Bulking Is Dead - Eric Helms & Steve Hall

guys, we're here today for another episode of stronger culture, I think. And hilariously, I don't know why I want to talk about this, but we're having some audio difficulties with Eric's fan on his laptop. It's throwing me right back to the first episodes of the Revive Stronger Podcast where I had my, I didn't know how many years old laptop, but it was struggling bit time with a lot of those episodes. They're alone with terrible internet. And I like it was the internet was coming in and out and I had to upload the episode overnight because my, my speed was so poor, but it was just throwing me back to those first episodes where I had hair, but hopefully my actual interviewing skills have improved. Eric, you still have hair and you're a great interviewer as well, I believe. I don't know why I do not do many of you a good lead in here. No, that's great. I don't know how to do that. I interviewed. Well, now what I will do is I'll tell them the one thing that they didn't realize was our true fix for the audio. And that is distracting people. So the audio she didn't go away, but I was like, Steve, just put on a stringer, then we'll be good. And at least on YouTube, everyone will have, they don't care about the audio if they see that kind of, you know, visual stimuli as I'll put it out. So, I'll come, the rescue will give shout out, never skip, mass day, stringer on. It's on. We've been having a heat wave in the UK. It's not actually at the moment. It's kind of average, kind of heat for the UK, but we were in the, I don't know, because you guys don't have a few Celsius Fahrenheit, but we were close to 40 degrees Celsius. Yeah. So, which is crazy for us. So I have a fan on me and I'm sat here sweating still because I don't know, I'm peak mass almost. Like, I guess that's my excuse. Do you notice that actually with your own body temperature, like when you are massing, do you notice you do get hotter? I would say I notice more that I get colder when I'm cutting. So I notice the absence of the body heat more than I notice the accumulation of body heat when I get bigger. But I think for me, the point everyone hates you, just I just want you to know that Steve, the point that would you talk about all of the, the off-season things, like, I'm like stuffed and I have no interest in food and I'm melting it's like where most people would love to have their, their, their body fat be, you know. For me, I don't get those symptoms strongly until I'm probably closer to like 94 to like higher and then it is precipitous. Then every step I get above that, I might have to adjust that up a little bit now. But back in the day, I had a run at trying to be a 105 kilo power lifter. This was say 2016. It was my last meet before I got hip surgery. And my, you know, when you're six foot and you want to be a good power lifter and you've been competing as a 93, everyone just tells you like, you know, dude, the reason why you're not obviously a world champion is because you should have at least a 120, you know. And like I knew better, you keep hearing it enough times and for enough people, you're like, maybe there's just a, a ridiculous just over the rainbow slope of massive games. If I can just get to like, you know, 105 and I never made it there, dude. I made it to 98. I just felt like I was a bag of sweat at night. Constantly hot. And we would go out to eat like Indian like every, like two days. And I couldn't get over 98 like feasibly. That was when I benched 165. But if you think about what I was benching at 93, it's basically gaining one kilo of my bench for every kilo of mass that I gained, which is not that great. So yeah, I had a run that was, that was definitely last time I remember experiencing like that kind of extreme offseason thing. But then in my youth, when I was first putting on size in like in my 20s, it was pretty wild. So I think I was just, I was just different metabolically back then. So yeah. This is, this is a great lead in actually to the topic that I was going to cover to some extent, because I appreciate you spoke about this length on the mass research, well, in the mass research review and also probably on other podcasts and also on the iron culture podcast, you talked about recomposition. So I don't want to go over all of that again. But it's really interesting to me because like just to briefly go over my background in terms of gaining, like I was first of all, I had no idea what I was doing. And I just gained and thought, hey, all the clean food and I'll gain clean weight in that. That clearly didn't happen. I got very fat, very quickly and wasn't happy with that. And then I came across later down the line, more of these kind of like slow gaining. And that was actually a lot of 3D MJ's content. And that was, I remember a time there was like, it was a recommendation, maybe a pound per month was a recommendation that you had ages ago. And so I kind of followed that by also headed the back of my mind. And I'm probably skipping over things a lot of things to be honest. It's been a long time. But P ratio's at the back of my mind, well, I was like, well, if I stay leaner, I'll have a partition more of those calories towards muscle, not so much to fat. So then I'd not really push my body fat up very high. And I'd stay what was now stage weight. So even then that was very lean for me. And so I just wasn't in the most productive space. And also kind of yo-yoing between like many masses, many cuts almost to some extent. And then I came across like Mike Israel and his content. I know pretty sure you guys debated or discussed had a roundtable on a Bell's podcast, a Bell Syvey, the Sustainable Development Podcast, I think a while ago. A while ago. Yeah, this is years ago. A Bell isn't so much in history as much as he was. That's funny. I've always called him Abel. So I was like, Abel, okay. You're probably right. I'm probably wrong. I mean, I hope I am right because the number of times I'm interacted with, I'm going to say Abel, as was like, I mean, I was on his podcast probably almost double the number of times. And we were DMing a lot. And if he just never corrected me saying his name the whole time wrong, then that is a level of respect that now makes me feel guilty. So I don't even- I don't know. Was I saying a Bell? I should- that doesn't even make sense. Like when I read it, I would read that as an English word as Abel. Why would I- I don't know why I decided to do that anyway? Who knows what the insides and outs of my brain dynamics? But I remember that podcast because I was also going to get you guys on to debate that topic as well. And also Mike had at that time and I don't know precisely where he is now, but quite a more assertive rate of gain versus yourself. And that was very appealing to me because I think I'd been constraining myself. So I kind of went to that and I even remember, I think it's 10 years today, Eric, or close to when you guys as 3DMJ came over to the UK and presented here. And I remember you- the Garth Study. I remember you specifically- I'm pretty sure it was the Garth Study where they- that was one of the earlier studies where they looked at surplus sizes and the impact on body composition. And I remember you displaying it and me being like, "Ah, but I think there's something too, this larger surplus. These guys were doing other things alongside their body building and things like this. I was trying to convince myself that this larger surplus was superior." And I thought I'd found this middle ground between that previous just gaining weight way too fast, then really constraining myself and like, "Oh, I'm at that sweet spot where I can't think it. Maybe it was like a 1%. " No, it closes a 2% per month kind of rate of gain. Maybe even a pound, a half a pound a week, something along those lines, it was certainly more assertive than where you were at. And then the P-Race Show debate happened to where kind of tracks kind of basically completely demolished. That argument where actually seems like you may even be in a better position to gain muscle. If you're a higher body fat attendant than the lower body fat. And so that was great for me because it helped me convince I don't need to stay so lean. But then I'd start hitting these wall blocks with my gaining phases because I'd be trying to gain fairly assertively. And like you said, not like many, they just keep gaining, they probably just gain an exorbitant muscle body fat, but I hit a ceiling of body weight where I was just like, "I can't push above this. It's not comfortable." So now the work by Eric Barichat and now your recent research that looked into different surplus sizes and this mass kind of research review and article that you did is really like spinning everything on its head where there was a time of which I thought similar to where people think, "Oh, if I don't beat my performance from last week by rep or load or add a set, I haven't progressively overloaded. I haven't put a stimulus forward that's going to maximize muscle growth," which we now know is fundamentally just not the case. Brian Minor did fantastic work on that. And the same here, well, I thought if I didn't gain weight for a week or two weeks ago, a month, that's terrible. I've just been spinning my wheels. I've been at maintenance. My body is not changing at all. And I think there was quite a lot of people may be pushing almost that narrative to some degree. And I think myself too, I kind of got caught up in it. So it's been quite for refreshing almost going a bit full circle back to, yeah, a pound per month is probably not a bad recommendation for a ton of people. So that's, yeah. Yeah, it's a nice, that's my backstory with it all. And to jump past this brilliant article where you outlined basically, hey, you probably me, if you think recombosition is just seeing it maintenance and losing fat and gaining muscle, you probably want to think about it a bit deeper than that. And you outlined some great examples of where it can happen in a deficit. In a surplus even at maintenance and it's much more fluid than it's not on a non-off switch. I think that's where a lot of people kind of think about it. surplus, gain muscle, deficit, lose fat because they're opposing and so it's really difficult to do it to at once. So the conclusion you seem to have for advanced naturals was essentially to kind of gain attain. And is that because we have evidence that maintenance is essentially as anabolic as a small surplus or because we simply lack convincing evidence that a surplus provides additional anabolic benefit once any G needs are met? That's my question. I don't think it was covered. Yeah, no, that's a good question. I think just give a little bit of background. I swear to God, I won't just rehash. Like the three hours I did on like brain. I need to go sign up. The review and yeah. So much of that confusion and back and forth stemmed from us not having, I think a clear understanding of each one of these things. What's the influence of body composition? What's the influence of training age? What's the influence of a magnitude of a deficit and surplus and how does it relate to mass gaining through the resistance, stringing stimulus and then how do they all fit together, right? And then also you've got these anacidotes where for someone who has always held themselves back because they were staying too lean and were afraid to get into a surplus, then absolutely like the seafood diet is a great advice like it was in your case. S-E-E. And I think there needed to be several things for people to understand it. And like you mentioned, Chris Barakat's article that just said, here's the data. I think for very analytical minded people, they were like, okay, now I understand it's possible, but I still don't get how or what did I have wrong before because some of these anecdotes really do seem to hold true. And I think what I, I didn't have the ability to fully, fully explain it to people until I could break it down the way I did in the mass article where I was like, here's like the actual math of it, you know? And I think I understood it conceptually, but that is not enough for certain types of personalities or brains to really get it. And to give you an example of this, I got an Instagram DM that said, as a response to me sharing the Brandon DeCruz podcast where we broke this down in depth, you can't lose fat in a surplus. And I was like, I mean, like that's kind of fundamentally true, but it just goes to show you how kind of very linear thinkers like you're not actually in a surplus or deficit. That's the thing that most people get miss, right? You are in an absorptive and post-absorptive state on and off constantly. Unless you got like an IVN or you're fasting completely. And thus, if you have an incredibly strong drive to build muscle, you could be going in and out of states where each time, you know, you have the fuel supply, your body is just waiting to build muscle because the signaling is there and still affecting you. And then anytime you go long enough between meals, there might be a small amount of fat mass loss. And if that drive the build muscle is enough, you can see, you know, over time, because you're coming in and out of the surplus deficit, your net energy balance could result in a small amount of fat loss and a pretty substantial in this instance that I'm describing degree of muscle gain and also over what time period, right? So it's probably true that if I caught you in the post-absorptive state that you weren't storing any triglycerides or the net change in stored versus liberated triglycerides was, you know, positive so that you were maybe gaining a little bit of fat. But that's not the same thing as saying that over a four week period where on a day-to-day basis, you had a, you were positive. You're eating more than your TDE that you can't lose a little of fat because you can't and we've observed it, right? So I think that's kind of the disconnect is that people are, we have a really tough time thinking about things at every single layer as we drill down and down and down and down and down and there's no impossible in that statement, you know, like if they were to use much more specific language in the post-absorptive state, you know, when you have consumed a very large meal, you're unlikely, you're highly unlikely to store more triglycerides than you're liberating. I would have been like, yes, that is true. But that's not the same thing as saying, you know, you can't lose fat in a net surplus, right? Anyway, so going all the way back to your question, is it because we don't have data showing that a larger surplus helps advance lifters or that being in a deficit is not harmful? I think it comes right back to the main point of that article was just to say, hey, you will benefit from a surplus to the degree that the rate of muscle gain that you can make benefits from it, right? And I think perhaps the most useful study that recently came out that chose this is the one that just got released by Vargas Molina. So it just came out, I want to say a month ago. And I think I saw, I don't know, I got an air gun chair at mental insulin's a few others, it got a lot of press because it was a group of 30 lifters. And I'll say lifters because they were, they did have some resistance training experience. I think the average training age was 1.5 years. And they were eating 2.5 grams per kilogram of protein. And that was like, hey, based on barricade and based upon rough low, we think this makes a lot of sense. And we're going to put one group in a 250 calorie deficit. And the other group is going to eat it maintenance. So we're going to see who has better body recomp. Right? Now, the fine print is that well, they had an average of 1.5 years of experience that is trained. Neither you or I would be like, that's really well trained. And we also know that how close you are to your genetic quote unquote limit. And therefore, how quickly you can gain muscle relative to your own max speed is not dictated by how long you've been lifting, but how close you're seeing you've gotten. So there's plenty of people who might have the, I don't know, maybe the third, a third close to how they're seeing that you and I would have had after our first year and a half because they may have not taken it as probably inappropriately seriously as you were right. And there may be a few outliers in that study who were just completely locked in for a year and a half, didn't hold themselves back with their diet, like maybe you did or made smarter decisions with their training than I did and didn't do some powerlifting stuff, whatever who were actually making the least amount of gains relative to their own maximum rate in that study. So anyway, we don't know, but they're essentially what we probably describe as intermediates. Some of them probably more novice, some of them a little more advanced. So they have a given known rate of gain that they can get. And then the final piece to it is that the average body fat percentage was about 25%. And this was a mixed group of men and women, but it was 26 men. So that means that they were reasonably high in body fat. They were at that point where definitely I was saying earlier that I'm getting a little sweaty, you know, I'm a sweaty Betty and I'm, I'm eating Indian every the night and if I, you know, if I skip a couple of meals and don't go to eat Indian, I dropped to 97. So my body is ready to liberate that fat. And certainly if Steve Hall was able to give the 25% body fat, he would probably be a type 2 diabetic and maybe in an abacoma. Have a hard attack before the end of the study and his body would be liberating fat and any chance it got, right? So with that background context, we have reasonably high in body fat intermediates and they're being trained in a research study, which we've talked about as the exact opposite with the internet. Typically it's actually a pretty damn hard training protocol, right? And low and behold, both groups gained about a kilogram of lean mass. Neither one was better than the other despite one being in maintenance and one being at a deficit. So I think that kind of directly gets at least part of your answer or part of your question I should say is that it seems like a deficit is at least not harming their ability to gain muscle, right? But then if you actually look at the energetics because the difference that did exist is that the group that was supposedly on a 250 calorie deficit or prescribed to 250 calorie deficit lost like a kilogram and a half or two kilograms more fat mass than the other group somewhere in that range. I don't have the numbers right in front of me. So what do we actually now know is that the amount of lean mass gains that they can make on that program with the given diet they were given was not constrained by being at an intended maintenance or an intended 250 calorie deficit. So that was not the bottleneck to them quote unquote, "maxing out" that level of gain on average. When you do the math, they will. weren't in a 250 calorie deficit and a quote unquote, you know, zero calorie, like maintenance level, they were closer to like 150 and 350 if I recall correctly. I don't know. I get another numbers right in front of me, but one was in a moderately small deficit and one was in a small deficit. That's probably a better like description of the two groups. And in neither case, did it hold back their muscle gain and I really don't think there's any logic to why something magical happens when your net energy balance becomes zero. And all of a sudden, like now we see a nonlinear rate of gain, right? Where you would all of a sudden unlock something. I think we do have evidence if we look at like rosinic, for example, which is on novices training four days per week. I often say three days per week. I just assume that about rosinic and I read the study again. Like, actually they got these guys on like a four day per week training protocol. And it is really I call him. Yes, three is just so honestly, it's probably 80, 80 percent of the resistring literature, if it's a longitudinal study. And then the other like 20 percent is probably 90 percent of those 20 percent being two days per week. So when you see a four day per week training study, you're like, oh, you know, but anyway, so it's a 40 per week training protocol that had actually pretty high volume progressive overload built in. And I'm like, that's like legit training program period. I saw that on the internet. I'd be like, ah, yeah, good call. So they were held back the control group by not being in that energy surplus. And they were in a small deficit. So it's an example of, okay, well, what's the difference between these two studies is, well, one, these guys are day zero lifting. And these guys are day, you know, whatever week week, week 83 or whatever it is, right? On average. So that is not the same. And what we see is that not being in a in a large surplus, held them back. In fact, I bet if there was a, if that had been slightly different control group, or they'd been given a little bit of encouragement to eat in a surplus, we could have seen a graded response to where they, if they were not in like a rough 100 calorie deficit, they run like a 10 calories surplus. They would have gained more, but still wouldn't have reached that, you know, average of three kilograms of lean mass gain that the two groups that were given a 2000 calorie weight gain or shake on top of their habitual diet would have gained. That would be my hypothesis. And I think the data overall supports that even if that study doesn't directly demonstrate it. It's just that what's the rate of gain you can make? And then how much do you need to support that energetically? And then how much does being in a, you know, an energy deficit, harm it? And if the rate of gain is really, really slow, and you can only put on so much tissue at a time, coming in and out of those energy fluxes, you know, and having maybe a, you know, not the, not a perfect diet in terms of energy status, may not be the bottleneck. I think that's, that's a really good way to look at it. And then the interaction of leanness is important too. Because if you're 25% body fat, when you're not in that post-absorbed of state eating protein, and when you haven't just recently trained, your body is not in as bad of a spot to support muscle gain as it would if you're a lean person, you know? So I think that's kind of the context. It's like if you're walking around at any energy state, surplus, maintenance, or deficit, and you're just barely skirting your lower intervention point of leanness, then between meals, you're probably going into like a walk around state of losing, you know, muscle mass. You're, you're going to have a net negative energy turnover. And if you're not lean, that's not the case, you know? So it's much easier to see that net turnover be positive if you're lifting weights, that is. So it's just a collection of all these variables together. You know, am I trying to stay to lean? Okay, that's that's some downward pressure. Am I a newbie who's, you know, lifting weights and has decent genetic? I think it's a really, really strong, strongest that everything we've talked about upward pressure. And then what collectively does that result in in terms of my max rate of gains? Okay, then what do I need to support that with nutrition? Okay. And then if I have set up a scenario where that is insufficient to supply it, okay, I'm going to then lose some body fat in the process. And if that inefficient, you know, conversion is even more, you know, giving me kind of this metabolic alert signal, then that is going to result in a less efficient gain of muscle mass. So I would say that there are, if we take a look at advanced lifter, right? It's not like we're taking out the equation of body composition. And we're not, you know, taking out the equation of the diet or the training stimulus. It's just that the training stimulus is heavily throbbed. You know, you got a governor on your system, even best case scenario, like, you know, we could take a look at, quote unquote, you know, my unicorn gains or the best gains you've made and said the last three or four years, what they really amount to on like a like, let's say it was, this was a 10 week study by Rorygas Malena, right? I mean, what do you think is the most you gained in the last couple of years over any given 10 week period? Like the best 10 week period possible? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, like barely wear on probably a normal food scale. So you want to, right? Really isn't going to be honest. Like I think I did have some spurts and I look back at like my recovery phase after 2023. There might have been maybe a 10 week period where I put on half a kilogram, you know, with some of that being recovered losses and some of it being new gains as I transition into the higher volume approach and was training muscle groups that I hadn't trained in that way with degrees of volume and and and and and intensity that I hadn't done at longer muscle likes all simultaneously. So I mean, yeah, that's that means that that you could have found a spot where I could have looked like the people in that that that progress Malena study maybe I'm being perhaps maybe too generous to how much I put on. But that's I think more realistically we can look at something you couldn't weigh on a scale. So let's say a hundred grams, maybe something you could weigh on a scale like the really good hot streak, you know, how much of an energy surplus you need to build a hundred grams of muscle and half it's it's it's that's it's not just not the constraint, you know, so now however though let's say you are trying to stay friggin almost shredded like you're you're not experiencing reds but your body is waiting to take to to give you some of those early stage symptoms of low energy availability. And now you want to put on a hundred grams of tissue. Well, you're you're basically just fluttering around an energetic state where your body is actually almost ready to use your muscle tissue for energy at any standpoint. So so so the likelihood is really low. But if you take if you take sweaty Betty, you know, Steve Hall or Eric Helms and then you put them in that same state, you could potentially be in a deficit and still gain those hundred grams just as fast because there's no metabolic pressure to use protein, right? There's no precipitous drop in iron stores and testosterone and you know negative sleep, you know, impacts that occur. So it is it's a really well demonstrated in that P ratio debate that Trexler did and one of the things he did that I think is the most convincing piece of evidence is he did a participant level meta regression. He looked at like seven studies where he got the individual data points and he plotted it and you see this very clear clustering where once you get up into the body fat percentages, you know, over 20 and a largely male sample, you just see the lean mass gains, which is a metric he made where you're basically adding any fat loss. So it will also two kilograms be a plus two score and adding any lean mass gains. So it's a gain two kilograms of muscle and lost two kilograms of fat. That would be a score of four. The clustering of that cloud just starts to precipitously increase as you get higher and that goes right back to what we started with where you were like, hey, man, do you get really sweaty and hot and all this stuff when you're high on body fat? Because what are we looking at there? It's exactly the opposite of what P ratio would predict is that the fatter you get, the more your body is going, I am so ready to lose this. I'm going to increase your your your your thermogenesis. I'm going to ramp up everything related to, you know, triglyceroid use and in the opposite is exactly what I was saying, you know, tracks, I mean, sorry, you know, Steve, I don't I don't notice it as much that my heat ramps up. But man, I get cold when I'm dieting. So it's exact opposite starts to happen when you get really lean. And for some reason, we know these experiences of bodybuilders, but we really wanted to believe the P ratio thing. And I think it's for two reasons. One, we know those those times or those people who were too lean held themselves back and they finally ate and they blew up and it was the thing they needed to do. And then two, when you're lean and you make gains, you can see it, you know, and when you're fat and you make gains, you can't and you don't like the way you look the whole time. And I think we just underestimate how much our psychology influences that. I know for me too, I like to think that I could hack the system like I don't like thinking that it's as simple as like be a healthy level of body fat way. You feel good and I try and progressively overload over time and train really hard and push yourself to your limits. I like to think that there's cases where we could periodize and that could somehow potentially more muscle growth or, hey, I could be clever about staying a bit leaner and go through these kind of well thought out mini cuts that will help again give me extra gains on the way out because I've improved my partitioning ratio, this sort of thing. It's like, ah, to think that I can't because muscle gain is just so slow as a natural past like that five years of like very intentional training, ah, to some extent a bit of pilt swallow, but once you've swallowed it, it's so much like just urine amount better blissful place where you just like let things happen. But to that question, so kind of thought, hey, there doesn't seem to be anything necessarily beneficial. Sorry Steve, really quick. I gotta say I don't see it that way. Well, maybe I did see it that way at one point because I have definitely had to swallow a lot of pils and if you listen to the history of my content, you will definitely see I have changed over time as the people we mentioned. You know, the funny thing is I debated Mike Isertel for literally years about appropriate rates of muscle gain and the context and the practical limitations of trying to track small surpluses and stuff like that. And then it became for full circle. If you look at the video that went viral on the RP channel when he, you know, brought me out and interviewed me, they got millions of views where most people on the street, they go, hey, aren't you that guy? They're referring to the is bulking dead interview. They did to me that probably has like three million views and I was something like that. So I am the video of the guy who killed bulking. But it was like a 40-minute conversation. I went through all this nuance and you could, you could see if you watched that in 2024 and you go back to fucking 2014 or whatever we're talking about where we both on Able's podcast, you can see the like what 10 years does and people who are actually open to changing their mind, which I think is kind of a cool look at how it's supposed to be, even though it takes a long time to evolve thought and change perspectives. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah. No, absolutely. It's very cool. I will have no doubt watched that video, but there's so much content nowadays. It's all just a mile from eights into one thing. What's the next? But so kind of come to the point of there doesn't seem to be anything necessarily beneficial about being in that surplus. So long as you're at a healthy level of body fat, but the body's happy to kind of use that if it needs to kind of go through that muscle building process because the potential for you to build muscles so limited when you are that advanced and the most obvious thing that's going to happen when you go into any sort of obvious surplus is fat gain as someone who has such a limited ability to grow muscle, right? Yeah. And I can you tell that I'm not fully awake because I actually started with a tangent to distract you said something different that I meant and then forgot that I was going to say another thing. I was like, you know, I've taken on these these hard swallows pills many times and by the way, that was the tangent. Did you notice how it's changed? But now the thing that I was going to say is I've swallled that pill so many times. So maybe I just have forgotten that I did feel the same way you did back in the day, but when I swallled this pill, it was so long ago that now I actually still see it as an optimization game, not like just it'll all work out. Like once I realized, okay, it's like I only need the degree of a surplus that can benefit me and maybe quote, unquote, piercization in a traditional sense of body building isn't going to potentiate it and many cuts won't help it. Like there's still so many other things on the table that in my mind, yes, the governor is on the car, but I'm just like whatever. Like the governor's always on the car and it's just this ever increasing governor, but I still have to do every single thing in my power to figure out how to get to this unknown, you know, mileage and I also can't see this pedometer, right? So it's still I still play the optimization game. Like all right, did I get enough volume in this week or how many of my sets did I actually take to zero RIR and someone could look at that and go the difference between Eric being perfect and not is a gain of 50 grams of tissue over a six month period. It doesn't matter and I would go, yeah, but the difference in me not getting any perfect and getting it perfect is 50 grams of tissue and they're like, what? You know, but I'm like, but if you add that up over time, you know, so that's that's the kind of thing where it's all about your perspective because three, four years of making 50 more grams of tissue is a pound ish, you know, of muscle and I think that does matter for the things we care about. So anyway, yeah. You're speaking to something that I was going to talk about later and I'm going to go on a very mini tangent and I'm going to bring us back because I'm going to be in the very we're recording this a little bit early because this time next week I'm going to be basically preparing for a flight to Bali where I'm presenting on the compounding physique and this is one of the things where I talk about how those little things add up and especially over time because it's one of the things I see where people are like, ah, you don't need to have that much protein that's been in the volume. You don't need to train that hard. But it's like these are all little things that yeah, in the short term, it does, there's barely any difference. Sometimes the research can't even show any like if it's not a big enough difference and you've said about this like in terms of the resistance that stretch. If it's very similar like you're in a short period of time, especially for trained people, you're not going to see barely anything but stretched out over years when you're trying to get all your ducks in a row. Well, suddenly you're kind of seeing that person slowly get to hopefully slightly more elite or what have you and when we're trying to be that person make it make it adds up over time compounds. So anyway, that's my tangent to bring us all the way back. Something I know we've spoken about before is post show, go through the recovery phase to try and get to your lower intervention point where you feel good, you're at this body fat where the body's okay and in that through that recovery phase and try and be as lean as you can whilst getting there. And that is to have as long a gaining window as possible before like you're getting too far away from stage condition or what have you. But I'm thinking if the surplus isn't any better than just kind of having a healthy level of body fat, what if someone does overshoot that and then just holds that weight. Are they now in less of an optimal situation than the person that was so tightly bound about trying to be nice and lean at that point and maybe if they just like, I don't know, chilled a little bit, got a bit of a fat, got soft, but then just that person now just maintains and trained hard is wanting a more optimal scenario to grow muscle than the other. What do you think to Eric? I think you're probably playing at the margins a bit, but I do think there might be a difference because in the unique state of recovery and also contest prep, there are some nonlinear things that are going on there. Like if you get lean enough, all of a sudden the wheels really start to fall off and then if you spend a lot of time in that state and we've seen this, to fully recover from that, it takes more than just getting your body fed up. So you can have this lag where your metabolic, you know, it's not just like, because I like in that article and where I've talked about this, I've been trying to focus on body recompositions to help people understand it. Like listen, leaner you are, more protein used for fuel, right? Fatter you are less protein used for fuel, right? So no problem of deficit and then deficit exacerbates that. But what we really see is that if you got really, really, really lean to the point where like the only way to get to 5% body fat for a male, for 99 point, many, many 9% of the population except for like that one dude who literally walked around with stride glutes and we've all, if you've been in a game long enough, you meet one of these people, you know, and they're like, I don't diet for shows and you're like, what? You know, like, they were, they were, they're maybe not the most stride guy on the planet typically, but they come into shows and they just kind of, for them, it's like a pickup game, you know? And they have stride glutes. We had a client, Robbie Sirdinho, who ended up getting his pro card doing pretty well, but Bertot sent me like his application photos and he had at the time, this 2012, where most of us would try to diet too and would think you're shredded. He got a little bit tighter, but he was doing four to six week preps and he would, he would feel the same kind of time course of a bad, but it was only four to six weeks and he didn't really even need to, right? You know? So like if it was classic back in the day, he could have literally just like, yeah, I just need to find a good shabour and a tanner and I'm ready to rock any given Saturday, you know? So it's not, if for any mortal to get to say 5% body fat, it requires months of dieting, right? So it's not this linear kind of thing where you could just like weigh the magic wand and move some things and have a mathematical thing spit out the process of getting yourself the 5% body fat and the, you know, like there's so many things that start to go haywire in that process and, and related to the time spent trying to get their hand in that state to where you come out the other side and it will take months for those systems to recover. So there is a difference between you at say 12% body fat, if you did that a week and a half after the show because you went hog wild or you steadily gaining at, you know, let's say 1% body fat per week. So seven weeks post show where you're 12% body fat. And I think the latter example is someone who has a much more favorable environment for putting on muscle. Right. And the former, you will probably be able to keep gaining fat for a while and that lag time will take a little bit more to catch up. It's probably not directly linear. Maybe like if you put on 12% body fat immediately than every system is, is almost ready to go into just a time lag. And are you getting enough of the nutrients that might have been deficient? So maybe at the four week mark, you're in the same point. But now that other person has had a few more weeks of gaining, if that makes sense. And it's kind of the same way on the way down to like, we've definitely experienced where you or I have gotten to the same level of leanness, but we know that we retain more muscle on the way down in our different perhaps or seen the same thing with our clients. Right. Like, I think Jeff Alberts is a great example of this is that when he looked back at say 2009 versus 2011 or 2014, he and people are like, what the hell? He had like almost a 10 pound increase in stage weight. And he was basically at the same point as career that we are now. Right. He turned pro at 38. I think he got his WBF and his NGA pro card in 2009. Many times beating me among others to do it. And then 2011 made his pro debut 2014 as well. And he was, he went from like 160 to 170 ish, right on stage in pounds. And there were people who were incredulous. But his offseason weight was quite similar. And like, he put on some maybe a couple pounds of tissue, which is legit. Right. Kind of the same thing we saw when he adopted some of different approaches in that area. And he'll talk about that. But I think the major thing that occurred was he had a much more reasonable diet. He took it slower. He was able to maintain more training efficacy. And he just preserved a lot more muscle mass, even though he got to the eventual same body fat point. Right. So I think that that's kind of the inverse if you want to think about it as like a heuristic of what is going on in the offseason on the contest prep. Right. So it probably matters to some degree, but I would say it certainly matters less than some people who really worry about this stuff. And that's why like the recovery diet guidance that we give and I'm sure you give as well is is pretty broad. Like, hey, over one to two months, we want to be five to 10% over stage weight. And I think most people they go, okay, that sounds good. And they think about it and they're like, well, those are drastically different experiences, getting 5% over stage weight in two months versus 10% in one month. The latter is going to make me feel like I'm being really quote unquote bad with my diet. But I think that's the type of range where if there is a difference, it's hard to know versus other things that we observe as coaches or athletes. It's pretty clear with even a little bit of experience. Like now this this approach was way better than that one. But in this case, I just think that's probably not true. So you can adapt it to kind of your personality or individual experience here. The things you struggle with and then it's like, okay, how do I find the least psychological friction and not make you feel like you're failing. Because I think that is that's something that I think people don't really appreciate how disastrous that can be to the mentality of a bodybuilder is feeling like they have. They've lost their discipline and their identity as a bodybuilder during that phase when they can't stop themselves from going out to like bingey and then they will they want to hide it. They're shamed their shamed about it because it's so directly conflicting. With the identity and that core entrance members card if I'm a bodybuilder of physique athlete to get in the door and it's control discipline. Willingness to do those things like chip away at these really incremental gains and go into that deep dark pain cave and do everything perfectly and suffer. And if you go, I actually binge down tacos earlier today. Like you just don't feel like you feel like the card is a sham. And I think that hurts athletes more than many people realize. And I think that is one of the main causes of burnout in the sport. So to be able to mitigate that a bit and help people understand it and find a little more grace and then even just aligning systems with physiology. It's like, okay, you're you're going to have an intense drive to binge and binging is driven at least behaviorally in many cases when it's not not like you know a clinical history of it by restriction. So if we can be as least restricted and tell you that's a good thing, then we're going to do okay here. And I think we rationalize that before the era of reverse or recovery dieting and we're talking about like Lee Priest and the magazines looking fat is going, hey, the post post, you know, competition period. That's an anabolic rebound phase. But it may have been in the guys who are cycling drugs. Yeah. But even in the natural world, it was believed just as fervently. And it's sort of papers over this period really well. And for me, I remember in '07 because I told the story before my very first contest pre-reverse diet, pre-recovery diet, definitely in an era where there were not much distinction between the advice given to naturals and enhanced. I put on 22 kilos in two months and I could have been diagnosed with clinical binge eating disorder looking back at retrospect. I didn't start to feel like I had done something wrong. Intel maybe month two or right at the end of month one because the initial weight game. I was not fat. And there was definitely some instances of me kind of going wild. My plan post show was a list of restaurants. It wasn't a recovery diet or first diet. It was like Italian Indian, you know, because I had just never thought about what I was doing any off season because I was a skinny guy. So I didn't think I had been mattered. I was like, eat a high protein diet. And then I had to be so meticulous for prep that it was such a divergence that I couldn't sustain it. And I was trying to track macros and I kept going off them. But then when I started to see like at the end of month one like, okay, hold on. This is as fat as I want to get the fad as they've ever been. This is good. And then I'm like, okay, here's my here's my game plan. It's 3000 calories. And I'd end the day at 5000 calories and I'd gone back to Chipotle twice and I'm just like. Your week, you know. That was really, really challenging. But I made it through that first month. Thinking I was just doing the thing that's normal. And I think for maybe people with a different personality, different background more solidified baseline behaviors who actually. Been appropriately prepared by a coach for what the bodybuilding lifestyle is. I could have. Like gotten through that and then been all right, but I wasn't. I was one of those probably one of the most extreme cases I've actually seen personally in met of. You know, post. You know, contest fat overshooting. And then going back to your point of it was at a big deal. It certainly felt that way emotionally, but when I look at it, what I actually did was I kind of recopped from 2007 all the way through to 2008. I held in the low 200 pound range. So I got I got the 102 and I actively cut down for a bit. Like I purposely was like, I need to do a bit of a cut. But then for a while I wasn't trying to cut. It was like my my physiology caught up. And then I told you that I was like struggling at 98. You know, feeling hot and I couldn't couldn't put on weight anymore. And that was 2016. Imagine how much more muscle I had in 2016 versus 2007. And being at 102. The weight melted off me for a little bit. And then I just hovered around the mid 90s and I look back at those pictures and my training logs. I was making great gains. I mean, I'd only been lifting since 2004. So I was like a early stage advanced because I was doing many, many things were right. Probably the most wrong thing I did was prepping if you want to think about slowing down your gains to reach advanced. So there was this phase sometime starting in October of 2007 all the way through to December of 2008 before I started my prep in January of 2009, where there was a non intentional. Um, you know, recomb going on if we look back at it. Um, where I was just like, well, I'm already fat with one. I want to start prep. And then I, you know, basically was like, I want to start my next prep closer to like 215 pounds instead of 220. And that is where I eventually started. And I remember I remember submitting the application because I worked with Lane for the most of my that second prep. And I was doing 15 pounds and I got up to 226. At the end of my recovery phase. So from 226 to 215 was sort of this extended recomb. I looked way better at 215 compared to 226 and not like I had just lost 11 pounds of fat. It was more like I lost 11 pounds of fat. I probably put on a couple pounds of muscle. So yeah, but I only know that looking at hindsight. So it was recoverable the situation I was in. But it would definitely be suboptimal. I would say, you know, if you could go back all over all of that and kind of figure out what would be the best thing from my mental and emotional state and my relationship with my wife and people around me and probably also in terms of my overall trajectory against. very interesting. Yeah, it just makes me think there's so many come back to this scene. I say far too often on this podcast, so many roads to Rome in regards to I've certainly know of people who feel like they gained like closer to that 10% of body fat about a sorry 10% of body weight above stage weight within a month and they feel like really bad about it because they think and hey like I'm already that much above or even maybe more than that and they're like I can't go into a deficit because I'm not recovered from prep but I want to be in a surplus because I want to kind of gain muscle. It's like well you can just hold and make this weight look better now. You might not be in as handicapped a situation as you think you are, which I think is really a useful framing because I also have in my head like losing body fat was like cycling downhill where it's gaining muscles like cycling uphill with the break on. So I do everything in your power to make that as easy as possible and it's like thinking a surplus is going to really aid with that and so it's really a really an important tool but you can almost just say like be it a body comp where you feel good, healthy, you can really really kind of like that match that is the fire for muscle game which is the training piece and so long as you're not fully into a deficit that leads to or being so lean that you end up feeling like hungry all the time and the training piece can't be that productive. You don't need to think about it a heck of a lot more than that. So I guess actually and I think there's a the bodybuilding scene in the UK is big on this in particular. I don't know if it's the same in the US but there was very much for a long time. I think it's changed a little bit now but it was very much like push your body weight up to like see your body composition improve and people would be like 40 50 pounds above stage weight thinking it was necessary to get that quote unquote soft to see that muscle come on. It's like actually you probably just made it all that much harder for yourself when next time it comes to compete. And also I'm thinking it's opening up options just as a kind of person example because I'm looking step on stage next year and I was thinking okay so after barley which is going to be basic come back in August and I was going to go through maybe a 10 week kind of relatively not aggressive diet but like a no okay diet to get me nice and lean close that lower intervention point and then basically hold there until like March May next year to kind of just feel good at this nice lean weight and I'm like well I could actually you could extend that diet over like 20 weeks and be in this tiny deficit I'd barely feel and being a better position to kind of gain muscle and that sort of thing could that be just as good. I guess it from this from I understand it it could be you really is like pick your poison. If it's poison. It could be a potion. Yeah it could be a potion. I'm afraid you know it could be a a strong you know if we want to go yeah want to go injectable like long lasting performative anti drug that makes super soldiers in the Marvel universe. Yeah no no I think this is kind of again also the inverse of of like prep right so we you you had you've you've talked to Martin Mcdonald a few times and he talks about like rapid weight loss isn't really worse than then slow weight loss and if you look at like muscle retention rates and I don't actually fully agree with that but I understand where he's coming from when you look at it in people who are not getting super super lean because you can see pretty decent body recomp you know like not much loss of muscle mass and like large amounts of fat mass if you give people who overweight large deficits and his argument is listen people are gonna regain the weight in any way so you're gonna have to kind of sick with weight diet long terms why not just get out of the way it's kind of one of the arguments he's put forth and he's like and I just diet everyone's in the law when I need to no problem kind of just maybe making quote unquote weight regain and and weight cycling not necessarily as pathological or negative if you do it in evidence-based way I think that game changes a bit with with large large deficits and either large amounts of weight loss or getting really lean and when you look at some of the kind of the outliers of and I will frame them as outliers like the the persistent metabolic adaptation and large scale uh at a metabolic adaptation so far more than be predicted and like the biggest loser um study for example or when you look at the degree of energy expenditure that is reduced in like the Minnesota semi-starvation study or some of the case studies on bodybuilders it's a different ballgame when you're pushing either well below your intervention point or when you're losing dozens of kilograms of fat mass um from where your body was in a short time period with a huge deficit in a large energy expenditure so um either one prompts a pretty disproportionate pushback physiologically right and um I think if you avoid that you have a lot of play wiggle room with with the the ranges of a deficit that will get you there whether it's a hundred calorie deficit or maybe a thousand if you're higher in body fat there may not be a big difference except just the rate of fat awesome how annoyed are you that you can't have as much you know of the food you like right so in that context yes but if we're talking about um whether someone diets 16 weeks to get in stage shape or 32 we both know the difference right um we we've seen it many times unless that person on 16 weeks just has great fat lost genetics low intervention point did everything else right as a drug-free competitor you're gonna see a different look even if you lose the same amount of of stage scale weight and get to the same you know stage weight it's just like the physique just looks beat up you know kind of spilly and like basically like uh you're you're flat but you're spilled over on stage and there's a filminess and it's not until there's a little bit of time spent recovering does that kind of look go away or it might just be that javaubar scenarios like yeah your six pounds lighter on stage you know so right yeah so I'm getting if I can frame it this way when you're between those upper lower intervention points you could basically diet uh not as aggressively as you would like but you can be much more aggressive or much less aggressive and you might be increasing your fat loss but slowing down your muscle gain so you can kind of again if you want to go long and slow or fast and short they're very similar in terms of result it's only when you're then below that intervention point now you slow as the way to go because your risky muscle loss so easily there is that fair to say exactly yeah and I think no one's modeled this quite as well like I was actually able to take James steel's uh model where he plots from week zero to week 80 the rate of muscle gain and I was like all right if this is a linear log change and every given period of time you're gaining roughly you know half that again or set another way it takes twice as much time to gain that same amount I took rosinick okay three kilos and eight weeks awesome what is week 72 to week 80 look like and it was point four kilos you know like oh my god I'm at one eighth but it's still a pound you know that's why the gains are still good over eight week periods when you're you know just a year and a half into your training career so we've modeled how does the diminishing rate of of muscle gain work but I don't think anyone's done a really good job like Kevin Hall's done some large scale modeling but I want to see someone model someone going from 25 percent body fat to five in a male who's lifting weights right take all the case studies and where we actually have like repeated dexas which is not enough to model right now it's just not going to happen yet but I think it we would start to see that the body constrains the rate of fat loss that you could actually achieve some people have tried to mathematically figure this out but they're not actually looking at the changing hormonal environment of how accessing other tissues impacts it's more like hey if we extrapolate these rates of you know fat oxidation that we see in these different energetic states and then we you know scale that to how much fat tissues available and we think about the bio energetic pathways what happens if you only have like two kilograms of fat on your body and it's it's less right someone could say oh therefore you can't be in a more than a 800 calorie deficit when you're shredded or whatever but those are made up numbers based upon and not made up those are numbers based upon an extrapolation of physiology in one state versus another and was well I think it's really important to acknowledge that like you're seeing a bottoming out of many of the hormones and signaling pathways and even like blood flow supply, vascularization and heaths and changes in fat physiology itself that makes tapping into those stores of body fat at the end from going from 6 to 5% harder such the point that you shouldn't even be using those numbers that you modeled based upon other research to get there so it's no higher than that I think it's be the probably the most accurate estimation of those types of look so if it's a question of how quickly can I gain muscle and the steel modeling and how big should my surplus be when you're becoming more more advanced lifter when you're becoming more and more advanced in a diet it's a question of what's the maximal rate that I can liberate fat and anything faster than that it's got to come from somewhere else right and there are ways where you can maybe dig for a bit and we are maybe losing a little bit of lean tissue and depleting glycogen, but that's what we got to do to overcome that hormonal environment. But then we do a diet break and we see the body get refreshed. You regain glycogen and I think we even see some slight regain of lean tissue during prep when it is heavily mediated by just the environment we're in. It's secondary to reds. You know, and you go into a show, you not only gain some glycogen, but you may regain a little bit of muscle mass, depending upon how much you lost and whatnot. And I, at least that's what we think we're seeing as coaches. So that would be really cool to see. Like really do we have a decent idea of how does our body's ability to tap into fat source change, as diminishes and diminishes and diminishes. And we look at, we would have to probably take some of these studies that are like looking at amino acid oxidation when you're shredded in a deficit. And then do like almost like a dose response. Like, okay, we know total starvation. It's two to three fold more when you're obese versus like 6% body fat. That's useful. We could try to model and interpolate between those two points. What we really need is someone who's like it 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 and 5% body fat and looking at that, not just in a maximum deficit of, you know, not eating anything, but like a 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 like up to a thousand calorie deficit at everybody fat percentage. And then we need it in a hundred people to accurately model this. We don't have that. We probably won't have that. So I think that is something we could probably model that in animals. And it would be probably a similar shape, but greater magnitude if I had to guess just on the way, you know, rats typically respond to things compared to us. But that would be super cool to see. Very interesting. Yeah. The hard studies to do, which is why we probably don't have them. And also it's a very distinct population that wants these studies done as well. But there's more of us growing, especially in the scientific kind of arena like yourself. So it's very interesting. And one of the thoughts that comes to mind just quickly, Eric, was thinking about training volume and obviously how there's that dose response relationship between training volume and muscle growth. And then thinking about kind of your energy balance equation where you are body fat wise and how that is into playing with your ability to recover from a certain amount of volume. And I guess you probably saw this too, but I certainly had, there was a time of which my offseason levels of volume I could handle during prep. And then there's a point where I was like, I need to start bringing this down because I just, I was going up a lower, up a lower six times a week and I had to change it to a pushpull legs. I can't think how much volume probably got trimmed off, but probably at least a third came down and then it slowly got back up. But do you think that your ability, all things being equal, your ability to kind of handle that workload? Could that be an indicator for, I guess, your muscle growth potential stimulus that you're providing? So if you're seeing that volume really like you barely managing to hold on to what you were, that's when you can be like, ah, now I know this might not be a great position to continue if I want to maximize muscle growth at this stage. Yeah, I, A, A answers yes, B, I think holistically we take a step back. Someone who is really analytically minded or very physiologically minded and doesn't, you know, consider much of the experience side of it, the subjective experience. I mean, not like how long you've been in it experience. They probably need to hear this is that we can't know our maximal rate of fat loss, nor our maximal rate of muscle gain. We're not walking around where, you know, I open my fridge and step onto the little water or my house is a metabolic chamber, where I, you know, every night I get into it, I sleep in the dexas and it scans me, you know, and then we have this constant date, you know, you know, data where we could actually figure this stuff out. So what do we have is our lived experience and the data we can track which accesses this a little bit. And that's a great example of one of the things that we can know. And the good news is that we feel all this stuff. That's why it changes our behavior. That's why we binge post competition because our body is telling us like this is not sustainable, healthy, good, and we need to change it. And that requires you to get fat, eat this or plus for a while, and then I will let you have a normal satiety response to a meal, right? Or in your case, how dare you get to a double-digit body fat percentage. I'm going to make you sweaty, Betty, and completely uninterested food. So same thing. If among athletes, like it requires an athlete who has some maybe pathological or previous clinical issues with food or body image to get into a persistent negative state of reds and develop things like the female athlete triad because an athlete who doesn't have those issues, they get to a point where that becomes a bottleneck for performance and they go, "Oh, I'm not going to do that," right? And if I identify that me not eating enough or trying to stay too lean is preventing me from improving my football performance or my triathlon time or my marathon, then I'm going to change that. And like, you know, marathon runners, triathletes, alternate endurance athletes, they all get leaner as they prep because it's probably less of a hindrance to maintain muscle compared to, say, improving your two-max and running economy. But they also recognize, and so do their coaches, that they're walking, out running, cycling, whatever, a fine balance, a tight rope, if you will, to being ill more often and not being able to train or getting injured more frequently. And we see that in the data, right? So when you look at athletes who are in chronic problematic low energy availability, experiencing red S, injury rates are higher, upper respiratory tract infections are higher, and frequency and occurrences of bone fractures and other things that look like, "Hey, you're not building or maintaining muscle or bone as often, and performance are all down." So that is also true in bodybuilding, right? And but you know, that's the thing. Because if you're paying attention and if you're not completely at war with your own body, like many bodybuilders are, exactly that. What signals do we use? How do we know that you can hang out and not worry about being in a surplus? Are you sweating constantly? Are you waking up in the middle of the night because you have to turn on the heater in your wife? It's the middle of the winter, bro. Like what's wrong with you? You probably don't need to worry about being in a slight deficit. You could probably gain just as well because your body is so good at using fat for fuel that you're not going to be using protein. So surplus deficits, I don't worry about it. You can be at a hundred-calorie deficit. You lose a little bit of weight. You're trying to stay lean. How do you know if it's too lean? You start to do a lot of volume and you get like your bonking in sessions, right? You're tapping into glycogen far faster. You're probably in a, like maybe your ferrous levels are a little bit lower. You're sweating out electrolytes or maybe you're not sweating. And you're overheating. Whatever, you know, I think in any of these cases there are going to be signs and signals that your body is telling you and performance holistically as a bodybuilder. Not just did I hit a PR is really what you want to look at. And if you can perform better at a higher body fat, that is probably something you should pay attention to. And that's not a consistent experience that I've seen as a coach. Some people have to be actually not quite to what you were talking about, 40-50 pounds over stage weight with kind of the UK, the bodybuilding scene where you had all these natural bodybuilders wearing massive shirts and just thinking they're getting huge. You know, like I see that and you will persistently see that only last for several seasons before the person is like, they start to realize this is not doing what I think it does because my stage weight is the same or one pound up. And unless they really like to hold on to their beliefs, it's like, no, you have to gain 40 pounds of fat, increase your stage weight by one pound. So next season, I'm going to go from, you know, I was 150 on stage and I was 190 in the off season. Now I need to be 230 and then I can be 151 like, okay, I don't know if that's worth it. But anyway, I digress. That's it. That behavior just changes. Like I saw that and a lot of, I'm not going to name names because I don't want to talk shit because, you know, we all can look back and be embarrassed by things we used to do. But there's some very prominent UK bodybuilders with a ton of respect for her. I was like, they'll figure it out. And they did, right? But I think understanding that the signals you get in season and prep and your experience, and I've talked about auto regulation during prep, these are what good coaches rely on. And these are what good athletes eventually learn to respond to because of the closest thing we can get to having that fridge full of WL water or the decks a bit. So well said. Yeah, I think that auto regulation piece, once you understand your body, it's such a game changer with training, with nutrition, with all those things. When you, like you said, you can read the signs of signals that your body is telling you, like, yeah, this thumbs up. No, this is bad because until you are at that point, you're, I at least found this. I'm so much relying upon my gurus or textbooks and other people to tell me why I should or shouldn't be doing. And why they can give you like, hey, go within these barriers, like on a bowling alley, like, yeah, we can give you bumpers of things to aim at. But to get a strike, you need to decide for yourself, where is the right call and how to throw the ball or whatever this analogy is somehow working for me. And I felt like, It took a long time to get there. It's like a bit of a skill set, but the more experience you get, the better you get at doing it all. But this whole, yeah, it's been eye-opening, kind of learning more about body recomposition and it's also been, it's just opened up opportunities for like, "Hey, it isn't on an off switch. There are situations where you're not wasting time just holding your body weight and maintaining." I just had it for the longest time where maintenance was like a dirty word. Like you only did that for very short periods of time to resensitize and that was the only reason you'd ever rationalize it. Otherwise, you should be pushing things. And in my head now, I'm like, well, actually, like, maintaining a body weight might be okay or like just eating around. And I see why now it's making more sense why intuitive eating can work so well for so many bodybuilders in their offices and where they're not tracking. 'Cause it's like, for me now, if I just ate intuitive, I probably just slowly lose weight, then I'd probably find myself getting a bit hungry, I'm like, I'll probably eat a bit more. But again, it's that data-driven bodybuilder. It's like, "Oh, but if I can manage that, like, I can measure it and maybe I can tweak it to be slightly more optimal." Or, "Must have gained so slow so people like something to chase." And you can't force it through the logbook. You like to, I try to, but you also can't force feed it. It starts, you just have to eventually kind of let go, which is what I come back to that pill of just like, "Hey, just enjoy the process, feel good, push yourself hard. It will work out in the end." But yeah, it's been a ride at least. I think there's probably been a lot of people have been through many swings and bolts of that. Eric, we've been about an hour. This has been a great topic. I think if we were to talk about anything else, we probably talk for another hour. I did have the question though, is there anything relating to body recomposition that you still don't have answers for? Is there anything you feel like you would like more on or would you feel like there's enough there to kind of know what we're saying? The piece that I think we're still uncovering is the degree to which muscle memory is a distinct phenomenon where muscle that you used to have can be regained faster than muscle that you don't yet have. Or is it just a case where if you lose muscle, you can gain muscle faster because you're further from your ceiling, right? Because the staircase gets increasingly steeper. And that was basically exactly what, and this is gonna come out, but Josh Pellens, his whole PhD was on this topic of his recent sensation, a thing that can occur without muscle loss. Because if it is just us doing studies on a bunch of untrained like the Augusta War studies and modestly trained people, where if we see a detraining phase where they lose muscle, they can gain muscle faster, are we just looking at the rate of muscle gain they had from six weeks ago when they had less muscle? Or is it actual faster slopes? And I have a feeling that it's probably not a distinct thing that we're looking at an early enough training age where losses of muscles make noticeably faster gaining of muscles following it, but not because you recensitize, just because you lost muscle. So you're just now become the novice version of yourself who had just tipped over the intermediate phase. And the reason why I'm curious about that is because in prep I do feel like if you lose muscle, it comes back pretty quick. And that would be evidence of in certain cases, maybe there is some type of kind of maybe metabolically driven muscle memory or something like that in that unique state. Because if I lose a pound, it took me years to gain that pound that it should take me years to regain it. But it doesn't seem like that's the case. Or you'd see advanced bodybuilders that they really screwed up in a prep, they look worse than ex-prep. And that's generally not what you see until they're dealing with like sarcopenia and they're in there and they're competing, like moving into their end stage career, right? - Yeah, very interesting. I know there's a long time ago I did speak to Josh about recentsization on the podcast. And I know I'm in talks with actually just message him the other day on WhatsApp. See when it's becoming publicly available, we can start talking about some of this research. So that'll be great. The people can look forward to that. Eric, it's a blast as always. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. Thank you guys for listening. And I guess unless there's anything else from you, Eric, we can catch you in the next episode. Oh, I should say again, I said it a few times, but the Master Research Review is always linked in the description, but you should definitely check it out. If you want to dive into this topic a bit more deeply, especially for the nerds who want to know all the math of how many calories are in a kilogram of muscle versus fat and why the scale can do some funny things and recombosition can be occurring. It was a nice breakdown. - Thank you, sir. It's a bit of pleasure. - Cheers guys.