on this again whether you want to look at the mechanistic data whether you want to look at the randomized controlled trials and they basically are all showing the exact same thing does that mean it's irrelevant and there's nothing else considered absolutely not there's thousands of things to consider methods are many concepts for few very basic fundamental concept calories are going to have to be accounted for one way or the other if you have a different method you like to get to that calorie thing you showed your method great if you want to track and weigh out your food great you want to give another simple heuristic just do this just don't do that great those are just different methods to get to fundamentally the same concept of calorie balance right whether you're saying yeah I eat this more food so I'm more satiated so I'm less likely to okay fine like those are just different systems to all get to the same spot so I apologize if I said this earlier I didn't clarify but it's not irrelevant there's a ton of relevance to all those variables it's just fundamentally you're going to have to get to the same place and if you get to the same place you'll have the same net result but there's a lot of different ways to get there and some are more successful than others and certainly many are more successful than others at the individual human level there's no question some people respond better to different micro macronutrient switches absolutely whether that is actual physiological whether that is now behavioral of course all those options are on the table if the strategy you'd like to employ to help people regulate is just simply modern blood glucose great sure that could be effective if you're taking another approaches saying I don't care at all about measuring blood glucose but I'm going to have them weigh their food and we're going to have a great that works too all that stuff will work it just depends on now we're at the level of well what other factors are we considering are we considering how their digestion feels are we considering how um their food preferences are we considering their cultural aspects are we considering their income and their costs like now those are all just different levels of nuance that we want to get into um I'll give you an example we just recently completed a study on intermittent fasting and we actually wanted to look at whether or not it did anything for muscle growth and so people are really interested in this topic from a perspective of fat loss but we were like well what about somebody who's trying to maximize muscle growth does the 16-8 intermittent fasting approach help muscle growth doesn't harm it or is it irrelevant I can't share the exact results right now because it's in review but what we what was very important to me is exactly what I'm saying I don't want to just know the answer at the muscle up but I want to ask him about their fatigue I want to ask him about their digestion I want to ask them about how hard they felt it was and all these things and I can tell you this much there's no clear-cut winner here there's never going to be it is well okay maybe this adds in muscle growth or a dozen but it was harder to do or it you know gave them made them more bloated or there's always just going to be pros and cons to these approaches right so it comes down to you saying which ones you want to optimize for and which of the downsides do you not care about or less important to you or don't affect you as much that's the game you're constantly going to play so when you talk about dietary stuff when I kind of say laissez-faire like it doesn't really matter what you do what I just mean is fundamentally you just got to get to the same kind of place and you'll get there and then from there you got to coach your people describe the same kind of place is that just in this particular instance yeah would be calorie balance for fat loss like you're just gonna have to get to a negative position that's just going to have to be how how it goes there is no other way to go about that again different systems to get to negative calorie balance but you're gonna have to get there that's like it's kind of circular argument because one is actually just the definition like for the other so there's no really way outside that Matrix all right I want to talk about If It Fits your Macros and the idea that you can eat nah whatever macros as long as your um you have a Target you're worrying about calorie balance all that but before we get there I think we have to understand the mechanism by which you add muscle and the mechanism by which you lose fat um when I started researching you for this episode you really changed my understanding of how fat is actually liberated uh and even in this interview the idea of the glycogen being stored in the muscle so it's really readily available versus fat which is a backup mechanism which has to be liberated first make its way through the blood all that is really helping me understand the sort of hows and whys of this all but walk us through the fundamental nature of um I don't know which you think is right to start with but walk me through the building blocks of building a muscle walk me through the building blocks of losing fat and just to re-anchor everybody because this I had never thought about it before that carbs and fat have more in common than protein has to carbs and fat that's very interesting that being more about nitrogen the other two being carbon I had never put two and two together even though I knew oh if you're building muscle like you you can check the nitrogen levels in your urine I just never stopped to ask why um so yeah mechanisms please sure we've laid a lot of the foundation here so this shouldn't be too difficult for us to get through but really you're breathing in O2 you're breathing out CO2 right that carbon is coming again either from carbohydrate or from fat and so really to answer your question one of the ways we set up how we analyze our folks is I want to know four fundamental things number one I want to know everything that goes in your body so I want to know what you eat what time you ate it how much you ate it where you got it from I want to know where you get your drinking water from I want to know what kind of toothpaste you use I want to know how you're cleaning your tiles and your floor if it goes on or in your body I want to know about it number two when everything comes out of your body I want to take we take saliva we take urine we take blood and blood and blood we take stool we take hair if needed we take every single thing that comes out your body sweat hair all of it there are different markers that are better and different biological samples so in in my world we don't treat we don't I don't treat anything I'm not a doctor a medical doctor but I'm not going to develop you plans and protocols uh based on Labs we do it based on humans right so how you feel is most important right and then four how you perform so how are you functioning I take all those things and now I know exactly what's happening and I can create and find those performance anchors find those constructs or constraints and then I can actually set to your very specific planica why that matters here is all that's happening in your body is input in and put out okay so fat then when you're losing fat has to come out of your body in one of a few places it either has to come out in your feces your urine your sweat your saliva or your hair but it's none of those places the only thing I left off that equation is your breath and so you use lose a very minimal amount of fat through your urine some through your feces you pee fat you can pee anything right but we're basically you might as well count that as zero interesting little comes out in your stool the overwhelming majority is coming out of your breath remember those chips that they put some weird thing in it that made you not digest fat and so it was like beware may cause anal leakage also mortified by that I never even tried them the anal leakage thing is historic oh God anyway so yes it can certainly hopefully not a lot is coming out in your stool but it can happen man I wonder it's been so many years since I thought about that I would love to know what actually was in there I will also tell you bad things happen if you take too much fish oil well it can yeah woof or MCTS or any kinds of things yeah depends on how hot you want on your fish oil there's a part of uh medical physiology you go through in med school and then they'll teach you all about what happens with excessive fat intake and especially in the form of oil I found the upper limits I'll just say that yeah amazing um so it's mostly coming out through your breath and if that makes no sense so we we are losing fat by exhaling that's right that's crazy it's nuts right but it is exactly what I explained earlier you're breathing in O2 and breathing out CO2 the sea is coming from carbs and protein you cannot burn fat alongs this is not possible Right so you're you're sorry it comes out as carbohydrate or fat I think I said protein a second ago 100 men as those two you can't burn fat along so it's coming from a combination of those two things and the fundamental answer is it doesn't even really matter which one is being used for exercise it doesn't matter which one is being used for exercise in terms of your fat loss so people will really be worried about do doing the types of exercises that burn the highest percentage of fat versus carbohydrate because I think that's going to Aid in fat loss it doesn't matter if they had just called the the molecule in food something different than the molecule on your body and I get why they didn't because they are the same they are but it gets really confusing when you mean dietary fat versus stored body fat okay so when you say it doesn't matter what you use what do you mean it doesn't matter what I use when I eat it's not because your dietary fat is just another animal stored fat correct it's the same thing yes but when I'm trying to lose fat yeah the fat that I eat has implications in terms of priming my body as to what to use for a fuel source so when you're talking about this because I've heard you describe this mechanism before and literally thankfully you stopped and said but that doesn't burning fat does not mean you're losing fat and I was like what because I can be burning the dietary fat yeah well you can even be burning your own endogenous fat yes but when people hear you say burn fat I think if they're anything like me they just assume you mean off my love handles you would think that's not necessarily what no it's definitely not the case so you have a difference in terms one of them would be called oxidized so are you oxidizing the fat okay great that means you're using it using that oxygen to burn the fat as fuel that's great I'm oxidized does oxidizing imply that I am burning my own body fat or that's what I do to fat I have it actually doesn't matter whether they're using the dietary fat or your own endogenous fat so you could eat a high fatty meal and then you would go train right then then your rate of fat oxidation would go up but you've also increased fat intake so yeah you're burning more fat but you ate more fat does the does the fat have to make it out of the food into my bloodstream before I can burn it it must yeah yeah of course okay so I have eaten the fat it's then not in the shape that I would recognize it from the animal I'm assuming it's broken down and some things free fatty acids and then that crosses your butter and your blood can be free fatty acid floating around yep so you ate it you ate that wonderful delicious fat however it came and it was in the storage form because it was in an animal stored form our plants doesn't matter right it's going to get in your belly your belly isn't going to break down into the free fatty acids put it into your bloodstream as the free fatty acids the exact way that you take it from your storage and put in your bloodstream mystery fatty okay that I was going to ask I didn't want to interrupt but if you took my blood could you tell whether I was uh releasing fat into my bloodstream from stored fat or whether I had just eaten it is there any difference or it is identical once it's well we would be able to depending on the marker you look at if you're looking at um some particular markers would be identical we wouldn't be able to differentiate but if we looked at other food particle stuff you'd be like oh you just ate food so it's kind of a cheat answer but so there are other things going on in the blood of five just eaten so you can presume totally got it yeah but fundamentally but the fat itself is the same if you want to give the because you say the same answer for blood glucose I I wouldn't know necessarily if we you get your blood drawn I wouldn't know if you just necessarily had you know some carbohydrate meal right before it or if this is just your normal blood glucose you we wouldn't be able to from that marker alone if I just looked at blood glucose levels like I wouldn't be able to see okay but I have God this is fascinating I had never thought about this before but what you're saying is um when I because there's only two ways for me to get glucose in my blood if I understand this correctly I eat and then the carbohydrate is broken down or I break down my own protein through gluconeogenesis you're shaking your head for those just listening okay so how do I get glue what are the ways that I can get glucose into my bloodstream certainly number one you can eat it yep any form of carbohydrate whether that's in the form oh so let me give you this real fast I'll try not to when you have glucose in your blood we call it glucose or blood sugar okay when we store that glucose we call it glycogen okay so the glucose is a six carbon molecule if I stack a bunch of those six carbon molecules together and store them then we call that glycogen yeah sorry I should have been more clear uh so does it take a different form when I eat it and it gets stored in the muscle or is it literally because for instance when you say I store glucose I always think about it as being stored as fat yeah yeah oh yeah so this is let me let me just hit a little bit more chemistry here so in your muscle it is stored as glycogen and in your liver is that a different thing than glucose it is the it is the exact um like imagine if we made this like physical thing so imagine so could I say it's parked in the muscle because when I think of storage I think of it transforming no no no storage is not transformation storage is not transformational it is literally storage if you let's imagine this is Legos so give me one Lego block and there was you know six notches on that one Lego block each Notch is a carbon I have one Lego block and that Lego block is glucose floating around right and he said okay store that put that away put your LEGOs away and he took the next Lego and you attach it onto it and the next leg untouched it onto it you could call that entire structure your Lego block but each individual one is still its own Block it's just being stored more efficiently so if your kid is putting away their Legos in their box and they just took all the Legos and dumped them in there you wouldn't be maximizing the efficiency if you store them and stack them on top of each other exactly where they're built you could get way more in that same box area does that make sense yes I'm still waiting for that's glycogen it is saying yo rather than just dumping a bunch of Lego blocks in our space let's stack it together perfectly each one is still its own individual unit but it was all perfectly stacked together so if you want to break out and open up your your storage area and pull one Lego block out you can there's nothing different that's only in the blood liver or muscle only in the muscle and the liver okay and the blood is just it is only it is never going to be packed together in the blood it is only in that free-floating my bad yes so in nature though we have another word so if we take muscle glycogen if it's in an animal we call it muscle glycogen it's in our liver we call it liver glycogen if it's in the blood we call it glucose in a plant though we don't call it glycogen we have a different term for it you know that is carbohydrate starch oh okay yep makes sense that's what a starch is so biologist same thing in a plant different name don't go nuts here but I'm going to give you I'm going to violate some stuff but just as a framework here we typically use what we call those shorter forms of carbohydrate so monosaccharides as I've heard of glucose fructose galactose things like that you take polysaccharides starch uh glycogen things like that right stored forms there's monosaccharides polysaccharides disaccharides and all the way down okay transportation and immediate utilization is done in the monosaccharide form so you're going to use fructose glucose as fuel sources for the most part plants and animals right you're going to use glycogen as a storage vehicle that's the point so in a plant it'll say yo we're going to collect a bunch of sunlight and then we're going to breathe in carbon dioxide the sunlight is where we get the energy from and we're going to collect the material the food they're eating is the air so they're breathing in CO2 breathing out O2 they're collecting their carbons through the air we can't go through that process that's called photosynthesis so our only way to get carbon is to eat the plant who just took all the carbon out of the air and store the animal they ate the plant or the animal yeah right we have to eat the thing that did it right so now it's going to bring in those carbons one at a time it's going to stack them together and make the glucose molecule then that glucose molecule is going to be running around that plant and it's going to say great we brought in more carbon we have enough to now store that current glucose that's floating around you so go store that as a starch they tend to go down which means I'm going to store it in the ground which is tend to be things like root vegetables so a potato is a starch tubers are starches because they're putting all those glucose molecules together and they're burying it Underground if it wants to fruit then or flower it's going to start breaking down that stored starch back into its monosaccharide just like you take down your broken down storage or your storage of in the liver glycogen and you need a little bit of it you pull one Lego block out at a time put it in your blood it pulls one like a block out at a time of its starch puts it in the the plant sends it back up the tree goes all the way up to the branches and gets in the flower or the fruit in the form of a monosaccharide which is why most of your fruits are actually fructose and glucose that's the carbon cycle right if the plant wants to store it it puts it in the root that's why most root vegetables are starches if it wants to put it in a more immediate access use it turns it in back into a monosaccharide that's why if you eat a banana or an apple that's not ripe yet it tastes terrible because it is mostly still starchy it tastes sweeter when it is converted those starches into fructose and it is now a sweeter flavored on a second okay hold on this is so interesting so I get the root thing that's their storage mechanism for energy the fruit will and and so they will use the energy stored in the root occasionally will they reuse the energy that they store in the fruit no because the fruit's gone so it gets even more fun so it isn't then fruit because you said they stored in the fruit if it's available for immediate energy I assume the fruit is a way for them to pass their seeds there you go okay yep so the idea is we're exiting we're letting that thing go yeah but but when it's a root they are used they are storing it for its own flowering purposes to make more fruit yeah exactly and on the way up the Chain by the way so same idea wow it goes from a polysaccharide to a monosaccharide at the end right but on the way up it goes to a disaccharide and in some particular plants you can stick a needle halfway through them and you can collect that and we call that syrup so that's why those are this is so interesting right this is why you're like why the hell do some trees make this unbelievably sweet little thing that we can get out of it again not all plants do all this is different but you're getting the pointer right so polysaccharide in the bottom stored convert it into disaccharides move it up the tree get it all the way to the end convert that into monosaccharides make that a sweet delicious tasting thing that then other animals will come eat to spread our seeds put it in their digestive tract excrete it later throughout the forest and get our seeds out there right fascinating we do the same thing we say store our starch our glycogen in our liver and our muscle keep the optimal amount in blood so that we can power brain activity and transport it back and forth where we want don't go too high don't go too low right you need more great we're just going to kick it either out of muscle in the blood or out of the liver and in the blood and so the way that you keep your blood sugar optimized is muscle and the liver constantly sort of dripping out glycogen or you eating your own food source to put it back in there so those are the three ways that you can keep your blood sugar elevated or or more consistent so this is why again we say the more high functioning skeletal muscle you have it's a little bit better blood glucose control you have is because it's that storage Depot that can say give or take you have some extra to give it to me great we'll take it you need some extra we can technically give it back the liver is probably doing most of the giving rather than muscle muscle is probably doing most of the taking but that's really where we're at now when it comes to fat this is the backup Supply okay sorry before you do that I need to understand when glucose becomes fat because if I overeat glucose it is going to become fat and it's my understanding perhaps erroneous but it's my understanding that the way that the body pulls the glucose out of my bloodstream so preferentially the muscle will grab it if it needs it brain will grab it if it needs it liver will grab it if it needs it but if none of them need it and it's in the blood the blood's like gut or the body knows I got to get this out of the bloodstream and it's going to store it as fat no not really really what the hell my whole world is clumbering it's all been a lie Andy and what are you talking about um so that process you're describing it's called de novo lipogenesis so this is the formation of new fat out of non-fat sources conversion from carbohydrate despite the fact that they're big long carbon chains it's not efficient it's not as efficient as it needs to be you're talking in the order of five to ten percent is what's going to happen there what's going to mostly happen is partitioning here's what that means if you were to be in that exact scenario we have excess blood glucose you could convert some of that to fat and storage yes hard to do though right what's easier to do is just change the amount of car of fat that you're burning and shift your metabolic energy demands more towards carbohydrate and lower on fat so think about that now if you say look making up a scenario at rest you're burning half of your energy from fat half of it's coming from carbohydrate yes now you have too much carbohydrate body says yo yo we have excess carbohydrate it's a pain in the ass to store it it's full pantheastern converted into new fat just burn more carbohydrates and start burning less fat so shift my bias towards more carb burning and there's really that much Flex in the system that's way easier than converting an entire moment I live off of 5 000 calories of pixie sticks there's no fat but I thought that person would get oh that person will get fat but how they're shutting down fat burning they're not necessarily that's what I mean so there is that much Flex in the system there's so much going on that if I just start cramming my weight but uh okay so if they stop burning fat fair enough but if they're only in taking sugar there's there is no okay so you're this makes everything makes a prediction if I understand what you're saying correctly which I may very well not but if I understand what you're saying correctly the person that eats only pixie sticks they are are they gonna get fat yes how are they gonna get fat they stop they stop burning fat but they're not intaking anything other than glucose sure but they're not getting rid of anything else uh-huh so they're fat uh fat reduction is going nowhere right they have no fat burning there is some de novo lipogenesis you can do that process you start sweating at some point like at some point something has to give do they just die like what because you're you're you've you've talked about this yeah the body will regulate the life out of blood sugar it doesn't it can't have the blood sugar it's does not work I don't know what word use but it will it will gum up literally gum up your system the blood uh cells start sticking together it's inflammatory at that high level yeah it's not good so man I always thought that that you pulled the glucose out of the bloodstream and put it into fat wow again that can't happen right so there is very hard super inefficient so we're probably not the best survive doing that yeah so the best way is to Simply Flex up and down as you called it where are we getting our fuel sources from how are they going to keep getting fat well they're going to continue to add to that mass right so any extra calories going to go somewhere and so if if you're really going to that extreme we're literally fat intake is sort of zero right every energy uh every amount of energy they're expelling is coming directly from that carbohydrate right yes that's all coming in any extra small amount of uh lipogenesis that can occur it's just going to add to that total sum so even if that is a small amount if you're literally taking this to the ex the reduction Maps atom here and that is zero zero fat burning a small amount of de novo lipogenesis is going to result in a lot of fat gain over enough time wow but it really does have to go like that now I'm not aware of any studies that have taken it to like an incredible extreme like that so perhaps when you get to certain levels that percentage increases from like five or ten percent um but in most normal circumstances people aren't that yeah no and look I get that and I understand that this is very much just a thought exercise but it it's helping me map the realities of the biology yeah it goes the other direction too by the way um if you were to go on a very low carbohydrate diet and go on a very high fat diet that doesn't mean you store extra fat right because the opposite equation would be like wait a minute like we we tried that game 40 years ago right I think that Wall's over eating more fat again of calories are balanced does not result in additional fat Mass gain for the zigzag same reason well you're just similar to burning fat you're supposed to switch over and this is also why um some of the marketing behind that side of the equation is um confusing give it the most charitable term because I can be burning more fat but that doesn't mean I'm losing more fat all I've done is I've shifted my metabolic balance from carbohydrate oxidation to Fat oxidation great fine doesn't mean necessarily you're gonna lose more fat doesn't mean necessarily anything else about performance either folks can perform at a very high level physically even on a moderate amount of carbohydrates or low amount of carbohydrates if their calories are high enough so you won't necessarily even lose performance by going on a small to low amount of carbohydrates depending on the exact sport some sports there may be more influence but just because you're not eating enough carbs doesn't mean your brain won't function right or things like that it's like oh I need carbs for you know or I'll have no blood that's not true either right so we've seen this equation play on both sides you have the flexibility but it wouldn't work wouldn't wouldn't work only one way right so it wouldn't work just high fat or just High carbohydrates if it's true on one side it's it's got to be true in the reciprocal as well would it not be easier to get fat eating fat because at least I know that can be stored as fat so even if I'm in Burn mode um if if I'm in okay I'm in taking way too many carbohydrates so I'm just eating pixie sticks again I get that that's a an absurd thought experiment but if I'm just eating pixie sticks and I'm not in taking fat very little um fat will be created from the carbohydrate itself from the glucose but some will okay that Stacks up but other than that like I'm just burning so it just becomes that every little bit adds to my body um still feels like something is going to break down there if you overeat but setting that aside on the fat side if I am I'm only intaking fat so now I switch over and my body's like okay I'm just going to burn this because it's all I'm getting um but I I assume that there is an easy path from dietary fat to stored fat is that not true is there an easier path from dietary fat to stored fat yeah it's it's a direct route there but it's still not going to matter if total caloric expenditure is balanced yeah no that I understand so what I'm holding in my head is a morbidly obese person and I I would have predicted that that morbidly obese person is closer and closer to eating pure pixie sticks but what I hear you saying is actually that's probably not true what they're doing is they're obviously over consuming calories but the calorie that they're having the easier time storing is fat and so what's going on for them I think is what your hypothesis predicts or your theory because I'm sure it's well tested predicts is that they are eating so much carbohydrate that their body switches over to just burning carbohydrate so every bit of fat that they get and they're probably getting a lot is stored as fat cool that that sequence makes sense to me um the sequence that now I'm having a bit of a hard time wrapping my mind around is they're not eating carbohydrates the body starts burning fat but they're still over consuming calorically and so it seems like it would be easy to shuttle the excess fat into fat cells no yeah so if you want to look at folks who are excessively fat okay you'll see actually problems on the carbohydrate side of the equation you'll see problems on fat equation if you look at a standard American diet they're going to be very hyperloric on both of those and what typically happens we do this in my nutrition class I've been doing this for 12 years where I have all the folks track their nutrition what is obnoxiously clear it's very rare very rare for any of my college students to ever hit even close to the minimum RDA recommendations for protein intake never even come close to it it'd be one or two people per 40 person class that even hits the minimum RDA numbers which I think are way too low they're eating way too much of fat on carbohydrate that's that's the issue here so could you find folks who are eating too much fat yes that's easy to come by right if you're looking at any of the accessible food things they tend to be very very high in fat right so fast food any of these things carbohydrates are even more accessible you go to any vending machine it's going to be mostly carbohydrate-based things right you're not going to find any protein there you know and maybe maybe they have some high quality protein bars but that's the best you're gonna hope for right and so you have accessibility problems on both sides of that equation I it would be I think you're responsible to blame it which is not what you did but just to clarify to blame it on either one of those as the primary uh cause for excess calorie intake so if they're a carbohydrates are in check and they're eating more fat going to be a problem if their fat is in check and they're eating too much carb going to be a problem you're going to find people across our 350 million Americans that are violating that in the droves across all of that Spectrum so I don't know like I'm not sure what the it's I guess I'll say this is kind of why I'm generally like I'll just say laissez-faire again because I'm like if you're eating too much I don't like for 350 million of you there's a hundred of you doing it this way 100 of you doing that 100 million you're both doing it wrong they've got big problems on both sides of the equation if you want a solution okay great now we're talking tactics we know where we have to get to I think it's generally best to flag yourself against protein for all the reasons we talked about and then whatever other system helps you personally there will be hundreds of millions of people who function better on this system or that system or anything else because there's so many of us and now it's coming down to things like practicality execution adherence and if you want to make arguments that some systems are more or less effective than others great we can do that but fundamentally like at this level of physiology it's not super important at the global scale if that makes sense it does because they're all making a fundamental mistake but for my own understanding of biology I have another question which is who's going to get fatter the person that um and let's assume calories are the same in either scenario the person that eats a all carbohydrate and the person that eats all fat who's going to get fatter if they're both eating 10 000 calories a day let's say and they're sedentary if you're in a lock in calories and you're locking protein I would say you're gonna have very minimal differences between the two groups interesting and we have evidence on that understand yeah because again if you look at whether you want to pull these randomized control trials or they take people through this and they put them on very high carb or very they get to the same place okay so the mechanism by which the uh glucose over consuming person gets fat is um that the little bit of lipogolises I forget what you call that the the Turning glucose into fat that what is it called again do you know about lipogenesis okay I'm never gonna remember that uh lipo lipo like lipolysis like lipid Genesis is making of a creation so it's creation of fat if it was lipogenesis I could get behind it but you throw another one of new you're making new got it yeah okay um that just seems like it would be a much slower process but you're saying no I'm gonna let go of this um I don't know I think this is pretty fun stuff to talk about personally to hell with them they don't I just can't wrap my head around um it depends on what you mean by time right so are we looking at this end of a 16-week trial or a six-month trial or a six year trial so um yeah we're six years down the road like it's a little bit of speed difference it's not it's not gonna matter right really yeah it's just like that's fast enough if you want to look at like a six-week change you might pick something up six day change for sure but what you're talking about generally is is years of work here and so by that point subtle differences in in speed are going to be equated for very very interesting okay so I legitimately feel like my understanding of fat just leapt forward give me the same breakdown now on muscle so um unlike fat which does not require a stressor to force my body to well you're gonna say with adding muscle it's Unique and then I have to go work my ass off in the gym I am never going to I can't just eat a bunch of protein and add a bunch of muscle I wish not true really what totally not true so Arnold Schwarzenegger could get to his size just by cramming chicken breasts I didn't say maximize I didn't say optimize you said you can't add muscle but just so if I just like my protein 100 really 100 how much give me a percentage two percent fifteen percent Oh you mean she was a total muscle mass yes well it would be an asymptote so what do you know what that means um meaning the first minute you do it it's gonna be much higher by day five that'll be lower by months yeah of course that's what asymptote means well it's asymptote is a is a line that goes sharper more vertical as you get closer to ask somebody else's over time is how they summed it up okay anyway got it yep um diminishing returns is is another way to that's an asymptote right understood so uh this is classic classic data from probably the mid 1990s looking at protein synthesis and what you'll see is some cool things if you simply do about a resistance sector okay we'll go back up at all times you are actually going through protein synthesis so you're making new proteins right now you're also going through protein degradation so anabolic is when the net result the protein balance is positive catabolic is when the protein balance is net negative right so right now I could biopsy you you would be going through some protein synthesis and you would be going through some protein breakdown at rest though most likely you're going through more breakdown than you are synthesis so your protein balance is probably not negative which means you are technically catabolic right now if it was the opposite you'd be anabolic okay great so one of the things that happens is when you go through a bout of exercise strength training you go from a net balance of negative to a net balance of positive now it's not much but it is technically positive the exact same thing happens by just eating protein that is enough alone eating a bolus of protein right now would take you from a net negative to a net positive in this next few minutes to hours without question if you then do a bottle of exercise and eat the protein the effects are additive so you take the exact amount of benefit you got from protein the exact amount of benefit they stack on top of each other and you get a double bump there if you add in carbohydrates to that meal it is another additive effect so you get up there right now that's acute that is like literally right now we go do it with biopsy you you go do that intervention and I biopsy you after that the protein synthesis process is not necessarily 100 predictive of net muscle gain eventually right there's the science is not perfect so just because I can measure the rate of incorporation of new amino acids in you that's not the exact same number so you asked for a percentage number if I told you it increased protein synthesis by 25 percent that would not mean you gained muscle 25 percent it is a is a small number and there is no actual good relationship between that protein so this is number and the resulting amount of whole muscle you'll have eight weeks later there's no number to give on that one um it wouldn't equate in fact the protein synthesis numbers are going to be greatly exaggerated um I'm going to go so far off track here but it's your job to pull me back in a second this is a really good another this is a PSA it's my turn to give a PSA when you start going into to molecular biology folks those numbers do not translate into whole human existence and what I mean is if you go to protein synthesis I just gave you the example a 25 increase in protein synthesis may result in a three percent increase in muscle growth eight weeks later you go back up the chain and you go to cell signaling if I was measuring um the gene expression and I saw a a 20 increase in gene expression I would say that basically nothing happened some molecules need to go up three or four hundred percent before it's actually physiologically relevant so you can see a paper somebody can post something or share something and tell you oh this mechanism this Gene this signaling activity increased by 80 percent and that could be total [ __ ] the science could be great but it could mean absolutely nothing because we know that that actual marker needs to be up 300 before it's clinically meaningful and so this is why when we say things like be very careful of mechanism and don't let mechanism be more important than whole outcomes if we have whole outcomes if we don't have whole outcomes meaning how much stronger do they actually get how much longer do they actually live how much more muscle when we measure the actual muscle mass those are always more important than molecular mechanism if we don't have those we can look towards mechanism that's great that's insightful if I'm creating a drug fine look towards mechanism I don't have whole body data but don't let people trick you with these molecular numbers because they they don't scale to human existence if that whole tangent sort of makes it does it makes a lot of sense so okay the punch line is and I'm gonna have a hard time eating my way there it does at a cellular level it really does have a it does a response but I'm still gonna have to go get the additive benefit of um you don't have sexually lifting if you what do you mean by that think about a sumo wrestler do you think they have more or less or the same amount of muscle mass as you and I I think they have a lot more but I don't think they would ever get that just from eating I think they have to train now may not be with weights sumo wrestlers are not really traditionally lifting weights right okay fighting they're in there like okay I'll give you a better example pick the random person on the street that weighs 300 pounds yep more or less muscle than you and I more no no not doing a single thing of exercise carrying all that fat okay they're walking right eat a little bit of there but mostly they're sedentary so is the amount of walking you you could you spent 20 minutes trying to convince me you have to train your ass off to listen to gay muscle yeah and now you're also making the argument that just walking around you Andy Calvin it's not stacking up right interesting man so it's both right you're correct you walk around the 150 pound backpack on that's going to stimulate some muscle growth eventually right but you're saying that the their muscle mass is more attributable to just the massive amount of calories I'm not saying necessary has to be protein protein I'm saying it is some part is some part actually people looked at this are there numbers to give on this uh in terms of what number uh the amount of muscle that an obese person adds okay um all right so check this out I'm trying to decide how much I can tell you on this one or not because we haven't because this is like secret this is like alien nice to science you're not supposed to talk about results while they're in review uh is that you're just gonna say you're not supposed to talk about results the first rule of science you don't talk about science yeah got it here's what I can say um so my colleagues and I have uh I'm sorry I'm just gonna apologize my co-authors right now it's impact Theory I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to go above Beyond right so if you look at the national databases so whether there's a thing called the UK biobank and there's one here in America called n Hanes and these are these National databases these are 10 to 20 30-year studies where they collect people every single year and they put them and then they make these data openly available and if you look at things like that you will see that muscle mass has kind of an inverted U H regarding mortality risk such that if you are under muscled and you add muscle mass your mortality risk goes down and then if you add too much muscle it is detrimental um there that does not stack up to me at all doesn't make any sense right there's just no way adding muscle mass is deleterious outside of very rare bodybuilders and things like that but these are the not the folks in these National databases right these are Mayo Clinic folks and things like that and so my colleague Tommy wood and I and Dan Garner and some other guys dove in and said I don't know if that's just true so we ran some modeling against these things and one of our papers is in review right now and one of the things that we found was if you look at the association between strength and muscle mass in these databases you'll basically see none you will also see that these folks have almost no connection between their muscle mass and their physical activity meaning the folks in these groups added their muscle mass not through physical activity which says they added it somewhere else food by being larger you tend to have more muscle which made you at a higher risk of dying it had nothing to do with the muscle mass we did though see an association a direct association between the strength training and brain health which is the first finding really ever to find a direct causal link between strength training and brain health not mental health physical brain health in addition um What's called the strength residual and so if I take your muscle mass and I look at how strong you should be just based on your muscle mass again big database stuff and then I actually measure your muscle mass the residual is the difference between your predicted strength of that given muscle mass and your actual strength the farther you are off that line then the higher your risk of of Death Becomes hmm so there's a standard for the amount of strength you would expect with muscle mass and are you saying that people that gain their muscle mass through just massive caloric intake they get the mass but they don't get the strength and that so these people are not the way that we phrase it scientifically is they're not accruing their muscle mass from training that's what's happening I don't know how they're doing it but there's not a lot of options left so that going back to original question I don't know what number that is I don't know what protein these folks like we could go back and I guess probably run that pretty quickly but the point is if you eat more and even if you don't exercise at all you're going to add some muscle it's gonna be there now are you adding all lean muscle no no no no no are you adding some muscle though yeah are you adding mostly fat yes this is not a good way um a similar note if you're trying to gain muscle and you want to gain lean muscle which means you want to gain as much muscle as you can with the least amount of fat gain what you don't want to do is eat excessive calories and so the typical number we'll say is like maybe 10 to 20 calorie increase don't do the whole thing of like oh my standard calories or 2 000 a day but I'm trying to bulk up so I'm going to eat 6 000 calories great if you're willing to have a whole bunch of fat come along for the ride like go for it if you want to add as much lean muscle like you're probably looking at a 500 calorie increase maybe making sure protein super high training that hide that's probably going to put you now there's actually um a couple of studies that are being run right now trying to figure out like what that exact percentage is but those data are not out yet but it's probably something in that neighborhood of 20 or so percent caloric increase rather than like what some folks will do which is actually like a doubling or even tripling of their calories so all that to come back the original point of yeah just eating protein probably does add to a lot of muscle growth um it's also adding protein alone is not going to bring a lot of fat along for the ride either so it's a pretty fail like easy way to go about it one gram per pound of body weight is the starting place you would have no issue going way higher than that though so I would typically say if you are a hard Gainer one of my first stops would be we're going way up in protein I want to do some other stuff timing wise nutrition and just other things um training wise course but going way up in protein is like there's a very low risk potential for reward from a protein perspective does animal versus plant protein matter at all yes everything matters um where it starts to matter is when you are below or not as sufficient where it matters the most is when you're below we're not a sufficient protein intake when you're at that one gram per pound or higher those things start to matter a lot less in fact there's a study came out very recently in the last few months directly comparing this and once you hit that number they saw virtually no difference in the amount of muscle gained over the animal versus plant protein which is to say you have options if you are like my students and you're eating you know 60 grams of protein a day 80 grams of protein a day the protein quality and the protein type starts to matter a lot more so my general recommendation is if you want to be very diligent and pay attention to your food intake and really plan things out then a plant-based approach can be fine if you want to just not worry about it though just eat a ton of plant-based protein and you're gonna be fine most likely as much as we can tell um if that's the strategy you're trying to take is plant-based man so fascinating okay talk to me now about I want to be optimal I want to add like real quality muscle I want to get strong um we talked earlier about some of the protocols in terms of 20 to 25 sets per muscle group per week that'll make sense um give me a little bit more information about the protocol especially as it relates to diet yep great so setting that protein as a minimum number there probably even going higher on on that again so I eat a lot of eggs yep egg whites uh whole eggs only chicken breast like if I'm uh if I'm open to animal protein so assume I'm not trying to do um if plant is better for adding muscle definitely let me know uh but I'll eat whatever source of protein you tell me I should whey protein casing whatever I'll do it but what's that optimal like thing sure we actually ran that study the egg white versus whole eggs I ran through that thing in general many similar findings this was only one study by the way we'll probably need this to be repeated with different circumstances there's just very limited things you can ever glean from one paper but in that particular case uh the whole eggs outperformed the egg whites interesting even though I'm gonna intake a lot more calories per gram of protein because of the fat yeah but you also now have a lot of the nutrients coming along for the ride you also have fat soluble vitamins that are needed and you're having the fat um there's more calories you're trying to go up in scale so if you wanted to go egg white only that's fine it could totally be done but I don't worry about that too much um if you want to do a thing where you have a handful of uh whole eggs and then add some egg white to that to increase there while keeping calories under control that's a strategy as well I typically am just mostly a whole egg sort of person and then I will keep my fat a little bit lower in other places so that my protein can stay high to not go again too excessively high in calories so what you're going to want to do is to set that protein marker as set number one then you need to make sure that your micronutrients are under control so if we have any blood work to go off we're going to get all that stuff dialed in whether that is from Whole Foods and or supplementation stuff ideally mostly from Whole Foods that's the Target right let physiology do what it does I think about protein powders it's totally fine of them love them I absolutely love way it tends to be very digestible it is very practical it is very uh transportable so we can use it on the road whenever the other limitations and things like that it tends to make it easier for people to hit their protein targets and it's it's very very effective for muscle growth it's also not required if you hate it you don't have to use it at all we will use it pretty often unless somebody requests not to for all those practical reasons it is no more magical outside of the fact it's very easily digested and absorbable but Whole Foods can get you there as well no problem if your total protein intake throughout the day is equivalent then your protein timing doesn't matter that much so it doesn't matter that you have your protein immediately post workout or things like that as long as by the end of the 24 hour period you get to the same total amount of protein you're good and so that's when I say like it's easily digestible fast absorbing things like that great but if you don't like it or have some reason why you don't want to use it no problem we can get there through Whole Foods just as easy or the inverse if you're just like yo like I love it great um I certainly have seen people that are you know five to six servings a day of that um easily like you can get there like I don't the Guinness is early into but we also deal with some professional athletes that are 300 pounds so that the numbers are a little bit different for them but that's even for moderate people 185 pounds 200 pound sort of folks so um I just see it as a viable option we consider it to be powdered food basically and nothing really more than that so highly effective um protein and total calories there micronutrients getting where it needs to be for your unique physiology as we would go we need to have enough carbohydrates to support training and then to support and maximize recovery because if we're going to be training harder we want to not just do them bare minimum we want to maximize recovery so what you're looking at there in terms of numbers probably something in the ballpark of three to six grams per kilogram of body weight roughly it would be a carbohydrate number so if you weigh you know 180 pounds you're probably in looking at the neighborhood of 350 grams carbohydrates today like plus or minus something like that um if you're training really really hard some of our like our competitive UFC fighters we're training multiple times a day six seven hundred calories or 600 grams of carbide or today is totally normal Jesus just because the the amount of um other training high intensity workout that they're doing yep we also you have keto athletes I don't think we have any at the current moment because it's not very effective I can't ever remember circumstance where I told somebody who's not on a ketogenic diet that they needed to go on one and we certainly had plenty that came in and said this is what I want to do help me do it better which we have no problem I'm not going to talk them out of that that's what they want to do um but I am I have not ever seen that and I can't honestly envision myself ever taking an apple and saying you need to go on a ketogenic diet because the rate at which you can liberate fat yeah and Spark it well slow even just from a performance perspective um there's no evidence whatsoever that is performance enhancing so now I'm changing your diet even for endurance no I've never seen data support that if somebody said that they feel like they perform or had data I believe them but physiology is physiology we don't also work with endurance like Ultra endurance runners or anything like that just candidly we don't not that I wouldn't I just haven't had a lot of those come across our desks probably a handful Maybe um in that case I would think about it more seriously but for the sports we typically work in the NHL the NFL Major League Baseball things like that it's not going to be a great fit for those folks unless they again came in really hell-bent on doing it would help them get better but I'm not going to change it's a very hard thing to change too there's going to be an Adaptive phase I'm going to miss six weeks six months of hard quality training to just get them right back to the same performance uh doesn't make any sense to do that so for non-athletes though boy there's a ton of potential sense to do that if that's an easy your system for you um on the carbohydrate thing as well we also have people that do very well on much lower amount of carbohydrates 200 grams 150 I personally I don't see any drop in performance with my own training and um in my own ability to add muscle mass even at like 100 grams a day I'm totally fine there I don't feel any drop and performance I'm not obviously training as hard or as much as our pro athletes are um but I have no issue putting on muscle at that low of a number so it can be anywhere up and down and then basically you fill in fat behind all those things so once you set protein once you set carbohydrate you can fill in fat you do want to make sure you don't go too low oh that that can be a problem so if you're getting that area of concern like we'll step in for sure being too low will be problematic being too high is only really an issue of just gaining weight too fast but there's really no harm to having extra fat there's lots of many important benefits of having fat in the diet for muscle growth for sure have you seen people on a heart a high carb diet regardless of exertion have inflammatory issues depend Define high uh north of 300 grams not necessarily in general I wouldn't see that if you're if you're looking at more of like if you're north of five to seven grams per kilogram body weight and you don't have any physical activity then there I would be much more likely to see an association with that um that is also to say I don't think many people have reason to be that high they're not training very hard whether or not it's causing additional inflammation or not it's certainly not necessarily needed so I I would not even for our folks that like in our executive program that really don't exercise much I'm not putting them at 600 grams carbohydrate and I'm if they are I'm probably trying to talk them out of that even if their inflammatory markers look fine like I'm probably pulling them down and not pretty good why would you want to pull them down what's the knock on effect you're worried about it is very easy to over consume carbohydrates because of availability so my concern would be in that direction um we're also going to be checking for other markers um of dysfunction if they're totally fine as I said earlier if we don't coach Labs we coach people if they feel great if their performance is great and by performance I mean their physical performance their cognition their focus their energy their ambition all that is exact their sex drive is all where they want it to be and they feel amazing and they're at 600 grams carbs a day like totally fine I have no issue with that if they don't feel great though or have something going on and the other things we tried aren't working then I might say all right let's pull the carbohydrates down a little bit because you don't have that energy demand so why be there lastly if they're at that number and they're not hyperchloric that probably means something else is very very very very low and that would be more of my concern not that the carbohydrates are evil but the fact that it is taking the place of something either fat is way too low or hopefully not protein makes sense earlier you mentioned that weightlifting was good for brain health why so I can spit out to you some different mechanisms but why it's actually mechanistically improving brain health I don't necessarily know very intriguing okay I have to ask this question the the thing that has held me back in developing my own physique uh nothing has slowed me down more than injuries I I know it's going to be impossible for you to diagnose but when you see people that have routine injuries what is your sort of go-to checklist for figuring out what's causing the problem so number one you want to start actually Occam's raiser here if your shoulder hurts you're probably doing something with your shoulder it doesn't want to do right now what is that case I'm look I would love to tell you wow there's this like secret hidden stressor in your immune system well it is you're probably doing some [ __ ] with your shoulder that it doesn't like that's going to solve the overwhelming majority of people's problems now we have a quest now we're going on a little uh a game going okay why now is the pain localized is it there is the injury in the same spot of the pain yes or no can we go find that out what's causing the pain I can just like earlier in our practice like we we don't resolve symptoms I don't really go after symptoms we go after if we can what's causing the symptoms sometimes you have to remove symptoms to allow you to then work backwards so no problem but the reality of it is I'm not just going to say put an injection in there not that I can again I'm not a medical doctor but I wouldn't advise just resolving the pain don't just take Advil blah blah blah if you need to right now because you can't work you can't sleep cool no problem but that's not your long-term solution you're just masking the pain we need to work backwards and figure out why is the pain there is it actually there in the thing let's just say your shoulder or is it actually uh an injury or head to your to your neck is it an injury you had to your foot what happened that caused some sort of altering of positioning or movement or stress load that then resulted in a net chain up into your shoulder that's almost certainly the cause of dysfunction right it typically is an acute injury or something like that that leads to some sort of compensation pattern that then results in wear and tear somewhere else right it's it's uh four tires on a car and if you have eighty percent of your weight in the back left one it just wears down but the problem is not the tire you can keep replacing the tire all you want but until you figure out the car is off balanced you're going to keep wearing something down there right and then the left tire blows so you put another one on and then that one hurts and then you put more stress in the front left and that one you get it you get it you just keep running the circles and so we would need to step back and look and say okay like what is the actual pain is it soft tissue is it joint is it muscle is it a sharp pain is something damaged in there or is it actually movement based is it only happening when you're doing a certain activity or is it all day long so this is a whole uh evaluation you would go through much like a physical therapist would take you through to figure out what's going on and then from there once we can identify what we think is actually the the core problem then we go on a mission to actually solve that with things like hey my shoulder just started aching it tends to be a pattern a Groove pattern so what I mean by that is this there can be an entry there can also be an injury that's long gone but pain is sensory and so that can be a learned signal and so what we need to do is desensitize the signal and teach the brain we're not in pain stop protecting that's all you're doing the brain signal is telling you you're in pain protect because it thinks something's injured but sometimes even when the injury is gone it continues to send that signal not typically the case in the shoulder though it could be that is very common in things like the low back like low back pain low back pain despite nothing being wrong it is a learned signal that you need to desensitize and you see a lot of the chronic pain going away for forever one if there is they are in a bad position but the other one would be again the pain signaling one so if the shoulder there was no like acute injury there you said right it was just more of like I've had trap problems that's been my chronic thing so this is the first time I'm having a problem with my shoulder uh historically it's been my traps specifically my left trap okay for sure right like that's this is how it goes right um so then we would walk backwards and figure out what's the dysfunction in the left trap why is that happening is it simply motor control okay great then we fixed that and that problem's there is it actually something else going on so is the left trap dysfunctional because actually uh it's the lower trap that's off is it maybe the rhomboider for spinatus is something else happening there that's pulling the react and you feel the pain in your left trap and you're getting that worked on a massage and rolled out but the dysfunction is actually happening in the shoulder girdle that's the problem right um I'll give you an example one of the professional athletes I worked with uh Tatiana Suarez UFC fighter undefeated neck pain neck pain neck pain right when we started having all kinds of back problems because she actually had an acute injury to the neck the shoulder blades are being protective so they are pulled way down and tight and so she's constantly right here which is straining the neck which is straining low back right so having to work back the chain starting with the low back resolving that pain to let the traps or the shoulder blades relax a little bit to let the traps relax a little bit so that the neck finally go through a ceiling process right so you have to kind of come backwards and figure out is there a starting place that I can get to my guess is with your left trap it would be like probably wasn't something injured in there but you probably had some sort of again what we'll globally call dysfunction this could be weakness it could be a firing sequence it just could be neural activation not on at the right time lastly it could be a competitory pattern because of some activity so every time you go to lift weights or do something like that something else is pulling in the wrong direction with the shoulder specifically also the very last thing we would evaluate is sleep so the sleeping position you're in obviously if you're a side sleeper and you're rolling in that position not necessarily bad but the mattress may not be fitting perfectly for your shoulder and that may be contributing to it as well so lots of things we could Tinker around with there brother this has been so fascinating where can people follow you and learn more sure my social media Twitter and Instagram Dr Randy Galpin those are pretty much exclusively science communication so like I don't do anything else on that but if you like to hear about science and this kind of science that's what I use those for and then um any links to any of the companies that I have the our sleep company absolute rest or rapid health and performance and all that stuff you can Google it or uh I think it's all on my personal website handygalpin.com but it's not really what I do with my time mostly so it's probably all there if you Google it I love it all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace click here to learn the daily hacks you need to melt away fat and build muscle for lack of a better term self-hate I want to change who I am but it's kind of this negative motivating factor which you have to move out of into a self-love State of Mind

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 839,335

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Andy Galpin, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, health tips, andrew huberman, fitness, muscle, strength, fitness lies, training routine, working out, exercise, health, kinesiology, peter attia

Id: i6R9-hPEkEI

Length: 188min 17sec (11297 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023