Today's episode is a deep dive into all things muscle, resistance training and healthy aging with two of the most influential voices in this space. Brad Schoenfield and Alan Arrogon. Brad is one of the most prolific researchers in muscle science with over 300 peer-reviewed publications on hypertrophy, strength and resistance training. Alan is a nutrition researcher and educator known for bridging physiology with real-world application. The two have also collaborated academically over the years bringing exercise science and nutrition into the same conversation. In this episode we discussed what actually happens to muscle as we age, why strength and power decline and what kind of resistance training best counteracts those changes while layering in the role of nutrition along the way. This is a long-form conversation nearly four hours where we go deep into the science but consistently translated into practical takeaways that you can apply to your own training and nutrition. Please enjoy. Today I wanted to get the pair of you back on so we could really go deep on muscle physiology. Obviously everyone right now is really interested in longevity. That's become a bit of a kind of trend which I think is a positive thing and muscle has very much become a central part of that conversation around longevity. I want to take this conversation through the lens of muscle physiology and aging but then weave nutrition and the importance of different aspects of our nutrition throughout that conversation. At the very top though what I'd like to do is just refresh myself as to how both of you became interested in all of this in the first place. So maybe Brad we can start with you. If I've done my research correctly, did this interest of yours in muscle and body composition was that through your own training in the gym? Yeah so the I'll give you the short course because the long course we'd be here for a couple hours but I had a very windy road to get to where I am but I started out as a really skinny kid. I found bodybuilding or bodybuilding family or some combination and I just changed my life and ultimately it led to me becoming a personal trainer and I competed in bodybuilding shows. I started training competitive physique athletes and I started then really getting into the science of it so this was all kind of a process that evolved over time and I ultimately found I had a greater interest in teaching and educating on it than I didn't actually showing people how to do a lot bold and so then you you went into the academic side of things. Correct. Been an academia now for 16 years. Published like 300 plus papers at this point. Just about it for now yeah. Right. And at what stage of your career would you say that you became interested in in how muscle physiology influences or affects aging itself? Was that something that you appreciated early on or was the early part of your career more focused on performance and aesthetics? Yeah it was an evolving process and early on it was just purely about gains, about you know maximizing bodybuilding type gains and I guess it's progressed as I've aged. You start realizing mortality and try to do what you can for myself to avoid the pitfalls of the aging process. So yeah it's become much more of a focus. Would you say in your in the field of kind of muscle physiology in general when you when you started out were scientists talking about the way in which skeletal muscle influences aging? I mean it was a little certainly more robically there was a focus on a Robic exercise and the cardiac respiratory system with VO2 max and the aging process but really not much and hopefully we can get into this a lot more as far as resistance training goes. Most of the early resistance training research prior to when I got into the field was strength it was strength related it was when I say strength related was athletic related. So it was on building strength and power and muscle hypertrophy which was my focus as a former bodybuilder and physique coach was secondary to the fact that there's a relationship between strength and hypertrophy that increasing muscle size will necessarily to some extent increase muscle strength but hypertrophy was kind of like the bastard child of strength research strength conditioning research and particularly there was the negative connotation with bodybuilding because of steroids even though there was a lot of steroids in sports too which somehow got chuffled under the rug. But anyway but when I came in my focus as a personal trainer the vast majority of my clients were not coming in telling me they want to take a second off of their sprint time ratta an inch to their jump height they wanted to look great naked they wanted to you know increase the size of their muscles and reduce body fat so I honed in on that that was my focus certainly in kind of the rest of the history. And Alan what was was your on ramp early days? A couple things really similar to Brad's actually well I grew up in a lot of my a lot of my adolescence was in Southern California so the later adolescence and so naturally in when you grow up in LA everybody wants to be involved with fitness and personal training back in the 80s and 90s was this sort of subversive emerging kind of fringe type of potential occupation for those people who know the right people and I just thought it was really cool the idea of being able to have a career just training folks helping people get fit working with celebrities and that was just it was sort of the allure career wise to personal training for me. Earlier than that it was more like just seeing bodybuilders on the magazine covers you know the classic dudes just being into various comics where they look like the bodybuilders on the magazine covers and I think there's this kind of innate thing within guys where you know you just want to you want to see if you can materialize those things and so that that was sort of the beginnings for me as I got towards college and just you know graduating high school and just thinking about careers and stuff there was this fork in the road where I really didn't know where to go in terms of either an exercise direction or a nutrition direction because I genuinely liked them equally but I just you know I didn't flip a coin I got a bunch of advice from a bunch of people I trusted and and I just went with a nutrition degree and then just started collecting personal training certifications and then a decade went by and then I met Brad and got to do a bunch of research publications so he has about a hundredfold my research publications but yeah that's kind of where it is and it's really interesting to have fallen into that role and gotten invited by other groups of researchers all over the world there's a result of the stuff that I initiated with Brad and I'll also add that Alan certainly shaped my nutritional the way I look at sports nutrition so I mean I had certain beliefs back then that Alan opened my eyes to a lot of nutritional fallacies that really stuck with me and really shaped my not only shaped my views at that time but my desire to really delve into the literature on the topic and become more of a certainly secondarily a nutritional researcher as well. 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with regards to the aging process, has that been something that you've become more interested in? Yes, I would say yes. As chronological age marches forward, you get to thinking more about, like for example, when you cross over 40, statistically you're kind of at the halfway point in this little earthly journey. And so you start thinking about it more. And certainly as you cross over 50, then you're like thinking about the statistics of muscle mass reducing about half a percent a year starting 40 at the population level. And then from 50 forward, it starts reducing one to possibly one and a half percent annually. And then at 60, it starts reducing about three-ish percent annually. And then you start looking at the statistics of sarcopenia prevalence in people 60 and up. And it's about 10 up to 20 percent of the population of 60 and up. And you really start thinking about these things. And you also start being glad that you started training and got into those habits and secured that kind of that musculoskeletal infrastructure earlier on. Because it's not like you can necessarily catch up, especially skeletally. It's like saving money before you retire. That's right. Yeah, there's been some really impressive research recently with, I mean, you see the MRI and CT photos of the master's athletes that have trained their whole lives. And they preserve muscle, like at 70, 60, 70 years old, fairly close to the 20-old athletes, not much of a drawbuff. And they actually have higher muscle, at least lean mass, muscle mass levels too. Then those who are inactive that are sedentary in their 20s. And the difference between the master's athletes at 60 plus versus the sedentary 60 plus is just extraordinary. I mean, you see the differences are it's frightening what the loss is, as Alan mentioned. I think that provides a lot of hope for the listener because often the way that I kind of hear this topic spoken about is age-related muscle loss. And that sounds like it's inevitable. Because it's inevitable that we're getting older. And one of the things I want to get into when we get there is to is how much is this baked in and how much say do we actually have in this in this process? What can we do to a tenure way to slow down these things that we're talking about? Maybe we could define a few terms here. So you said sarcopenia, 10 to 20% of people over the age of 60, probably have sarcopenia. What does that actually mean? So sarcopenia, the simple definition would be an age-related loss of muscle mass or age-related loss of lean mass. It kind of falls under the umbrella of frailty, which is sort of a general wasting and degradation of the bodily systems. So sarcopenia, it's been categorized into two main definitions. So there's primary sarcopenia, which is just the sort of the normal physiology of aging. And that can include things like annual hormonal decline, starting like age 35-ish, and also a drop in the muscle protein synthesis response to both feeding as well as training. There's just sort of this natural decrease in the insulin sensitivity of endothelial tissues. There's this decrease in so-called microvascular perfusion or blood flow to the muscles in response to various stimuli. And when blood flow gets decreased, then delivery of nutrients amino acid specifically gets decreased. And then you compromise muscle protein synthesis. There is increases in insulin resistance, decreases in satellite cell activity. There's increases in inflammation, we measure through IL-6, CRPD and F-Alpha, various markers of that, that seem to converge towards this blunted anabolic response as we age. So that's sort of this odd mix of these so-called primary sarcopenia. When you say blunted anabolic response, meaning that the muscle cells, muscle tissue is not responding in the same way as it would earlier in life to lifting weights or eating protein. That's right. So for example, in younger adults, you'll see muscle protein synthesis. So for listeners, the way that protein, the way that muscle grows or stays the same or decreases is based on a process called muscle protein turnover. So there's the muscle protein synthesis side of it and then there's the muscle protein breakdown side. And so as long as muscle protein synthesis outpaces muscle protein breakdown, then we can see muscle growth. And if there's an equilibrium there, then we see maintenance of muscle. So with older individuals, it's not like with younger individuals where you can stimulate MPS maximally under resting conditions with like 20, 25 grams of high quality protein. With older individuals, you almost need double that per dose in order to get a similar muscle protein synthesis response. Does everyone get anabolic resistance? So if we go back and think about those muscles, athletes, people would be neck-suzzing their entire life, right? Maybe like I'll sit in this room. Are we going to eventually, no matter what, we're going to get to that stage where we require a double protein? Or is that someone who's being sedentary and then developed anabolic resistance because of the sedentary lifestyle they were living? Okay, so that kind of has a complicated answer. Brad brings up the really excellent point where you see masters, athletes see cross sections of the quad and you put them next to people half their age, 35-year-olds. And it's very similar. There's just slight differences in sort of the quality and the firmness and the tone of the muscle. In theory, old muscle can be rejuvenated with progressive resistance training, physical activity, proper nutrition. Now the degree to which it can be 100% rejuvenated, I guess that's open to speculation. But with secondary sarcopenia, the factors that come into play there are inactivity diseases and poor nutrition. So with inactivity and diseases and poor nutrition, you have the so-called secondary sarcopenia, which has an acute nature up to six months as well as a chronic nature longer than six months. And so there's this weird kind of overlap between primary sarcopenia and secondary sarcopenia because the inactivity factors really maybe the strongest thing and that happens regardless of how you define sarcopenia. So yeah, Brad, do you know of any research comparing young and old muscle and sort of waking up rejuvenating, etc? Yeah, so it's to unpack this a little more number one, anabolic resistance exists on a continuum. It's not you either have it, what is depends on your qualification is to where it actually sits on this spectrum. But I mean, you can be somewhat anabolic resistant, you can be very anabolic resistant. And certainly we know just through like these masters athletes, they're maintaining a lot of their muscle throughout their older years. So obviously they're not as as anabolic resistant as younger individuals. The issue really is in terms of trying to study this in a controlled fashion, it's very difficult to find a cohort of older individuals that have been training for a long periods of time. For the vast majority where we do a lot of studies in younger people, it's quite easy or certainly easier to do studies on trained younger individuals to get a cohort of trained older individuals becomes much more of a much much more difficult process. So most of the comparisons that we have are between like untrained younger and untrained older. And certainly the substantial differences in their anabolic responses. But we can speculate again, I think through these masters athletes, just because we see the maintenance of tissue that's not only more so than much more so than other older individuals, but more so than younger individuals who've never trained. So it's showing that they've on average maintained greater muscle over the years than younger subjects. So I would say that yeah, you certainly can somewhat avoid out of my existence, but we also know that the aged muscle in these masters athletes is not quite what the younger athletes is. And you're going to, I mean, Alan talked about some of the issues
Monely, this is just going to generally be drop-offs in testosterone, which is primary male, hormone for women. It's estrogen, primary female and abalch hormone, which goes down really precipitously after menopause. And then those things like, I mean, again, Alan brought a lot of this up, chronic inflammatory response. I mean, you can osteoarthritis, so often sets in with older individuals. And that tends to, or can produce more chronic inflammation, just also went to fear of training ability. So there's a lot of things that happen as you get older that there's certain things that you just cannot completely control for. But what I would say personally, just looking at the objective, trying to be objective in the overall literature, while you can't completely offset it, you can substantially reduce the effects of it. And can you compensate or override it by adjusting the amount of training you're doing or the amount of protein you're eating? I'm not so certainly not by the amount of protein. Well, when you say you will need more protein, so I don't know if you want to get into the leucine threshold, but there's a central amino acid called leucine, which is thought to have fairly well established. It produces a trigger post-exercise to kind of kickstart the muscle building process. And it's not an on/off switch, so, but if you're deficient, somewhat deficient in the leucine response, you're not going to achieve as much of a robust response. And that again, does seem to, in older individuals, untrained older individuals, it's substantially greater. And we don't have good evidence, at least from my interpretation of the literature, in well-trained older individuals to make that determination, I wouldn't think that consuming protein would offset it. Well, in other than the fact that it's going to help you to maintain more muscle or consuming sufficient protein, it's not going to, by itself, counteract animal resistance. The training response is a different matter. And yeah, so I mean, training number one, it counteracts chronic and the chronic inflammatory response is really concrete evidence that chronic inflammation has really negative effects on muscle building. And this would be cyclical, so the loss of muscle would tend to create more chronic inflammation, the creation of more chronic inflammation, would tend to reduce the muscle, and it's kind of this cyclical kind of. It's like bi-directional. And there's some other factors where monolids, not really clear, but there's at least some evidence showing that you can at least keep your testosterone levels a little higher with training, with chronic training. Satellite, the satellite cell response is really important. So satellite cells are muscle stem cells. And they have multiple roles in muscle development, including donating their myonucleii, as well as communicating between the cells and kind of coordinating the muscle building process. And these again are cyclical factors. So when you start to lose muscle, and by the way, I should mention that with sarcopenia, there can be a loss, there can be apoptosis, which is death, particularly of the type two muscle fibers, which are your strength-related fibers, which really has negative implications for carrying out strength-related tests and power in particular. So the satellite cells within type two fibers tend to get, the activation tends to be reduced, which then you get more sarcopenia, you get more muscle loss, which again has negative effects on the muscle quality and quantity. So these are all factors that, again, if you're training, training can counteract to some extent all of those factors. It is possible, despite the antibiotic resistance, it's definitely possible if someone even hasn't been training for, let's say, 10, 20 years and now they're 50, and they're listening to this and thinking, "Gosh, I've got all of these things happening at the level of the muscle. Can I build muscle now?" What do we understand from the literature as to what's possible if someone is in their 50s or 60s and begins doing the things that we're going to speak about and unpack the resistance training and the nutrition? What could they expect? Yeah, so the response, again, is certainly blunted from younger individuals, but you can make really impressive gains in a very short period of time. So we've carried out multiple meta-analytic studies on this. And we actually did one in the oldest of the old, so people that are 75 years and older, and they had, particularly, you see the biggest gains in strength. There was a one standard deviation, the standardized mean difference, which comes down to the effect of a standard deviation of one, roughly one standard deviation improvement in eight to 12 weeks on the effect size, the standard mean deviation was 0.3 in muscle hypertrophy, which is somewhat less, but still quite impressive for people that are quite sarcopenic at that point. These are people that had not trained before, and this isn't comparison of other untrained individuals. So we compared a training regimen of eight to 12 or eight to 16 weeks. I was like, wow, I forgot the specifics, versus a control condition where they didn't train, didn't do resistance training. And just really profound differences in this population. And you see it all, there's other meta-analysis showing, again, quite robust, 15, 20 percent, in some cases, increases in muscle cross-sectional area, fiber cross-sectional area, in these older individuals and strength improvements. Huge strength improvements, I'll give you one example that to me is the epitomizes, the effects of strength training. There was a study by Maria Fitter-Rohne, this was a seminal study dating back to 1990, and it was carried out on non-agenarians, 90-year-olds, in a nursing home. They went in, they had them do just leg extensions, three days a week, eight to 12 reps, I moved eight to 10 reps, for eight weeks, three days a week, and again, 90 average age, 90 years old. After eight weeks, there's ten subjects, the average increase in strength was 150 percent, the average increase in functional capacity was 50 percent. But to me, the coolest part of this study was three of the ten subjects were able to walk without the assistance of their cane after eight weeks. And people think that the leg extension at non-functional exercise, I don't think there's anything more functional than being able to walk without assistance. 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and use code the proof for up to 35% off your first order. You've mentioned muscle quality a few times and you've mentioned strength. I'm thinking about the listener now who is hearing all this and thinking, okay, what's the goal here? So is it that I want to build muscle and build muscle size is that the most important thing? Or is it that I need to build strength and power? And I guess if we think about the overall goal, what really matters to the individual, it's what you just mentioned, which is I would say their physical capacity to do the things that they love, to be independent, where that's what we all want. And also to reduce their risk of chronic disease. So if we're thinking about muscle tissue and the things that are happening as we age, what do you think is most important to focus on strength, power, muscle growth, or is that the wrong way of thinking about it? And it should just be all of those. - I'm gonna let Brad kill the answer to that. I just wanted to relay to you the previous question about people starting in their 50s or 60s and wondering whether there's hope to get this muscle building process started. Well, I recently ran a 12 week transformation contest in my online community. And the winner of the female category was a 65 year old, okay, so a 65 year old woman. And she lost 9.5 pounds or about five kilograms of fat mass. And she gained 1.6 kilograms or about 3.5 pounds of lean mass in the 12 weeks as a 65 year old. And she's not on testosterone. She's on a very low estradiol dose because she's at her massive ovarian cancer operation. And so there's really, I mean, there's hope for people on the second half of life for sure. I just wanted to give that example out. - That also speaks as well to the fact that, I very much positioned this as a conversation around healthy aging and avoiding chronic disease and frailty and being independent. But let's be honest, most people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, also, if you were to survey people, I think a lot of people's goals is to look a bit more toned. And a lot of people do care about like how we look and that's adds into confidence. So that's, I think an important thing for us to, as we go through this conversation, to kind of speak to the fact doesn't have to be one or the other. You can make improvements across the board if you want to. - Well, I was just gonna say, you really can't disassociate or you shouldn't. Disassociate, building muscle from increasing strength and power because number one, they're interrelated. It would be extremely difficult to focus just on strength and not gain any muscle because if nothing else, increasing muscle will have, it's not a direct, a linear relationship, but there's certainly a functional relationship between muscle growth, the size of a muscle and its ability to produce for us. But I think they're, from even from a health perspective, both of them become really important. So strength obviously has functional importance and independence, power, which is really the ability, it's kind of strength over time, it's force over time, the ability to carry out strength in a rapid fashion that becomes extremely important to avoid falls and other debilitating injuries. But I think sometimes people lose the fact that muscle is more than just for aesthetics. That muscle, I mean, there's several things. Number one, it serves as a kind of a reservoir for an island that touched on insulin resistance earlier. But it serves as a reservoir for glycogen storage and increasing the sensitivity of the insulin receptors on the muscle part of what resistance training does. But having a larger muscle allows you to store more glucose and thus certainly diabetes and insulin resistance is a huge issue. Muscle also, this is something that a lot of people don't realize as well, is that muscle is a secretory organ. It's secrets what are called myocons, which are, basically substances produced in the muscle. A lot of the myocon functions are intrinsic there within the muscle, but they also are secreted into the circulatory system, kind of in an endocrine fashion. And they interact so they can reduce chronic inflammatory responses, you get anti-inflammatory myocons that we talked about, the issues with chronic inflammation. And they have other effects on multiple other tissues that have health related benefits. So again, I don't think we should be looking to separate, just focus on strength or just focus on muscle. They're interactive and they're, I think, they're all quite important. And when you say quality, how do you define muscle quality versus quantity? - Yeah, so a couple things. I mean, one of the things that you see, which is really profound in the older individuals, the succopenic individuals, is fatty infiltration of the muscle. When you look at these MRIs, it's not just that the size of the muscle decreases substantially, but the, within the muscle, you see this marble and kind of like a, a t-bone steak. - Wagyu, wagyu beans. - Wagyu, yeah. - Wagyu beans. And it's been well documented that the fatty infiltration of muscle has negative effects on the muscle's functional capacity, including it's, it enhances the, when I say enhances, it increases insulin resistance. There's that and of course, quality also is the loss of the type two fibers, as I mentioned. So when you're having aptosis of type two muscle fibers, you're gonna have a reduced capacity to produce strength and power and that's where, I mean, a fall, well, you know, when you're 20, I remember when I was, I was 30, I broke a wrist, and it's like, I was doing it in martial arts and people sign in my cast and it's kind of a cool thing. I mean, you break your hip as an older individual. The less statistics I saw on that were something like 50% never regain their functional capacity. I mean, personal story, my dad, it happened to him, he fell in the hospital while trying to get onto his, he was out of his bed and trying to get up into his bed. Seven days, he had broken his hip, seven days later, he was dead from sepsis complications from the surgery. So, it's only something that we wanna avoid if we can, given that mortality rate. Sorry about that. Can we double click on the type of fiber, the type two and type one muscle fibers? What I'm hearing is that it's important as we age to try and attenuate, stop in particular, the loss of the type two muscle fibers. What is it about type two muscle fibers that makes them different to type one? And why is that important for generating power? And they're both quite important to type, they kind of have a yin and yang function. So, type one fibers are endurance related fibers. They are able, they're, I don't wanna say, indefatigable, but they don't fatigue easily, but they also cannot produce nearly as much force as their counterparts, the type two fibers, which are strength related, but they fatigue quite easily. So, your basically the human body is such, so beautifully designed to carry out multiple functions. If you wanna go for a long distance run, the type one fibers become much more important. If you wanna lift very heavy objects, your type two fibers become important. As mentioned, the functional capacity, I mean, opening the top of a bottle, I mean, carrying packages, all your functional tests, many of your functional tests involve strength, strength endurance related functions. And power becomes extremely important to reduce, so when you're fall, if you somehow and balance becomes an issue with a lot of people, as they get older, if you lose your balance and you start to fall, you'll have to be able to rapidly engage your strength to reverse that fall. You might have strength, but if it's not the power aspect, again, type two fibers have both the strength and power related component, then there's ways to train for each as well. - Yeah, which I definitely wanna get into. Would you say overall this appreciation for having enough muscle and also having quality muscle, and how that affects aging and our risk of falls, but not only that, our risk of metabolic conditions, things like diabetes, and other chronic diseases, is something that is appreciated generally across medicine now, outside of your fields, like in the same way that we might think about high cholesterol or high blood pressure. - I think that it's increasingly beginning to be recognized in that sense as the sort of the musculoskeletal muscle
skeletal system being the, I guess, the conductor of what the consequences are for other systems of the body. And so with not only that, but not only does it dictate movement, but it must, it must scale the muscle for the most part, it dictates fuel use and fuel partitioning. And so with the preservation of that and the preservation of function, then people begin to see the importance of, you know, why is it so crucial to avoid things like sarcopenic obesity and dyna-penic obesity? There really shouldn't be this kind of conflict between whether strength or power is more important. You know what, the power for the listeners, the way you train for power is you try to maximize the speed of the movement over these sort of lower, moderate loads, like 40 to 60% of 1 RM, whereas with classic strength training, you're trying to basically increase much heavier loads, like, or not necessarily moderate to heavy loads. And so I think that both adaptations can and should be trained for that. But yeah, I agree that there's a growing recognition of the importance of all of the stuff across domains in the health sphere. You mentioned it earlier, but I think we should come back to this. My understanding is this is not an old person's problem, like if we're not active in the way that we're going to speak about, some of these changes can begin as early as 30. So perhaps we can just double click on, what do we see out there if someone's living sentry, when would someone start to experience these changes at a muscle level and start to see their reduction in strength and power? So I've come across literature citing the beginnings of muscle degradation and the negative part of the aging process, starting in the early 30s. And that time in life coincides with a sedentary shift a few years after college where you literally settle into the seat of your sedentary job. And so whereas an individual might be walking around across campus or back in the 80s, you know, cycling around on the BMX or skateboarding in the 90s, now we're just sort of like this, right? This is the sport right now. That's not even PubMedding. Right, right, we're double time on the PubMed. Yeah, it's it really just this coinciding of the sedentary shift in life is really where you see inactivity, muscle disuse and this, in quotes, you know, secondary styles are copenia that's driven by inactivity. And then people are just so distracted with the stresses and obligations of life and career that they drop the ball on nutrition as well. And so there are definitely people who at 35 are, I would say biologically older than healthy, well-trained, well-fed individuals double their age. So that's the reality of things and that's a good thing. And from like an evolutionary perspective, how would you explain what's going on? I mean, we hear that phrase, use it or lose it. Does it just not make sense to have a lot of muscle if you're not using it? Well, I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, having muscle was energetically expensive, energetically wasteful because if you're not using it, muscle protein synthesis is a very energy intensive process. So if you're not using the muscle, you'd have to go scavenging for more food just to preserve the muscle and that didn't make any evolutionary sense. But of course, if from an evolutionary standpoint, you didn't have your McDonald's and your Burger King and your delis to go to, so you had to scavenge for your food, which necessarily made you need to use the muscle for the most part. And I also did want to add on to what Alan said that the, and he described it very well, but you have to remember that there is a genetic and lifestyle component to sarcopenius. So some people, and if you have the Filipino genetics, you can probably preserve more muscle over time. Yeah, sure. You have the Eastern European genetics, not so much. Sorry, I got the short end of the straw there. But in all seriousness, if you have good genetics to some extent, no matter what, if you're sedentary, you're going to start losing it at some point. But the onset is going to depend somewhat on your genetics and also somewhat on the extent of your activity where you're sedentaryism. So if you're highly sedentary, it's going to make that more, it's going to increase the likelihood that you start earlier and cause greater loss as far as the quantity of muscle. And if you're gardening, if you're doing some general chores and getting out there, walking a lot, to some extent, it'll help to prevent loss. I will say this, it's pretty clear that activities of daily living, even if you're quite active, you're still going to have sarcopenia. Really resistance training is the only thing that really counteracts sarcopenia. I asked you this, Alan, I think a couple of years ago, so maybe I'll throw it to Brad. But I imagine, and I've had this question from people in the community who sort of point to long-lived populations and look at centenarians and in areas of the world where gyms aren't kind of pervasive and people are just really active in terms of how they grow their food and or walking to and from work or to and from the grocery store. And they're not necessarily doing dedicated resistance training. So if someone was thinking, "Is resistance training really required or can I just be physically active in my daily life and pointing to those centenarians?" How would you explain that? We're going to depends upon what the activity is. Resistance training is moving weights, is basically using your muscles against a resistance. It doesn't necessarily have to be formal weight training, using machines or free weights. If you're just, like I said, if you're walking in this, some good, compelling evidence on it that I've seen, that just general everyday living tasks. That's not in the, you know, going into the Okinawa region or whatever, but just in the studied populations that we have of the US and Europe, you will see some retention of muscle as opposed to people who are very sedentary, but you still see sarcopy and it changes that happen over time. It is imperative. Now if you're a bricklay or something, if your job is or a UPS work or where you're carrying packages, that is a form of resistance training and that can help again to reduce the effects of sarcopy. So again, this is on the continuum. It's not you're either, well, there is a definition for sarcopy and as far as two standard deviations of muscle from healthy individual and a slow walking speed. That is the medical definition and by the way, sarcopy is now a medical condition. It is a, doctors can actually bill for treating sarcopy as an ICD 10 code as of like 10 years ago. But with that said, and again, I don't know how much you want to get into the variables here, but to truly achieve your best results, you're going to need to train relatively close to failure. And yes, worker is not struggling. If you struggle to pick up that package, he's not going to be working there much longer. Yeah, I want to get into the variables and what effective kind of optimal resistance training looks like. Certainly. I want to add to Brad's comment about the genetic and environmental interplay of the development of sarcopenia. I think that individuals vary psychologically and just sort of their attitude towards keeping the fight going as they advance into 60, 70, 80 years old. I've noticed that with a lot of folks north of 70, they kind of lose their give a, give a damn. You know, there's almost this downshift in fire for training and push in and pull it. And so I think that the psychological state and the attitude in general towards getting after it and training is very different usually between folks in there, let's say 30s to 50s or even 60s versus people 65-ish and up 70 and up. There tends to be the shift where people really do slow down psychologically, motivationally for the training aspect and doing what it takes to stave off sarcopenia. Do you think that's because
people underestimate how important muscle is to their quality of life. I think there is the element of people just simply not being aware. That's huge. My wife started training her parents who were in their 80s and they certainly had no idea what the value would be for that in terms of getting rid of pain and restoring function. It's pretty remarkable. I imagine a lot of people still see resistance training as something for bodybuilders. Yes, there is that attitude. You talk about people like the centenarians, the super centenarians. They do a lot of yard work and house work still. There's a bunch of pushing, pulling and squatting going on through the day course of the week and walking up and down hills. The major muscle groups get stimulated to a different degree than somebody living in the suburbs. I also wonder if there's a sneaky component to this where usually people, I guess through 30s, 40s, 50s, again, have that little bit of body fat. Maybe at that time of your life, particularly if you're looking at scale weight, it's not clear that you're losing a lot of muscle. Reverse recomp unfortunately. Whereas the holy grail would be to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. With the aging process, it's just the opposite. With the gain of fat tissue, you get the gain of these inflammatory adipocines that can inhibit and turn the muscle andabolic processes. There is this bidirectional negative outcome of this reverse recomp or sarcopenic obesity development with people staying relatively the same weight in some cases. I'd also like to mention too, when it comes to the blue zones, and I've not seen research on it, maybe it exists as to the extent of the sarcopenic changes in those individuals. Looking purely from a mortality standpoint to me is misguided that it's quality of life to me becomes as or certainly more important in all facets, but particularly in aging. So you can live. We are able to keep people living longer, or just genetic factors, and people can live. But how they're living is, of course, a paramount importance. If you need to be physically dependent on others to carry out tests while you're living, how much is that really living? It reminds me of some of the animal studies looking at calorie restriction, where they extend lifespan. And then the same question arises as to if those animals were out in the wild and in the environment, what would their quality of life look like? The animal, the whole caloric restriction thing with aging, we can break it down really simply to that caloric restriction extends longevity to the degree that it brings an individual to a healthy body composition. So caloric restriction beyond that, you've been across this line of diminishing returns where you see lean body mass compromised and then functional compromise. And so there's nothing inherently beneficial about caloric restriction. There's nothing inherently beneficial about, for example, extending fasts if it reduces body fat to a healthy degree than great it's working. But you can't take a normal weight or certainly a lean or an athletic active person and figure, "Oh, we're just going to caloric restrict so we can increase longevity." It doesn't work that way. Obviously right now, JLP1, Agonist, is very, very topical and clearly a lot of chronic disease burden in America is driven by excessive body fat. And so it makes sense that JLP1, Agonist, have entered the conversation and are pretty heavily prescribed now, I think, 30 plus million Americans are on a JLP1 agonist. Do you have any concerns with regards to people using those medications and losing a lot of weight if they're not also thinking about what we've been talking about so far, which is the importance of muscle and protecting the muscle quantity and quality? It's not emphasized enough that the reduction of appetite, or sometimes in a lot of cases, a near elimination of appetite and cravings, is going to result in just obviously reduced food, calorie, nutrient intake, and then the subsequent losses in muscle tissue and lean body mass in general. There is a joke about semi-glute-hyde giving you semi-glutes, right? Because people forget to train, people forget to eat, and especially in athletic communities where, for example, there's a lot of anecdotes in CrossFit communities where people get on a AGLP1 drug and it's fantastic for the fat loss and appetite cutting aspect. But then again, they actually forget to eat and then they forget to fuel properly and then they can't necessarily train to the capacity that they would have if they had remembered to eat and fuel. So there is a lot of caution involved with that. I sidetracked myself with thinking about semi-glute-hyde being semi-glutes. But yes, to your previous question about the relative urgency of fat loss versus muscle gain. I know you loaded that question with 45 caliber hollow point, but yes, they're both important. And I think that there are ways to sort of individualize the situation to see who needs one versus the other more. I think at the population level, we can build the case that the global obesity prevalence is headed towards 25% -- the obesity prevalence in the United States is a little over 42% or 43% with no difference between the sexes. So that is an urgent catastrophic problem, right, true. But if people understand the relationship between muscle preservation and health and as it ties into fat loss, then they've figured out the whole thing. There's some really interesting research. I think it was a 2018-2017 study by a guy named Clark where he took a cohort of obese individuals and super interesting study. Never been replicated. It's a two-year study. Put them on a periodized progressive resistance training program. He put them on a diet that was a maximum of 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. He put them on a total caloric intake, which was roughly their RMR, with their resting energy expenditure. That was their assignment. Another part of their assignment was, okay, you are going to focus on increases in strength performance with this progressive resistance training program. They're also going to increase endurance performance with this cardio respiratory program. You specifically are not to focus on body weight. You are specifically not to weigh yourself. Now, there's a bunch of consistent research showing daily weighing is beneficial for weight loss and weight loss maintenance. With this particular study, with this particular assignment, they lost a little over a third of their body weight in the two-year period just by focusing on training performance. It's really interesting to me that this study or some variant of it has not been redone since Clark did it. I'd also say there's the classic fat but fit research, which shows that those who are overweight and even obese and are fit, more fit, are actually healthier, have better health-related markers than those who are thin or normal weight, but unfit. Again, fitness has multiple connotations. It's not just resistance training, but there's obviously a aerobic capacity and other factors. Certainly, I would say fitness per se, if you had to pick, you shouldn't have to pick one. It is a false dichotomy. If you're both leaner and more fit, that's going to be the best. Even if you are overweight, just getting into the gym and getting fit, particularly, I am somewhat biased as a exercise-strain-related researcher. But resistance training to me is the most important thing you can do. I'm certainly not disparaging. I think aerobic exercise is extremely important. As I've gotten older, I've become more and more a believer in the importance. I think that you shouldn't have to choose one, but resistance training is indispensable. It gives you a lot of the benefits that aerobic training does by itself. For sure. You don't want to downplay resistance training. You're going to end up surrendering your broke heart. I'm not sure. If you're taking a fistful of 10 or 20 capsules every morning, I don't blame you for thinking that this doesn't feel like real health. Enter IMAIT. Look, I get the skepticism about supplements, partnering with it.
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[email protected] for a special discount on your first order of I amate daily ultimate essentials. That'siamatehealth.com and use the promo code Simon. Replace your cabinet full of supplement bottles today. Yeah, I just had Dr. Robert Eckle on the show who's an endocrinologist and scientist that's interested in obesity. And he was talking about exactly what you just spoke to this kind of idea of metabolically healthy obesity, particularly in some individuals who seem to be quite active. And they're actually looking at redefining obesity as preclinical obesity and clinical obesity kind of based on this in that some people with excessive out-apacity seem to not be getting the same metabolic consequences as others, which is interesting. At a high level, we think come back to like the problems we're talking about here for the American population is excessive body fat and being undermuscled. That's what I'm hearing and some combination of both. Would it be fair to say that in terms of the lifestyle elements that are driving those problems, excessive body fat is largely driven by nutrition and being undermuscled, if you look at the average American diets today, is largely driven by being sedentary and not doing resistance training. That's fair. I'd agree with that. Yeah, I mean, there are some nuance to that, but the big picture, yeah. Right, so you look at resistance training, though not necessarily as the big lever to lose body fat, but more as a lever to improve your muscle. Correct. It's very easy to out-eat your exercise. It's very hard to out-exercise over-eating, because ultimately it comes down to calories and calories at energy and energy out as to losing body mass per se. Another, what tissues you're losing, of course, will somewhat depend on your activity levels. But yeah, I mean, if you do an hour of running, you'll burn 600 calories. That's like a bag of potato chips. So it's pretty hard to, for most people, food is just so, there's an overabundance of food in our society. It's so available, and just people like they have their snacks, they just take food. It's without even thinking most people. It's just offered everywhere. As opposed to you talk evolution from an evolutionary standpoint, where it was very difficult to get food, it's so important to focus on, from a fat loss perspective, focus on nutrition. You see people at the beginning of the year, I'm just going to exercise, and that's going to take care of everything. And it certainly will help. I'm not certainly putting down that it's not a component, but the most important factor there is your nutritional intake. Which is where the jail perwanaghanus seem to be effective. In an environment where there's a lot of hyperpalible foods and a ton of food noise, it makes sense to me why people are getting the results they're getting on those shrugs. Just before somebody dings me on the idea that in younger subjects, muscle protein synthesis is maximal at 20 to 25-ish grams, I'm aware of the Macnottan at all study, where they compared 20 grams versus 40 grams in the post-exercise state with a high volume of sets, where 40 grams of protein post-exercise outperformed the 20 grams by about 20%. And then of course, trauma in it all comes in a couple years ago where he compares 25 grams of protein with a hundred grams of protein post-exercises and milk protein. Unfortunately, this study is missing an intermediate dose, which probably would have been superior to that 25 or not superior to the hundred grams. So yeah, I was thinking about that and I wanted to mention that before I totally forgot to pick back up on it. - What's the main takeaway from that that you want to leap into? - Sure, sure. The main takeaway from that is Brad and I were right in our 2018 paper, man. (laughing) - I'll piggyback on his comment that we have a paper, I collaborated on the paper with a group in Portugal that's hopefully final stages of review. And we actually have a pre-print out on this. But we looked at muscle protein synthesis in plant proteins versus animal based proteins. And there was some nuances to it because plant proteins, there was combinations of different plant proteins. But the really interesting finding overall was that it really did not make much difference in the younger individuals, plant versus animal, but it did in the older individuals. And our hypothesis, you know, what we are explanatory rationale was that the losing threshold comes into play. And there's evidence of this that in younger individuals losing threshold really isn't as important. The, and Alan talked about 20 grams, it might be that losing as a trigger might not even be as important as long as you're getting some that you don't need a higher dose that for some, for whatever reason, in older individuals who are anabolically resistant, that there may be this need for this really higher dose, maybe over, as Alan said, 35, 40 grams. And in that, I'm sorry, there will be four grams, but like a 40 gram dose of protein or more. To me, the interesting takeaway is is that plant-based proteins might have to be supplemented with leucine or you might need more better blend to really get your leucine, hit your leucine threshold. Or just stack even more total daily protein. Exactly. Which is difficult for older individuals. Which is not necessarily an efficient way to yeah, older individuals tend to have more difficulty with getting food in that. Loisatiety. Loisatiety as well as the taste sensation tends to diminish as you get older. I was gonna bring this up later, because I saw that paper of yours, but let's hit it now. So I have a few questions on that. And mostly because this was an area where recently, I had Dr. Luke Van Luegan on the show. And some of the things he shared with me kind of changed my perspective a bit. So let me throw this at you and see what you think. If I'm thinking about this the right way or not. So he ran a study, I think 2025. And they were looking at daily muscle protein synthesis. So maybe we can double back to what you were talking about. And if that was daily or after a meal and what the difference is. And they compared it to a vegan to an omnivorous diet. I'm not sure if you've seen this study. It was relatively new, so I don't expect you to kind of have the results handy. But they were looking at 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram. And these subjects were 72 years old. And they did like a 10 day crossover looking at eating an omnivorous diet and then a vegan diet. There was no resistance training in this study. And in that diet where they gave the subjects the food. So they know exactly how much protein they're getting. They didn't see a difference in daily muscle protein synthesis. And then interestingly, they extended that study and this is about to be published. So I will put a caveat here and say, go to go through a peer reviewed. God has to go through that process. So we'll come back to that. But I just wanted to throw out what he shared with me and see what you thought. So they ran that study and had subjects prepare their own food. Trying to target these protein levels. What do you think happened? Though when they were doing the vegan diet, they ate less calories and less protein. And subjects had less muscle protein synthesis and the muscle size was actually reduced compared to the omnivorous phase. But what was interesting was that if the subjects were doing a resistance training, it didn't seem to make a significant difference between the two groups. So my question, I guess, and I realize I just threw a lot at you at once. Feel free to comment on what part of that you want to. But my question is, how much of those differences, I guess, in the animal versus plant protein, matter if the right resistance training stimulus.
You know what this is there? I just saw a study where older subjects, not exactly sure the age bracket, older adults, were supplemented with 250 gram doses of protein, high quality protein, on top of their habitual intake. So you're supplementing the diet with 100 grams of protein. So it almost doesn't really matter how low your habitual was. You're definitely there. It didn't do anything to increase lean body mass because there was no resistance training program. So the lever of resistance training is far stronger than protein effects for sure. And so now I wanted to add that. What did you see in your study Brad? - Well, I was a meada. And so that's not necessarily indicative and muscle protein synthetic responses are one out. So you know, you just an acute study. So you can't necessarily, we can infer. It's hypothesis generating, but really Luke's study I'm interested in seeing that. You can't necessarily extrapolate that to long-term gains. If you're asking me my opinion, I see no reason. As long as you have a good mix of plant-based proteins, if you're hitting your target, which is, again, if you're talking about optimization, probably 1.6 to 2.0 grams somewhere in that room, but even 1.4, in that population. So if we're not talking about bodybuilding population, that's looking to maximize every gram of muscle they gain. I just don't think it's gonna make much difference between plant and animal, but. - There's different, a couple different pieces of literature we can point to. I mean, with noons, noonez, noonez, noonez at all, did a recent meta-analysis, well done, meta-analysis. I mean, they didn't some analyze like we did with trained and untrained subjects, but they found this cutoff at about 1.59 grams per kilogram of body weight being helpful to a range of adults up to the older adults, whereas they didn't see anything from the 1.6 and up with older adults, but the authors also conceded that, hey, there's basically no research on older adults consuming 1.6 grams per kilogram and up. And so I would speculate that in certain metabolically compromised states like sustained hypochloric conditions, older folks, older folks on plant-based diets can benefit from the 1.6 and up. Just like the younger folks were seen to benefit from 1.6-ish grams per kilogram of body weight in first heavier Lorraine and colleagues, and then Montene and colleagues. So these were two studies that pitted complete plant-based versus omnivorous diets. They only two of their kind with resistance trainees, and they didn't see any differences between groups in terms of size and strength gain over, I believe, 12-week period on both of those studies, 10 or 12. - So when we're thinking about optimizing protein intake, and you mentioned like 1.6 grams per kilogram, from all of the available research, do we know if 1.6 grams per kilogram is significantly better than say 1.2 grams per kilogram where a lot of people probably naturally fall, or is it only clear that 1.6 grams per kilogram is significantly better than the RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram? - So I think the first thing that I wanna point out is the use of the term significantly because that gets kind of bastardized when we talk about this. Usually when people talk about significantly greater, they're talking from a statistical standpoint, which is really, again, I don't wanna bore everyone to death with statistical jargon, but it comes down to a p-value, it's a probability value, it's not about a magnitude of effect. People, when we usually use a word significant, you think, wow, that's a big effect, you can talk about statistically significant and the magnitude of effect can be small. Again, from my reading of the literature, it's a continuum, so we shouldn't use these binary cut-offs, 1.2, what about 1.3? What about 1.4? So as you start getting lower, you will start to see some reduction in the gains that people experience. You know, what point is that can be practically meaningful? Again, I think this is where an interaction between left self-actors, genetic factors, plays into it, and it's hard to give an exact people want these cut-offs. I certainly would say if you're at the RDA, you're gonna substantially, and this, from, I think most people would practically mean it, consider it practically meaningfully reduce the effects, the magnitude of effect that you achieve. So you'd say the floor of that range of where you would want like the lowest protein intake to be, would be around 1.2 grams per kilogram? I mean, if you want to maximize gains, 1.6, I think is the good target for the most individuals. And this can be variability when you, it's not like everyone has the exact same target anyway, because these are averages that we derive, that provide guidelines, but, you know, again, genetics and other factors are gonna enter into that. But as you start, I would just say, shoot for that, and if you're less, at some point you start to compromise gains, 1.5, how much I don't think that would practically meaningfully for most people, if you're a body builder, I think that might be practically meaningful for many. But for the context of the person who is wanting to avoid sock, copainier and the consequences that we were talking about earlier. - Oh, sure, so, so 1.2 is generally kind of the floor. That's generally what, the safe minimum. In our meta analysis in 2018 with Morton, that was roughly the average intake of the subjects in aggregate before protein supplementation. So protein supplementation took them up to 1.5, which is 1.6, and some beyond that. And so there was some benefit, some concrete benefit to bringing protein up from the 1.1, 1.2-ish up to the 1.6, which is a point, and then there was a little bits of outlying benefits above and beyond that, in you caloric or caloric balance conditions. Now we have to consider that there are going to be some older folks who engage sustained hypo caloric conditions with resistance training as normal weight to lean individuals. And so there was a 2014 systematic review in meta analysis by Eric Helms, who found that a dosage of 2.3 to 3.1, grams per kilogram of fat free mass, maximized the retention of lean mass, and this particular population who potentially niche, but we're talking lean resistance trained individuals in dieting or hypochloric conditions. So here we are in 2025, and refalo and colleagues added a whole lot more data to Helms' original systematic review. So whereas Helms looked at six studies, refalo collected 29 studies, and this meta regression, and found that, okay, so they came up with two figures. So on a total body weight, on a grams per total body weight basis, protein dosing that maximally preserved lean mass in lean resistance trainees in hypochloric conditions was 1.9 to 3.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. So that is very similar to Helms at all, if you were to kind of ballpark that into fat free mass. But now here's the really trippy thing. The fat free mass figures are a lot more dramatic in refalo's systematic review than Helms. So whereas Helms saw 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilo of fat free mass having the greatest effect on lean mass preservation, refalo at all saw 2.5 to 4.2 grams per kilogram of fat free mass having the greatest effect on lean mass retention in resistance trainees who are lean and hypochloric. So the moral of the story is we've got the general population who may or may not be in a sustained caloric deficit or may or may not be lean and resistance trained who will mostly get along well with the 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. And then we've got athletic populations sustaining hypochloric conditions who can benefit from not only 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, but potentially a whole lot more than that, even double that per refalo at all's latest systematic review and metal regression. So when you say of body weight,
How should people run that calculation? The total body weight or the lean mass? Good point. Good point. We can relay the figures that directly relate to lean mass, but I think it's a lot more practical to just look at the total body weight figures. I think that if people base their protein needs on ideal body weight or even target or goal body weight, they'll come a lot closer to the targets or the values that were arrived at in research where we're looking at normal weight individuals. So how does someone, let's say someone's listening right now and wondering how to apply that to themselves? Yeah. To themselves. So if somebody is happy with their current body weight, then they would look at 1.6 grams per kilogram of total body weight as the sweet spot. And if somebody is severely overweight or underweight, then they would either estimate lean mass and apply some of those figures that we talked about or they would simply estimate ideal body weight or look at their goal body weight and base protein intakes on that as a proxy for lean mass-based protein targets. The muscle protein synthetic data that we have is generally based on lean, when we're talking younger individuals, lean younger individuals, which is somewhere between like 12 to 15% body fat and men and 20 to 24% body fat and women. So that's where we're basing it on body weight. So you'd have to say if I was going to be, you figure out what you would be at 12% body fat, what your weight would be. Certainly if you weigh, if you're 50 pounds over weight, the extra protein based on that weight is not going to help you build muscle. So if you're someone that's, let's say, 300 pounds and you are on a JLP1 agonist, how is that person going to calculate the amount of protein? You know, there's ways to calculate ideal body weight that dieticians have used since the beginning, but those spit out some really brutally low numbers. So you would just base it on your target or goal body weight. How much protein do you usually look for if you're having a protein ball? Oh, my goodness. I do protein bars as just full-blown emergency foods. So I really don't care. I get like disappointed if it's like a lot lower than 15 grams, but yeah. I look for 30. But yeah, I don't really care about it. The Alan Brad, not made it, but it was review for four meals a day, hitting at least 0.4 to 0.55 grams. Has that kind of stood the test of time? Do you still think even distributions of proteins throughout the day could be slightly more important? If you're a body builder, for the gen pot like I tell people, this is my view. I don't know about Alan, but people in the general public just hit your daily protein. You can, I mean, it's pretty clear too with the intermittent fasting research that there's not much difference. I mean, so I mean, yeah, if you're a body builder, I think that's where you micromanage and it becomes more and more important. So again, these are on spectrums. Alan had a great table that he made for nutrient timing like what's, when it's unimportant, it's not necessarily one answer you can give. So in certain populations, I don't know if you agree with that, but I do. And there's some key research we can point to as well. So yes, Sue, we're on now or. Oh, we're back rolling. This is how we do it, Brian. It's 24/7, man. We just cut that out. This is the good stuff. So yeah, in 2020, Yasuda and Kali compared two versus three protein feedings a day and basically untrained subjects, but they put them through a resistance training program. And they found that the three a day, the three doses a day outperformed the two protein feedings a day for muscle size and strength gains. And I believe it was like a 12 weekish. That was in 2020. So fast forward to 2025. And we finally got the three versus five by Tavarez and colleagues in resistance trained subjects, finding no significant difference between groups and muscle size and strength gains regardless of whether they had three protein rich meals or five protein rich meals. And so, you know, we're sort of back to this question of who are we looking at, who are we trying to optimize for. There are some nitpicks I can make with the Tavarez study because even the three protein feeding a day group, they still had five meals, but two of the meals were low protein. They didn't do straight three freaking meals a day versus five meals a day with the different protein spreads. So practically speaking, I think for the general population who is still interested in building muscle, a practical minimum would is possibly three meals, three protein rich meals a day. And then you can just kind of optimize up from there. You can use Brad and my model if you're a body builder to where you do a minimum of four protein feedings a day that's somewhere between the point four to point five, five grams per kilogram of body weight per meal in terms of protein content, which would translate to roughly 30 to 50-ish grams of protein depending on your body size. So what about this idea that if you donate enough protein in a single meal, you won't turn on this process of muscle protein synthesis? Is that an oversimplification and does that depend on whether someone's being fasted or fed before that? Yeah, yeah. Sort of this, the muscle full effect, which can happen with supposedly an over abundance of feedings as well. So yeah, that would be more of the muscle full effect. In theory, if somebody consumed all of their protein in one or two meals, they won't get the same degree of muscle protein synthesis as if they consumed it in like, let's say, three to five meals. We have a cute research looking at that by, I think it's Aureda, Jose Aureda and colleagues where they compared to 40 gram doses versus four 20 gram doses versus eight 10 gram doses. Eight 10 gram doses, that's right. And the four 20 gram doses did best. But then again, you're looking at a design that's not necessarily externally valid. You're looking at isolated protein doses. You're looking at kind of a low overall protein dose. And so it's tough to say you just basically have to connect the dots. And if you want to hedge your bets in the direction of possibly optimal, you really do want to have more than, let's say, one or two protein. In terms of what's meaningful to the average listener, again, who is wanting to prevent psychopenia as they age and supplement the resistance training, which we're going to get into kind of three three meals a day where you have a good amount of protein in each of those meals is probably going to get you there. So that was going to be my point is that we can look at optimal. And again, when we look at studies, you look at statistical significance, but to me, the most important thing for certainly for the gen pop is practical meaningfulness. And Alan brought this up before, but by far, resistance training is the primary driver. And you will get even with suboptimal protein doses, you'll still get resistance training gains. Then the question becomes, well, how much are you actually losing out on as far as the gains and strength and muscle? And by the way, the gains and muscle strength tends to be less affected by protein. It certainly is affected still because of the relationship primarily between muscle and strength. But I would say that for most people, it's total daily, if you're getting your total daily protein, even if you get it, it's going to be pretty hard to get it in one meal. But I think that would be not the greatest, I'm not saying that would be a good way to go about it. But I don't think you'd see the vast majority of people who were just looking to gain some muscle and be healthy, that it would have practically meaningful differences. We see this again. The intermittent fasting studies are really quite compelling. We've had a bunch of them now. So a six- Grant Tinsley- Grant Tinsley's research, yeah. I mean, he's doing, was it the 618, so 6 hours fed, 18 hours fasted, and you just don't see much difference in muscle development between the two groups. Again, there's been multiple studies here. I think we need to go beyond just looking at its significant, statistically significant or not, and trying to tease out how much are they actually gaining on these regimens. In my opinion, I think where it starts to become real importance from a practically [BLANK_AUDIO]
standpoint is for people want to be maximally jacked. Yeah, like I went. Yeah. Grant Tinsley's work. It really influenced my view of the whole protein distribution situation. And really sort of reinforced, for me, the hierarchy of importance. So if you get first tier of importance over here, total daily protein, then the distribution of those constituent doses of the total, very distantly secondary importance. Whereas distribution or protein source quality of the protein source becomes more and more important the lower your protein intake is. That's just suboptimal. Yes. Yeah. Which brings us back to what we kind of started this with Luke Van Loone's research. And we've had a great conversation about protein now. But one of the points that I really wanted to make to listen to this show is if they are eating a plant-based diet, and they are in, say, 60, 70s and 80s, when satiety can go down, there is a kind of greater degree of intentionality that's needed because of the satiety inducing effects of a plant-based diet. And with that, you're more likely to under consume both total calories and protein. Which then could have that negative effect that we're talking about, particularly if you're not coupling that with resistance training. Would that be fair? That's fair. I keep going back to those two studies that compared vegans versus omnivores resistance trainees. But I also have to concede that. Look, those studies involved protein powder supplementation. So one of them was heavy-elorane at all. They boosted the subject's protein intake with soy protein. The other group had white protein, I think. So they both had a supplement. Yeah. So it's not necessarily going to have a ton more fiber necessarily in that group. So in a scenario where you're not necessarily depending on protein powder, then, yeah, satiety could be a barrier to getting in-quads optimal. Yeah, I think that's where I was going with intentionality. I think if you're, if we're talking about up at 1.3, 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram, a protein isolate, which I don't think is a bad thing, is going to make it a lot easier to get there, for sure, for most people. Yeah, particularly older individuals, again, the satiety aspect and also, again, your taste, the reduction diminishing taste sensations. You can drink food and it's much easier to go down. It didn't, Greg put, say, that it's straight to the muscle, just. No digestion. No digestion. He said that? He said that. He said that. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah. The like, great, Greg. We had some fun times with him at the body power expo. We hung out. We ate, and, well, we drank at that point, but, yeah. All right. So, what was for another day? Speaking of bodybuilders, before we close the loop here, tie the bow on all things protein, what about the idea of the anabolic window? Oh, we're just talking about distribution. Where do we start? Distribution. What about slamming that protein shake straight after you do your resistance training? Is there any merit to that? I think you and I spoke about this and it seemed to have a lot to do with whether someone was fed or not before. Yeah, for sure. We can refresh everyone on that. And then again, is this even important for the everyday person? Okay. I'll try to do the elevator pitch version of that. So, in the anabolic window hypothesis has its origins in glycogen restocking. Studies back in the late '80s. And so, it was a John Ivy and Robert Portman who started looking at differences in, well, first glycogen restocking with immediately administered versus delayed ingestion of carbohydrate after an overnight fast after a glycogen depletion protocol, which is 90 to 120 minutes of moderate high intensity, tapping out glycogen in the quads. So yeah, well, duh. There is an anabolic window for glycogen restocking. If you're going to look at the hours post-exercise, if you delay, then you're going to be potentially significantly screwed by the eight-ish hour point if you have another event to engage in endurance-wise. If you did not take advantage of the anabolic window. So, that concept sort of got superimposed on the, okay, what about protein timing post-exercise? What about protein timing plus carbohydrate post-exercise? How was that? What was your on that for a second? Yeah. So in that research, if you didn't consume carbohydrates quickly enough after exercise, you weren't able to get enough glucose stored in muscle before your next event. Correct, correct. So, for endurance athletes who have this multi-stage event, then you absolutely have an post-exercise anabolic window to restock muscle glycogen. And how long does that window? You know, gents and asker, if you can drop, they basically said, look, if you have less than eight hours between events, between glycogen depleting events, then you better consume post-exercise carbohydrate ASAP and then you better consume it to the order of 1 to 1.2 grams per kilogram, body weight per hour until you restocked at like 3 to 4 hours. And then you're ready to go by the time the next event comes through. So that was the post-exercise anabolic window for carbohydrate. And so John Ivey and Robert Portman figured, hey, what about muscle building? And so they compared immediately ingested proteins and amino acids and/or carbohydrate, no ingested post-exercise immediately versus delayed. And sure enough, you saw greater muscle protein synthesis with the sooner consumed protein and carbohydrates versus the delayed stuff. Now the thing, okay, this is a little bit of a rabbit hole here, but they used some pretty low doses of protein and amino acids in these earlier studies. So, okay, so we'll set that little tidbit aside for a second. So what happened after that in the decades following was longitudinal studies. In other words, studies that span beyond the acute phase of just a few hours post-exercise. We're looking at weeks and months of training and their results on muscle size and strength and so we can either look at muscle protein synthesis in the short term or we can look at gains in muscle hypertrophy, actual gains in muscle size and strength in the longer term. So these longer term studies didn't necessarily bear out the anabolic window hypothesis, especially when total daily protein intake was about 1.6, 1.7 and up. And Brad and I did a meta-analysis on this in 2013 where we included like 13-ish studies where we found no meaningful difference between the protein timed conditions versus protein neglect conditions, pre-end or post-exercise as long as total daily protein was around 1.6, 1.7 grams per kilogram of body weight. And then after that got a bunch of people mad because the anabolic window didn't necessarily exist. But Brad and I, we proposed and we did a narrative review before we did that meta-analysis. And in our narrative review, we said, look, why is everybody looking at the time of ingestion post-exercise when really it's all about optimizing the timing of availability of nutrients in blood circulation? And so there's a certain time course that you have to consider after you consume even quickly digested protein like a 40 gram dose of a way, for example, we'll take 45-ish minutes to peak in the blood. And so we thought, hey, if there's this anabolic window situation that's immediately post-exercise, why don't we test it out? And so we ran this randomized controlled trial where we compared immediate pre-exercise protein feeding 25 grams of weight versus immediate post-exercise feeding 25 grams of weight. And so if there was in fact some sort of immediate post-exercise anabolic window which is defined as like 30 to 60 minutes post-exercise, you got to have your vast, digesting protein and carbs. Then we might see it with this particular comparison. So we did not see that. There was no significant difference in muscle size and strength gains regardless of whether you consume protein immediately post-exercise or immediately pre-exercise. And by the way, there's a cute research looking at the muscle protein synthetic effect of protein by itself versus protein consumed with carbohydrate. And so that member, I said, okay, let's put that aside for a second. Okay, so I'm going to grab that piece.
And when you consume about 20 to 25 grams of protein or more, it doesn't matter how much carbohydrate you add to it because muscle protein synthesis pretty much plateaus at that point, regardless of carbs co-ingested with it. Now some of the nerdyer people will say, yeah, well, more carbs equals less muscle protein breakdown. Okay, maybe possibly, but this has been compared by Juha Holme in 2015, where he looked at a 30 gram dose of way protein post-exercise versus way plus maltodextrin post-exercise. And they carried that out for a number of weeks and they found no significant differences between groups in terms of muscle size and strength gain. And so we're slowly just kind of like the anabolic window theory really is kind of falling apart as the years go by. And finally, in 20, I believe it was 23 or 2024, gentleman named Yasin Locke, he did kind of a replication of me and Brad's pre versus post-exercise study, except instead of the protein neglect period being two hours, he stretched out to three hours. So he compared a protein timed group with protein immediately pre and post versus a protein neglect group where the lag was three hours, pre and three hours post. No significant difference between groups in muscle size and strength gain as long as total daily protein was optimal, which he did make it optimal, like around two grams per kilogram a body weight. So this whole post-exercise anabolic window concept was great. I mean, and it's still, look, if you want to consume protein post-exercise, go for it. It's an opportunity to feed. There's no downside to it. And it can serve as one of your protein dosings that you could potentially optimize this distribution of protein intake through the day if your main goal is muscle mass gain. But the timing of protein appears to be highly, like I said, distance secondary concern if you're already getting total daily protein. So people who are really kind of stressing out over protein timing, it's a whole lot of a do about nothing. Yeah, I think again, what I'm hearing is, and you you step that out in terms of your priorities, is that if you get total protein right, then a lot of these other things kind of fade away in terms of their importance, whether it's distribution or proximity to a workout or protein source. If I can add some nuance just from my own personal perspective. So in the maiden analysis that Alan and I and James Krieger had carried out, as Alan pointed out, there was no statistically significant differences. Once protein was equated for a total daily protein intake. But if you did look, there's something called a forest plot where you get a zero line where there's no effect, and then everything to the right, it favors protein timing, everything to the left, favors no protein timing. The interesting thing was all of the studies showed a very small, but there was no study that showed a benefit to non-protein timing. And for me, I think just in extrapolating it further, for the Gen Pop, I mean, the effect size was something like 0.16, which is a very weak standard, you know, standard mean difference. But so for the Gen Pop, I don't think it really makes any practical meaningful differences. If I'm coaching a bodybuilder, that small effect may, this is worth to me, the practically meaningful aspect comes into play as opposed to the quote unquote, just a little significance. I do recommend when I've done this, hey, it's not going to hurt you, and it may qualify, we don't, study isn't going to tell you this, but there's the possibility that it may give you a slight edge. So yeah, I think again, the hierarchy for the Gen Pop, for probably the vast majority of your audience, it's not going to mean anything. And then thinking again about that total protein number, it sounds like both of you lean more towards that 1.6 grams per kilogram of ideal body weight. I was spoken with Stuart Phillips, I think he tends to think that 1.2 grams per kilogram is probably enough. Are you guys leaning more to 1.6 just to be sure? Again, I think it depends upon what your idea of practical meaningfulness is. I think we have enough data that I think you can get better gains, whether they're practically meaningful between 1.2 and 1.6 is really going to be dependent on the person, in some extent. I will say this, if I'm coaching a bodybuilder, there's no way in heck I'm telling them to take 1.2. grams, and certainly it's not going to hurt you to take the higher amount, and potentially even somewhat more. And it might hurt you from a practical meaningful statement. I've argued a lot. Let's do about this. And he finally conceded that, like, maybe 1.6 and up, or certainly beyond 1.6. That's what we're arguing about. We basically were agreed on this sort of plateau at 1.6. But I got him to concede that in hypochaloric conditions or in caloric, sustained caloric deficit conditions, possibly more than 1.6 could benefit athletic populations. So I'll add to Alan's point there, it should be published imminently, but I collaborated with a group out of Germany on a study that's in its final fingers crossed. Final stage of peer review. And we had three groups. These were resistance train, young resistance train individuals in a caloric deficit. And this were, they were coached, it was a four week study, so it was relatively short term. But they were nutritionally coached every week. They were getting their diets reviewed, et cetera. And one group got 1.6. Another group got 2.4. And another group got 3.2 grams per kilogram. And the 2.4, and there was no difference between 2.4, and no very similar results, 2.4 and 3.2. But 2.4 and 3.2 had greater preservation of lean mass than the 1.6 did. And so the 1.6, I believe, lost a kilogram a little over a kilogram, which would be 2.2. And they were doing a resistance training? Yeah, the other regimented resistance training program, whereas the other two lost a fraction of that, like, less than half a pound, I think it was like 0.2 or 0.3 kilograms. That's great, because that's a direct comparison study. That would square with the meta regression that Reflow just did. And it would also square with, you know, Eric Helms' 2020-2014 systematic review. And so I think, you know, in the conversation of, you know, appropriate or optimal protein dosing, we have to ask who's the population we're looking at? What kind of state of energy balance? And again, these are short, I think, another important point. These are short-term studies. So what would happen if we extended that and people are taking 1.6 versus 2.2 versus 1.6? Over a long periods of time, how would that continue to show discrepancies, where that would widen the effects of muscle gain? Or would it somehow regress? So there would be regression to the mean. We can't say. I'd be interested to also kind of see how that study would play out in the context of people who are obese and using a JLP one agonist, another kind of context where they're in calorie restriction. And there's much greater ability to preserve muscle when you're obese, but when you're, these were lean subjects in the study that I was referring to relatively lean. When you're obese, your body can use the fat for the muscle protein synthetic energy requirements. So you can basically, you're using, you don't have to use protein tissues. You can use your stored fat. I don't know if Alan would agree. Yeah, yeah. But for sure, decomposition is most pronounced. So in other words, the fat loss and muscle gain simultaneously. It's most pronounced in individuals who have the body fat to spare. And also who have the margin of muscle potential to spare. So in terms of hard numbers, if a man's fat-free mass index is, let's say, below 23 or so, then he's got some potential to gain more muscle mass. The closer you get to about 25 in terms of fat-free mass index, the closer you get to sort of a population level, ultimate muscular potential. And so of this same individual had a body fat level of, let's say above 15. Then you know, we put those two together, put those two qualities together, he's got potential.
for recomposition. When you say recomp, what is that mean by definition? The loss of fat mass and gain of lean mass simultaneously. Yeah. And it is made possible by having the extra body fat to fuel the process and also having the potential for muscle gain in front of you. So if I were to sort of do the converse of that, you take somebody who's at a fat free mass index significantly above 23 and a body fat level significantly below 15, well, then this individual better choose one goal or the other whether they want to focus on muscle gain or fat loss because it's not likely going to happen. So when someone has more body fat, they can use the energy stored within that tissue to fuel the muscle protein synthesis that's occurring after resistance training. Yes. The concept is that when you start getting leaner and leaner, the body, obviously, you have to fuel protein synthesis to build muscle. It's the most important factor, much more important than muscle protein breakdown, at least by the evidence we have now. And it's a very energy intensive process. So as you start becoming leaner and leaner, there's less internal energy and dodginess energy that can be utilized for fuel. And that basically the muscle, the body will start to take lean tissue and it's not going to take it from the kidneys or the heart. It's going to take it from your skeletal muscle. Sure. So if you have the body fat to spare, you have a viable contributor of ATP to the process. And I want to relate to you that anecdote actually got from Brett. So we're talking about recomposition, like with women, Brett mainly works with women. And so women who have the possibility of recomposition in front of them, in my observations, need to have at least 25-ish percent body fat and a maximum fat-free mass index of about like 18-ish. Okay. Then you have recomp available in front of you. If you're very lean as a woman, below 25 percent body fat and also close to your muscular potential towards 19-ish as a fat-free mass index, then you have to pick one goal versus another. But anecdot, related to me by Brett Contreras, or a good friend and colleague, he sees just continued recomp in women for very long periods of time, even beyond when you would think the recomp would stop. And so this whole argument online about, you know, as a caloric surplus necessary or is it not it? I mean, technically it is necessary. But also in reality, people have varying degrees of body fat to where the more excess body fat somebody has, then the less they need a purposeful caloric surplus programmed into their thing to gain muscle. But coming back to general population because the average person does have excessive body fat, then they're likely to be someone who can build some muscle and lose some fat. And they don't need to think about, okay, if I want to build muscle, I need to increase my calories from where they are. Not necessarily. The interesting thing, I just ran a transformation contest in my group, my online community. And it had 36 people, like 90, I want to say at least 90% of them recompt because they have the extra body fat to spare and they have the potential for muscle gain in front of them. So recomp is a real thing and it's really kind of common with people who get on their progressive resistance training and begin to watch their diet a little bit. The question also is, can certainly recomp and we see it all the time in our research, but can you maximize muscle growth? And that's where it starts to get these disconnectes. Is that certainly recomp is real and that you can do it quite readily. I would argue that the evidence seems to show that as you get leaner, certainly as you get leaner, but I think even for the majority of people, you're not going to be able to optimize muscle development as you are reducing body fat. Maybe if you're very obese, you're not going to matter. And did you start getting to somewhat lower body fat levels and I'm not talking about sub 10% I'm talking you know, 15 and below is starts getting nice. For men to women 25 and more to optimize muscle development, I think at least the small surplus is probably not so. But the average male out there, his body fat is well above 15% right? Yeah, it is. And towards Brad's point, and you can correct me on this if I'm getting the literature wrong, but aren't the first three to four-ish weeks, there's some edema going on at the muscular level that would potentially confound or blur the whole. It would depend upon the training status of the individuals, how novel the routine is. So yeah, certainly if there's a novel exercise routine for several weeks, I mean if someone's on training, no question that's going to happen. But for resistance training individuals, it would really depend the at least would be blunted the edema and it goes away after a few weeks. I guess the the post on listening who let's just say they are representative, we're going crazy, we've driven them crazy with details. No, this is great, but let's let's let's if we bring it to the surface about what people, the average person what they really care about is let's say they go into their to their local gym and their they've had a coach, you know, set up a resistance training program and they've had someone look at their diet and the question that they are wondering is okay, if I'm leading less calories and I'm losing weight, am I going to be able to protect my muscle and all of these things that we've been talking about in the same process and what I'm hearing is that if they providing their not super low body fat percentage to begin with, if they have the resistance training in place and they consume enough total protein, providing that the diet isn't crazy low in calories and maybe you can speak to that, then they can in fact build some muscle, maybe it's not optimal for bodybuilding, but they can build some muscle and strength whilst losing some body fat. That's the formula basically, resistance training, sufficient protein, don't go to aggressive on the Chloric deficit for sustained periods and then, you know, that's kind of the the recipe for retaining muscle while losing fat. Extreme Chloric deficits, energy deficits, and start to leach more muscle. Now again, it depends on which the starting point is. If you're obese, not really going to make that much difference, but as you're getting even into the overweight category, that's where you go on like these 800, 600, 800 calorie fast, semi fast. You can start to see some issues. Particularly if your protein is not higher. What's the pace of white loss that you think indicates is representative of a good calorie deficit so someone can kind of keep an eye on that? Okay, so in proportional terms, observationally, like 1% drop in body weight per week would be the general upper cutoff that you'd want to see if you really want to maximize the preservation of lean mass during the fat loss process. And so that range is typically, you know, like half a percent to a full percent of your total body weight per week, that is pretty ideal for keeping your muscle while losing fat. Now there is research showing more aggressive deficits working to affect greater fat loss, but you still, you begin to see sacrificing of lean mass. Just as the lower you go in calories, for example, very low calorie diets, like below 800 calories, massive lean mass losses, typically. Even if you have protein high, with protein high, you can keep the lean mass losses down to roughly a third to a fourth of the weight that you lose. If protein is high enough and if there's resistance training, without those factors, you are just seeing unacceptable lean mass losses. Really with with diets that are 800 calories and below, which I have to imagine can occur in hospitals as well. Yeah. Yes. And you know what? And those lean mass losses at the 25-ish, 33-ish percent that I'm talking about, they are with individuals who start off in a state of severe obesity. So if you put a normal weight person on a very low energy diet, or certainly if you put a lean person on a very low energy diet, you can easily see lean mass losses be right even with fat losses and even more than the fat losses. With just outright consecutive day fasting, four days and plus, you see two thirds, three fourths of the losses being from lean mass. So these 800-ish calorie diets, 6 to 800-ish calories.
calorie diets, not too far from a outright fast. How much of that is recoverable and maybe is water or glycogen versus actual muscle tissue? A lot of it. A lot of it. And even if it's actual muscle tissue, muscle is an amazingly malleable and reconstructable tissue of the body. But the bummer is that over the long term, this is going to affect hormonal health and then skeletal health. And then the other systems follow that when you're really aggressively dieting all the time. Do you think that's happening to a lot of people that kind of do the annual really low calorie diet, lose bit away, then regain it across the year and then do it again the next year? And are they just losing a lot of muscle in a short period of time and then repeating that over years? Yes, basically, usually with these very low calorie diets, 800 calories in below, people don't sustain them for more than to one to three months at a time. Three months is extraordinary. It's usually medically supervised. But in the context of, let's say the annual detox, the annual detox routine, it's just, I think it's more of a psychological detriment than it is a physical or physiological detriment because it really kind of makes people lose hope and lose motivation with this yo-yo dieting effect. And instead of building these durable habits over the course of the year and not needing to do the January detox, they just sort of subconsciously depend on my annual detox, which is going to make me drop 10 pounds and little are they realizing they're dropping like, you know, anywhere from like four to eight pounds of lean body mass when they do this. There's another piece here that I want to mention. There's a concept called the fat overshooting hypothesis where when you lose, rapidly lose body weight and you lose a substantial amount of lean mass, the body tries to overcompensate because obviously losing lean mass is a threat to survival and all the body cares about it surviving. And when you then, the body tries to then gain back the lean mass and what it does it overshoots the fat re-gaining of fat. So you end up with greater fat accumulation than you started with. And there is, you know, good deal of support for that theory. That is related to the collateral, the so-called collateral fatening phenomenon where if you lose a lot of lean mass in the fat loss process, then you have a higher degree of appetite stimulation and cravings at the end of the dieting cycle. And the body essentially wants to get back to where it was in terms of energy homeostasis. And so, yeah, losing too much lean mass while you're dieting can make you actually hungrier on a chronic basis versus having preserved that lean mass. And that's called the collateral fatening phenomenon. Just quickly, you mentioned someone would be better off following more durable habits than doing these kind of yo-yo diets, severe calorie deficits. What are those big ticket items, those durable habits that would serve someone better and help protect their lean mass? Okay, so everybody differs in minimum effect of dose of what's appropriate for their lifestyle, their schedule, their goals for exercise. So on an individual basis, you need to find that and you need to find what you can stick to or progress within. That's sort of like the kind of overarching principle and the details of that are, you know, their details. And then with the dietary habits, you need to find a eating pattern, an eating routine that you can maintain and be consistent with. And the only type of eating routine you can be consistent with on a long-term basis is one that you don't hate, one that preferably you like it, you actually look forward to the meals. And then you can just maintain this routine day to day. And everybody is going to differ in their sets of meal archetypes for the, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner meals or some people will have more of like this grazing type of pattern. But you need to find that pattern that you enjoy and can stick to. And so with the exercise and the nutrition being these healthy patterns that can just go on day to day to day, then you have to look ahead and say, look, if I have body weight to lose, then somewhere between as little as half a pound to a full pound per week is perfectly acceptable. Because then by the end of the year, you're 50-ish pounds down or by the six-month point, you know, be 25 pounds down. And even if by the end of the year, you only lost half a pound a year and you're 25 pounds down, well, hallelujah, because you got back to a healthy weight in a year, whereas it took you 10 to 20 years to accumulate the excess body fat. And so I think that's kind of the big picture people need to look at instead of focusing on, oh boy, boy, I'm reactive. I'm reactive. I'm just sort of gaining this, this body fat and having this unconscious routine that's detrimental by the time the holidays hit or after the holidays. And here we are back in January. Oh, I got to get these 10 pounds off. You know, so it's a complicated thing. And it's a lot of habit building. Did you have anything to add to that, Proud? Yeah, I think intrinsic motivation is extremely important in this case. So you need to constantly have a reason why you want to do something. So if it's losing weight, you need an intrinsic motivation to be doing that. And if you want to maintain your weight, you need to be intrinsically motivated. Like I said, certainly most people, if they don't enjoy their meals, they're not going to stick with it. I'll give the counter to that if you're a bodybuilder. I mean, for years, you know, my bodybuilder is, I mean, for many years, it was just routine. I didn't even think about it. Food was fuel and I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy it. It was just there. I did what I had to do. But again, it was my intrinsic motivation, having eight back all the time. Yeah. The only thing I'd add to what you said, Alan, is what if someone's thinking, well, the foods I like to eat are fast food and pizza and pasta. Sure, sure. Yeah. How would you suggest they think about that? That just requires some education about the various food groups and some proactive self-experimentation on the part of the individual where they just break out of their routine and try different healthy foods. They just cross in within the groups. It has to be a proactive process because a lot of people don't even realize that they would enjoy whole and minimally processed foods. They just literally have to try that and entrain the sort of classically conditioned the routine. And then over time, you find that you, one of the reasons why you like the food, the healthy food more than the junk food is because you subconsciously know it's doing your body good. Right. And while energy is energy, making those healthier food choices does affect how hungry we are. For sure. Right. Which then affects our total energy consumption and can make dieting if you want to call it that easier or harder. That's the classic Kevin Hall studies with the biggest foods that the highly processed foods are highly palatable. They're designed to make you want to eat more. It's good for the companies that make them because you just want to keep eating Oreos. I bet you guys must have been happy at least with the two recommendations and the new dietary guidelines, one with a bit more focus on protein than previous years and two with the calling out of hyper process foods. Those were good. That was good. Yeah. Oh man. Those guidelines. Those are the same guidelines. A lot of debate and outrage, all sorts of takes about those guidelines. All sorts of takes. I actually missed the, like, just visually, you don't really catch that they are promoting legumes in there. There is a bag of frozen cheese. I may come on out and they barely emphasize. A bag of frozen feats. I'm like, where's the legumes here? So, yeah, the previous incarnation, my plate, had had it. I could nitpick at that too, but we can also nitpick at the current guidelines too. You got this fatty piece of red meat at one of the cornerstones and it's like, okay, as much as I love red meat, where's the evidence that fatty red meat filling your diet up with it is going to optimize health? There's the evidence outside of these different communities online. Yeah. We could debate those as a whole separate episode. Maybe we can save that. We need to get the resistance training. And what it is, what it isn't. maybe. we start with why is resistance training the right tool for addressing those age-related muscle changes that we were speaking about at the beginning of the episode? What is it about lifting a weight or moving our body against resistance that helps attenuate, slow down some of these changes in muscle? The body adapts because of survival, I mentioned this earlier, and when you resist and strain the body is perceiving a threat to its survival because it's not if you're just sedentary, it's not used to lifting heavy things or lifting anything, challenging, and it will respond by getting stronger and getting greater muscle endurance and getting more muscle. Those are the, this is called the principal specificity, which is a primary exercise related principle. So the more specific of the specific adaptations to imposed demands, the more specific the demand is the imposed demand, the specificity to that imposed demand, the greater the adaptation to that demand. And you know if you don't resist and strain the body is perceiving, it doesn't need the muscle for, at least the larger muscles for anything substantive. And as we talked about, it's expensive to maintain the muscle and it gradually goes away. So your resistance training, this is, there is a lot of things in, that we can talk about with variables, et cetera, and the application that still remains somewhat equivocal. There is compelling evidence, it's not even debatable, that resistance training helps to improve quality life in so many different ways. And what's the difference fundamentally between resistance training and maybe we can define resistance training and what it is and what it isn't. But different between cardio, going for a jog or a brisk walk or a hike and lifting a weight in terms of what's happening at the level of the muscle. You know the challenging different systems, so again going back to specificity when you're running long distances, not only isn't having more muscle beneficial, it's actually detrimental because you're carrying around it. It's like running with a vest at that point. So the body, obviously, when you're carrying out long-term long-distance aerobic training, the body is going to adapt by improving its cardio respiratory response, vascular response. Whereas resistance training, the specific adaptation is to improve your the size and the neural capacity of the musculature, the type 1 fibers, the type 2 fibers, and their neural adaptations that are driving them. So essentially biology is saying, well, that was that was heavy. And if I'm going to be exposed to that again, I need to be, I need to adapt and be stronger and be able to produce more force, quickly. Yeah, and how deep you want to go, but basically when the when you're lifting a weight, or again, challenge, it doesn't have to be lifting a weight, where your body can be a weight. It's it's using a resistance. You can push on a wall, that's a resistance. The forces, the mechanical forces on the muscle are converted. It's it's processed called mechanotransduction, where the mechanical forces are converted into chemical signals. And there's a various cascade of enzymes and about like enzymes that drive protein synthesis. The end result is muscle protein synthesis. So that's kind of the very simple and short course to it. And that fades back to what we were talking about earlier. That's when the nutrition becomes impolone, because in terms of running that process off to doing the resistance training, you need the amino acids available. Yeah. And I was thinking about how Brad talked about when you look at the forest plots, and they're just slightly in favor of the post exercise feeding models. The fact that muscle protein synthesis, or the anabolic response to protein feeding, is markedly greater in the post exercise state versus the resting non-exercise state. Kind of speaks to that potential little bit of it advantage there that we're seeing. Brad and I were talking we're like, man, we never skipped the window. Even though we did all this research on it, and we show, you know, it's not going to hurt. It's not going to freaking hurt. Now we're not working our asses off to freaking just purposely skip the damn window. But, you know, we're hungry at post exercise anyway. So it's one of those things. Yeah. Okay. So Brad, what does a good high level resistance training program conceptually? What does that look like for this avatar of this person, you know, in midlife or beyond that that wants to prevent psychopenia? Yeah. So I can give some general guidelines. There is no ideal resistance training program because that's always going to be specific to the individual. And research is never going to tell you that it's research is giving you the means, the averages. What I'd say is the two most important things are consistency and effort. I think for most people a minimum effective dose routine would be two to three days a week, one to two, I mean, half hour sessions really, one to two sets of major muscle group exercises. Generally, if you're looking for more time efficient training, you want to use what are called multi-join exercises, which involve more than one joint is the name class of squats, rows, presses. And the most important thing again, as I mentioned is effort. You need to be challenging your body beyond its present capacity. You do not necessarily need to train a failure. I came from the old go-all-out or go-home body building mentality where every set not only was the failure, but it was using drop sets and forced reps and negatives. Heavy negatives, yeah. So that actually has been I think quite compellingly shown not to be obligatory to optimize development, but you need to be pretty close. You need to be within a couple reps or three short of failure depending on various factors. And when you say a couple of reps short of failure, that is the point where that person wouldn't be able to do another pull down or another squat. And what I would say is again for the majority of the Gen Pop, the last few repetitions need to be difficult to complete. You don't have to be failing on that last rep, but they have to be challenging. If you're not challenging, again the only reason the body responds, the adapts, is because of a threat to its survival. It's being challenged beyond where it feels it needs to go. And in the early phases of training, the initial phase for several weeks, anything is a challenge if you're sedentary. So you can make gains and most of them in neural anyways, getting the coordination aspects to learning the movement patterns. But as you start to go into two months, three months, etc, it becomes more and more important to be within a couple of reps short of failure. For the average person out there is thinking about reps kind of shy of failure. Is that equally as effective as just thinking about like out of 10? How hot is this? You can use, that's quite a rating of perceived exertion so you can. And I will say this, for unless you've trained to failure, it's very difficult to gauge how far you are away from failure. And this has been documented quite well in the literature. So I think for the untrained individual or in the early phases of training, using an RPE where you're doing an 8 to 9, I think would be a good gauge there. You should be somewhere in that. It is one reason why I think it is beneficial for most people if they kind of train to failure. So at least so they get to know what failure is, you can then gauge how far away you are when you're actually finishing a set. But yeah, I mean again for Gen Pop, this gets more and more important as you get more interested in optimizing your your muscularity. I want to add a little bit to what Brad is saying about failure. So the utility or optimality of failure, it really varies across different exercises. So you're not necessarily going to be doing a set of concentration curls and go, I'm going to leave one in the tank. We're good. However, if you're squatting or you're deadlifting or you're bench pressing, then there is a pretty high risk to benefit proposition going on there, training to momentary muscular failure. In terms of injury. In terms of injury. And you know, there's little things about, okay, it can be more taxing just systemically nervous system wise ish psychologically even to be taking certain movements to failure, whereas you know lateral raises and you know the little gap is your machines as well. You know, calf raises on machines, on isolation exercises, then failure is a lot more of a viable thing.
Brad, I wanted to ask you this. So how do you feel about the literature looking at trained subjects, resistance trained subjects, as well as untrained subjects, underestimating their failure point by two to three reps? Yes, we recently published a couple studies on this. And in the early, so when we first, we had resistance trained subjects come in, they were within one to two reps of their estimate. And they improved to like one or less at the by the end. So we did a pre-study and post-study. So as they were training, they learned they got even better at estimating. I think it comes down to the teaching of it. I think again, with the untrained, it becomes a bigger issue. They're much further away. Sometimes they can be three to four in some cases. And part of it depends on the repetition range. As you're using higher reps, it becomes more and more, so like 15 reps becomes harder and harder to gauge because of the acidosis. So it's more like in the six to 10 rep, which is greater accuracy of looking at it. So there is nuance to that. But unless you've trained a failure, it's very difficult to properly gauge. And even when you have, when people conceivably, because a lot of times people think they've trained a failure and they haven't. But once you acclimate them to the RIR, the repetitions in reserve tool, they become better at doing it. What I'm hearing there is that if someone's relatively new to lifting, probably when they think they have a couple of reps left, they probably have more than that. So you might want to go another couple and then you're probably getting closer to that, to that point you're talking about. If they're not, let's say someone is going in and, quote unquote, going through the motions a little bit and they're more like a six out of 10 effort. And so they finished the set and they had four or five reps left. And let's say this is how they're training all the time. Is that resistance training completely useless? Are they just getting less benefit? So again, it depends upon where you are on the spectrum. Effort really shouldn't even be a factor there. You should be focusing on getting your form in my humble opinion. It's about teaching proper form, getting the coordination, the neuro coordination or musk coordination. As you start getting more and more experience, it becomes more and more important. So are you getting nothing? Well, you can maintain on a lot less. So this is to keep making gains. You can maintain by using less effort and strength by the way. So I'm mentioning this as far as hypertrophy. Strength you do not need to, you can train further away from failure and continue to make strength gains, particularly if you're using somewhat heavier loads. So again, there is nuance in this as well. But for the gen pop, most of them as they're continuing, they're going to plateau relatively quickly within the first several months if they're not consistently trying to progressively over and train. Keeping there the intensity of effort at a high level. Can you make up for that effort with doing more sets? So I think at the beginning you mentioned a minimum effective dose two or three days a week. You get in there for 30 minutes and what I heard was I think about two sets per body group. So you might do two sets of some type of pushing, two sets of pulling, two sets of like a squatting and a hinging type pattern. So that would be four exercises, two sets of each as a minimum effective dose repeating that two or three times a week. So I'll answer this kind of from the opposite side of the coin. We carried out a study relatively recently that was published when we looked at resistance train subjects, training, single set routines. So these were minimum effective dose roughly four to six sets per muscle per week. And we had one group train to failure on every set. And the other group was at a two RIR, two repetition short of failure. And the group that was training to failure did see modestly greater gains than the group that was training at a two RIR. So what I would say is if you're training at a minimum effective dose, there's a great later need to train closer to failure. Great title on the study by the way. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then if you're getting more than four to six sets per muscle group per week, it becomes less important to go all the way to failure. That is the current thinking of as far as the literature goes. But I will say this, the vast majority of studies on volume training have trained to a volitional failure. So I imagine most people need to take their set a little bit further. Most people, so I will say this from many studies carried out in our lab, most people do not train hard enough in their training. When we get them in to the lab and we, I mean, they're all supervised training and we push the crap out of them. They almost universally state that they've trained harder than they ever had in their life. I'd say 90% are telling us, and these are resistance trained. Some of them pretty jacked to genetics come into play there as well. But look, they all grow. So most of them do. So just anecdotally, I take stuff to failure often. I mean, wherever it's safe and most machine stuff, I take it to partials. For example, rowing movements, various movements where I literally don't stop when I can no longer complete a full, beautiful rep. I'll put in one or two partials. Is it okay to chaid a little bit there to get a little bit of momentum? Think of the lying hamstring curl. I mean, who ends their set with this beautiful full range rep at the end? I've thrown a couple partials because it's safe to do and if you feel a little more, you feel more brotacular. So with everything that I just said, the bro and me still wants to believe that there may be some benefit, tiny benefit to training the third. I agree with that. I'm like, one thing I will say, there's a lot of gaps in the training. If you're a failure training literature, number one, it's either all sets to failure versus no sets to failure and that is not an dichotomy's choice. You can do just the less at the failure which I'll do. As Alan pointed out as well, it depends on the exercise. If you're doing a set of lateral raises, I don't finish a set of lateral raises and I can't crush it. I can't walk or I can't lift my arm. You'd rest for a few minutes and you'd come back, but if you're doing a set of squats or bent rows, I mean, put some more taxing on the neuromuscular system. So again, there's new ones that we haven't really looked at in the literature that may, I don't, for a highly competitive bodybuilder or someone that wants to maximize the results, there's not a downside hypertrophically at least to doing at least less at the failure. Again, I think it's a good cost benefit, but we don't have good evidence. And it might become relevant for the everyday average person, especially if they're just not doing a lot of sets throughout the week. Well, so let me clarify that as well. In the study that we had, I don't think that, so yes, they did see better benefits going to failure. The other group still saw quite good benefits. These were resistance training individuals. So that comes down to how important is that those extra gains, they were very modest, extra gains. How important is if you're someone who wants to maximize, well, if you're someone who wants to maximize results, you're probably not going to do a minimum effect of those routine. But what I would say is that I think for the vast majority of the Gen Pop, training failure is tough and it requires extra effort. So if you want to expend that extra effort, you might be able to eat out some more gains. And some people might have a psychological barrier to training to failure. And if somebody specifically dislikes it, then that could compromise their adherence to the. And if they're not confident in that list or form isn't right, then they might increase their risk of injury. Yeah, I mean, again, as Alan pointed out, it depends upon what you're doing. If you're doing it on a machine, it's really safe. I mean, now look, there are certain medical conditions that they might be working through that you can't account for. But if you're a healthy individual, I don't really think safety is as much. As long as you're training with good form. What I'm talking about choosing load here. So I can choose a lightweight and I can get to two reps to failure or complete failure by doing a lot of reps or I can go and select a heavier weight and get to the same kind of point of fatigue or failure with fewer reps. If we're thinking about this person who's interested in combating the age-related muscle changes, is there a rep range that you would say is kind of most optimal? So confidence in an opinion exists on a continuum from weak to strong. If you ask me about most variables, I'm somewhere usually between weak to moderate.
depending on the variable. This is one area, first of all, I've changed my opinion pretty much at 180 on it. And I have the highest degree of confidence because we have literally dozens of studies now and virtually none of them. They all virtually show the exact same thing that on a home muscle level, there is virtually no difference between training at five or six reps up to 30 plus reps or so, provided that the last repetitions are relatively close if they were with a high amount of effort. It's compelling. We've done studies in our labs, do Phillips done some really great work with that. There's many, many others we've done made analysis and it's been made in hours made analyzed in multiple different ways. It's just compelling and anyone I think that is challenging that is just either oblivious to the literature or they will have a personal bias where they don't want that to be the case. Now with that said, there are some, I will, so for the vast majority of the Gen Pop, if you're just talking about the average lifter, I think whatever you like, I will say this, usually training with very high reps is not fun. We had a study where we did, we gave young trained individuals 8 to 12 reps to failure or 25 to 35 reps to failure. And first week of the study, the young well trained subjects in the 25 to 35 reps, half of them puke. Some of them at headaches. I mean, it just does a lot of acidosis that's built up. So it does a normalize to some extent over time. The body adapts. So by the end of the study, there wasn't really issues, but I could see that being an adherence issue for a lot of people. But it gives you wide freedoms. I mean, certainly you're training around a joint related injury or something that gives you options. I will also say this, a moderate rep range with the so-called hypertrophy range, which has been pretty much rebutted, refuted. Still to me is an effective, I think it provides an efficient means of training. And I do say as a general rule, it's probably best for most people to train the majority of their sets in that rep range 8 to 12, 6 to 15, somewhere in that range. I will also say there is some evidence that training across a spectrum of repetition ranges may modestly enhance the hypertrophic response. Why might that be? Well, there's a few possible reasons. There's some evidence. I think it's still relatively weak, but possible that there may be fiber type specific effects where heavy load training may preferentially hypertrophy the type two fibers. And the higher load training might preferentially hypertrophy the type one fibers. We've a made analysis actually that's currently in process. So I don't have any results yet to tell you, but we'll see about that. There's strength related factors. We're building more strength with some lower reps may transfer into your moderate rep training to create more mechanical tension, which is the primary mechanism for most of growth. There's buffering capacity. That's achieved. So you get greater buffer and capacity with somewhat higher reps, which may transfer to moderate rep. So again, this is really getting into the weeds where it would be have potential benefits in my opinion for bodybuilders or people like Alan. But if you could, and let's say you weren't working around an injury, some variability might be a good idea. Yeah, look, I think number one, it can add spice to a workout. So it's not going to hurt. Here's the thing. It's not going to hurt you to vary your routine. There's no evidence that it's going to have negative effects for showing me from my hypertrophy standpoint. And it may produce everything is quest benefit. To me, there's a potential benefit. I'll be at modest or somewhat small. But then it comes down to preference for we've talked about this over and over, but the most important thing in a routine is adherence. If it's going to help you to for the gym pop, and again, bodybuilder, there's no question in here. You tell a bodybuilder to stay in the gym six hours. He's staying in the gym six hours. So when he does a job, he told him to eat the grass off the, you know, in the field, they'll go out and start scooping up grass. It's just anything for the bodybuilders to do. But just to be clear, for for the person who's making sense of this, the take home message is that whether you choose a weight that you can do six reps with or 15 reps with, it's making sure you're taking that set to the same point of fatigue. So it's the effort that matters most. Exactly. And there's some evidence that it becomes more somewhat less important with heavier loads and somewhat more important with lighter loads. You still got to be challenging your muscles, but it's just easier to overload to challenge the muscle with the heavier load. At least that's the current theory on. What about the speed in which we do the reps? So if we think about a squat, the time it takes for us to kind of go down to our deepest position and then the time it takes for us to come back to a standing position. So we just recently published a made analysis on that very topic. And basically it showed that within modest tempo, so up to like four seconds, eccentric or so concentric is when you're lifting against gravity, eccentric is when you're lowering gains gravity for any difference between speed tempos. There was a slight benefit to somewhat faster concentric tempos, but contrary to popular belief, lowering slowly doesn't seem to matter. That's for hypertrophy again, not for strength or power, which I'll get to in a sec. I'll say this that it makes sense even though we didn't see it on eccentric. If you just let the way drop number one, there was really no, that wasn't what was being studied. So people think I could just like do reps like this, lowering it under control number one is making the muscles do work and that if nothing else, just logically, as well as more mechanical tension, right? Exactly. And number two, you're not putting the joint under if you're just dropping the weight, the joint is under stress. So just for me, injury standpoint. Now with that said, if you're looking for power development, first of all, strength is moving, you're necessarily going to move away more slowly as you start getting as you're getting closer to failure. So the initial reps, you can be pumping, let's say you're doing a 10 RM, first few reps, you can do quite quickly. As you're getting to your seventh rep, your eighth rep, your ninth rep and close to failure, it has to stave loss, there's going to be velocity loss as you're going. So you're not going to be able to move it, there's an intent to move it quickly. You're trying to push it quickly, but just the resistance is not going to be able to move quickly. I will say this, and Alan brought this up earlier, for power development, lighter load, somewhat lighter loads, and moving the concentric portion quickly becomes very important for power, because power is both the strength component, she got to develop strength, but also you got to develop the speed, the rapidity aspect, and we published a made analysis, and this becomes more particularly more important for older individuals, for your power athlete as well, of course, that would be important. But as people get older, we talked about the issue of falls, etc. And what we found, we did it this made analysis, I collaborated with Collegamine and Newt Balachandra in really excellent researcher, and we showed a modest effect size, or moderate effect size, for doing explosive concentric with a control eccentric versus doing a controlled concentric and eccentric. And these were on functional capacity, so get up and go. Fred Han is not going to like that. What's that? Fred Han, it's not going to like that. So when you say that becomes more important for elderly. For functional capacity. If I kind of walk and I trip on something and I need to catch myself, I need a certain amount of power, is that when that comes into play? You know, again, they didn't look at your ability to recover from a fall from all the people. They looked at functional capacity, which involves power, so you would just, you can assume, so it's never been trying to study, you're not going to subject the older individual to a fall, to see if they can recover from that. I would hope there's no way you'd get ethical approval for that. So you just have to infer that this greater function of control translates. How do you recommend this person again, who is interested in just healthy aging? How do you recommend they think about their training in terms of power and risk of falls? What are the actual things in the gym that they think about? Yeah, I think that at least the portion of the training should be devoted to somewhat explosive, vast concentric actions. It doesn't have to be all your sets, but doing some sets. And again, this is where prescription is very individual, so it's hard to give a specific recommendation here. It's just more general that you want to incorporate some faster concentric actions with control these centrics, and particularly in the lower body, so like on a light press, and particularly as you
you're aging. And so what might that look like in terms of let's say seconds going down and up? As fast as you can. So bringing it up quickly as fast as you can and then lowering it, making sure the muscle lowers it under control. I don't like to necessarily give this no one second to second. If you were lowering it to the point where the muscle is doing the work and not gravity is letting the weight crash down, then you're good. Right. Which on a leg press is like as your knees are coming into you're you're slowly letting the plate down and then you in this case, if we want to train for power, push it up as quickly as you can. Okay. And how long should someone ideally be resting between sets? Yes. We recently published a made analysis on this. And again, this somewhat is dependent on appreciate what you consider appreciable. So resting 60 seconds or less compromises muscle development to some extent. 90 seconds and above did not seem to show much different whether it's 90 seconds or two minutes or three minutes, they're not really showing much different. So that would seem as this, it's not a hard cut point that like it 89 seconds in your bed and 90 seconds. But you still gain muscle at 60 seconds. So again, it depends upon you. There's a trade off then, of course, as to getting out of the gym more quickly. You also don't necessarily have to do sets and straight set fashion. So you can do like circuits or agonist antagonist supersets where you do, let's say a shoulder press into a lat pull down. So there's different ways to structure that as well. But the issue seems to be, and we actually carried out a original study that seemed to show this, that you compromise the reason that there's reduction in gains with the short arrest periods is your compromising volume load, meaning that if you do a set and you're doing it close to failure, close to failure, and you're resting only a minute, the next set you're going to have to drop the weight substantially to get the same amount of reps or if you're doing the same weight, you're going to get much fewer reps, whereas if you rested somewhat longer, 90 seconds, two minutes. Now you're of course getting out of the gym more quickly. So doing shorter rest periods can make you allow you to do more sets and you make up that volume load with more volume. So that's where kind of the trade off and there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer there. Some people like training faster and again, you're still going to get gains. So I also want to point out that there's very little research on this and resistance trained individuals. As a matter of fact, our group is the only one that carried out a study and resistance trained individuals on the topic. So hard to give concrete guidelines for people who are more well trained. So is the part of rest that is important is providing rest for the muscle group that you've just exercised or is it total body and I ask that you mentioned antagonistic muscle groups. So when I'm short on time, I know I go in, I do a set of bit like chest press and then also go straight to the lap pull down or row and work the opposite muscle and my thinking is, well, I'm resting my chest during that exercise. And so I can get through that volume in half the time. Yeah. To some extent, that's true. There is neuromuscular effects of the body. You are not only resting a muscle, when you're resting, it's not only specific to the muscle, but your central nervous system is actually carrying out which muscles are going to be active. So there is an effect on the central nervous system and that's less study. But what we do know is that you maintain the majority of your volume load when you're agonist antagonist supersetting. I want to add to this that, okay, so there's a theoretical optimal repetition range for let's say hypertrophy. There's a theoretical optimal intercept rest interval for hypertrophy. There's a theoretical optimal tempo for hypertrophy. So all of these things, if for example you're somebody who prefers higher reps than what would be considered the moderate range of sweet spot, or you prefer shorter rest periods, then what might be the, you know, a little bit more conducive to efficient gains in hypertrophy. You can progressively overload anything, any sort of routine, like high rep short rest, progressively overload it over a period of weeks and months and you're still going to get hypertrophy. It might not be as efficient, but you're still going to get it. And if you do what I just said, you'll also be forcing more cardio respiratory adaptations in the process. So for folks who are, you know, who are not necessarily have just hypertrophy on the brain. And let's say they're dealing with certain injuries, or let's just say you prefer your repetitions at like 12 or 15 and up. You're not compromising hypertrophy goals per se. As long as it's progressively overload over time. So I think that's not talked about a lot. I see a lot of folks online saying, gotta be four to eight reps. Boom, period done. Gotta be that yet. It got to be two minutes, two point five minutes between sets. Period. Boom. No, it, okay. You can progressively overload basically any rest interval and any, any repetition range to achieve hypertrophy. You guys important to not let optimal or perfection be the enemy of good health. Sure. Because coming back to, I mean, what you mentioned with nutrition, all of this is about what is sustainable, what is someone going to enjoy most so they keep doing it for not just a couple of weeks program, but for decades. Well, I'd also say that what some influencers claim is optimal is not optimal, at least by any scientific standard. That's optimal by their own personal experience or just their own intent to make money off of a program or something. For me, one of the biggest takeaways here that we've spoken about is just the importance of effort and intensity in what we're doing when we are lifting weights. Other than heavy metal music from a nutrition perspective, is there any important things to get right that will help us with that effort when we're lifting weights? It kind of comes down to total daily nutrition as a first priority. And then as a second priority, it comes down to the individualization of the meal that fuels the workout in terms of composition and placement. So generally speaking, for the goal of maintaining muscle tissue, whether you're trying to just maintain it or whether you're trying to grow it, you need to be careful of the severity of any energy deficit that you end up sustaining. So generally speaking that half a percent to full percent body weight loss per week is a good guideline another guideline that roughly correlates with that is keeping the Chloric deficit to 10 to 20 percent below maintenance if you engage a deficit. Sure, you can go, you can have a more aggressive deficit than that 25, you know, 25 to 40. There's a lot of research on 40 percent Chloric Deficits. But once you reach that, once you significantly cross over the 25, certainly to 40, you start finding real difficulty in maintaining lean body mass. Even with high protein intakes and resistance training, a 40 percent deficit, pretty rare to see LBMB retained and certainly gained. So that would be, okay, so that would be the big picture of energy balance for recovering and being able to carry this through. The other part, the secondary part would be, are you properly fueled leading into the training belt? So a simple way to look at it is you don't want to train with hunger pains. You don't want to be, certainly don't want to be hangry while you're training. And there is, in fact, some research showing that breakfast versus skipping breakfast, having breakfast versus skipping it is going to increase in greater number of repetitions, so a greater lifting capacity. Now, with that said, if you're somebody who routinely skips breakfast and trains, then you can become somewhat adapted to that routine and just be fine with it. But generally speaking, if you want to optimize the performance of the training belt, most people are not going to do it after an overnight fast. I also add to, there is some evidence that ketogenic diets are inferior to high carbide, but to somewhat moderate, lower to moderate carbohydrate diets for performance aspects that the glycogen depletion probably is interfering in anaerobic. And that's, it's not with your heavy lifting, but when you're getting more into your moderate to higher repetition ranges. Uh oh. Yeah. Yeah. YouTube comments have just gone off.
I'm just the messenger here. But I'm like at the complain. So yeah, there you are. There's going to be a whole lot of people citing Jeff Follick's work here, I think. Well, there's a meta analysis done by King and colleagues. I believe it was where they concluded that resistance training, it's benefited by pre-exercise carbohydrate intake. So a cute carbohydrate intake, it benefits resistance training that is over a certain amount of volume. But it makes sense. You're looking at a glycolytic activity. And certainly, even if you are relatively glycogen loaded going into the resistance training about, if you have a higher volume of resistance training, then the sets at the end of your workout are not going to necessarily be as productive as somebody who had a meal pre-exercise. The math doesn't work out perfectly when you try to figure out why is that. But the fact is, it is what it is. And that's what was seen in the majority of the studies in this particular meta analysis. So if you want to be on the safe side, then training fast, it is not the ticket for maximizing resistance training performance, although you'll find select my minority of folks who prefer it that way. Brad mentioned the ketogenic diet. This is just one of those things about where the higher carb conditions always seem to have the edge in lifting capacity, even if sometimes it does not reach statistical significance. There are still, if you look at the data and you look at where the plot's lean on the graphs, it's almost always going to be in favor of the non-ketogenic higher carb condition. The kind of the way it is. Now this is not to say that you cannot gain muscle on a ketogenic diet. You definitely can gain muscle on a ketogenic diet as long as your total calories are in place and your resistance training is progressive. But it's the equivalent of trying to swim upstream or trying to box underwater compared to a much less encumbered and optimized process with enough carbohydrate in the diet. And that enough carbohydrate in the diet, we can't put a finger on where that is, but it's more than ketogenic level carbohydrates, which are 50 grams a day or less. Bodybuilders have certainly figured that out. They're not shy on rice and oats and potato. Yeah, they have. I mean, if you look at the literature and aggregate, it appears to be a minimum ish of about three grams per kilogram of body weight that would possibly be the lower end of what might still optimize muscle recovery and growth. So, but that hasn't been systematically investigated and compared head to head with lower amounts. So, are there any other compounds like caffeine or creatine or other supplements that can help with effort, the intensity? Caffeine and creatine, they both have good track records for working for ergo genesis or performance enhancement. For resistance training as well as certain types of aerobic training, like caffeine is a little bit more of a multitasking full spectrum performance enhancer, whereas creatine enhances a little bit more of the moderate to high intensity side of the energy continuum there. We just did a meta-analysis on regional changes in muscle size, measured by things like MRI and ultrasound and computer tomography that showed these tiny little increases, these little sad increases in muscle size as a result of creatine supplementation. But out of the 10 studies that we included in this meta-analysis, only one of them was on bona fide trained subjects and another one was on recreationally trained subjects. We have to look at the totality of the evidence. There's a bunch of other data on trained subjects showing that those on creatine have a 20% increase in strength versus the control group who had on average a 12% increase in strength over the course of the studies. There's also the fact that some people are non-responders to creatine. So up to somewhere between 20 to possibly 30% of individuals do not respond well or they just negligibly respond to creatine supplementation for a different set of reasons. But okay, bottom line, even though Brad and I did that, that creatine in muscle architecture, meta-analysis, people blame us for killing creatine. I'm here to tell you. You pay creatine a bit. We didn't kill creatine. Creatine still, I would hypothesize that trained subjects can make creatine work better because they can potentially train harder and put it to work more and put more. Also, I would say that just if you look at the strength figures over time that can lead to hypertrophy, that maybe is not necessarily detected within the confines of these shorter periods of weeks. In fairness, Armada did show that you got greater hypertrophy. It was just a modest effect. Basically, what we did because most of the data that's been proposed is based on fat-free mass. Fat-free mass, of course, is not necessarily muscle mass. It is both muscle tissue but other tissue, particularly water. And creatine, of course, is an osmoide at a trax water. There's also evidence that it might have effects on extracellular water. It's intracellular, that's interesting because that actually increases the size of the muscle. There's some evidence that it might have effects extracellularly. So we want to deceive when you're actually measuring muscle size. Looking at the muscle itself, is there an effect? I'd say that. I'd also say the other two Owlin's point. The effects on strength are impressive. It also somewhat depends upon your diet. Someone like yourself who has a plant-based diet, you'd probably be more responsive because meat, meat, and fish. So beef, fish have high amounts of creatine internally. When you're consuming them, you tend to get more creatine stores. Some of that may, this can be as Alan said, genetic components as well, but those who are plant-based are not eating a lot of meat. Yes, we do take creatine. Yeah, we know how do you dose it. Do you do the point 1 grams per kilogram type calculation or just 5 grams a day? No, that's great that you bring that up because for increases in muscle hypertrophy, 5 grams seems to be the statistical average to cut off, but for gains and strength, they've shown that roughly does fall on 0.1 gram per kilogram of body weight. This would be a good target for older individuals, as well as individuals who feel that they might be hypodresponders to creatine supplementation. I just realized as well now that we're talking about crazy. We didn't talk, and I don't think we need to go too deep, about the effect that resistance training is also having on the skeleton, on bone, and whether that in some ways may affect the load that someone selects and the number of reps they may want to do. So it's interesting you bring that up. There's been this load threshold theory that has been proposed as far as what you need to impact bone tissue. I'm skeptical of that research because it doesn't take in, we're kind of getting the effort. So it's kind of like what we used to think with with the light load training, that it didn't affect muscle or didn't have substantial effects on hypertrophy. It was because most of those studies, they were very far away from failure when they were using the lighter loads. And we don't have as much, so looking at bone development is a much more difficult study to carry out specifically because the building of bone is a much longer process. So you can see very robust gains in hypertrophy within six, eight weeks, whereas for bone, it takes months. Usually you need a six month study to see somewhat appreciable gains. And I am skeptical. Again, we don't have great evidence on this yet, but if you're training close to failure, I think that the stimulation of bone probably is not, this is my speculating now without a lot of heart evidence, but we don't have evidence against it. The evidence that's been used to say that you need to train heavy for bone has been in my opinion based on somewhat biased data that hasn't looked at really training hard with the lighter loads. So once again, we come back to effort. I'm hearing effort is kind of the top priority when it comes to training and I'm hearing total daily protein top priority.
when it comes to nutrition, at least for the specific things that we're talking about, along with calories. Right. Protein calories and complete micronutrition if possible. Brad, how do you think about this resistance training program over time? Let's say in the two different contexts. One person who's happy with their strength and their muscle mass and the other person who's looking to progress that to increase their strength further to build more muscle. What are the differences in terms of how you might play around with that program for maintenance versus progression? Maintenance requires much less volume and even somewhat less effort. So you can get by once you've built muscle, much easier to maintain it, to continually build more muscle. In particular, as you start getting closer to your "genetic ceiling," Alan talked about the fat-free mass index. The higher the more experience you get and the closer you're getting to your genetic ceiling, the more that using a science-based approach becomes relevant and necessary to continue to make gains. So in the early phases of training, almost anything is a stress, an unknown stress to the body and it causes it to respond for the most part. But look, there's genetic, there's lifestyle factors, so there's so many things that enter into it. I think it's very important to point out as well that evidence-based practice is not simply looking to research. As a researcher, obviously I'm very biased towards the importance of research, but it's only one component of the evidence-based approach. There were pretty much all equal with including your personal expertise and the needs and abilities of the individual. Research will never tell you what to do. It's only going to give you general guidelines and much of the research certainly on variables that you're talking about, have a lot of gaps in the literature. It makes it difficult, the confidence in my opinions on the topic are less than I'd like, if I can't make a strong opinion, I'm not going to make a strong opinion. So you need to express the uncertainty of the data, the supporting data when you're looking at the evidence-based implications. So these are all things that I know people want hard guidelines, they want to give cookie cutter. This what you do just do, eight to ten reps of three sets. It's just not the way science works and not certainly applied science. But providing the effort is there if someone's not saying progress, they need to increase their volume. Yeah, so there's different strategies, but certainly that would be one of these. Volume has been shown to be a driver. You can make certainly very good gains with a minimum amount of volume, but there's a dose response relationship that's been shown over and over in made analyses. So yeah, I think that would be certainly in my opinion that one of the first things that I would look at, but there's others as well. So that would be just to be clear to the listener, that would be looking at, okay, for a pushing movement, if I'm doing six sets in a week, and the efforts there, if I want to progress that and get an increase in strength in my pushing movement, build the chest muscles, I might increase that to eight sets or ten sets a week. Absolutely, but you also have to realize, and this is where I don't know how much into the wage you want to get, but volume is not necessarily, or doesn't necessarily have to be a static variable that's, you do the same amount of volume across your career, or I mean, you can stagger volumes, you can do, you can cycle, you can do what's called various variations of periodization. To me, periodization really is planning. It's not following the Soviet model. So I mean, but you can do some, like a month of somewhat lower volume and then progress them moderate, then higher, and then cycle back with delode periods. There's all sorts of strategies that could be used, but this is where the personal expertise, so again, the research is going to give you the general guidelines here, and even with that, the gaps in that literature, so you need to use your expertise, but I think this is the most important point. Ultimately, everyone becomes an N equals one experiment. You use what we know through science to give you kind of put you in the right field, the right, you know, the general area that you need to be, and then you got to tweak that to your own needs. Yeah, I think that a lot of people don't realize that volume, whether, you know, you're trying to optimize it or not, it can be specific and different with each muscle group that you want to focus on. Absolutely. So some muscle groups, you may not really give that much of a darn about you, you know, you don't necessarily need to bring them up in terms of muscle size and or strength, so you train them at minimum effective dose or some people not, you know, just skip legs, complete, and I'm kidding. For healthy aging, you think training legs is even more important? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's always important to just train legs. Please don't take that snippet and then like, Alan, there's one pinst in the beat, so it doesn't. But yeah, certain muscle groups that you want to focus on the progress of, then you can apply these, you know, progressive overload, high effort, optimizing volume, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case with every muscle group. Such a great point in that the research, really, most of the research we have on volume really hints towards specialization cycles where you focus on, because we don't have good evidence for volume for all the muscle groups as to what to do. They're kind of extrapolated when we give general guidelines as to ranges of volume. So yeah, I think Alan's point is so important that it's not not a one size fits over. Every muscle gets the same, that needs the same volume. You might do that, but usually to me, volume should be strategically used for those more for those muscles that are less well developed and less for those who are more well developed. Is effort the best indicator of how effective your workout was versus say how sore you feel the next day? Effort always is as we talked about the most important factor having a high level of effort, but soreness is really not a great gauge of the quality of a workout. We actually, I collaborated on the paper with my good buddy, Brad Contreras, on this some years ago, and I think the general take home is still the same. Soreness is most indicative of a novel stimulus. Soreness is related to in some extent muscle damage and muscle damage when you have a novel stimulus, your body is more prone towards developing muscle damage. There's something called a repeated bout effect whereas once you do the same movement even for once, you know, another session, you start to diminish that response. So varying the, if you vary your exercise a lot, you'll tend to get more sore. But do you necessarily need to do that? Probably not. Again, we don't have great evidence on this. So number one, different people get sore differently. On a general basis, women seem to get less sore than men. It's thought that estrogen might be involved in that. And efforts can enter into that to some extent volume. What I would say is that if you're too, here's the rub, if you're very sore, it's a negative. Because you're not going to be able to come back to train properly. So I think some mild soreness is not a negative. It's certainly not going to hurt you. You can certainly train when you're, when you have mild soreness, whether that promotes, whether the novelty of that enhances results, I still think is questionable. And certainly some people might not get that mild soreness and it doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily indicative that you didn't get a good workout. So that would be certainly down the totem pole as far as what would be indicative of a workout quality. Are there any things that people can do that would enhance their recovery, reduce muscle soreness such that when they go back in to do their next workout, they can workout with a greater intensity, whether that's from a nutrition perspective or a elsewhere. So I've gotten a lot of folks coming up to me and saying, I'm sore all the time, what can I do? And they're looking for a nutritional solution. And they ask them, all right, so how many, what kind of volume are you running? And how fast are you pushing it? How fast are you pushing the progression of that volume? They're like, oh, well, I'm doing like 25 sets a week and 25 to 30 sets a week and I'm taking every set to failure. I'm like, all right, think about cutting back on your, basically your training load and then see if, if your soreness goes down to because that chronic soreness that never goes away could be an indicator that you're just
At least overreaching if not overtraining. And so I would begin there. And then nutritionally there's a lot of rumors floating around about BCAA supplementation being great for reducing delayed onset muscle soreness or doms. The body of research on that effect really does not necessarily look at protocols that are optimized in total daily protein. And when I say optimized in total daily protein I mean at least 1.6 grams or a kilogram of body weight. And when they do apply branch chain amino acids on one group they almost never equate the other group with an equivalent increase in just regular old protein. Branch chain amino acid supplementation has shown some benefit in bed rest patients. HMB has actually shown some benefit in bed rest patients. But really a better route for recovery if you're compromised somehow on the amount of protein you can consume is taking full spectrum essential amino acid supplement. And that basically you've got the branch chain amino acids in there plus the rest of the essential amino acids working together. And at least in theory it's more effective and to a small degree. So if you can't increase the protein then you can supplement with EA. I haven't met a lot of people in the real world who can't just add a scoop or two of protein to their diet where they would need to resort to amino acid supplementation. Another thing that people can do I mean since we were going all the way back to the beginning of the conversation where we talked about how sarcopenia happens, how it's this sort of mix of a decreased muscle protein synthesis increased chronic inflammation factors. So that's where we look at what the general population is missing in their diet and there's a handful of things. One of them is omega-3 fatty acids. And so there's a decent body of research showing that when you bolster that nutritional shortcoming in the older population you see increases in even things like muscle protein synthesis but increases in strength, reductions in inflammation and then you have this combination of positive things that can mitigate these factors of the aging process that we're trying to mitigate. So the dose of omega-3 is something that's heavily debated. You have two or three grams of combined EPA and DHA showing benefit in the older population but then you have research showing that much above one gram of combined EPA DHA. You might be flirting with atrial fibrillation. So you can make the judgment call on there and if you're afraid of that, afraid of A-Fib then you just increase your fatty fish intake because then you're sort of getting this whole food matrix thing where you don't really see this association with atrial fibrillation with an increase of fatty fish. Another recovery indirectly would be vitamin D3 and so there is, it's just sort of widespread at the population level under consumption of vitamin D3. It's the older population, D3 status is usually pretty terrible, pretty high prevalence of that. So just bringing that status up can really help with not just the, it can help with a musculoskeletal side as well as a bunch of other functions. The interesting thing about vitamin D3 utilization is there's some controversy over whether or not it's affected by body fat level. So since we can synthesize vitamin D from just sunlight, it's been hypothesized that if somebody has a lot of body fat then there's an impedance in that process of synthesizing vitamin D3 from sunlight. However, there's research showing that despite fat loss and differences in body fat that sometimes fails to correlate with how the body processes vitamin D3 but there's newer research showing that if you have a lot of visceral fat then the visceral fat is what can reliably impair utilization of D3. So that's basically the story with vitamin D3 and the dosing for vitamin D3 has been anywhere in the literature benefiting like 1 to 2000 IUs as sort of a shotgun solution. As low as like 500 IUs as fine but usually 1 to 2000 IUs is typically what's going to rescue most folks at the sort of the gen pop level their shortcomings in vitamin D3 status. HMB like Brad brought up, it just keeps, it's just hit and miss. It's really a dice roll with how well it works and when and for whom and it's a much bigger gamble than the other other factors that we pointed out. I also had this some alternative therapies massage foam rolling potentially and heat application. So again getting blood flow to the tissues is very important for the recovery process, the verinutrient delivery and all of them have had some evidence showing potential improvements from Doms now the alternative is how much of that is placebo effect because it's very difficult to sham that in a controlled study. So it feels good also it's not going to hurt you and then maybe have some benefit to it. What about cold plunging? That's about three times a day. That should people be careful of cold exposure. So the cold exposure unfortunately has negative effects when we've carried out recently published a made analysis on this topic. It decreases muscle protein synthesis, it decreases muscle development muscle hypertrophy and it decreases strength. So that's if you're working at heart that's probably not the best strategy to use. Now again if it's an occasional I'll give it this that's doing it frequently. If you just really sore one time and you do a cold plunge it's not like you're going to lose all your gains. So I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an occasional cold plunge but keeping that as part of a regimented intervention I think is not the smartest thing. Also thinking about interference if that's the word we want to use kind of blunting the gains adaptations from resistance training. A lot of our listeners are pretty active people that are doing jogging or hiking or playing tennis. It's kind of cardio fast-cular exercise. What would the most optimal kind of way of positioning cardio around resistance training be and is there any risk of having them in too close proximity or one before the other which blunts the adaptations from lifting weights? So this is another topic where my views have shifted over the years. There was the chronic interference hypothesis where it says that aerobic training promotes catabolic signaling and resistance training promotes anabolic signaling so you're going to get this interference with M-Tor and Torse ends on that's a nodal point for muscle protein synthesis. Most of the more emergent or most of the emerging research refutes that as a matter of fact in untrained individuals because again they're basically sedentary. Adding in cardiovascular exercise seems to have a positive hypertrophic effect. There's certainly is going to be a point where doing more cardio or doing a lot of cardio can interfere. If you're running a marathon going out and doing marathon training, yeah you're going to have trouble building muscle. There's certainly some inflection point where that's going to have negative effects but for most people doing moderate or if you're an athlete like a soccer they say in Europe football but that's not American football. I love trying football. I love Europe so. But or basketball player tennis player is a sport that is very highly anaerobic and aerobic requires you're doing a lot of practicing, you're doing a lot of combined training. That's where you risk really this interference and potentially overturning. But for most people doing moderate cardiovascular exercise with moderate resistance training, it's just not a factor. If you want to look at optimization, yes it's best to separate your sessions. For most people that's again not going to make much of any effect. And again what I would say if you can do them in the same session and you want to try to optimize results, do your resistance training before you do your cardio? Because that's where there could be some performance interference at least. So you're not fatigued. Fatiguing yourself. Because then that's going to affect the effort. Is there a way you can compensate if you are that highly active individual who is doing the basketball, the tennis or pickle ball around the resistance training? Is there a way you can compensate through consuming more protein, more calories or is it just the activity itself that is going to come at the cost of muscle? I think it really depends.
depends on how dire or advanced your muscle growth goals are. If you're looking at the general population who wants to maintain, let's say, an average healthy degree of muscle mass or even a little bit above average, then I don't think it matters that much, especially with the type of recreational volume that the average person will do. In the course of a week, they may have like four or five, thirty to sixty minute bouts of recreational play. And so I don't think it matters too much. I want to sort of drill down on what Brad mentioned. If you want to have the most productive resistance training bout, you're probably not going to want to even play like a vigorous pickleball game right before your resistance training session. If anything, save it for afterwards or at least separate those guys by, well, the literature bats around six hours, but that is a pretty arbitrary number. You cause into pickleball? I am not, but I'm here to try. I've never played it. I know people love it, so I'm not. Okay. We've been going for four hours at this point, so I'm sure there's still a lot of people. What's about to get started here, man? Come on. We have room. If we can convince Brad to make the trip across the country again, we'll make sure we have around two. But before we wrap up, I'm curious from both of you, maybe we can start with Brad. What are some questions that remain unanswered unresolved that you're still interested in and would like to research from here on out? I mean, again, I think it's not a specific question. It's getting greater clarity. So I mentioned earlier, like take rest intervals. We only have one. We had nine studies in our maiden analysis. There was only one that involved resistance-strain subjects. So I think it's just a matter of getting more data on populations, and particularly with resistance-strained individuals. Historically, the data has been skewed towards untrained subjects. One of the things when I came into the field that I tried to change, I'm like, you know, why do we care about what's happening and not why do we care? But that's not really, to me, the most interesting question, what happens in the first two, two, four, six, eight weeks? What's important is what happens over time and how do you keep making progress? So I think that there's just so many gaps in most of the variables, the literature on the variables that we just need more data and more, I think, well-designed studies. There's some studies that most studies are certainly a majority in resistance-strain, who are underpowered. It's one of the things that our lab has really tried to focus on is getting more subjects involved. We almost always, in our parallel group designs, try for 50 subjects now, so 25 per group. Even that is still something not that large. But I mean, there's still a lot of studies where you get like 8, 9, 10 subjects per group, which just, you just need a lot more studies than to get proper made analytic derivatives from that. So I don't know what Alan would. I've just sit back and watch Brad crank out like three studies a week and I'm good. Just, you know, we're talking about Tavarez and colleagues who just put out the three protein feedings versus five. I like to see an arm with like two protein feedings in that and then see if in fact this minimum of three that we're looking at with sort of, yeah, at least younger resistance training subjects is going to hang in there with the three in the five. I find that interesting because a lot of people have, you know, they, they intermittently fast. They push the boundaries with low meal frequency for one reason or another. I think it would just be interesting to have that data. For the longest time, we were waiting for a study directly comparing some higher amount of protein dosing versus 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight in resistance trainees. So we kind of got that with baguari in 2023, but it wasn't in hypochloric conditions. These guys were recreationally trained and these were men who were averaging 21-ish percent body fat. So, you know, we're not quite there. I think it would be great to, I actually spoke with Yasuda and said, hey, I'd love to see your your two to three study replicated, but in resistance trained subjects, you're two protein meals versus three, two meals versus three meals on muscle size and strength gain, not in resistance training subjects. So I planted the seed. I know he's thinking about it. I know he knows I'm kind of a big deal because I know Brad Chowinfeld. And so a lot of times, you know, researchers will want to get on that train to just get their stuff out. So we'll see Yasuda. I'm talking to you, buddy. And, you know, to follow up on what I'm saying, one of my real issues and why I don't really do much in the nutritional realm or somewhat limited is that it's so difficult to control the nutritional studies. So resistance training, when we're doing the resistance training study, I can, when they're in the lab, we control every aspect of their routine. We don't know what happens when they go out and eat. We try to get food diaries. They're historically inaccurate. But when you have a sufficient number of subjects, you can assume that there's enough, that are randomized, that there's enough variance, that the variance is going to be small enough where it's not going to affect when you have enough subjects. When the focus is on the nutritional outcome, very, I'm just not trusting a lot of the data that we get. You tell someone to take three meals of protein. How do you know what they're taking? Unless you're doing, so yeah, I'd love to have unlimited funding and do get body builders and a metabolic water on some island where you're performing. Kevin Hall style study. Yeah. Exactly. You get millions of dollars in funding. But it just becomes difficult for me to trust with a high degree of confidence the results. Because people, I just know when I get, all the time we get food diaries from subjects and they say, yeah, I had 800 calories. It's a five day food diet or the average 800 calories and they gain like five pounds across the study. The statistics on that are alarming. So across the body of studies on subjects with obesity, you see an under reporting range of about 25 to 50 percent in the non obese population. The average rate around 20 percent under reporting. That's probably a generous, a charitable estimate amongst registered dietitians under report by 10-ish percent. So you're looking at the most highly trained nutrition professionals still unable to accurately report. And not only that, people misreport to higher degrees depending on and in different directions, depending on the food group. So they'll under report the junk and they'll over report the lean proteins. You know, and so I guess in terms of how you interpret that, I mean, they could be pros and cons because you can supply everyone the food. And yes, you can get a very clear idea of how the nutrition is affecting whatever the variable is because you know that attack you're at. Like you're there in a metabolic ward like Kevin Hall and you know they hated. The downside is and it is interesting because like that's what Luke Van Loone's study showed is that it's also interesting to know when you just tell people to do something like what actually happens in real life when when behavior and and and so I guess in some ways the, the less controlled the food is maybe the more representative it is of a real life. That's the classic. You're looking for ecological validity. You're looking for internal validity. Ecological validity is the generalized ability to real world. Yeah, then you get good, you get good results. You know, you're very, you can be I think very interesting results from just telling people what to do and seeing what happens. But if you're looking for proof of principle for what actually is accurate when you do something, you know, and look and you yeah, you can provide people with food number one very expensive to do that. And number two doesn't mean they're not having twinkies after your yeah, I had that nice meal of chicken and rice and I think I'm going to have like a tub of Oreos with them. Unless you set up cameras. All right guys, I think we did it. Is there is there anything before we wind up here that you didn't get a chance to speak about that you want to or something you want to add to what we covered? Just that it's always a pleasure being with my buddy here and he's a wealth of knowledge. So both of you right right back at you Brad. Yeah, this was I knew this was going to be awesome and I'm really happy with it came out and thank you so much for pulling this together. That was not an easy task. No, of course. And yeah, I appreciate both both of you immensely and your contribution to science and respective fields and collaboration. So thanks for doing this and I do hope we have around to likewise and we will. There you have it friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and want to stay up to date with future episodes, be sure to hit that subscribe button on YouTube and follow on Apple or Spotify. Finally, thank you for showing up and the effort that you're making to take control of your health. I look forward to hanging out with you again in the next episode.
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