028 How does dieting affect hypertrophy?

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Hyperdrophy Pass and Present. Thank you for joining us as always. Chris, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Thanks, Jake. Good to hear. So we introduced Golden Era plans last week and I've had some interesting feedback from people. A few people were actually shocked at how different the plans were, which I don't know why they were so shocked because we still see plans like that today quite commonly online, but I guess it is interesting to see that stark contrast, especially when it's a workout that's performed by the same person just over, you know, is sort of pre-enhancedment and post-enhancedment. So that was the first time we've compared those. So if you missed the last week's episode, go back and have a look and you can see an example an early example of how retains changed in the early anabolic period. Now we will be introducing more plans like that, but I wanted to jump back to a silly era plan this week and we're jumping back to Clancy Clarence Ross who we have discussed in the past. So Mr. America, Mr. Universe winner. Now Clancy, we introduced Clancy early on because he actually did some interesting things. He was one of the first bodybuilders to use a split routine like an upper lower. So what he would do is he actually used his full body and he split it into upper lower in the same day. Now he didn't do it all the time. He did that before competition and he did some interesting things before competition. We're going to talk about another interesting type of routine he did today before competitions, but he's an interesting character because he started when single sets were come the only way of doing things. And so he actually bridged that period of starting out just doing single sets and then experimenting with multi sets and then he actually became a huge proponent of the multi set system, which is usually only like two or three sets per exercise. It wasn't anything like what we see today, but he actually won some of his competitions using a single set system, won some of his competitions using two or three sets per exercise. And it's again, just interesting to see that development they have the same lifter and how they responded to slightly different routines and tweaking the routine over time. So the routine we're going to talk about today, I'll be honest. There's a lot that I love about this earlier, obviously, and we talk about that each week. And then there's some things I look at and I made this come in a while ago that sometimes the C stuff that they were doing. And at the time, I think to myself why? Why, what were they thinking? I don't get it. And sometimes over time, it dawned me. Oh, that's why they did that. And I'll be honest, this is one of those things that hasn't dawned on me yet. And I still don't understand why they did this. There's a little bit that I will discuss as you, you know, maybe why, but it's I still don't really understand the full version out behind it. So it is something that I've sort of hallowed off on presenting to you guys but I figured it's relevant to what we're talking about today. So let's jump in and give you guys perhaps an example of something that I think maybe I wouldn't be emulating in my own plans today. So again, Clancy Ross, this is 1945. This is before his competition. And this is what they would call a definition routine or sometimes I call that reducing routine. It's basically a weight loss routine. Now, bear in mind, this is the, the bit of grace I will give Clancy at this point in time is that they were using these routines to get into condition for the show. So I understand this is not, you know, the purpose of this is not hypertrophy. Okay. So we need to understand that they weren't doing a lot of cardio, you know, they weren't like they didn't have sort of other methods that were using for conditioning that kind of using their gym routines for conditioning. So from that standpoint, okay, we can, you know, cut them a bit of slack, but I'll just present the routine to you guys and then I'll let you guys judge. So actually, there's, there's one thing I think you did very well. So what he does say is routine was the same, the same exercises as his, I'm going to call that a hypertrophy routine. It was just his, his normal routine. Yeah. So he hasn't gone in and suddenly changed up all of his exercises. He's kept the exercises the same. He's changed a format, which I'll talk about in a moment. But the exercises we have, and again, this is, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday or three times a week was a standing overhead barbell press, a barbell curl, a barbell upright row, a barbell bench, an incline bench, a deadlift, a squat, a leg press, and then a calf raise. So a lot of multi joint exercises here. And I will mention that there was a bit of, I don't want to say contention, but there was some, you know, competing beliefs here as to do you do more multi joint, so do you do more single joint exercises leading up to comp and there were certainly some bodybuilders like red shoe decay push a little bit more towards more single joint exercises. But this is the way Clance he was doing it. And he was doing three sets of his bit of 15 to 20 repetitions for each of these exercises. And he also shortened his rest periods between these sets compared to what he was normally doing. So short rest periods, 15 to 20 repetitions, multi joint, big exercises, big lifts. And he did this, I think he did this for about a month, I will just say. So this isn't something he was doing for, you know, six months or a year or whatever, it was just in there, those sort of few weeks leading up to the comp. Chris, what have you, what have you got to make of that? Well, I think obviously the point that you led with is the most important one to emphasize, which is that he's keeping the same exercises in his program when he's going from his standard routine to his, you know, precondition routine. You know, that's so important because what we're saying there is that he's ensuring that any gains that he's achieved in the offseason, I hope we're going to be carried over, oh, not necessarily offseason because he's literally describing like just a few weeks before the competition, but you know, all the gains that you've up to that point in the pre, you know, kind of competition preparation phase, you know, he's now got to the level where he's going to probably not gain any more muscle mass is just going to try and keep as much as he's got. And these at least ensuring that there is that correspondence between the fibers that are being activated previously to the fibers that are being activated in that last couple of weeks. Switching exercises, the worst thing you can possibly do, I think, really in that kind of situation because you're basically not going to gain anything new from the fibers that you might be training into different because you're probably not going to access much of them or we're going to talk about some of the variables going to that in terms of not just into the activating and loading, but you may not be able to stimulate the hypertrophy anyway, even if you are activating and loading, but we'll get on to that later on. But yeah, obviously potentially, you know, kind of that any discrepancy between the exercises before and after starting the diet, probably not going to be, there's not going to be a very good idea. I mean, all the other stuff that I could say probably said before when we talked about this exact same routine, you know, I don't see a lot of, you know, kind of back exercises in there. Obviously, please to see the deadlift in there, which is something that we don't see. I just can't get my head around it. It's like, why would you not pick a barbell up off the ground? You know, it's the easiest possible exercise you can do with a barbell. So why isn't it in the programs of most of these golden, sorry, silver here. My brain is now in golden era, but you know, why isn't it in the in the routines? So, um, but yeah, I mean, comments on the exact exercises probably already done, but yeah, I think the important thing is that, you know, we're seeing that continuity between the, you know, the prediate and post diet exercise selection. Obviously, I'm in the same kind of, on the same page as you as regards the sets reps, that kind of thing. I don't see any value in shifting to higher reps, you know, for that phase, um, it makes no real sense to all from a fatigue point of view, whether it's in to work out or post work out really. If you were able to recover from this, I mean, most of that, I'm looking at it and, you know, most of it would have been more less recoverable. Maybe you could say chest, he's hitting it with a barbell, a flat bench and an incline bench as well. Um, so, you know, might run to some issues there. But if that weren't an issue, those higher repetition sets, at least that first set, he should be, that first set should be stimulating as much as possible in the sense of maintaining what he's built. Right. So he's not losing a whole lot by doing the high repetitions because he's still kind of getting that first set stimulus anyway. It's not, it's just not really giving him any of the extra, yeah. Well, I think the issue is the recoverability side. And I'm more touch on that when we move into the physiology part of today's podcast. But, you know, you're right, assuming that assuming that he is recovering from one workout to the next, which I think is a pretty big assumption. Um, you know, if that's the case, then yeah, you know, uh, so the 15 rep max as you're getting close to a similar level of recruitment that you would do with a kind of a moderate load, you know, eight to 10, maybe it's not going to be massively massively different. So yeah, in terms of the stimulus. So if you're assuming that there's no hypertrophy possible really in that final few weeks, which is probably a fair or something, actually, and reality is that if recovery is happening, there's probably not too much to worry about in terms of, of the, of the program. Um, there are absolutely worse programs out there. I give you that. But I think the, the assumption that he's able to recover from that type of workout, um, with that rep range in that caloric restricted state, I think is, is a little bit to a, um, a stretch. Yeah, that would be the variable. And I don't know how, how hard he would have been dieting. But I guess what I find interesting, while I look at this and I think, oh man, this is not a plan I would like to do or that, you know, I would give clients, given the parameters that he was sort of following here of, you know, trying to hopefully maintain as much muscle as possible that he built and not let's say, obviously everyone had access to cardio, you could just go outside yet. But, you know, let's say that for what of reason I was not actually on the table, because I just weren't thinking about it. If he was using this workout to burn as much energy as possible for the purposes of fat loss and to try to maintain as much as he had, ultimately, this is kind of something, I guess, you would maybe lean towards, like again, I'm not trying to justify it, but pushing it, like if this were recoverable, okay, this is achieving the best of both worlds, but not doing either one well, you know what I mean. So it's like, okay, I know what you're thinking. I can kind of see what logic led him to this point. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you know, you would immediately make your life ten times easier by doing a single set of moderate loads, you know, kind of eight to ten reps, and then going for a long walk. Exactly, exactly. But if that just wasn't on the table, okay, you know, I can see why they're maybe trying to burn energy in the gym, but I know just take a take a bottle of water, go for a nice long walk and enjoy the nice weather. So hopefully we'll talk about some potentially, maybe more productive ways of achieving fat loss, or at least things to be aware of. But you know, just to kind of, before we move on, just like, go back to this routine, you know, like, yes, we can be very critical about it, but you're right, you know, fundamentally, you know, we're still talking about routine, which is, you know, full body three times a week with, you know, sort of up to three sets per exercise. And, you know, okay, I'm being critical about the recoverability, but on paper, it's not horribly outside the zone of recoverable, you know, recoverable is kind of three sets of moderate loads, which is up to 15 rep max. And he's just above that, you know, you could equally say the same about somebody who's doing four sets of maybe heavier loads, you know, sort of bottom end of the moderately heavy load, like six seven, you know, if they're doing four sets of maybe six seven rep max, you know, that's probably the same territory as doing three sets of, you know, 15 to 20. So the reality is, it's not horrible, we write, it's not horrible, and it is still better than 90% of what we see in the bodybuilding, you know, kind of mainstream apart, the bodybuilding community today. You know, so, you know, yes, we're being critical about it, but we're being critical from a very exacting position. Yeah. It's not horrible. I don't want people to run away with the idea that I'm being, you know, saying that this is, even though it's a silver era program, it's not going to work. It isn't horrible. It's still better than most of what we're going to, most of what we're going to see today. Yeah. And the exercise selection, like you said, we don't have chin ups, we deadlift, maybe you could have done a slightly better hip hinge, but, and, you know, I guess triceps long heads not going to get much work in what he's got there, but apart from that, like it's a fairly decent exercise selection, he's just using a barbell, you know, there's, there's certainly a lot more he could do worse, yeah, a lot. It's, he's just, I feel like he's just trying to achieve too much with one tool. He's just not using other tools. Yeah, sure. And again, we don't know why that might have been the case. I mean, I mean, practical considerations, you know, it's like, but yeah, I just wanted to, I didn't want to finish talking about that part of today's podcast with that emphasising that, you know, any criticisms I have are being made from a position of extreme, you know, kind of a very exacting mindset and not being made from a kind of looking at this in the in the spectrum of all the possibilities I see out there. It's absolutely up in the top, in the top 10% of what's out there. I mean, gosh, I mean, goodness, the fat loss programs I was taught to do as a PT and, you know, I'm not even talking about like, you know, men's health magazine type ones of bodybuilding to come, I'm talking about like, have been passed down to me by world-known leading coaches and those fat loss programs horrendous compared to something like this. So it's quite amazing when you kind of get exposed to some of the really crazy stuff because I made the error of asking my co-host on the other podcast that I do, I pause for the other. I asked Rob to start sending me, you know, all the silly things that he sees specifically related to the topics that we were going to kind of talk about. So I said to him, you know, send me some silly stuff that you see regarding, you know, whatever it might be, eccentric training or, you know, kind of vertical jumping or what have you. And my goodness, there's some absolute insanity out there and people are making all kinds of weird stuff up. I think this is the reason why people, they kind of arrive on my social media and they start asking me these questions and I'm like, no, that's not how this works, it works like this. And they're like, oh yes, but these people said it works like that. I'm like, I'm sorry that you, that you were listening to them, but that's just absolutely not how it works. And I think we're kind of in this strange place where people kind of, they look at your numbers on social media and go, oh well, this person had three million followers and you've only got 150,000 therefore they're more likely to be correct. And if you think like that, you're going to get yourself into all kinds of trouble, you know, that's that's just not how it works. But, you know, anyway, that could be an entire discussion in and of itself, but that's that's a career. Well, you know, I do, I don't want to make one comment on that on what you just said, you know, Robson, you use some stuff that people are doing poorly and I'll expand it briefly on the kind of what we were taught to do. And this is stuff because I would say if I look at the fat last programmes we were taught, there was one that was like, okay, and that would be German body composition. I don't know if you've been, if you've been exposed to German body composition training, I don't know, like this came largely out of Charles Pollacken. I'm sure there was maybe people before Charles who were using it. I'm not sure. But what I liked about it, it was for fat loss, is it was full body. Now, and it would use like, you sort of pair exercise, you pair an upper body exercise with low body exercise, ideal blood chanting, it would increase energy expenditure supposedly. But so, so I look at that, I'm like, oh, full body, okay, that's good because a lot of the time, you know, a lot of the programmes I've seen in contemporary times are not full body, but they would do like five sets. And so, you know, I'm looking at like actually plans that have been talked about are used in modern times. And the one bit they got well is a bit that people like Clancy got well. And then the bit that Clancy got, I guess, maybe, you know, was questionable, was still better than what I'm seeing done today. You know, we were doing five sets of 15, 20 repetitions, same as what Clancy was doing. So, yeah, all in all, actually, this was probably not that bad compared to a lot of what we would be exposed to today. Incidentally, I was just laughing as you were describing, because incidentally, if you want to make yourself feel really, really miserable in the gym, then do a higher up upper body, more to join left, and then do a higher up lower body, more to join left, rather than, you know, a super set of door relatively close together. And that is one of the most unpleasant experiences that you can do, I think, in a gym. The metabolic demand is just off the charts. It's, I'm not saying that it has any useful adaptions that result, but it's certainly a way to feel pretty horrible. No, I've volunteered multiple times doing these work. I can imagine, I can imagine, it's really, really, really nasty experience. I think I did it once and vowed never to do it again. It was definitely an experience. So anyway, yeah, there's some weird stuff out there, but ultimately, from my perspective, you know, there's a lot of strange stuff out there, what we see in the silver era, even when it's bad, it's still good. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Okay, so where are we going now? What are we talking about? So we just saw your program that you brought to us about pre-competition, strength training routines. And what I'd like to talk about today is just a, I kind of an overview of what's going on during caloric restriction as regards muscle mass is concerned. Now, the reason I want to talk about this is because I think that from my perspective, which is kind of the sort of the muscle physiology perspective or the neuromuscular physiology perspective, when I look at the way that this topic is treated, it tends to be kind of driven from the nutrition point of view. People kind of come to, or nutrition in body composition point of view. So people come to the topic and they're thinking about systemic physiology, whole body physiology. They're not thinking so much about what's going on with the muscle itself. So what I want to do is kind of say, let me present an alternative way of thinking about this or complementary, not alternative complementary way of thinking about this, which will help you or help the listener to just, you know, bring in a lot more muscle physiology into their kind of full processes when it comes to dieting. And really it's about muscle mass maintenance. It's not about fat loss, particularly or at all. It's about muscle mass maintenance and how that is going on or how that is being affected by the decisions that we're making. And I'll walk through and explain how it works. So basically what we can see in the literature is that we've got broadly two things to think about. We've got the effects of chloric restriction on our ability to, you know, kind of create a workout stimulus. And obviously we've got what's going on outside of that workout situation. You can buy that into two kind of pieces. You've got the recovery process, but then you've also got the potential for no atrophy to happen. So we've got the same things to think about that we have in any strength training program, we're just going to say, well, how is chloric restriction affecting any of these three pieces? Now, you know, straight away, you know, when we think about workouts, I'm so old, you can kind of go, well, you know, am I less motivated because I'm hungry? Am I feeling lethargy? You can tighten all those things. So you're going to kind of instinctively, you know, expect that to be a reduction in motine accruement because of the motivation reduction. So straight away, we're kind of aware of that. But of course, you know, this boy is emitting that, you can kind of bring in, you know, sort of a whole list of different things that will increase motivation, increase accruement. So I think most people are aware of that problem instinctively, or just kind of, you know, they figured it out. And they're kind of like, well, okay, we're going to need to take steps to address that. But it's interesting just to be aware that one of the factors that drives that low motivation is a reduction in, you know, the stores of carbohydrate that we are holding. So muscle glycogen blood glucose, those kind of things. As those drop, we obviously are going to experience that reduction in, you know, kind of, or experience fatiguing sensations that contribute to our inability to hit maximum levels of accruement. So it's not, it's not just about saying, oh, well, when I'm dieting, I feel tired, it's about, no, there are specific reasons, or at least one very good reason why we know that might have. And of course, you know, that then also kind of gives us a clue about what might be happening in the post workout period, because of course, you know, when you have low glycogen, you're going to get exotherated calcium and relative fatigue. And that's going to create problems for you in the post workout recovery period. So kind of already starting to piece this together as a model. So essentially, you know, we've just talked a little bit there about how, you know, cloric constriction might affect our ability to perform in a workout. We've also got issues going on related to the, you know, workouts stimulus and the atrophy periods. And that really comes in the form of cloric constriction suppressing muscle protein synthesis rates. So this is a pretty well described phenomenon. A lot of the hypertrus searches have looked at this and they've come back with answers. Broadly on the lines that, you know, a strength training stimulus can rescue what they say rescue muscle protein synthesis rates. So essentially, you were coming to the workout from a period of rest and you had a suppressed level of muscle protein synthesis compared to you, if you were not in cloric constriction and then you do a strength in workout and it bumps you back up to your, you know, and beyond your kind of original levels. So generally speaking, you're going to see that strength training is doing something pretty useful to prevent that particular problem happening. But of course, you know, it's never going to get to levels that it would be if you weren't in that suppressed level, because it's not, you know, kind of jumping you up to massive levels, but it's kind of just moving you same kind of level from baseline, as it would have done in a calorie balance state. So, but we're also aware that reduced muscle protein synthesis is going to slow down recovery post workout. So not only are we going to get a problem from the extra calcium unrelated fatigue caused by low glycogen levels, we're also going to get a slow rate of recovery from a muscle protein synthesis kind of point of view. So just pause there a moment and just kind of come back to the program that you brought to us today. And I made the comment that I don't necessarily think that in the context of a dieting situation, we would expect recoverable volumes to be, you know, quite as high as they are in in calorie balance. It's because of this reason. It's because we're taking low muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein this is used to repair muscle damage. And also we've got more calcium unrelated fatigue for the same workout because we're essentially, you know, triggering and accelerated rate to excitation and contraction, coupling failure, especially in situations where we are in caloric restrictions. So, I think what that for me sort of starts to give us some ideas about structuring, strengthening workouts when we're in caloric friction. I'm looking at the programs that I'm, you know, kind of writing for people who are not in caloric friction. And then I'm converting them into programs that are suitable for the dieting phase. And I'm going, I'm expecting recoverabilities now to be lower. I'm expecting to get a, have a problem with motor unit crewman during the workout. So, what can I do in the workout that's going to increase motor unit crewman? What can I do? You know, in the post workout period, or for the post workout period to avoid, you know, triggering so much muscle damage. And incidentally, reducing volume is a cool way of addressing both of those things. As we told before, I mean, one of my favorite stories for people is to kind of get them thinking about how their workout experience relates to physiology. I say to them, if you go in and do, you know, if you're normally doing three sets of every exercise and you go in and do three sets, my favorite example is the seated hamstring girl. I know for a fact that if I go and do three sets of hamstring curls, seated hamstring curls, I can kind of hit a certain set of numbers with a certain weight. If I only allow myself to do a single set, I will absolutely beat my first set number of the three set protocol by at least one rep, you know, is like, I know that's going to happen. And it's just because your brain knows that it's got more work to do. And so it creates a perception of effort associated with your future expectations. So, if I'm now looking at that, and I know that I've got a recoverability problem, and I've also got a motor unit crewman problem, I can actually address both those problems by dropping from three sets to one. So, you mentioned the glycogen and that affecting, so low muscle glycogen, affecting muscle damage. Now, we talked a few weeks ago about carbohydrates and seeing and having some kind of like intro workout carbs. So, someone might be listening, thinking, can I just do that? That's not going to influence muscle glycogen or blood glucose. So, that's a strategy someone could use is it? So, the pre-workout carbohydrate-motherencing is going to fix, not fix, but it's going to move you in the direction of addressing supra-spinal scionistics. It's going to affect the motivation problem during the workout. I think carbohydrate-motherencing gets you halfway there because it starts to address the motor unit crewman deficit you might be experiencing because it's just going to make you feel a bit better briefly while you do the workout. I mean, that's the layman's version of it, but it's not going to address the post-workout fatigue issue. There's some really nice data in actually cross-country running, in fact. Because it does actually produce pretty decent amount of muscle damage in the lower body. There's a quite intense, maybe an hour and a half run and they come back and generally speaking, they've got a neuromuscular fatigue component associated with calcium monocumulation. It's their impact phases in their stretch actuate the line charts. If you give those athletes a carbohydrate drink before they run, they actually experience a lot less damage post run. And it's because they're not in that kind of glycogen-deplied state in any way, shape or form during the during the actual run itself. In contrast, if you just give them water, they do experience that that bigger damage response. So there's not much data in that in the strength training side of things, but since post-workout fatigue works the same way, irrespective of the flavor of exercise that you're working with, it kind of gives us a pretty strong hint that that pre-workout carbohydrate is actually a really interesting thing. I mean, like from an nutritional point of view, again, this is the point I'm making when I say that I think that a lot of the discussions around dieting body composition and muscle mass retention during a diet and pre-competition of body voting, a lot of it is driven from the nutritional body composition viewpoint. What I'm trying to do here is get people to go, okay, how does this look from a muscle physiology point of view? Or neuromuscular physiology point of view? Because a lot of those guys will tell you, you know, just make sure you get your post-workout protein and that'll, you know, and I'm not denying that and that will, you know, mention that later on, although it's not as big of a fact as people think. You know, that absolutely does help, but pre-workout carbs actually going to give you something a little bit interesting that, you know, is probably not usually discussed, and it's doing that by reducing the incidence of calcium I'm glad to do. So, in the trust country example, how long before the event are they can see me in the calahydrates? I think it varies. I think it varies. I mean, that's something that I'm not, I'm not knowledgeable enough about how systemic physiology works for absorption rates and that kind of thing, but, you know, I would imagine that, you know, if people want to give themselves the best possible, you know, kind of chance of it getting full absorption, they're probably not going to want to swig it on the way to the gym. You know, you might want to give it a bit of lead time to get it to the point where it's capable of contributing to, you know, the internal processes. I just want to stay out, probably give it a couple of hours. I wouldn't want to risk leaving it or just before I walked in the gym, whereas from a calahydrate, mouth-racing point of view, you can, obviously, because you would want to do both. You would want to have pre-workout carbs in hour to hour, two hours before, and he would want to have some intra-workout or before you lift or close it to the actual exercise itself. Yeah, bearing in mind that if you didn't want to ingest those as calories, you wouldn't have to, because it's not actually going to do anything for you at that point. Now, you also mentioned a reduction in NPS. Is there any influence on macronutrient ratio that would influence that? So, if someone says, "I'm dieting now, I'm just going to push my protein up super, super high to mitigate that," is it just the simple fact of being in a deficit that's going to have that negative impact on NPS? So, this is an interesting one. So, this requires a little bit of context. So, the shape of the literature that we've got in the moment as regards muscle mass retention, NPS, muscle protein breakdown, all that kind of stuff, the shape of the literature is currently a little bit messy. And the reason it's messy is because we see a very distinctive difference between when caloric restriction is perceived as a stressor when it's not. And when you start to try and piece together the data that we've got in people, in animals, in various different models of research, they aren't always taking that into account. They're investigating caloric restriction and they're not necessarily recognizing that there is a very big difference between when caloric restriction is perceived as a stressor when it's not. And so, you kind of get these different results. And when you're looking at this from a muscle physiology point of view, you instinctively will start to try and allocate studies to one of those two categories. It'd be like, "Does this fit into that category, or does it fit into the other category?" So, let me kind of just walk through that framework, and then I'll come back to the question about dietary protein. So, essentially, when we look at when we look at the two scenarios, caloric restriction in a non-stress state. So, if we say that the caloric restriction is not behaving as a stressor in that scenario, what we see generally is just a suppression of muscle protein synthesis rates, and not very much else. And as I say, you can rescue that with strength training. So, now, just to be kind of 100% clear for people who are interested in being 100% clear, the reason I say that caloric restriction reduces muscle protein synthesis, and as a result, is going to produce atrophy compared to, you know, caloric calorie balance, is because we've got some really, really well-controlled human trials on this, both from an atrophy point of view and also from an MPS point of view. Now, when I say really controlled trials, I'm just going to flex a little bit because most of the time, when I see hypertrophy and body comp researchers doing this, they're not controlling for the muscle physiology side of things. Let me give a good example of this. So, imagine you've got either a group of people or a group of mice or rats, it doesn't really matter in that particular situation, and you've got one contingent of them, one group of them, sub-group of them, the Tardieting and one group that's not. And essentially, all you're doing is controlling for, you know, the amount of calories they consume, and you're saying, we're going to allow them to carry on doing their normal physical activity levels, and you think that you've now controlled physical activity, you haven't. Not from a muscle physiology point of view. You might have done from a body comp hypertrophy point of view, you're thinking systemically, but you think on a muscle-by-muscle level, you're not. And the reason you're not is because if body weight changes, then the motor unit recruitment required to do the same, the same physical activity changes. If I, like, just imagine, if I'm getting up and down out of a chair, that requires a certain level of recruitment, a certain level of effort to achieve. If I put a weight to vest on it, now requires more effort. If I take the weight to vest off, it requires less effort. So, for my muscle point of view, different body weights massively impact on my ability to retain muscle mass with my normal physical activity. If I need 35, 40% of my motor unit recruitment to walk up the stairs with one body weight, but then I lose some body weight, and then now only need 30%. My muscle mass is going to reduce accordingly, because I'm not going to train the muscle fibers in that 10% gap. So, we've got some really nice data in the mobilization, where you've got immobilized people, and you essentially have calorie deficit groups and calorie balance groups. What you see is that muscle mass loss happens faster in the calorie deficit group, than the calorie balance group, and that is 100% controlled from a muscle point of view. Now, this is just a really good example of why I say that applying muscle physiology frameworks to the discussion of calorie restriction and atrophy and what happens in that phase is really useful, because it's telling you that the current kind of nutritional body comp driven processes or frameworks are not telling you, because they're not thinking like that. So, that's kind of like just a quick aside, just to describe why I think this is an important thing to consider. Coming back to this idea of there being two different sort of states that we can be in. With calorie restriction, you've essentially got this, as I say, scenario where you're just getting a reduction in muscle proteins and this, you can kind of then sort of distinguish that from things like sleep restriction, which you talked about recently, which is where you get a reduction in muscle protein synthesis, as well as a muscle protein breakdown increase. Now, you can push caloric restriction to a point where it starts to behave like a stress cell and then it starts to look more like sleep restriction. And you start to get an elevation in muscle protein breakdown rates and everything starts to behave a lot more kind of aggressively. Now, what's interesting is, I mean, there's a famous meta-analysis from 2022 where they showed that if you take calorie deficits beyond like 500 calories a day on average in strength training populations, then you start to experience muscle loss despite the fact that you're still doing a strength training program. Now, we can argue around the edges about whether those strength training programs are keeping people in a kind of stimulus phase, you know, the whole time, almost certainly not. So, maybe the number is slightly bigger if you're doing full body every other day with exactly the same exercises, but the point is that you do start to see this muscle protein breakdown increase at the same time as a muscle protein synthesis suppression, and that even if your workouts are, you know, kind of rescuing that, they're probably not rescuing it as effectively as they were with a smaller deficit or a less stressful experience. At the same time, your muscle protein breakdown rates are increasing, which you probably aren't defending against. So, I think there's this kind of shift as we go from caloric restriction, which is in a non-stress state and caloric restriction, which is in a stress state, and it actually completely changes what's possible. So, a lot of people would say to me, you know, can I gain muscle in deficit? And I'm like, yes, but with caveats, you know, if you start to experience that as a stressful, then no, it won't, because I think what will happen is that the suppression of muscle protein synthesis rates will increase, and the increase in muscle protein breakdown rates will get out of hand when your balance over the week, land up being net atrophy instead of net hypertrophy, even though you're doing everything right on the strength training side of things. And this then bring me back to your original question, which is, okay, so what does, you know, kind of dietary protein do? Well, as I said before, dietary protein is going to help you, as the nutritionists correctly point out, you know, recover in the post-workout period, because it will increase muscle proteins. And this is the contributes to both repair and hypertrophy. But what's interesting is that in dietary situations, in dieting situations, sorry, we start to see that the beneficial effects of dietary protein start to reduce. So, if you're in a state of chloroestriction, then that bump in muscle protein synthesis, post-workout, that you're expecting to get from consuming your protein starts to get smaller. And it, it's really interesting to kind of, you know, and this is the reason I gave that background about there being two different types of chloroestriction, one that's a stressor and one that's not, and there's probably a gray area between the two, is because I'm not sure from the minimal amount of data we've got at the moment, whether that suppression of dietary proteins effect on muscle proteins synthesis happens in situations that are irrespective of whether it's a stressor, or whether it's only when it's a stressor. But it definitely happens when, you know, if we assume that a stressor is always going to the worst of the two. I think, you know, any scenario where we're pushing chloroestriction into stress territory, we would expect it to start to behave, you know, in a state where, you know, more dietary protein probably isn't helping very much. So, you know, what's really interesting is that I think, you know, nobody really wants to be in that state. So, at some point, you know, somebody's going to have to go away and see whether dietary protein effects on muscle proteins is as oppressed at low calorie restricted levels, or whether they're, you know, only expressed that phenomenon is only observed in more severe calorie deficits, or sustained severe calorie deficits. Obviously, it's probably just going to be a sliding scale, but at the end of the day, it is happening and it is a thing, you know, so just in general, I don't really like to comment too much on the nutrition stuff, but I think there is definitely an argument to say when people are looking at their macros for a period of dieting, I would definitely look not just at protein and go, if I, I think there's this tendency, people just go, if I throw enough protein at the problem, then I'll be okay, you know, and I'll somehow protect them from muscle loss. It won't, if your calorie deficit gets too big, absolutely won't, I'm absolutely confident about that. Is it duration of the MPS is elevatorfall with the muscle, with the protein, is that reduced as well? Or is it just that that spike that's reduced? To my knowledge, there's no time point data we're just dealing with, with just like very, very basic observations at the moment. So, I don't really know if it's shaped over anything. Yeah, like how would someone rationalize it more protein? Once you've kind of like maxed out what's going to be providing that MPS spike, anyway, why would more protein even be beneficial? I'm not even sure what that argument would actually be relying on. We'd obviously need to get somebody who's more versed in that literature to comment on that, but my understanding is that there is a belief that it impedes the atrophy effect or it impedes the breakdown effect. And I don't, I don't think that's what's reflected in the data that I'm looking at. What I'm looking at is that the stress response, the glucocortical response has an oxidative stress, has multiple pathways that produce oxidative stress, we then start to create atrophy, and they are largely kind of going to do that independently of what you're eating. And in fact, independently of what you're exercising as well. I think the way to think about is that when your, when your, when your caloric restriction is not behaving like a stress or then essentially you've got a lot of flexibility over what you can do. Your nutritional interventions will have an impact, your strength training will have an impact, and you can kind of manage the process from a positive point of view. It's like, yes, you're dealing with an MPS reduction due to the, due to the caloric restriction. That's totally true, but you can still work with that. I think when you start to push caloric restriction to a higher level, now just pause for a moment to comment on numbers. I can absolutely guarantee that both you and I are now going to get people demanding to know the exact number of calorie, you know, the exact quantity of calorie deficit they should use in order to avoid muscle loss. And they'll keep asking that no matter how many times I say that's not possible. The physiological answer is that if you are perceiving it as a stress or then it will be a stress or. So if the number is lower then it's lower if the number is higher, it's higher. Now I've said before in other places that I know roughly what my numbers are for a stress response to be created and they're a lot lower than 500 a day. Now I think they're more like two or three hundred a day. And that's because I'm old and like my brain is always doing stuff. So I kind of have that issue there. But ultimately, and other people's maybe higher, you know, the point is not the number. The point is, are you experiencing as a stress or if you're experiencing as a stress or then you're going to get a glucose or a response is going to create a stress or it's going to produce this muscle protein breakdown acceleration. And as a result, you're going to lose muscle mass irrespective of what else you're doing right. It's just like you've got to think about these things is like two totally separate frameworks. Yes, there's a gray area in the middle, but fundamentally this is two separate frameworks. If we can manage it from a non-stress point of view, then it's totally manageable and things will have an effect. As you start drift higher into the calorie deficit sort of area and it becomes a stress or then you have problems. And the interesting thing is of course that antibiotics make this entire argument go away. You know, because ultimately being a glucocorticoid response, it is essentially, you know, the exact polar opposite of the anabolic response, glucocorticoid and anabolic are literally polar opposites to each other. So if somebody is using anabolic as part of their pre-competition preparation, everything I've just said is completely irrelevant because it's just not going to happen. You're going to get a permanent increase, not permanent, but you're going to get a constant increase in NPS and you're not going to have the muscle protein breakdown issue that you get with the glucocorticoids because there's just not going to be that. It's the same thing we mentioned when we were talking about sleep restriction a few weeks ago and you made that comment there as well about antibiotics. And I think in that episode we made a comment about doing caloric restriction alongside poor sleep would be a bad idea and this is explaining why that would be exactly the recipe. Yeah, you're just you're just creating two, two, two drivers at the same problem and you just summing them together. But again, you know, somebody who is, you know, kind of using anabolic is going to listen to this and go, that's not my experience at all. And like, no, it won't be. Yeah, you absolutely won't be. You could you could have horrible sleep and you could eat, you know, you could have a huge caloric deficit, you know, and the anabolic would completely obliterate all of those negative effects. And that's what we see. You know, that's what that's what bodybuilders are, you know, I think are able to get away with in those in those scenarios where they are using those compare. And I don't know if you are able to comment on this or not, but presumably we would at least see some of that mitigation even just with like TRT, for example, it doesn't have to necessarily be super high doses of anabolic sort of have effect as far as you're using muscle protein breakdown. So, so yeah, I mean, this is tricky because a lot of the time, most of the anabolic steroid research is done in animals models because obviously it's easier to get through ethics. So it kind of like is really hard to transpose dosages to humans in those scenarios. You can't really go, oh, this is the dosage in a in a in a wrap. Therefore, that's going to be the equivalent. You can't really do that. That's that's it. So you get a directional effect. I say this all the time in physiology. Physiology gives physiology research gives you really good clear directional information. You know, if you start going in this direction, you're going to get these kind of effects. It gives you horribly, horribly poor quantitative information. I'm like, well, at this point you will get this effect and this point you'll get this size of me. It doesn't really give you that kind of data. Having said that, you know, I think that there is a tendency in the industry for people to say that TRT is not the same thing as anabolic steroid usage when it is. Yeah, I think a lot of people are there who go, oh, what TRT is just replacing your previous levels of testosterone. Not really. There is a definite indication on the hypertrophy side. You can see hypertrophy happening. Even in in the few studies that have been done, you can see hypertrophy happening even in young people at what are essentially fairly common TRT dosages. You know, it depends on who you talk to and what the clinic is that prescribe. But in the boundary of rain, in the ranges that see people being prescribed those, you know, kind of those issues. In that zone, you are getting hypertrophy in young people, when those young people are given those, those in an experimental context. You know, similarly, if you look at side effects, and we've been talking about there's a lot recently off line, but, you know, if you look at side effects, you get side effects that are pre noticeable even in TRT dosages. So one of my favorite sources of data for this is tendons and ligaments. You get tendon rupture and ligament risk increases even on TRT dosages. So, you know, that's just, you know, go and look at the studies. I've actually just pulled them all up and done a kind of analysis of them and you do see that happening. So, and that's because of the anabolic effects that testosterone has or anabolic have in tendons. And that actually, interestingly, has a more negative than positive effect because the tendon isn't gaining strength from size, it's gaining strength from structure. So this is one of the things that people miss about tendons. They go, oh, well, you know, tendons are a bit like muscle, the muscle gets bigger, you get stronger, the tendon gets bigger, it gets stronger. No, tendon doesn't get bigger and stronger. The tendon gets stronger when it gets restructured. And the restructuring process starts with collagen degradation. So if your anabolic comes along and starts basically doing the whole kind of, you know, oh, we can't have a degradation happening. Breakdown is not going to happen. The poor tendons sitting there going, well, how are you expecting me to get stronger if I can't restructure because you can't let me break down the stuff that was, you know, kind of weak previously. I need to rebuild this in the way that's more, you know, kind of resistant by stiffer or whatever it is that you're trying to do. So the tendon doesn't actually adapt properly in those scenarios, you know, and you see that effect even at very, very low dosages of anabolic steroid kind of. So, so I think really there is a tendency as a whole in the industry for people to go, no, no, no, no, you know, TRT is not the same thing as what the bodybuilders are doing with, you know, larger, you know, what are called recreational dosages. You know, I think broadly speaking, again, it's directionally the same. It's just you're going to get a much smaller effect than you get with the kind of recreational dosages that bodybuilders use. So you've mentioned a few times now that, that, that sort of transition point with the deficit is when it's perceived as a stressor. Now there's not an easy way to identify when it is or isn't a stressor. I guess we could look at perception. Is that going to be more or less something you can, someone can rely on? Yeah. I mean, not wanting to push too far into psychology territory, but yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, there's a, there's an interesting, yeah, I think it really depends on how in touch people are with how they feel. That sounds really strange because it's like, how can I not be in touch with the high field? But I think there are people who just kind of may be out of habit, just out of, you know, the way that they've run their lives for however long. They don't necessarily check in on themselves. I mean, there's this kind of tendency in psychology research to talk about, I'm also likely research, sorry, psychology kind of as a as a as a mainstream phenomenon. They talk about checking in on yourself, like, you know, how am I feeling right now? How would I actually experience what's going on around me? I think there's a lot of people who just go through life and don't check in on themselves. They're like, you know, how am I feeling? Do I feel hungry? Do I feel sad? Do I feel happy? Well, all those things. And I think if people are not doing that, then they are going to have a gap between their ability to note a notice when they are sort of experiencing stressor when they're not. People who are in the habit of checking in on themselves probably have a better sort of way of assessing whether or not they're experiencing something as a stressor. As I said before, you know, we were talking about joking mud before we came on the podcast. You know, I absolutely know immediately if I push my color restriction into stress territory, my mood changes instantaneously. I noted and straight away it becomes something that I can really kind of, you know, act to fix the problem. I think there are a lot of people who just kind of maybe don't realize that they're just feeling miserable and don't necessarily put two and two together. So I think it's one of those things where the process might be more about learning to observe yourself rather than about, you know, wanting external metrics to tell you whether you're in a stress state or not. When it comes to workouts, there's been a lot of discussion online about, you know, what's the optimal training routine. I'm not talking for fat loss of this talking in terms of a standard hypertrophy routine and there's sort of two competing thoughts. And I know we've touched on this in a past episode where some people say, look, you know, if we look at, you know, biomechanics and we look at muscle physiology, this is the way we would want to structure work out. And then other people come out and say, well, I find that boring or I don't find it enjoyable. And therefore it's not going to be optimal for me. And I want to do what I find fun. And obviously there's a line there and we've explored that conversation to pass. But it sounds like that's actually relevant when it comes to this when it comes to dieting. And in fact, you could have two people who would perceive a particular method of dieting completely differently. And I know I've had clients where I generally will get clients to log, I'll get them to you, something like my fitness power, some similar app. And some clients find that having some control over that is actually something that gives them a lot of comfort and they enjoy that process. And I've got other clients where their thought of logging is such a, it just hangs over them that they, I'm sure that would be a significant stress in their life. And for them, it would be better to have some kind of lifestyle modification where it's like, maybe we do some kind of intermittent fast, or maybe we just do food, you know, substitutes or swaps or whatever it might be to still get that person in a chloric deficit without adding that perception of stress to it as well. And you know, just to expand on that a bit further, I know there's a tendency as well for people to do things like it may be a little bit less so now, but certainly in the past to have like, you know, work out day nutrition, rest day nutrition. And you know, maybe one day it would be high carb, one day it would be lower carb, or, you know, high calorie, lower calorie, whatever it was. I did that for many years with clients and got to a point where I found, you know what, it's for most people, this is just adding stress to how they're viewing their weekly diet. You know, they need to be thinking about they can't eat some of the things each day. You know, they need to have two totally different diet outlines. You know, they just they can't meal prep easily like it just makes that process so much more difficult than it needs to be for a lot of people. So perhaps this could be actually one of the the more important pieces to this conversation is how do you achieve a chloric deficit for yourself that actually is less burdensome or less stressful for you to actually follow through on? Totally. I mean, I think ultimately, if people want to push the caloric deficit to the maximum level that they can get to without becoming a stressful, they've got to take all the other stressors out. You know, because ultimately we are working with the general adaption syndrome here. This is talking about stressors and stressors are cumulative, you know. So, you know, this is not talking about post-workout fatigue in the kind of old general adaption syndrome model. This is actually talking about the general adaption syndrome. So anything that is stressful is going to be a negative. So if you can if you can find one dieting model that is less stressful than another, then that's a win straight away. So I think that probably has to be the guiding principle behind any, you know, kind of diet plan, which is like how are you making this as as stress-free as possible? The only modifications I would add would be that if you can take a carbohydrate supplement a couple of hours before your workout, that's a good thing. And if you can take some protein immediately post-workout, that's also a good thing. Don't worry about carbs post-workout because you can't replenish them anyway in a muscle damage state. This is the biggest myth that's come across from aerobic exercise. All the aerobic exercise guys are like, you know, chugging carbohydrates post-workout and going, oh, this gets me ready for the next workout? Yeah, sure, because she didn't create any muscle damage. You know, try that with muscle damage in place and watch what happens, absolutely nothing. So you're only carbs pre-workout, you want your protein post-workout, but other than that, I would say, you know, largely speaking, minimizing stress is going to be the better factor than anything else you can possibly do if you want to push that caloric deficit, you know, a little bit higher. You know, but again, in terms of modification of strength training routines, I think with whether you're in a caloric deficit that is non-stressful or all-stressful, it doesn't matter, your recovery rates are still worse. So whatever you were doing before, you need to dial that back a notch, you know. So if it was 3 sets per muscle rep, pull it back to 1 or 2, you know. But again, hopefully people aren't using like silly frequencies or anything like that, so they shouldn't need to modify anything other than work out volume. So would you say, like obviously if you look at beginners, you know, greet compositions quite easy to achieve, you've got somebody who's never trained before, they can lose body fat and gain muscle and it's not normally going to be that difficult to achieve. If you've got someone who's more advanced, is it reasonable to expect an advanced natural lifter to be able to gain muscle while dieting or is that somewhat unrealistic expectation? I think it's very difficult to say at the moment based on the literature and I think you would probably find that any gains would be so tiny as to be unmeasurable. So I'm not expecting that to be unsurable in my lifetime. I don't think there's any reason, I mean like a lot of people get very confused about the difference between muscle physiology and systemic physiology. And there's that kind of quoting laws of thermodynamic dynamics at you and I'm like, muscles don't care about that. That's literally irrelevant. You know, it's like, you know, did they get mechanical tensions doing this and do they have the available protein to, you know, kind of act on that if so, it's going to grow. But if you have color extraction in place, you're going to suppress MPS and it's going to stop you from doing that quite as effectively. So from a physiological point of view, there's nothing stopping you from doing that except you're going to find that, of course, your sort of rate of increase can be a lot slower than it would be if you were not in that calorie restricted state. Of course, if you push into the point where you've got the, you know, stress response starting to kick off, then of course, it's not going to happen, it's going to go the opposite direction. It sounds like frequency would be more important in someone who's dieting. Well, yes, of course, because you, you know, you've got that suppressed MPS, so your atrophy periods are going to be more pronounced and your stimulus periods are going to be less effective. So if you lose any stimulus period that you could be getting, then of course, you're going to be a worse state than you were before. So, yeah, I mean, for body every day is always going to be the best on paper. For body three times a week is probably a pretty decent compromise. Honestly, at this point, anybody who's using up a low split side, I don't really have any time for. I think you mean to say for body every other day, I think you said for body every day, but we did do for body every other day. We did talk about the possibility of someone doing full body every day, and we were talking about, you know, obviously, keeping reps and reserves, doing single set, lower repetitions, being careful about, or mindful of, you know, more length and muscle positions. And, you know, it's interesting having this conversation. It makes me wonder, you know, could that potentially be a feasible option if someone wear was recovered from that? Maybe that could be an interesting approach. Yeah, and of course, you would just have to push that, that sort of, those concerns regarding recoverability, you'd have to push those even harder in their diet. So, if somebody wanted to do, you know, kind of for body every day, because they were like, well, can we, can we really mitigate the loss in muscle mass by providing a small stimulus every single day? I think you would really have to be super careful about what you were doing, you know. I mean, I would be leaving probably two reps in reserve, you know, like doing three or four reps, and just leaving two reps in reserve, something like that. I'd be, and again, from a, because you have to remember, recoverability in terms of sort of, so coming back to this idea that, you know, leukocorticoid and anabolic hormones are kind of opposite to each other. You've got the same issues across the whole board, not just about muscle tissue. So, I would expect people to get more creakiness, more kind of joint discomfort and stuff in a diet compared to when they're not in a diet. So, again, I would be super careful about everything, so I would want to make sure that I would just say, don't do this with free weights, for example, I would be like, don't, don't do this with free weights. If you're going to do an everyday workout, planning a diet, don't do free weights, find machines that feel really super comfortable for you, and even limit ranges of motion, if you have to, to avoid any discomfort whatsoever. And I'd go very, very extreme in terms of protective of the, of the kind of the movement patterns and the stability and all those things to avoid any kind of discomfort. Just even then, like, there'd be some situations where I'd still be cautious. Like, for example, one of the, share a person example, one of the things that catches me out is the C2 Lego, because I'm not a big guy, but I've got pretty, pretty strong hamstrings. So, I can move pretty decent amount of weight on a C2 Lego, but what tends to happen is it pulls my lower back right away from the pad. So, I'm pulling and it just absolutely pulls me around. And I can be absolutely pushing myself as hard as I possibly get into the C, and my legs are still moving me around because of that kind of discrepancy. So, that has caught me out in a diet a couple of times, where I've been dieting, and I've been going to the gym and doing C2 Lego three times a week, because I tend to drop back into full body A a lot. I do do full body AB, I prefer it if I'm like trying to get things to maximize, but I tend to drop back into full body A, because I'm just like, well, it means that if I only get two workouts, it doesn't matter. So, I kind of do C2 Lego three times a week, and that has given me sort of some discomfort in dieting situations. It never does when I'm not in a diet, and I can just. The kind of the repair ability is there, whereas if I start doing that in a dieting situation, I always tend to get grumbly lower back situation. The C2 Lego is actually one of the exercises I've seen most, the highest number of clients have issues with, especially stronger clients, and from a lower back perspective, not just because obviously some people do notice and hamstrings do take a little bit longer to recover from, that's a fairly common thing for people to observe, but in terms of getting injured or just tweaking their back for a lumbar, I do have certainly seen that in a C2 Lego quite a lot. And this is where, like for me personally, I use a C belt, if I'm going to use a C2 Lego, because it doesn't feel good in my back either, and if you are, you move in decent loads, it's pretty challenging to get yourself into it. It can be aggravating when you're doing it in a full body workout, and you've just done some pressing, for which, for me, is a triceps exercise. So I'm very triceps dominant, so I do any kind of pressing, and then I go and do a C2 Lego, and I just don't want to press into it. I'm like, no, no, no, this is not why I want to do right now. I've kind of done with the pressing thing, you know, kind of, can we move on and do something else? I'm like, well, I actually have to press in order to keep my stability in this exercise. So, you know, it's like, if I remember, and I'm going to be like, okay, so I do my presses, and then I have to remember, and I'm going, okay, so I do some quad work and then do some pulling, and then whatever else, and then come back and do C2 Lego at the very end. Okay, now it's not quite so bad, and I can kind of, you know, countenance the idea of using my triceps again. But it's just an example to put some kind of, you know, real life picture or, you know, color to this idea, which is that, you know, I think that it's not just about muscle recovery, you know, the potential for overuse injury or, you know, discomfort or whatever, I think is also going to be higher. And it might, it might be that it's, as I say, the motivation to stabilize myself is not there. It might be the repairability of other structures is not there. It might be a combination of all of those. But I think it's definitely a factor that I'd be aware of is, you know, if you are going to go down that route to trying to use super high frequency, then, you know, just try and take all the risk out of the program as you can. And why would you? Now, when you talked about stress before, you sort of mentioned it's the, like, the cumulative total of all the stresses that we want to be conscious of, and we're not just talking, dyking stress, are we? So obviously, we've talked about sleep, and, you know, lack of sleeping, a country being a factor there. But, you know, this would even be psychological stresses that would be, you know, relationships. For all stresses, psychological. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, I guess if, if people are like, you know, experiencing stress in their, you know, I guess in their work or in their home life, like, these are all things that are going to be contributing to that as well. Hey, so it might be the kind of thing where one might want to consider when would be the most appropriate time for them to actually do a dieting phase or, you know, are there other interventions that people could be using at that point as well? And obviously, you talked about checking in with oneself and actually seeing how they're feeling. But, you know, there's certainly other interventions like, you know, even if we look at stuff like earthing or grounding or meditation or these things that have a positive effect around, you know, cortisol levels. So, there certainly could be other interventions or lifestyle interventions that people could be looking at at including as well, couldn't they? Oh, totally. I mean, interestingly, checking in, checking in is more about trying to get to handle on what your kind of numbers are. I'm not sure. I mean, yes, checking in, I think, for some people, can be a stress reliever, but the context in which I was introducing it was more about just trying to use your perceptions to gauge where you're at. I think, you know, if it has a stress relieving, in fact, great, but it's more about like, it's like a counter movement jump test before a workout. It kind of gives you a feeling of where you're actually at. And I think a lot of people just don't know where they're at because they've never thought. It's like a fun, it's like a literacy function really for, you know, it's like emotional literacy really. It's like where are you at? A lot of people just don't think to check in. It's strange because it's almost like just, you know, doing basic maintenance on your car to check the oil and check that, you know, kind of state to it. Is it capable of doing what you want to do? Check the tires, check the pressure. You know, you've got enough water in the washer bottle. I mean, it's like, are you checking these things? I mean, you could do the same thing with your brain in terms of, you know, the state of stress that you're in. But yeah, all those other tools that you can then implement are totally, you know, kind of valid to help people manage and alleviate some of the stress they're experiencing. But yeah, I think the big stuff is, is like, don't try and do this when you've got a big project at work. Don't try and do this when you've got a relationship issue that you're managing. Don't try and do this when you've got family members that you're taking care of. Don't try and do this when you're all the, and a lot of people will say, oh, no, no, no, no, you can handle all of that stuff you can do, it's like, you can, but it would be a lot easier if you didn't have to. So why make your life difficult? Why not just organize this for another point in your calendar year or whenever when it's going to work better for you? Yeah, it's funny because, you know, given what you're saying there, it's like, well, actually, the best time to die would be on holiday or on vacations. Like, oh, I bet that's when you want to be eating all these foods that's not going to help you be any deficit. So it is a bit of a balancing act, but it's definitely something worth being aware of that, you know, what else is going on in life and it's not going to stand in the way or it's not going to exacerbate some of the downsides that dieting is going to be causing alongside it. So, you know, even supplementation could have a role to play there as well. Like you said, you know, these scenes are not going to, you know, necessarily, you know, mitigate some of the downsides if there's all these other big factors going on, but these are things that people could certainly be looking at and including. Totally. And I think there's, again, from my perspective, it's frustrating that a lot of the dominant narrative around dieting has come from the body recomposition, nutrition standpoint, and it ignores the muscle physiology standpoint as the primary driver. If we started looking at dieting as being primarily about muscle mass retention from a muscle mass, from a near-emuscular physiology point of view, I'm not saying that these approaches are not complementary. I think they are complementary, but I think at the moment we're losing a lot of information and usable, practical knowledge that we could implement simply by ignoring this side of things. From a supplementation point of view, I think that if researchers start to take into consideration this kind of framework, then they would have a number of interesting avenues they could pursue, especially around the oxidative stress side of things, because the way in which glucose corticoids produce atrophy is by me, we talked about this in the sleep module, sorry, podcast. Ultimately, we've got this issue whereby oxidative stress is being produced by the glucose corticoids through a number of pathways, and that is then driving the atrophy by elevating muscle protein right now. If you interfere with that oxidative stress and there's been studies that have done this, they've gone in and they've tested a glucose corticoid, usually an exogenous one, they've produced an exogenous, they've implemented this regime of exogenous glucose corticoid, they've created an oxidative stress response, they've noted that, they've then produced a muscle protein breakdown response based on the oxidative stress, they've then gone in and applied an antioxidant, and it's broken the link, and it's stopped the glucose corticoid, the exogenous glucose corticoid, from leading to that muscle protein breakdown that produces atrophy. So, there are some really interesting interventions that are already being tested in certain contexts, but I don't what's not happening is that the body recon kind of section of the literature is, they're not looking at this stuff and realizing that's doable. So, they're not thinking in those terms, and that's the same thing that happens when you try to talk to hypertrus searches about what they call stretch medias hypertrophy, and you're like, hey guys, this is just psychomerogenesis, and they run around screaming, waving their hands in the air. I think like, come on guys, it's not physiology, come on. And it's the same thing we've got here with, you know, the body recomp is kind of going its own way, and like, there's some really interesting stuff being done, physiologically around liquor corticoids and exogenous, or exogenous horrendous, but they're looking at that stuff and showing how it works and how it produces atrophy. That is absolutely usable. It's just that it hasn't quite, they haven't quite made those connections yet. So, I think it's really, really interesting. I'm not saying that I think antioxidants are a good idea because they have got down sides, but I think there's data that could start lines of investigation for people who know more about that stuff than I do. Now, I'm sure there's going to be people listening who are going to be thinking, okay, you've mentioned a large deficit could be more problematic potentially, due to the stress response. Now, there's some people, and I would put myself in this camp as well, who do prefer to do like short abouts of, or maybe even like intermittent dieting periods, where they might do like a large ecloric deficit for either a few days at a time, or they might do it for a couple of weeks, and just sort of reduce a total dieting period, as opposed to just a, you know, smaller deficit, a couple hundred calories for, you know, 12 weeks or whatever. Now, obviously the main thing you've brought up there is, hey, this is probably going to become a stressor if it's a significant deficit. Is there anything else worth being aware of? Like, if you want to look at, you know, this shortage of dieting at a, at a larger deficit compared to, because in my mind, I'll tell you what's happening in, for me, when I do this, I think to myself, okay, if I'm in a deficit, and I know that there's this reduction in NPS, and I know that I'm probably not going to be building significant amounts and muscle over this time, is it going to be better for me to draw this out over 12 weeks, and potentially kind of not really get anywhere, and just, you know, do that dieting period, or, okay, maybe there'll be this increase in muscle protein breakdown if I do this significant core deficit, but if I get it over and done within a couple of weeks, I can now go back to actually building in only a few weeks time. Is there, do you have anything to sort of say to either side of that, or is it kind of going to be someone's individual preference? I would say that it's going to depend on the steepness of the curve, of how, how, so obviously, yeah, it's going to depend on the steepness of the curve, your glucocorticoid response essentially, so if you're, if you're sort of short periods of time with, with large deficits, produce a really big stress response, then attributes can happen really quickly, and so you're going to go backwards really fast. If it's producing, if you're, so like, if you've got a really steep curve on your glucocorticoid response, it's hammering you down into really negative territory really, really quickly with, with just a smaller extra deficit. If you've got a really shallow curve, so getting a very small amount of extra glucocorticoid response for an extra couple of hundred calories a day, then you're in winning territory aren't you? So it's really going to depend on, and how sting your curve is. So if you've got this really, really shallow stress response, so that you add a couple of extra hundred calories a day on a deficit, and you only really produce a little bit more atrophy, that's a shallow curve, no big deal. You can manage that. If you've got a curve like that, which is how I suspect minus, then you get this enormous stress response from just going a couple of extra hundred calories a day into a deficit, you feel absolutely horrific, and you know that you're probably hemorrhaging muscle mass, that's a rate that is not really sustainable. So I think it really depends on what your curve looks like, and only you can really experiment and play about with that and get a feel for what it looks like. And again, being stressors, there are going to be aspects to them that are things that you can adjust to. So, you know, for people who've been in say intimate investing as a lifestyle choice for three, four, five years, I would not expect them to have the same kind of stress response as to a bit of fasting than somebody who's not. So, again, and now everyone's going to run around going, "Oh, all they need to do is spam into that intimate investing," like, "Okay, yeah, just bear in mind that it takes time to get through these adjustment phases." So, if you want to, if you're planning on doing a diet next year, maybe, well, we're in, you know, December already, so. If you're talking about, you know, six, twelve months time, you're planning on doing a deficit, and you're planning on doing a career restriction period, and you want to use intimate investing, fine, you could spend a year getting used to that, and I'm not saying a year of the right number. I'm just pointing out that months and months and months are probably necessary to really kind of get to a point where it stops me as well. So, what I think is a risky choice is to be a person who's, you know, been eating three squal meals a day since the year dot, and then say, "Oh, and for this diet I'm going to use intimate investing." I'm like, "That's not a good choice." That's not a good choice. It may look like a good choice in paper to you. You may be attracted by the idea of it, but you're shocking yourself with two separate stressors. The actual kind of timing of your meals, which you've become accustomed to, and the fact that you're still in eating less than your maintenance level of calories, that's two things that you didn't necessarily need. You could have had one thing and, you know, sort of got to the same point. And I'm not, I'm not bashing intimate investing. I'm just pointing out that, you know, it is going to require a little bit of adjustment. No, I think that's such a good point. It's not a, I understand a sort like a sexy point to make that, "Hey, this is going to be dependent on the person. If it's some people, this is going to be potentially better for them, other people, this is going to be more suited." But ultimately, that is the way this is going to work, and, you know, I would always present, if I'm dieting with a client, I'll present them two options. And I say, "Hey, we can either do it this way. We can either do, you know, say, often what I'll do is, is multiple days a week. Am I going to do it every second day at a very significant deficit, or say, you know, three or four days a week, or a very severe deficit, a few days a baseline, or would you prefer just this like, you know, smaller deficit, keep it the same, do that for a longer period of time. What are you going to find less burdensome?" And they might not know. I have to experience both to know which one works better for them. That's the point that I'm making. It's like, you know, everything that we can talk about around this topic, all of it comes back to the same point, which is how are you feeling when you're doing it? That's all it comes back to. It's like, you know, when I say, "How are you feeling?" I mean, how are you actually feeling? I don't mean how you think you're feeling. This is the one that we're talking about. Like, you know, something like that. How do you nothing up? Genuinely experience this, you know, because that's the real, because you can't lie to yourself about your stress levels. They are what they are. So, you can kind of fake it to make you, but ultimately that isn't how your body experiences stress. So, you've kind of got to be able to communicate with yourself and know what it is that is happening. And you may have to try multiple different approaches to get to a point where the one that feels least objects and what to you is identifiable. And so, all of the details on top of that are just marketing, really. It's like, somebody wants to do it. This way, this way, this way. That way, it's just like, well, what it comes back to is, you know, how is the stress experienced by the person? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely interesting. Two different people are going to have a totally different experience. So, I mean, my favorite way, by far, to diet would be intermittent fast. And then I basically just book and or I'll have some calories before my workout. And I have, you know, peri workout carbs. And then I'll basically have everything else for dinner while you're laughing. Yeah. I'm laughing because I'm just looking at you in, you know, kind of the two totally different parts of the world that we're living in. You know, I can look outside and there's snow on the ground and there's a gray sky. And all I can think about is getting a hot drink in my hand. Maybe I want to eat. Whereas, you know, you're able to walk outside and there's probably blue sky and sunshine and a very nice ambient temperature. But there's environmental factors that feed into these kind of, you know, kind of experiences. But at the end of the day, it just keeps saying it comes back to how the person is experiencing it. And yes, environmental factors are going to play a role. But at the end of the day, it really does just come back to how big is the stress that the person experiencing? You take away as much stress as you possibly can. You can push that deficit further. Okay. I got one more question on macronutrients. So, there used to be this idea that someone could push up carbs when they're dieting and especially push up carbs towards the end of the day. And that'll have a sort of, I guess, like, bluntening effect on cortisol. And that'll, you know, this sort of like, carb loading, which reduce stress from dieting. And that's sort of made a bit of research and slightly not so much around that the cortisol effect, but people sort of really pushing hard. Hey, carbs is like the thing that matters. Is there anything to that in terms of pushing carbs up during dieting, having some kind of this mitigating effect on cortisol? Or is that not really a thing? I don't know. It's a question that I'm actually very interested in. I've mentioned to you before that I've collected a few animal model studies where I can see correlations or these visible relationships between muscle glycogen running down to very low levels and around those times you start to see cortisol jumping upwards. So, you know, just in terms of association that you could make a case for that. I don't feel comfortable at the moment making a strong case for it. And I haven't got to the point where I've got a model that I'm confident in, so I wouldn't want to commit. But I am in the process of collecting studies where I see them and starting to try and build a picture because I do think there's something going on there that's interesting. Again, it just comes back to, does it help people individually? Personally, I tend to drift in that direction. I definitely run hot on carbs. I don't tend to be able to function without them. But again, people are going to be different and have different experiences with it. So, I think for now, I would just keep going back to the point where it's like, try a bunch of different stuff with it for a few days and just make notes, check in with yourself, figure out what it feels like and then try to be different and do the same thing again. And you'll figure out what works for you. When people come to me and they like pitching an idea and they're like, this works because of these reasons. I'm like, I'm not really, I'm not really going to listen to you because at the end of the day, there's too many variables in there for that to apply to every single person. What I'm more interested in is the person who comes to me and goes, well, I tried this and I tried this and I tried this for like a week at a time and I experienced this one, I did this, I experienced this one, I did this, I experienced this one, I did this. You figured out you're an answer then, haven't you? You've got to point what you now know that if you eat these things in these places or you eat these, you structure your calorie deficit in this way, you know that that and works for you. At the moment, I'm much more likely to accept the kind of experience as the other person who's done the testing because they figured out what works. And the point here is that people say, well, why don't you do this for strength training? Because we're not talking about stress wars when it comes to strength training. Like when people come to me and go, well, I like training with this exercise routine and it works for me. I'm like, I don't care because we're not talking about stressors anymore. It's irrelevant. So when I'm talking about managing stress, it's about how you feel. When I'm talking about strength training, it's how strength training works, totally everything. So strength training doesn't play by the same rules as stress management because one's about how you feel and one's not. So that's why we would say for somebody who goes, oh, I tried three times a week for body and I didn't like you're there for I'm not going to do it. I'm like, I don't care. It doesn't change the fact that three times a week is still better than we haven't nonsense, boast that you were doing before or like to do. You know, that's not the same thing. That's not the same thing as trying to figure out how stressors are being experienced in your dieting phase because stressors are the thing that's managing whether or not you're getting out of the happening or not. That seems like a really important point. And I hope people have understood it. But is there any more you can expand on that because they are two totally different things? Exactly. What I'm saying is that when somebody comes to me and goes, I tried, you know, 10 different training programs and I hated training three times a week for body but I really love training bro split once a week with each muscle group. I'm like, I don't care, you know, four body three times a week is still better than nonsense. Because you'll enjoy them in your lack of enjoyment. It is not infinite. It's a marginal benefit. Yeah. So marginal benefit. But the feeling that you have the muscle works is also the same regardless of your extension. Exactly. Exactly. When you're talking about dieting, you're talking about managing a stressor because if you push the stressor to the point where it tips you over into it, it being naathrophy, you can't really rescue that. So you could be doing on paper what somebody has told you is perfectly correct and ideal. And they could have given you a million physiological reasons why they're, you know, some kind of super genius when it comes to what are you composition. And it still won't work for you because if you're miserable, it doesn't work. But because ultimately it's because it comes down to these physiological correct because in this instance, psychology is driving the physiology in strength training. Psychology is having a marginal impact on physiology because it's affecting motivation. But there are other things you can do to become motivated. So again, it's like you can handle that problem to a greater extent. Here is the totally different. It's like if you're miserable, I don't care how many PhDs have put together a program that's supposed to work for you, it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good point there that from a high perjury standpoint, this psychology is influencing essentially that one component, like that motivation bit and that's one of many things, whereas when it's coming to dieting and stress, it's the one thing that's driving all of it. And at the end of the day, that marginal change in motinocrim that happens due to motivation, you still can't fix exercise selection problems. You can't. No matter how much you motivate yourself, you can't make a biceps called train your calves. You can't, you know, you can't make sort of, you know, the trying to think of a slightly less less less you can't make the cost of fibers of the pack work in shoulder flexion, you know, their shoulder extensors. So it's like there's no amount of willing it to happen that's going to make it happen. Yeah, I mean, ultimately what we're saying is what can, what of the physiology you're looking at? What can psychology influence? And like, I guess that's really what we need to be asked here, because when people are trying to make this argument and I enjoy this, I don't enjoy that, it's like, yeah, okay, but what is that enjoyment factor able to influence? Like you said there, it's not able to influence, you know, which muscle or part of a muscle is actually being, you know, used in a particular exercise. How long that stimulus period is or whatever, it's not actually influencing any of those things. There's only one very minor part of inequality. So I think that's trying to be a health caloric restriction. It can literally bomb you back post baseline. Yeah, yeah, cool. Okay, I think that's a good place to end is anything else you wanted to add before we finish up? No, I think my good. Okay, cool. Well, it's it's a time of the year where people probably aren't thinking about dieting, but I'm sure they will be in about a moment a bit. So when you do start thinking about dieting, maybe come back and listen to this and start thinking about, you know, what are some some ways that you could diet in ways that you're going to perceive as being less stressful or just going to work better for you. And it might not be what, you know, other people are saying works for them. It might actually involve a little bit of trial and error and seeing what's actually suited best to you. So thank you guys for joining us and we hope you'll join us again next week for another episode.